But for all the Marks out there, there are also men like 26-year-old Anthony, who is floundering in small-town southern Ohio. As David and Amber Lapp reported in First Things, Anthony is unmarried, in and out of relationships, and often struggling with drinking and intermittent employment. By their account, “Anthony has thought about suicide in his lowest moments. ‘I just felt so alone.’ ”

But Anthony is not the only young man in America struggling while going it alone. In a report I co-wrote with Kay Hymowitz, Kelleen Kaye and Jason Carroll on the benefits and costs of delayed marriage, we found that young men in their 20s were more likely to have difficulty with depression and excessive drinking if they were single, compared with their peers who were married. Forty-eight percent of single men ages 24 to 29 reported they were frequently drunk, compared with just 28 percent of their married peers.