That soft rubbing sound you've heard all weekend is David Brooks wringing his hands:

...sexual marketplaces are a rapidly expanding feature of society, and they are becoming more distinct from marriage marketplaces. Furthermore, as the sex markets become bigger and more efficient, people have less incentive to get married. As the scholars Yoosik Youm and Anthony Paik write, "Opportunities in the sex market act as constraints in the marriage market."

The big problem here is that there is an overwhelming body of evidence to suggest that marriage correlates highly with happiness. Children raised in marriages tend to have more opportunities than children raised outside marriage.

Over all, Americans are spending much less time married. They marry later and divorce at high rates, and remarry less and less. We are replacing marriage, one of our most successful institutions, with hooking up. This is a deep structural problem, and very worrying.

Brooks would love to turn the clock back to a time when there was intense social pressure to get and stay married ... because married people are happier. But one reason married people are happier is undoubtedly the fact that they aren't pressured to get and stay married. If we had the society Brooks wants, in which being single is a scandal, being divorced or separated is a scandal, and being openly gay is a real scandal, a survey of married people would find a hell of a lot less happiness.