"...the National Center for Family and Marriage Research shows a small but definite rise in the decoupling of fatherhood and marriage."

Susan Gregory Thomas, author of In Spite of Everything: A Memoir has an interesting article in the WSJ entitled “Are Dads the New Moms?”:

Though losing ground as husbands and providers, men are finding a new role—as rock-solid fathers….

Even as men have made great strides as fathers, however, they can find themselves rudderless as spouses. “We’re getting a new cultural script for a ‘new dad’ but not for a ‘new husband,’ ” says W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project. “That married people with children now often refer to themselves as a ‘stay-at-home mom’ or ‘stay-at-home dad’ instead of as ‘wife’ or ‘husband’ signals that we now prioritize parenthood over marriage itself.”

As men try to be better dads, they are running into the familiar difficulty of balancing kids, career and marriage—a problem that women have been trying to manage since the 1970s. With men as with women, it is marriage itself that often gets short shrift.