The Slow Death of the Well-Suited Couple

I went to high school in the ’90s, out in rural Indiana. I was involved in sports, so I got to know a good number of people from surrounding counties—places where everyone had a well pump, a church, and at least one cousin they didn’t talk to.

Back then, you’d see a chubby guy and a chubby girl start dating, and it wasn’t strange. It was normal. Common. They’d go to prom together, graduate, get married, and start a life. I remember girls saying how cute those couples were—not because they looked like anything out of a magazine, but because they made sense. They belonged together. Same kind of people. Same social tier. Well suited.

Some folks today don’t like hearing that. The idea that there are social tiers feels offensive—maybe even cruel. But that doesn’t make it less true. Everyone knows they exist. Even the people pretending they don’t are busy trying to climb them.

You still hear people joke about marrying “out of their league.” And sure, it’s usually meant as a compliment—“Look at him, he really scored.” But if you look at the strongest marriages, most of them aren’t built on one person reaching up and grabbing someone they had no business landing. They’re built on being evenly matched. That’s what being well suited is. And that’s what’s slowly going missing.

For a lot of men, porn has done serious damage. It’s rewired their expectations. Makes them think they deserve a certain type of woman—usually one they’d never talk to in real life. So they chase money, chase muscles, chase status, trying to close the gap. And look, sometimes that pursuit makes a man grow. God often uses the desire for a wife to push a man into maturity. But if his target is off—if his expectations are built on fantasy instead of wisdom—he’ll overlook plenty of women who would’ve made faithful, lovely, godly wives. And he’ll stay single, year after year, wondering why nothing’s working.

Women deal with their own version of the same problem. Social media and dating apps have created a flood of attention—likes, comments, messages from guys they’d never actually consider. But all that noise messes with your sense of reality. It inflates your sense of the options. So when a solid man comes along, he can look smaller than he really is. Good men get passed over. Better ones are always “just around the corner.” And years go by.

We’re watching the slow disappearance of the well-suited couple. The kind of marriage where both people know who they are, aren’t trying to live in a fantasy, and are willing to build something together from the ground up. Recovering that won’t be easy. It’ll mean offending some modern sensibilities. It’ll mean telling people they aren’t as special as they think. But it’s necessary.

Because here’s the truth: we all start out as grapes and end up as raisins. Beauty fades. Bank accounts rise and fall. But when you’ve got someone who fits—really fits—you grow old without growing apart. You build a life. You raise kids. You sit on the back porch at the end of a long week, surrounded by children and grandchildren, and you’re content—not because life was perfect, but because it was shared.