Category: Marriage/Family

Birth rates have reached extremely low levels in many countries around the world, including virtually all high-income countries. The causes of this decline and the solutions to it are of great interest to policymakers. People’s attitudes toward work—specifically the elevation of career advancement to a very high place in individual values—may influence fertility. The rise of “work-focused” value sets and life courses means that achieving work-family balance isn’t just about employment norms adjusting to the growing complexity of individual aspirations; it can also mean that many men and women find their preferred balance to be more work and less family

The deferral of marriage contributes to the soaring number of young people who will never have children—many with a profound sense of grief.

Play around with the annual UK survey data on Families and Households released in February by the UK Office for National Statistics, and you find an extraordinary thing: the proportion of lone-parent families in 2020 is now down to levels not seen since the 1990s.

Men without high school diplomas are about 20 percentage points more likely than all other men to have gone without sex for at least a year.

Two groups of female respondents—college-educated women in their 20s and, especially, women over age 35—are most likely to be stakeholders in the sex recession.

In 2019, my then-fiancée and I met with our priest during the premarital counselling process. One of his questions was whether we wanted children. We said we did. That was good, he replied. If we didn’t, he would refuse to marry us. Although he would make exceptions for marriages beset by genetic, medical, or mental health issues, he flatly declared that DINK (Dual Income No Kids) couples were going against God’s design for marriage.

Earlier this week, Ross Douthat suggested that even if we are about to experience economic and technological breakthroughs, the most convincing evidence of an escape from cultural stagnation would be “sex and romance making a comeback at the movies.” According to Douthat, there has been a decline of the love story, a “cultural void where romance used to be.” There is “very little adult smoldering” and few marriage proposals on offer at the cinema today. “It doesn’t seem coincidental,” he continues, that this cultural void “opened at a time when the sexes are struggling to pair off—with fewer marriages, fewer relationships, less sex.” As if on cue, The Guardian chimed in with an ode to asexuality.

Americans may be divided in many ways, but if there’s one value we share, it’s a clear condemnation of extramarital affairs. A recent Gallup Poll found that 92 percent of the nation agrees that marital infidelity is morally wrong, making it the most universally criticized issue among those tested in the poll. Of course, our collective disdain for adultery hasn’t put an end to cheating. Quite the contrary, in fact: 16 percent of married individuals report having had at least one affair since getting married, with people over the age of 55 causing more than their fair share of the misery. Read on to discover what else factors into the likelihood of your partner straying, and for more cheating red flags, If Your Partner Has These 4 Qualities, They’re More Likely to Cheat on You.