Category: Marriage/Family

There’s ample conversation about toxic masculinity in our culture today. In some circles, the consensus seems to be that all men want nothing but to wield power and subjugate women.

Of course, many of us know that this isn’t true of all, or even most, men—we need the gifts of both genders to build a truly healthy society.

The hookup culture is contributing to the mental health crisis, and the imperative to cultivate a culture that venerates enduring love over fleeting interactions has never been more pressing.

Demographer Lyman Stone projects that, on the current course, as many as one in three young adults in the United States might never marry and as many as one in four will never have kids. That’s a lot of kinless Americans. Given the importance of marriage and family for what Jefferson called “the pursuit of happiness,” this would be a tragedy. So let’s find new ways to make it easier and more appealing for young adults to get married.

Before you can begin to talk over the conflict like reasonable, loving adults, you have to pry your closed hearts open again.

“Instead of studying the type of women who write to Emily Oster about babies impeding their happiness, Pakaluk traveled across the country to interview their exact opposite: college-educated women with five or more children. Many women she interviewed were also pregnant (with their sixth, seventh, or eighth baby) or were weighing the decision of adding babies to their brood — and not at the expense of their happiness but for the chance to expand it.”

Rather than seeking enduring emotional bonds that result from a supportive and loving partnership, young adults are seeking a “quick fix,” a transient feeling of pleasure and the excitement of feeling “chosen”—even only briefly—by a peer. Gaining the physical attention of someone else has become an exciting game that nobody wins.