I think your marriage 3.0, is hindered by the major issues of divorce culture.
Both divorce acceptance (peer pressure), and most importantly, legal setting.
The reason you "can't" get married in 6 months is because divorce exists, is easy, acceptable, and common.
Also, while I'd argue for a "patriarchy", whether a formal Patriarchy or Matriarchy, SOMEONE has to have a capacity to a final say. Without such, you can only have divorce.
When two states argue they go to the Supreme Court and unless the most extreme situations occur, they accept the Court Ruling and stay states in the same country.
If there is no supreme Court, and two states argue, the ONLY answer is war. In families, this means not being a family anymore.
The last problem is diversity. Homogenous cultures without modern divorce issues, you can practically take any two people and marry them, and it will be at least an "okay" of a marriage.
Now we teach that homogeny is meaningless. But, in most divorce stats, logical marriages don't get divorced.
If they share the same culture and ideals, the divorce rates are not the 50%, but float in the sub 10% zone. We now tell Catholics to Marry atheists and Jews to Marry Muslims, like none of it matters. It's all good, diversity is our strength... but it isn't, at least not that kind of diversity, that's just stupid.
Divorce laws are maybe the single most important thing here. Women hold all the power and can end a marriage anytime they choose while taking everything from the husband. This is why rushing into a marriage after 6 months (a great idea 300 years ago) is a horrible idea; you have no way of knowing if she’ll go crazy and decide to ruin your life for no reason 30 years later. I’ve seen it happen.
Birth rates won’t improve until marriages improve, and marriages won’t improve until the divorce laws are changed. Marriage isn’t a spiritual sacrament to the vast majority of married couples and it isn’t a legally binding union, so it’s just a very expensive and burdensome formality.
I get your reservations, but I rarely see a case where the red flags don't show up within the first 6 months of dating. Even if the partner doesn't catch it, their friends and family will.
A lot of it has to do with elders being unwilling to speak up. My cousin got married to a girl that cheated on him within 2 months. His mom saw the red flags a mile away but didn't feel like she could tell him.
True, this is another reason not to have sex before getting married - that level of physical intimacy before the actual choice will cloud your judgement.
I too have been feeling that people wait way too long to get married. People being too perfectionist about destination weddings instead of getting married in church.
I also recall something about girls in Romania sewing wedding dresses when they are very young. I think another problem is that people don't get ready for weddings until they meet someone.
Yes. I spent a lot of time in my 20s worrying that a seemingly great woman might suddenly go insane. Now that I'm in my 40s, I'll report that I still haven't seen it firsthand. I'm sure it happens, but very "man bites dog." As it stands, I predicted the bad wives with 100% accuracy. I only spent the social capital warning one friend off, as we had known each other since preschool and I figured I had to speak my piece. It was, of course, useless, as he married her anyway, and naturally she held a grudge because he told her that I warned him off.
I agree that marriage isn’t a spiritual sacrament to most people and that’s why those unions mostly fail. It’s still incumbent on the person seeking marriage to only marry someone who sees it as a spiritual sacrament. A man has control over his choices and he shouldn’t be surprised when he marries a woman who doesn’t see the spiritual component involved in marriage or tries to paper over that void with the fact she’s charming and attractive. If a man is completely honest with himself he can see whether the woman has that quality or not and your family will usually always point out red flags if you’re willing to listen. The countless stories of men professing to be completely shocked or bamboozled by a woman divorcing them are dishonest as the man had to know on some level he shouldn’t have married her to begin with and willfully overlooked red flags and it also strips a man of agency like he is a helpless child in the stage play of life. Women always rely on the lack of agency defense in why they shouldn’t be held accountable for their own choices but it simply doesn’t work for men. I like the conversation Vito has with Michael in the Godfather when he says women and children can be careless but a man cannot..
I feel like this is a stupid solution, but it's also a very real one: "bitcoin fixes this." Outside of the home, men should invest heavily in cryptocurrency because the State cannot seize cryptocurrency. It's an asset with 100% fungibility, 100% mobility, and is impossible to seize at the border.
If his liquid wealth is majority, or partially in cryptocurrency, he always has the option to just pick up everything and leave. It's not pretty, and it'll leave scars and a broken home, but it's his main weapon for escaping a feminist state. "Fuck it, I'm moving to Thailand or Japan or the Philipines or Argentina" will become a very real possibility. If she leaves, he can take his years of work and his wealth with him.
Not an optimal solution, but it is certainly a functional one.
It's not just the man/woman issue by itself though. It's the lenient divorces by themselves, that encourage women to not trust them.
Two young people, if the woman doesn't establish herself, she isn't getting money.
Now child support is part of this, and lends to women getting some more money, but if a husband and wife are married 2 years, dude just started as a car mechanic and she's working part time as a waitress, while they rent, the money of divorce itself is generally going to be irrelevant.
But if she is a part time waitress and not pursuing a career, then if he leaves her, nothing.
Worse still is the latter factor, if one is widowed or divorced, single mom, her kids are her own. No new man can be trusted to keep her per se, as he can easily divorce her.
Let's say she has 2 kids and then gets widowed/divorced. Then she gets remarried to a dude who can divorce her at the drop of a hat. They have +1 kid, this dude is obviously only necessarily going to care/be obligated to one child value later if he leaves.
So her other two kids require her to be a career woman.
Child support itself is complicated, at some levels it is damaging to men who are fathers. To men who reject fatherhood, it's really not a huge deal per se.
I've been on every side of custody and child support. CS has no place in active parenting. But CS isn't really damaging to an inactive parent. This fix alone, ending active parent CS would basically make most men no longer at much risk of divorce.
I agree, a lot of marriage prep courses are for the purpose of multi-cultural couples talking about who takes our the trash, who cooks, how household chores are allocated. Back when people mostly married people of the same ethnic group and religion, this was stuff everyone knew, because it was the same inside that group.
I destroyed a potential relationship in one afternoon with a lapsed Baptist (I’m Catholic), by bringing up our future children’s religious upbringing. I sort of assumed we would bring them up Catholic since I was the one who had a Church, but he wanted to do both at once.
I had seen that personally with some friends who tried doing both the husband’s Lutheran Church and the wife’s Episcopal Church. They never connected with a Church Home because all they did was run from one Church to another. Stuff happened in their relationship, no support network, and they divorced.
So I sort of insisted that we had to figure it out before marriage and kids, and apparently that was a breakup speech???
But 6 month marriage prep doesn’t seem extreme to slow a few of the hormones down (because a lot of the young people think if they are not drowning in love hormones, that they have fallen out of love, and just automatically get a divorce. 😔).
I went on a date with a hard core CRC girl and things were going well until I mentioned an ancestor who was a Catholic missionary. Might as well have told her I was a serial killer.
I think culture is built one family at a time. I wonder if certain parishes have lower divorce rates? It might inform what kind of culture is needed to improve things.
I largely agree with your article, but I'm surprised that you would say only the woman's choice anxiety matters and "her husband's wants are now also irrelevant." I personally have less children than I wanted to have because my husband didn't want them and I never thought to have that conversation before we got married because I thought that was just what married people did. We had our one child after years of bitter dispute (as I got older and older), but we never considered divorce because of our religious beliefs and also because I would never throw away our otherwise happy relationship. Though I don't have any data or anything, I would be surprised if my situation was uncommon amongst all these women who have less than their desired amount of children.
I knew a woman whose playboy husband never wanted a child. She gradually reduced her birth control until a miracle appeared and then quietly went back on her birth control. Apparently, he never suspected anything. He also was not much help with the child. I suspect that some of the less than 100% effectiveness of certain birth control methods is due to women choosing to have a 'stealth child' that their partner does not want.
The comments on this post related to women and divorce are stunningly ignorant. It’s very rare for a woman to initiate divorce for ‘cash and prizes’ and it’s funny to me how none of these commenters say anything about immature men who run off with another woman… I’d think that is a particularly more common scenario, especially as men get older and don’t want to be saddled down.
Anyway, thank goodness there is no longer a marital debt, which was a disgusting idea. If marriage is a sacrament, then marital relations are expected as an expression of love. The idea of a debt cheapens things.
Because it is women who overwhelmingly wield the axe of divorce. College educated women initiate divorce in 90% of their marriages. She can initiate divorce at any time and get cash and prizes for walking away.
I'm in agreement with your overall conclusions, but in my experience it's nearly always the woman who wants to have more chidren/have children sooner, ans the man who wants to wait. It's submissiveness and respect for her husband preventing her from making a "mistake" on her contraception/NFP and getting pregnant, not the other way around.
It seems to me that marriage 1.0 was less about a woman grimly fulfilling her marital duty, and more that the women wanted kids and the man wanted to have sex, so things worked themselves out. His desire canceled out his misgivings about supporting another kid. Now that it's possible to decouple them, he loses his urgency to beget, and she doesn't want to drive him away and so puts up with longer and longer delays until her desired family size slips away. I'm sure it happens the other way sometimes but this is what I see.
Yes, too much control over something that should be spontaneous is an issue; but it seems to me it damages the husband's reproductive incentives even more than it does the wife's.
People are odd when it comes to sexualituy and children.
One of my best friend, Darren, belongs to and believes in 'Quiverfull'. He is potent, very potent. Multiple women perfectly legal as opposed to multiple wives so illegal. I doubt if he has an accurate tally of his grand children.
On the other hand, my sister Ann has 9 children (LDS convert). When they were young and we as a family all ate out in a restaurant, it was outrageous the comments, nasty comments she recieved from entiled women. It was always women who would get my sisters face about having 'too many children" and "destroying the World". Never their red-faced silent mbarrassed husbands. The word "World" was somehow always verbally capitlized.
On the other, other hand, my Grandmother Anne was a mail order bride as an Irish-English orphan direct from the slums of late Victorian London to the Golden Prairies of Canada. My Prairie-Farmer Granfather Wes had sex at least 3 times producing My Uncles Howard and Frank along with My Mother Carolyn. But I doubt if Grandfather Wes had sex much more than 3 times. Once Uncle Frank completed the triad, I am pretty sure that Grandmother Anne welded the oven door shut. My grandmother lived 50 years of her life as an old woman. She liked it that way.
Guys will give a gentle ribbing all in good fun when they think you have a crazy amount of kids. Some women, and progressive women especially, will take offense for apparently committing a crime against feminism. My wife has dealt with that. None ever had the guts to say it when I was present though.
Interesting take, and I mostly agree, but you forgot to factor men into that equation. You assume that the only gatekeepers of fertility are women because they're the ones putting on the IUDs and taking the pills, as if men were all universally inclined to become fathers as soon as possible. Perhaps you do live in a niche community that's more religious and sees fatherhood as a positive, but in more secular circles as you call it, you'll find women who are desperate to become mothers struggling to convince their hesitant male partners to get on board. And she can't just "go ahead and have the baby anyway" because she wants him to be on board and not betray his trust. Contraceptives didn't only make women agonize over their choices, but men too.
At the macro level, the number of children men and women want is equivalent. At the individual level, I can see that sort of friction lowering the rate.
I think even beyond modernity I have a bit of a control freak temperament, but just going for it with my fertility has been really good for my health in every respect (including physical!) Girls and women are taught to be at war with their own bodies from a very young age. Putting that aside to embrace myself as an embodied female is actually very liberating.
We have seven kids so far and I just feel so blessed that I can. I would feel like a huge jerk if I just shut it off. My husband and I love each other and all these little people we've made. I know for a fact that some people feel inconvenienced by us, even in the Church. But we're having the best time we never expected we could have!
It does help to have like-minded weirdos around us. One to have a retreat to go back to, but also because we can help each other. My little niche maintains a list of medical specialists etc. who won't give us grief over family size.
This was a thoughtful and well presented article. I appreciate discussion on this topic that isn't hysterical.
I'd like to posit something I haven't seen put forth anywhere. Maybe it's possible that the human species simply doesn't breed under certain environmental conditions. For example most species stop or slow breeding in the face of overpopulation and/or resource scarcity. In these cases the females who don't breed are seen as making a sacrifice for the long-term survival of the population group.
It might be the case that conditions have become so threatening for humans on Earth that biological, reptilian-brain group survival has kicked in regardless of personal choice. I know that among my female friends over the years, mysteriously not being able to get pregnant for no detectable reason has been quite common. Fertility clinics are a multibillion dollar per year industry for involuntarily infertile couples. Perhaps it's because there's something species-level biological happening.
Fertility is crashing everywhere. If fertility was crashing only in the West, it would make sense to talk about divorce laws and feminism and such. But there is no population of humans anywhere on earth whose fertility is not tanking. Even African fertility is reducing. I don't think that's about divorce laws.
This all suggests something other than personal choice. If this hypothesis is even partially correct then removing autonomy from women isn't going to change anything.
Hey that's a great article. I'm about half done and will have to finish later, but so far really useful info. I'm from Dutch country and live in a dinky farming town still heavily Amish.
«Maybe it's possible that the human species simply doesn't breed under certain environmental conditions. For example most species stop or slow breeding in the face of overpopulation and/or resource scarcity.»
Overpopulation perhaps, but not resource scarcity increases breeding unless it is extreme (and then the reproductive system shuts down in women). Indeed poorer women in poorer areas had a rule *more* sons because sons were investments for the old age of the mother or additional workers under her control, and up to a point the more the better, especially if several were expected to die before adult age. Sons used to be *profitable*.
Living with abandon can lead to pairing up with the wrong guy/gal. Among people I know in my parents' generation, the ones who lived with abandon (small sample size, admittedly) ended up childless, and the ones who followed convention ended up having kids and grandkids. The trick is to balance wisdom and courage. Basically commit once you have the right man/woman, but it's not always easy to tell if someone is right.
I often think that instagram as an expression of the female need for validation is like 5 features away from being a near perfect way to channel that need in a virtuous way.
The problem is that women are usually not disagreeable enough to ignore the jeers of colleagues calling them "rabbits", and that fathers-in-law are often worse than anything at being risk-averse: "Better my daughter grow old alone than marry a man without a stable job".
Adventure these days is saying "screw the housing market, we'll live in tents and roam the country", "screw the labor market, we'll make ends meet with odd jobs", "screw expectations, we'll build our own". Unfortunately the state is purpose-built to crack down on this. You can't homestead innawoods without the alphabet boys ruby-ridging you.
As a veteran of Marriage 3.0 I really appreciated this affirmation. My wife and I bucked all the trends and raised 5 kids on a carpenter’s wage in Northern California, at times taking risks and finding unusual opportunities.
We also had the quick engagement - 6 months from dating to marriage. And we experienced a lot of the social pressure you describe. My daughters, though they diverging politically and religiously from our path, followed our pattern in quick intense engagements and multiple kids, the upshot being I’m blessed with seven grandchildren.
There are a lot of good points in this essay, however, this one is the key: 'Then have their back.'
There's a lot of words and ideas thrown at a lot of different 'problems' but they're typically about what other people should be doing. It's like there's an Advice Industrial Complex out there generating reams of product to be consumed by people who are looking for 'help'...because their people have abandoned them to 'individualism' and 'making up your own mind' (which the author correctly points out leads to more paralysis than decision-making).
All of this comes down to (again) the terrible way that 'the right' and 'conservatives' frame issues leading to endless dead-ends and frustration.
Say it with me: The family is not the foundation of society.
Not unless by 'family' you mean vast networks related individuals such as humans lived in from prehistory until just very recently.
The so-called 'nuclear family' isn't enough of a 'family unit' to weather most storms (or to take many risks).
The old 'tribal family' with its extended relations spread out over a wide - but still close-by - area had room for error. There was almost always someone there to 'have your back' if your risk turned up to be a bust.
The Advice Industrial Complex doesn't exist to solve the problems of families. It exists to solve the problem of how to make money off of 'family problems'.
I wonder if women would be so hell-bent on 'careers' if they know that they could have their children and if something went wrong (like illness or autism or alcoholic spouse), someone would have their back.
And men might feel that they could take on the (very) risky proposition of 'marriage' if, they, too, knew that someone would have their back.
We have seen the solution and the solution is 'us'.
It's a wild ride, and you never know how it's going to go. Day to day is different; working for myself allows changing both how often I work as well as meeting the needs of the family on things besides the $$$'s.
But it's good, and we can always find ways to make things work. Life and children as such joys in all your trials.
No. The economy is so unstable and chaotic young folks with an aspiration to survive cannot afford to make even a single mistake. Fix the monetary system, deport immigrants, execute pedophiles. THEN, we can talk about having more kids.
«In short, if you want couples to have kids again»
"couples" do not have children, *women* make that choice and for a long time that choice was in a large majority of cases to have sons as pensions assets.
Currently women in developed areas have the freedom of buying property or stocks as pension assets and many choose to avoid the effort and risk of bearing and raising children, which also often requires finding and putting up with a man as a provider. "The Economist" once wrote that sons are no longer necessary investments for women in developed areas but have become expensive hobbies in competition with other expensive choices like longer vacations, better cars, more stylish furniture, house renovations.
The developed areas that still have higher natality rates make the expensive hobby of having sons cheaper with full-pay during pregnancy, zero or low-cost delivery, zero or low cost nurseries, zero or low cost quality schools. But women who do not have children resent that their taxes be used to subsidize the hobby of having sons of other women. A feminist solution might be to fund child-bearing and child-raising costs with taxes only on men, merely formalizing their role as providers across history.
As to the “if you want” part on a wider perspective many employers and taxpayers in developed areas reckon that encouraging higher natality rates of workers in their own areas not only would require higher taxes for subsidies but would also produce entitled workers demanding high wages and that is also unnecessary as there literally billions of unemployed or underemployed workers in the world who expect much lower wages and whose bearing and raising costs have already been paid by foreigners and are therefore much more competitive.
I think your marriage 3.0, is hindered by the major issues of divorce culture.
Both divorce acceptance (peer pressure), and most importantly, legal setting.
The reason you "can't" get married in 6 months is because divorce exists, is easy, acceptable, and common.
Also, while I'd argue for a "patriarchy", whether a formal Patriarchy or Matriarchy, SOMEONE has to have a capacity to a final say. Without such, you can only have divorce.
When two states argue they go to the Supreme Court and unless the most extreme situations occur, they accept the Court Ruling and stay states in the same country.
If there is no supreme Court, and two states argue, the ONLY answer is war. In families, this means not being a family anymore.
The last problem is diversity. Homogenous cultures without modern divorce issues, you can practically take any two people and marry them, and it will be at least an "okay" of a marriage.
Now we teach that homogeny is meaningless. But, in most divorce stats, logical marriages don't get divorced.
If they share the same culture and ideals, the divorce rates are not the 50%, but float in the sub 10% zone. We now tell Catholics to Marry atheists and Jews to Marry Muslims, like none of it matters. It's all good, diversity is our strength... but it isn't, at least not that kind of diversity, that's just stupid.
Divorce laws are maybe the single most important thing here. Women hold all the power and can end a marriage anytime they choose while taking everything from the husband. This is why rushing into a marriage after 6 months (a great idea 300 years ago) is a horrible idea; you have no way of knowing if she’ll go crazy and decide to ruin your life for no reason 30 years later. I’ve seen it happen.
Birth rates won’t improve until marriages improve, and marriages won’t improve until the divorce laws are changed. Marriage isn’t a spiritual sacrament to the vast majority of married couples and it isn’t a legally binding union, so it’s just a very expensive and burdensome formality.
I get your reservations, but I rarely see a case where the red flags don't show up within the first 6 months of dating. Even if the partner doesn't catch it, their friends and family will.
A lot of it has to do with elders being unwilling to speak up. My cousin got married to a girl that cheated on him within 2 months. His mom saw the red flags a mile away but didn't feel like she could tell him.
True, this is another reason not to have sex before getting married - that level of physical intimacy before the actual choice will cloud your judgement.
I too have been feeling that people wait way too long to get married. People being too perfectionist about destination weddings instead of getting married in church.
I also recall something about girls in Romania sewing wedding dresses when they are very young. I think another problem is that people don't get ready for weddings until they meet someone.
Yes. I spent a lot of time in my 20s worrying that a seemingly great woman might suddenly go insane. Now that I'm in my 40s, I'll report that I still haven't seen it firsthand. I'm sure it happens, but very "man bites dog." As it stands, I predicted the bad wives with 100% accuracy. I only spent the social capital warning one friend off, as we had known each other since preschool and I figured I had to speak my piece. It was, of course, useless, as he married her anyway, and naturally she held a grudge because he told her that I warned him off.
I agree that marriage isn’t a spiritual sacrament to most people and that’s why those unions mostly fail. It’s still incumbent on the person seeking marriage to only marry someone who sees it as a spiritual sacrament. A man has control over his choices and he shouldn’t be surprised when he marries a woman who doesn’t see the spiritual component involved in marriage or tries to paper over that void with the fact she’s charming and attractive. If a man is completely honest with himself he can see whether the woman has that quality or not and your family will usually always point out red flags if you’re willing to listen. The countless stories of men professing to be completely shocked or bamboozled by a woman divorcing them are dishonest as the man had to know on some level he shouldn’t have married her to begin with and willfully overlooked red flags and it also strips a man of agency like he is a helpless child in the stage play of life. Women always rely on the lack of agency defense in why they shouldn’t be held accountable for their own choices but it simply doesn’t work for men. I like the conversation Vito has with Michael in the Godfather when he says women and children can be careless but a man cannot..
I feel like this is a stupid solution, but it's also a very real one: "bitcoin fixes this." Outside of the home, men should invest heavily in cryptocurrency because the State cannot seize cryptocurrency. It's an asset with 100% fungibility, 100% mobility, and is impossible to seize at the border.
If his liquid wealth is majority, or partially in cryptocurrency, he always has the option to just pick up everything and leave. It's not pretty, and it'll leave scars and a broken home, but it's his main weapon for escaping a feminist state. "Fuck it, I'm moving to Thailand or Japan or the Philipines or Argentina" will become a very real possibility. If she leaves, he can take his years of work and his wealth with him.
Not an optimal solution, but it is certainly a functional one.
It's not just the man/woman issue by itself though. It's the lenient divorces by themselves, that encourage women to not trust them.
Two young people, if the woman doesn't establish herself, she isn't getting money.
Now child support is part of this, and lends to women getting some more money, but if a husband and wife are married 2 years, dude just started as a car mechanic and she's working part time as a waitress, while they rent, the money of divorce itself is generally going to be irrelevant.
But if she is a part time waitress and not pursuing a career, then if he leaves her, nothing.
Worse still is the latter factor, if one is widowed or divorced, single mom, her kids are her own. No new man can be trusted to keep her per se, as he can easily divorce her.
Let's say she has 2 kids and then gets widowed/divorced. Then she gets remarried to a dude who can divorce her at the drop of a hat. They have +1 kid, this dude is obviously only necessarily going to care/be obligated to one child value later if he leaves.
So her other two kids require her to be a career woman.
Child support itself is complicated, at some levels it is damaging to men who are fathers. To men who reject fatherhood, it's really not a huge deal per se.
I've been on every side of custody and child support. CS has no place in active parenting. But CS isn't really damaging to an inactive parent. This fix alone, ending active parent CS would basically make most men no longer at much risk of divorce.
I agree, a lot of marriage prep courses are for the purpose of multi-cultural couples talking about who takes our the trash, who cooks, how household chores are allocated. Back when people mostly married people of the same ethnic group and religion, this was stuff everyone knew, because it was the same inside that group.
I destroyed a potential relationship in one afternoon with a lapsed Baptist (I’m Catholic), by bringing up our future children’s religious upbringing. I sort of assumed we would bring them up Catholic since I was the one who had a Church, but he wanted to do both at once.
I had seen that personally with some friends who tried doing both the husband’s Lutheran Church and the wife’s Episcopal Church. They never connected with a Church Home because all they did was run from one Church to another. Stuff happened in their relationship, no support network, and they divorced.
So I sort of insisted that we had to figure it out before marriage and kids, and apparently that was a breakup speech???
But 6 month marriage prep doesn’t seem extreme to slow a few of the hormones down (because a lot of the young people think if they are not drowning in love hormones, that they have fallen out of love, and just automatically get a divorce. 😔).
I went on a date with a hard core CRC girl and things were going well until I mentioned an ancestor who was a Catholic missionary. Might as well have told her I was a serial killer.
The problem is that you were dating a Baptist. The culture is shit and taught you that that is anything but insane.
Even internally, people are taught like they are a Mission Tripper, but they aren't.
Moving to a sinful place IS what badass saints do to be ON MISSION. But if you're not on mission, you're just Lot in Sodom, dooming your family.
The Church barely even actually marriage preps, because most idiotic marriages that get annulments later make it through marriage prep.
We need a culture.
I think culture is built one family at a time. I wonder if certain parishes have lower divorce rates? It might inform what kind of culture is needed to improve things.
I largely agree with your article, but I'm surprised that you would say only the woman's choice anxiety matters and "her husband's wants are now also irrelevant." I personally have less children than I wanted to have because my husband didn't want them and I never thought to have that conversation before we got married because I thought that was just what married people did. We had our one child after years of bitter dispute (as I got older and older), but we never considered divorce because of our religious beliefs and also because I would never throw away our otherwise happy relationship. Though I don't have any data or anything, I would be surprised if my situation was uncommon amongst all these women who have less than their desired amount of children.
That's a good point. It goes both ways and is overly simplistic. I removed the sentence.
Your situation is a valid counter-example.
I knew a woman whose playboy husband never wanted a child. She gradually reduced her birth control until a miracle appeared and then quietly went back on her birth control. Apparently, he never suspected anything. He also was not much help with the child. I suspect that some of the less than 100% effectiveness of certain birth control methods is due to women choosing to have a 'stealth child' that their partner does not want.
The comments on this post related to women and divorce are stunningly ignorant. It’s very rare for a woman to initiate divorce for ‘cash and prizes’ and it’s funny to me how none of these commenters say anything about immature men who run off with another woman… I’d think that is a particularly more common scenario, especially as men get older and don’t want to be saddled down.
Anyway, thank goodness there is no longer a marital debt, which was a disgusting idea. If marriage is a sacrament, then marital relations are expected as an expression of love. The idea of a debt cheapens things.
Because it is women who overwhelmingly wield the axe of divorce. College educated women initiate divorce in 90% of their marriages. She can initiate divorce at any time and get cash and prizes for walking away.
I'm in agreement with your overall conclusions, but in my experience it's nearly always the woman who wants to have more chidren/have children sooner, ans the man who wants to wait. It's submissiveness and respect for her husband preventing her from making a "mistake" on her contraception/NFP and getting pregnant, not the other way around.
It seems to me that marriage 1.0 was less about a woman grimly fulfilling her marital duty, and more that the women wanted kids and the man wanted to have sex, so things worked themselves out. His desire canceled out his misgivings about supporting another kid. Now that it's possible to decouple them, he loses his urgency to beget, and she doesn't want to drive him away and so puts up with longer and longer delays until her desired family size slips away. I'm sure it happens the other way sometimes but this is what I see.
Yes, too much control over something that should be spontaneous is an issue; but it seems to me it damages the husband's reproductive incentives even more than it does the wife's.
People are odd when it comes to sexualituy and children.
One of my best friend, Darren, belongs to and believes in 'Quiverfull'. He is potent, very potent. Multiple women perfectly legal as opposed to multiple wives so illegal. I doubt if he has an accurate tally of his grand children.
On the other hand, my sister Ann has 9 children (LDS convert). When they were young and we as a family all ate out in a restaurant, it was outrageous the comments, nasty comments she recieved from entiled women. It was always women who would get my sisters face about having 'too many children" and "destroying the World". Never their red-faced silent mbarrassed husbands. The word "World" was somehow always verbally capitlized.
On the other, other hand, my Grandmother Anne was a mail order bride as an Irish-English orphan direct from the slums of late Victorian London to the Golden Prairies of Canada. My Prairie-Farmer Granfather Wes had sex at least 3 times producing My Uncles Howard and Frank along with My Mother Carolyn. But I doubt if Grandfather Wes had sex much more than 3 times. Once Uncle Frank completed the triad, I am pretty sure that Grandmother Anne welded the oven door shut. My grandmother lived 50 years of her life as an old woman. She liked it that way.
Ah, the Human Variety.
Guys will give a gentle ribbing all in good fun when they think you have a crazy amount of kids. Some women, and progressive women especially, will take offense for apparently committing a crime against feminism. My wife has dealt with that. None ever had the guts to say it when I was present though.
Interesting take, and I mostly agree, but you forgot to factor men into that equation. You assume that the only gatekeepers of fertility are women because they're the ones putting on the IUDs and taking the pills, as if men were all universally inclined to become fathers as soon as possible. Perhaps you do live in a niche community that's more religious and sees fatherhood as a positive, but in more secular circles as you call it, you'll find women who are desperate to become mothers struggling to convince their hesitant male partners to get on board. And she can't just "go ahead and have the baby anyway" because she wants him to be on board and not betray his trust. Contraceptives didn't only make women agonize over their choices, but men too.
At the macro level, the number of children men and women want is equivalent. At the individual level, I can see that sort of friction lowering the rate.
I think even beyond modernity I have a bit of a control freak temperament, but just going for it with my fertility has been really good for my health in every respect (including physical!) Girls and women are taught to be at war with their own bodies from a very young age. Putting that aside to embrace myself as an embodied female is actually very liberating.
We have seven kids so far and I just feel so blessed that I can. I would feel like a huge jerk if I just shut it off. My husband and I love each other and all these little people we've made. I know for a fact that some people feel inconvenienced by us, even in the Church. But we're having the best time we never expected we could have!
It does help to have like-minded weirdos around us. One to have a retreat to go back to, but also because we can help each other. My little niche maintains a list of medical specialists etc. who won't give us grief over family size.
This was a thoughtful and well presented article. I appreciate discussion on this topic that isn't hysterical.
I'd like to posit something I haven't seen put forth anywhere. Maybe it's possible that the human species simply doesn't breed under certain environmental conditions. For example most species stop or slow breeding in the face of overpopulation and/or resource scarcity. In these cases the females who don't breed are seen as making a sacrifice for the long-term survival of the population group.
It might be the case that conditions have become so threatening for humans on Earth that biological, reptilian-brain group survival has kicked in regardless of personal choice. I know that among my female friends over the years, mysteriously not being able to get pregnant for no detectable reason has been quite common. Fertility clinics are a multibillion dollar per year industry for involuntarily infertile couples. Perhaps it's because there's something species-level biological happening.
Fertility is crashing everywhere. If fertility was crashing only in the West, it would make sense to talk about divorce laws and feminism and such. But there is no population of humans anywhere on earth whose fertility is not tanking. Even African fertility is reducing. I don't think that's about divorce laws.
This all suggests something other than personal choice. If this hypothesis is even partially correct then removing autonomy from women isn't going to change anything.
There are a few populations of humans who's fertility is doing just fine. We can learn quite a bit from their lifestyle, imo.
https://www.f0xr.com/p/the-amish-fertility-miracle-part
I'm sure there are but the only one I know of is Israel. If you're thinking of the amish their fertility is in decline too.
Point being there are potentially bigger issues at hand that no one is taking into account.
I would argue contraceptives are permeating Amish culture, but there is also a significant uptick in women with fertility issues.
Hey that's a great article. I'm about half done and will have to finish later, but so far really useful info. I'm from Dutch country and live in a dinky farming town still heavily Amish.
«Maybe it's possible that the human species simply doesn't breed under certain environmental conditions. For example most species stop or slow breeding in the face of overpopulation and/or resource scarcity.»
Overpopulation perhaps, but not resource scarcity increases breeding unless it is extreme (and then the reproductive system shuts down in women). Indeed poorer women in poorer areas had a rule *more* sons because sons were investments for the old age of the mother or additional workers under her control, and up to a point the more the better, especially if several were expected to die before adult age. Sons used to be *profitable*.
Living with abandon can lead to pairing up with the wrong guy/gal. Among people I know in my parents' generation, the ones who lived with abandon (small sample size, admittedly) ended up childless, and the ones who followed convention ended up having kids and grandkids. The trick is to balance wisdom and courage. Basically commit once you have the right man/woman, but it's not always easy to tell if someone is right.
I often think that instagram as an expression of the female need for validation is like 5 features away from being a near perfect way to channel that need in a virtuous way.
The problem is that women are usually not disagreeable enough to ignore the jeers of colleagues calling them "rabbits", and that fathers-in-law are often worse than anything at being risk-averse: "Better my daughter grow old alone than marry a man without a stable job".
Adventure these days is saying "screw the housing market, we'll live in tents and roam the country", "screw the labor market, we'll make ends meet with odd jobs", "screw expectations, we'll build our own". Unfortunately the state is purpose-built to crack down on this. You can't homestead innawoods without the alphabet boys ruby-ridging you.
As a veteran of Marriage 3.0 I really appreciated this affirmation. My wife and I bucked all the trends and raised 5 kids on a carpenter’s wage in Northern California, at times taking risks and finding unusual opportunities.
We also had the quick engagement - 6 months from dating to marriage. And we experienced a lot of the social pressure you describe. My daughters, though they diverging politically and religiously from our path, followed our pattern in quick intense engagements and multiple kids, the upshot being I’m blessed with seven grandchildren.
Grandchildren make it all worth it.
There are a lot of good points in this essay, however, this one is the key: 'Then have their back.'
There's a lot of words and ideas thrown at a lot of different 'problems' but they're typically about what other people should be doing. It's like there's an Advice Industrial Complex out there generating reams of product to be consumed by people who are looking for 'help'...because their people have abandoned them to 'individualism' and 'making up your own mind' (which the author correctly points out leads to more paralysis than decision-making).
All of this comes down to (again) the terrible way that 'the right' and 'conservatives' frame issues leading to endless dead-ends and frustration.
Say it with me: The family is not the foundation of society.
Not unless by 'family' you mean vast networks related individuals such as humans lived in from prehistory until just very recently.
The so-called 'nuclear family' isn't enough of a 'family unit' to weather most storms (or to take many risks).
The old 'tribal family' with its extended relations spread out over a wide - but still close-by - area had room for error. There was almost always someone there to 'have your back' if your risk turned up to be a bust.
The Advice Industrial Complex doesn't exist to solve the problems of families. It exists to solve the problem of how to make money off of 'family problems'.
I wonder if women would be so hell-bent on 'careers' if they know that they could have their children and if something went wrong (like illness or autism or alcoholic spouse), someone would have their back.
And men might feel that they could take on the (very) risky proposition of 'marriage' if, they, too, knew that someone would have their back.
We have seen the solution and the solution is 'us'.
Children and life are messy.
It's a wild ride, and you never know how it's going to go. Day to day is different; working for myself allows changing both how often I work as well as meeting the needs of the family on things besides the $$$'s.
But it's good, and we can always find ways to make things work. Life and children as such joys in all your trials.
No. The economy is so unstable and chaotic young folks with an aspiration to survive cannot afford to make even a single mistake. Fix the monetary system, deport immigrants, execute pedophiles. THEN, we can talk about having more kids.
«In short, if you want couples to have kids again»
"couples" do not have children, *women* make that choice and for a long time that choice was in a large majority of cases to have sons as pensions assets.
Currently women in developed areas have the freedom of buying property or stocks as pension assets and many choose to avoid the effort and risk of bearing and raising children, which also often requires finding and putting up with a man as a provider. "The Economist" once wrote that sons are no longer necessary investments for women in developed areas but have become expensive hobbies in competition with other expensive choices like longer vacations, better cars, more stylish furniture, house renovations.
The developed areas that still have higher natality rates make the expensive hobby of having sons cheaper with full-pay during pregnancy, zero or low-cost delivery, zero or low cost nurseries, zero or low cost quality schools. But women who do not have children resent that their taxes be used to subsidize the hobby of having sons of other women. A feminist solution might be to fund child-bearing and child-raising costs with taxes only on men, merely formalizing their role as providers across history.
As to the “if you want” part on a wider perspective many employers and taxpayers in developed areas reckon that encouraging higher natality rates of workers in their own areas not only would require higher taxes for subsidies but would also produce entitled workers demanding high wages and that is also unnecessary as there literally billions of unemployed or underemployed workers in the world who expect much lower wages and whose bearing and raising costs have already been paid by foreigners and are therefore much more competitive.
Good article. I was thinking recently. Once birth control and abortion were available, the birth rate dropped the steepest it's ever dropped.