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Marriage rates and birth rates are falling. Meanwhile, the average ages for marriage and motherhood are rising. Fewer women are getting married and having children, and those who do are usually older and more educated than ever before.

Many even within the left-inflected mainstream are willing to acknowledge, if reluctantly, that marriage and birth rates in free fall are serious societal problems. Fewer outside conservative circles, however, are able to recognize that a ratcheting up of what is deemed an appropriate age and stage for marriage and motherhood is a concern unto itself.

There are two main reasons for this. First, ideological prepossession is getting in the way of reality and reason. Mainstream feminism has begotten generations of women who tacitly determine whether something is good by asking themselves whether it comports with what they’ve been taught constitutes female empowerment, rather than subjecting that mainstream feminist dogma itself to scrutiny.

Second, extended adolescence and arrested development among young (and not-so-young) people across the political spectrum foster legitimate concerns about youthful readiness for marriage. This, in turn, creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of both genuine unreadiness and a ratcheting up of standards for readiness that, together, inculcate an inertia and purposelessness that, sadly, transcend even our political divides.

Fortunately, meaningfully protecting women’s agency over their lives and producing marriageable young men and women share a cultural prescription: Return marriage to its status as the cornerstone of adult life, not its capstone.

Ignore the Mainstream Feminist Narrative

One mainstream feminist response to a recent Evie Magazine article about delayed motherhood and its costs argued that conservatives who want women to be informed about the realities of fertility and age are actually harming women’s well-being. Those who advocate for younger marriage and motherhood, the author alleges, want women to “start “looking for a husband by 25” rather than “building a life — deepening friendships, falling in love, figuring out who you are, establishing some kind of economic footing.” There is an alleged conspiracy afoot here, of course: “a world in which women’s freedom is narrowed” and their “dependency is normalized” in part because they are led toward “partnership with older and more established men.”

The sleight of hand here is masterful: Women cannot build a life, deepen friendships, fall in love, or figure out who they are while prioritizing marriage? Looking for a husband by 25 is oppressive? This kind of arrogant, belittling overgeneralization comes not from conviction but from fear.

This is fear not of women’s oppression, but of their happiness outside the bounds of mainstream feminist zeitgeist. Married mothers are the happiest young women in America. Most of them aren’t oppressed trad wives marrying men 10 years their senior. In fact, the women getting married at all are increasingly women on equal, if not superior, educational and professional footing in relation to their husbands. And many of them choose to prioritize marriage, family, and motherhood anyway. This is why Sheryl Sandberg has started taking shots directly at stay-at-home moms: She realizes that they aren’t oppressed victims, but formidable opposition to her soulless, androgynous project.

I married my husband when I was 25, and he was 26. We were both college graduates and, at the time, on our way to terminal degrees. We had our first child when I was 27. I worked full-time in higher education until I was nearly 35 and a mother of three. Now 38 with four kids, I am a stay-at-home mom and a writer. We prioritized the upward trajectory of my husband’s career over mine at every step along the way; for me, we chased stability, good health insurance, and flexibility to accommodate primary caregiving.

Maybe if I’d “started looking” for a husband well after 25 (or never), as mainstream feminist advice dictates, I’d have had an established career without the flexibility I could prioritize as a young wife and mother with a second income in the house. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt “ready” for motherhood until I’d achieved the next rung on my erstwhile solo career ladder. Maybe I’d have had fewer children because I started well into my 30s, and then found it difficult to justify prioritizing primary caregiving, since our home and family would have been manageable enough with two kids, even alongside a less flexible career.

Maybe I would never have known that it is coupling up young, as reflexive equals and co-creators of one shared life, that confers true agency rather than a shallow imitation thereof. Then, maybe, I’d be humming along with the mainstream feminist de-prioritization of marriage and motherhood. After all, that would be easier and less painful than acknowledging that I had missed out — not on oppression, but on degrees of freedom.

Reject Peter Pan Syndrome

There’s another problem keeping today’s young people from marrying early. Twenty-somethings of both sexes, but particularly men, are suffering from arrested development. There are many economic and cultural reasons for this, but one is that it’s been a while since we expected them to do otherwise.

As I recently wrote, a secularized society subsumed by moral relativism and absent respect for legitimate authority is a civilization destined for ever more nihilistic individualism. When grown-ups lack sufficient confidence in their own moral and practical authority to compel corresponding grit, commitment, and maturity from their children, hallmarks of virtuous adulthood inevitably fall by the wayside.

This nihilistic individualism that militates against the capacity for marriage begins at home. College-educated gentle parenting often centers feelings above behavior. Meanwhile, working-class non-parenting often allows screens to eradicate emotional discomfort, lessening the need to establish firm boundaries for conduct. Many parents of all educational backgrounds now do some combination of the two.

This anti-formation continues in institutions. Left-coded social and emotional learning inculcates flimsy “self-regulation” that establishes forgiving environments and therapies for poorly parented (mostly male) children, in place of the self-discipline regardless of environment that is actually required for functional adult life. Meanwhile, right-coded “manosphere” content takes aim at these inane educational interventions as “feminized” and thereby excuses boys from the behavioral habituation that would render them unnecessary.

Together, today’s homes, schools, technology, and media unintentionally conspire to produce self-indulgent young people. If we are going to get serious about a return to the cornerstone marriage, we have to reestablish as a society that the point of having children is to produce adults. Not just women, but also, and even more pointedly, men. If “the future is female,” then there is by definition no future.

I am raising four sons. I want them to start looking for a wife at 18. That doesn’t mean they’ll get married at 18 or should! It also doesn’t mean they will forfeit deepening friendships or figuring out who they are. They’ll just — if they’re very lucky — do those things alongside people they meet at 21 and marry, not begin looking for, at 25.

In the 1989 romantic comedy “When Harry Met Sally,” the two protagonists harbor a trendy disdain for love before falling in love with one another. In his eagerness to convince Sally that he is truly reformed, Harry abandons his blasé indifference to romance and says, “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

We should be helping young people of both sexes couple up with as much of their lives ahead of them as they can. It’s best for them, it’s best for society, and it means that we’ll need fewer articles about how easy it actually is to have a first baby after 35. Because we’ll have a lot more couples empowered enough to have third and fourth babies by then.

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Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including on Substack.

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