The following is an edited transcript excerpt from <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1930-president-trump-endorses-jake-paul">The Michael Knowles Show</a>.
* * *
The New York Post published an article yesterday based on a new survey that&#8217;s just come out.
The headline reads:
<blockquote>‘Hotwifing’ — the sexy new couples trend that’s ‘strengthening’ marriages across the country</blockquote>
Now, to be clear, I don&#8217;t encourage you to read the article or the survey, but this is part of a broader cultural trend, a broader cultural normalization of polyamory, of “consensual non-monogamy.” That&#8217;s the new gross clinical jargon they use to sanitize their own perversions.
From the article:
<blockquote>Could ‘hotwifing’ save your marriage? 71% of kinky couples say loaning their wives out for that thing that only husbands and wives are supposed to do together strengthened their union.</blockquote>
Seventy-one percent. The overwhelming majority of these &#8220;kinky couples&#8221; say it strengthened their union. In reality, these are people whose unions are probably not all that strong to begin with. But they say — and these are people who are obviously very, very confused about a lot of things — that pimping out their beloved actually strengthened their union.
Color me a little bit skeptical.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Could &#8216;hotwifing&#8217; save your marriage? 71% of kinky couples say loaning their wives out for sex &#8216;strengthened&#8217; their union <a href="https://t.co/U2cynXcIlF">https://t.co/U2cynXcIlF</a> <a href="https://t.co/aA51Nem0Eu">pic.twitter.com/aA51Nem0Eu</a>
— New York Post (@nypost) <a href="https://twitter.com/nypost/status/2031777390880309504?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 11, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
In any case, you hear a lot about this right now. When some people read this, they react in the old fuddy-duddy way: “Geez, these kids today. This is crazy. Can you believe what they&#8217;re doing now? In the olden days an inch of stocking was looked at as something shocking, but now anything goes.”
That&#8217;s the wrong approach. Because this is not novel. This is not an innovation. There&#8217;s nothing new about this. This is just paganism.
Our culture — the West, sometimes we describe our nation as a Christian nation — but even what we call the West is really a pale shadow of what we used to call Christendom, which was Christian civilization that thrived from roughly the age of Constantine up through the Protestant Revolution, which then starts to crack it up a little bit. But still you had a substantially Christian civilization, albeit amid wars of religion.
Then with the Peace of Westphalia and the Enlightenment, people tried to preserve Christianity but without taking religion all that seriously. You get into modernity and you&#8217;re really living on the fumes of Christendom. Soon enough that gives way to overt paganism.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1930-president-trump-endorses-jake-paul"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-1054531" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-1024x171.jpg" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" data-wp-editing="1" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-1024x171.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-768x128.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-1536x256.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1.jpg 1800w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Here’s what Tertullian, an early Christian writer and Father of the Church, has to say about how pagans versus Christians regarded sex. 
A great line from Tertullian in his &#8220;Apology&#8221;:
<blockquote>All things are common among us, except our wives. We give up our community where it is practiced alone by others who not only take possession of the wives of their friends but most tolerantly also accommodate their friends with theirs.</blockquote>
It&#8217;s a great observation — almost Chestertonian millennia earlier. He says: we Christians are different from the pagans in that we share everything except our wives, and the pagans share nothing with each other except their wives. They won’t share their money, they won’t share their food, they won’t share their resources, they might not share their time — but they will share their wives.
But we Christians are the opposite. We&#8217;ll give anything to each other except for our wives.
Saint Jerome has a famous line in his commentary on Hosea:
<blockquote>Rarely does a heretic love chastity.</blockquote>
Every so often there is a heresy that promotes chastity, but generally speaking you notice — especially in modern religion, with wacky pastors of weird breakaway schismatic churches — they’re always promoting strange sexual practices. That’s the one common thread among all the weird heretical forms of Christianity today.
Rarely does a heretic love chastity.
What this new study reveals — the one meant to shock us with a New York Post headline, “Can you believe 71% of these kinky couples say it’s actually great for their marriages when they cheat on each other?” — is not a new discovery about the present. It reveals how ignorant we are of the past.
This is what paganism was always like.
It&#8217;s amusing when people think they&#8217;ve discovered something new. These people promoting orgies and decadence and bacchanalia think they&#8217;ve discovered freedom. “In the old days people were uptight, but now we’re free. We have free love, we’re doing drugs, we’re polyamorous.”
It makes you think: wow, no one has ever thought of that before — doing drugs and behaving like degenerates. What innovators you are.
It just reveals how little we understand the past. We pretend we understand ancient paganism. We pretend we understand what Christianity replaced. We really don’t.
A great example of this is in the Bible. In Exodus, the Israelites leave Egypt, and Moses goes up Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. Five seconds later, the Israelites abandon the God who led them out of Egypt and start worshiping a golden calf.
Moses comes down and essentially says: what are you doing? Stop worshiping this golden calf.
When people imagine that scene, they think the Israelites were just bowing down saying, “Oh golden calf, we worship you.” But that’s not really what was happening.
They were actually doing the same stuff modern pagans do. They were indulging in food and drink, engaging in all kinds of strange sexual behavior, revelry, and excess.
It’s the same pattern.
There is nothing new under the sun.
So when we come across these “new discoveries” about relationships and marriage and free love, what we’re really doing — wittingly or unwittingly — is rejecting Christianity, reverting to a kind of base, degraded paganism, and pretending that we’ve discovered some new revelation.
But it’s the opposite of a new revelation.
It’s the rejection of revelation.

Couple At A Restaurant Meal

‘Hotwifing’ Is Being Sold As A Marriage Booster — Yes, Really

Bible

Christianity

Marriage

Michael Knowles

Opinion

Paganism

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
These days, a flagship news publication running a fawning story about polyamory is about as surprising as a sports section running box scores. So I wasn’t at all shocked when I saw the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/podcasts/lindy-west-polyamory-marriage.html?smtyp=cur&amp;smid=fb-nytimes&amp;fbclid=IwdGRjcAQWLEhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeEDJySn9ee4yqViq6nlJ3VnFLnZagFSRHsHLrkfHfgf-FEzZtqZELWPMn6NI_aem_gRjqUWp_QCWucRttc05R6A">latest entry</a> in the New York Times’s “Modern Love” series was titled “Lindy West Thought She Couldn’t Handle Polyamory. She Was Wrong.”
Still, the piece was worse than I could have imagined.
That’s because West, a writer and cofounder of the “Shout Your Abortion” campaign, is married. It was her husband, Ahamefule “Aham” Oluo, who proposed their arrangement. West, meanwhile, “envisioned a classic, happy marriage” and “thought we would probably have a baby.”
Not so Oluo, who told West early on in their relationship that he did not think monogamy was “healthy” for him. Twice divorced by 27, he attributed the failure of those relationships to “possessiveness and jealousy.” 
Like any normal person, West cried and felt “devastated.” Now, I’m no marriage guru, but if you propose something to your wife that makes her break down crying, you probably should abandon it — especially if that proposal is “I want you to support my infidelity.”
Oluo didn’t do that. In fact, he told West it was <a href="https://x.com/jessesingal/status/2029638370390069501">racist</a> that she, a white woman, didn’t want him to have sex with other people. He eventually moved across the country to be with his girlfriend, at which point he essentially made West date the both of them. West grew to accept the arrangement in what she credits as a therapeutic breakthrough, but which is very clearly an acceptance of Stockholm syndrome.
To add insult to injury, West — who describes herself as having “a fat body” — says that Oluo’s girlfriend is “tiny, little, beautiful … very much an inverse of me.”
This obviously sounds horrendous to anyone with a mostly functional moral compass. But let’s strip away all the New York Times-approved therapeutic language and tell this story in plain English: A man who ended two marriages before turning 30 because he presumably refused to stop cheating marries a woman, cheats on her with a more attractive person, and bullies his wife until she thinks she’s the lucky one for being a part of her husband’s relationship with his mistress.
Twenty years ago, that would have been too implausible for a Lifetime movie. Today, it’s a Wednesday human interest feature in the paper of record.
How did we get here? It’s not that this particular kind of sexual deviance is new. “Swinging” is basically synonymous with the 1970s and, as Gay Talese chronicles in “The Neighbor’s Wife,” has been something Americans have practiced since at least the 1930s. Nor is it that we’ve simply started discussing a once-taboo thing: The first season of “Friends” features an episode where Chandler dates a woman in an open marriage.
The problem is that we’ve essentially let the swingers win. It’s not that we’ve normalized it — if a typical American couple moved a girlfriend into their house, they’d certainly scandalize the neighbors — but we’ve all but accepted that these are things people will do. We say “polyamory” instead of “swinging” or “freaky nonsense.” And we write think pieces about “polyamory” like it’s a new kind of generational slang instead of something deeply, deeply strange.
I am not the first conservative writer to lament the total absence of shame in American society, and I’m not here to launch a moral crusade. Someone else can do that. No, my goal is much more modest. I’m not sure we can stop this nonsense altogether, but we can absolutely make the swingers retreat back to their Vermont compounds to live out their postmodern harem fantasies under the cover of darkness. 
It’s time to make weirdos embarrassed again.
Let’s go back to Lindy West’s prince of a husband. This guy sucks. If you get divorced twice before 30, you need to hang it up and spend the rest of your life thinking about what you did wrong. The fact that this walking red flag managed to get another woman to marry him and then convinced her to let him get a girlfriend is insane.
Ideally, this guy would’ve gone to church or gotten shoved into a locker and not grown into such a terrible person. Barring that, West should have heard “two divorces” and run for the hills. And as an absolute last resort, the second he proposed “non-monogamy,” she should’ve used her sizable platform to shame this loser and make him completely undateable in Brooklyn or Portland or wherever else smelly lotharios go to manipulate women with art degrees.
We may never be able to put this particular genie back in the bottle — the days of shocking exposés about swingers are probably behind us — but we can absolutely get back to the kind of society that produced the “Friends” episode where the swinger was both clearly a bad person and a punchline.
In fact, I think it’s important we don’t try to overshoot on this one. While there are some genuinely disturbing offshoots of “polyamory” — I’m <a href="https://www.thecut.com/article/daniel-lavery-grace-lavery-lily-woodruff-brooklyn-interview.html">thinking of</a> Daniel and Grace Lavery, both transgender-identifying, who formed a “throuple” with a biological woman they somehow got pregnant — this is, by and large, not a serious moral crisis that needs to be battled. It’s a farce perpetrated by bad people who think they’re smarter than everyone else, and it needs to be mocked.
If you feel like I feel, join the cause. The next time the New York Times publishes one of these articles, don’t read it. If you ever meet a man who tells you he’s polyamorous, tell him he’s a bad person. Most importantly, get married and have kids and do normal things like coach Little League and have movie nights and — I cannot stress this one enough — do not cheat on your wife with an ethnically ambiguous performance artist and then try to intellectualize it so a bunch of Vassar grads tell you you’re a hero.
Just be normal. It’s easier than all this woke nonsense, and certainly more rewarding. And if enough of us do it, we can send these hippies back to the commune once and for all.
***
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

GettyImages-1135649970

Since When Is Cheating A Lifestyle? The NYT Dubs ‘Polyamory’ A Love Story

Media

Polyamory

Upstream

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
I told myself it was motion sickness. The tour bus had lost air conditioning, my entire college chorale sweating our way back to campus from a tour of New England. I tried to distract myself in conversation, but nausea won out and I ran for the tiny bathroom at the back of the bus. “Did you get your reading report turned in, yet?” A friend asked as I whizzed by. I shook my head.
When we got home, my husband and I stopped to grab groceries and a pregnancy test. I didn’t keep them stocked because I had no intention of needing one for over a year — when I would graduate with a journalism degree. We wanted to start our family young, just not before graduation.
I had ignored early symptoms until fatigue consumed me a few days into the tour. I pushed on in denial, trying not to throw up lobster rolls and clam chowder. The positive pregnancy test didn’t surprise me much, but it did send shockwaves through our little world. We were grateful and humbled (so much for natural family planning).
My journalism professor’s reaction captured my own tension between delight and overwhelm.
“Oh are you?” He asked with a congratulatory smile. “But how are you going to do all of the things I need you to do?” I laughed and assured him that, God permitting, I would do it all.
Conversations about <a href="https://www.compactmag.com/article/get-married-young/">the benefits of getting married young</a> are cropping up all over the internet recently. Pronatalist activists are encouraging people to have more kids, and sooner. Simone and Malcolm Collins are a pronatalist couple warning about the birthrate crisis and aiming for 14 children through IVF. They recently <a href="https://x.com/SimoneHCollins/status/2017242647195205732">argued</a> for having kids in college, especially if universities better support parents. They even imply that college could be an ideal context in which to have kids: “Late night wake-ups with a baby are no problem for college students who are used to pulling all-nighters,” they say.
I believe children are a gift from God, and I was given remarkably favorable circumstances for finishing school with a baby. But I learned that college and kids are a difficult, not an ideal, combination. You just can’t do it all. 
At least attempting to graduate was a no-brainer for me.
I once wandered a park with my boyfriend and our conversation drifted to whether we could get married while still in school; he could graduate a year before me and work while I finished up. But I worried that dragging debt into a young marriage was unwise and impractical. Would it be too much of a burden? He listened thoughtfully before responding. 
“If you really want this, I’ll work hard and we’ll get through it,” he said. “I’ll do whatever it takes to help you finish.”
We got married two years later over Christmas break, and jumped back into classes together. Fast forward to April, and we discovered our baby was due at the beginning of Christmas break (a truly providential due date). I hoped that professors at my Christian conservative school would be supportive. I still wanted my degree and one more year in a community I loved. But that year would look starkly different from my dreams. My paradigm would shift from “soak in senior year” to “survive.”
I carried a bag of almonds with me through the end of the spring semester like a talisman to ward off nausea. I nibbled them behind the piano at strategic moments during chorale concerts. Getting out of bed in the morning felt impossible, and I drove home to sleep through classes I couldn’t sit through. I only made it through finals thanks to weeks of extensions from professors.
My husband helped me prepare for my new normal. Stress about academics was not an option. Health was the priority for me and the baby. Previously nicknamed “Hermione” for my type-A approach, I would need to settle for passing grades.
Extracurriculars had been the frosting to my college cake. I loved chorale, moot court, and drama, and I’d even started an a cappella group. Now I had to cut back or let go. Before I told my close friends my news, I told my moot court coach. My goal had been to secure a competitive partner and shoot for the national championship. But now that I likely couldn’t compete in January, I didn’t want to disappoint an ambitious partner.
I front-loaded an immense credit load for senior fall to make the spring semester with a newborn a little easier. I registered for 17 credits plus another 8 credits of intermediate French online. I waddled around in maternity blouses and slacks, battling brain fog. All that French I paid thousands for? It’s pretty much gone. I qualified for nationals in moot court, but made the painful decision to opt out.
I finished finals before my due date and emailed professors to make sure I could bring my baby into class. Then I slept, curb-walked, and pulled my first all-nighter birthing my daughter into the world. 
I had no idea how the spring would unfold. My mother-in-law flew out for three weeks to help me resume classes. She stocked our freezer with food. I stocked the stroller with burp cloths, pacifiers, and nursing covers, taking notes when I wasn’t breastfeeding or walking hallways.
Nighttime feedings weakened my academic abilities. <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10204456/#sec4-clockssleep-05-00022">Research suggests</a> that sleep deprivation impairs your brain’s ability to retain new information. I’d stare at a single physics problem for an hour, my mind just as blurry as my tear-filled eyes. Before the baby, I had been reveling in a rich education. Now I was just hoping to secure a degree. 
I also felt cut adrift from class camaraderie. I was known to one student simply as “that girl with the stroller.” I skipped social events and felt my wit and energy wither. My classmates were soaking in their college experience. I was savoring quieter moments with my family of three.
Community looked different, but it was still sweet. Some friends took slots to play with my daughter each week while I tackled assignments. They helped me with diaper blow-outs during physics lab. They endlessly encouraged me. Guys in my classes helped me wrangle the stroller in and out of classrooms. My daughter became a mascot in classes, cooing happily on her blanket while I took notes. I dreaded being a distraction, but she brought smiles and baby fever everywhere she went.
Just a few weeks before graduation, we got strep throat. I spent days in bed tending a feverish baby and feeling the weight of late assignments with every excruciating swallow. My mom flew across the country to help me catch up. Through it all, my husband worked full-time, washed countless dishes, rocked the baby, and folded laundry.
By God’s grace, I walked across the graduation stage with my 5-month-old in attendance. I’ve already forgotten my final grades. I don’t even remember the GPA threshold for the honors tassels I earned. I do remember the pink tassel I found hanging in my apartment before commencement. My husband bought it to represent an honor that wouldn’t be recognized on my diploma: bringing life into the world and nurturing it. I couldn’t do it all, but the sacrifices were worth it.
***
Clara York is a freelance reporter and poet writing on family and religious issues. She lives in Virginia with her husband and two young daughters.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Woman pushing baby in a pram

‘That Girl With The Stroller’ — I Loved My Baby, But College Was Never The Same

Children

College

family

Today’s young adults, on average, now spend more than a decade navigating the ambiguous space between sexual maturity and marriage. What was once a short transitional chapter has now become an extended, and often confusing act in a person’s life.
William Shakespeare captured the drama of human development in these famous lines from “As You Like It,” penned around 1599:
<blockquote>All the world&#8217;s a stage, 
And all the men and women merely players; 
They have their exits and their entrances; 
And one man in his time plays many parts…</blockquote>
Centuries later, the theme still resonates: We all progress through life from infancy and childhood to adulthood and, if we&#8217;re lucky, old age.
But one act of that lifelong drama — what Shakespeare called the season of the “lover” — has grown significantly longer. A majority of young people today now date for over a decade before saying, “I do.”
For most of history, “sexual debut” (or losing one’s virginity) and marriage were either concurrent or chronologically very close. In the 1950s, the <a href="https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/marital.html">window between these events</a> was just a few short years for the average American.
Not so today. Sexual debut occurs, on average, at <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/nsfg-2022-2023-puf.htm#female">17.4 years for women and 17.6 years for men</a>, statistics that have held relatively steady over time. But the average age for first marriage is now much later: <a href="https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/families-and-living-arrangements.html?utm_campaign=20251202pio&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=govdelivery">28.4 years for women and 30.8 years for men</a>.
Often billed as a fun season of life, the pre-marriage single years today are marked by loneliness, confusion, and poor mental health. 
Shakespeare had it right when he described the lover:
<blockquote>Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad 
Made to his mistress&#8217; eyebrow.</blockquote>
Young adults today are indeed woeful.
Gen Z has struggled with <a href="https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/generation-z-and-the-transformation-of-american-adolescence-how-gen-zs-formative-experiences-shape-its-politics-priorities-and-future/">feelings of loneliness</a> more than any other generation: their <a href="https://glocalities.com/reports/trend-report-polarization">despair and disillusionment</a> are growing.
At least some of this disillusionment may find its root in a confusing dating culture. To extend Shakespeare’s metaphor, one might say that we have lost the script for life. Just a few decades ago, young people knew they were expected to look for a spouse, marry, and then start a family and build a future together. Now that’s not so clear.
So, what can be done? Do we write a new script? Dig up the old one?
In an age where freedom and self-determination are highly valued, any script may seem overly prescriptive. Of course, men and women should be free to make their own choices. No two love stories are the same. And there will always be some people who choose intentional lifelong singlehood. But the absence of norms and expectations appears to create its own problems.
The overwhelming majority of today’s young adults still want to get married and have kids. In a new <a href="https://www.independentwomen.com/2026/02/17/two-truths-and-a-lie-dating/">national poll</a>, fully 80.5% of respondents (aged 18-29) were either married (18.5%) or said they hoped to get married one day (62%), and 70% said they either had kids already (24.5%) or hoped to have them (45.4%). Will they achieve these dreams?
We may not be able to replace the old script for family formation, but we can help the young adults — the lovers — who are stuck on stage, calling for a line. Changing our culture is hard, but possible.
For starters, we can be more honest about what choices and behaviors make people happiest.
More time spent single before marriage means more opportunity to gain pre-marriage sexual experience, but this isn’t a good thing. Our culture tells young adults that pornography, casual sex, and cohabitation are no big deal. Social science, however, suggests otherwise. These choices are associated with <a href="https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1142&amp;context=dignity">worse health</a>, <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7871523/">worse mental health</a>, and <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19203165/">lower marriage satisfaction</a>. Sexual inexperience is actually linked to <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/does-sexual-history-affect-marital-happiness">stronger, happier marriages</a>.
Pornography poses particular problems for Gen Z. We’re not talking about your dad’s Playboy magazine anymore; we’re talking about a lethal cocktail of social media, artificial intelligence, and ubiquitous internet connection. And it’s not just the guys: Young women are increasingly reading and listening to erotic literature.
A solo sex life is a cheap but easy replacement for relationships with real-life human beings. After all, fellow humans come with smelly socks, emotional baggage, and for many in Gen Z, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/young-men-women-are-taking-poll-gender-gap-staggering-new-levels-rcna202672">divergent political views</a>.
The widening political divide between young women and men both reflects — and reinforces — today’s strained dating culture. Time spent online only <a href="https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/NYUCBHRFuelingTheFire_FINALONLINEREVISEDSep7.pdf">deepens political animosity</a>.
And yet, young, single people are <a href="https://pro.morningconsult.com/instant-intel/gen-z-social-media-usage">very online</a>, sometimes using the internet to look for love. Technology has made connections easier, but relationships harder. Many married couples <a href="https://www.theknot.com/content/online-dating-most-popular-way-to-meet-spouse">first met on dating apps</a>. But online dating offers a literal world of possibilities when it comes to potential “matches.” Youth of yesteryear were often constrained to high school sweethearts or college coed counterparts. This “<a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/valley-girl-brain/201802/why-dating-is-such-challenge">paradox of choice</a>” that overwhelms today’s dating men and women also undermines their satisfaction even after they commit to one another.
The influence of technology on relationships goes even deeper: Young people today are spending a lot of time on <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11284647/">social media</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/upshot/video-games-boys-young-men.html">video games</a>, and less time on <a href="https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/how-social-media-made-us-less-social/">in-person social interactions</a>, where real-life relationship skills develop. The COVID pandemic accelerated this trend, but it was <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8478850/#cdev13652-sec-0036">underway before</a> (and <a href="https://www.edweek.org/leadership/kids-screen-time-rose-during-the-pandemic-and-stayed-high-thats-a-problem/2023/02">continues after</a>).
Underdeveloped social skills are likely contributing to &#8220;approach anxiety” in today’s young men, who say they <a href="https://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/4726/1/BSC-ThesisS4637917Approach-anxietyFinal-B.pdf">don’t want to come off as “creepy</a>” when asking a girl out in real life. The #MeToo movement has also played a factor. While the effort to raise awareness about sexual misconduct has had some positive effects, <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/me-too-backlash-getting-worse_n_5cddd96de4b00e035b8ce786">it chilled many male-female interactions</a>.
Most (54.3%) young adults agree that #MeToo has made men fearful of false accusations and, therefore, less interested in dating. Gen Z still expects the man to make the first move, but mixed messages on masculinity are contributing to men’s anxiety in approaching women.
Many young people of both sexes are anxious about parenthood. Among young adults who say they don’t want kids, the most commonly-cited reason is, “I don’t think I’ll be a good parent,” outranking cost, career impact, and societal concerns. In the 18-24 age range, nearly one in three (32.3%) respondents who didn’t want kids cited this as their primary reason.
This points to something cultural — not economic or policy-oriented — about parenthood hesitancy. Perhaps our social expectations of parents have gotten unrealistically high. Perhaps our cultural messages on what makes a “good parent” or even a “good life” have become less clear.
Whatever it is that has deteriorated the confidence of young adults, it won’t be easily fixed by a new government program or subsidy. More and more pundits and institutions are <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/in_focus/4424068/heritage-foundation-right-american-family-needs-saving/">joining the bandwagon for a big-government pro-family agenda,</a> but this is ill-advised. Decisions about family formation aren’t like other consumer decisions that are more easily influenced by government intervention. They relate deeply to our conceptions of identity, morality, and meaning. They can totally change the direction of our life’s story.
“All the world’s a stage” comes from the play “As You Like It” and like most Shakespearean comedies, the final scene is — you guessed it — a wedding. Young adults today can still find their happy ending, too. But they would benefit from a culture that puts less emphasis on shallow, short-term satisfaction and more emphasis on becoming people who can build a future.
* * *
Hadley Heath Manning is a senior fellow with Independent Women and author of the new report “The Dating Decade: Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Swiping Right.”
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Making a grand entrance into marriage

A Decade Between First Date And ‘I Do’ — What Changed?

A Decade Between First Date And 'I Do' — What Changed?

Apps

Dating

Gen Z

Relationships

Shakespeare

Social Media

Women

When I ponder the deeper aspects of love and intimacy, I sometimes like to consult the wisdom of our left-wing thought leaders, in the same way I sometimes like to stick a pencil in my ear to see if I can make it come out the other side of my head, then slam the ball-peen of a hammer down on my kneecap with full force before finally jamming a lit stick of dynamite between my buttocks and blowing my own ass off.
For far too long, stodgy conservative influencers like Matt Walsh and God have defined human love as that relationship in which a man and a woman come to realize that the jigsaw complementarity of male and female bodies has become a fleshly symbol of the harmonic convergence of their individual souls, so that they seek to come together through the sacrament of an indissoluble lifelong marriage, in which she submits to the authority of a member of that gender with some semblance of a capacity for reason, while he includes within the circle of his own happiness the happiness of a member of that gender that can never be made happy or if they can it just costs an absolute fortune.
But unlike the sluggish thought of conservatives, the wisdom of leftism never allows itself to become mired in the stagnant tar pit of moral and physical reality. Leftism is progressive, like emphysema or one of those horrible degenerative diseases that you don’t even want to think about because it’s so much like leftism, it makes you wonder how a good God could ever allow such a thing to exist. No. Leftists have now moved beyond restrictive, outdated categories like the essential nature of the human condition, and they’ve discovered all kinds of new wrinkles to human love that past generations never even conceived of without getting arrested.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/hosts/andrew-klavan?elementPosition=6&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Hosts&amp;rowType=Hosts+Portrait+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974735 aligncenter" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-1024x171.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-1024x171.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-768x128.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-1536x256.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now.jpg 1800w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
For instance, through the brilliant writings of leftist academics who have dedicated their lives to the selfless work of saying ridiculous crap that only some idiot like a journalist could possibly fall for, we now know that your gender is not determined by what gender you are. That wouldn’t be fair. You didn’t ask to be born. And if you did ask to be born, you sure didn’t ask to be born with every cell of your body evolved over slow millennia to either create and nurture the next generation, or to drag your ass to work so the next generation and their mother don’t starve to death while they’re home playing Candy Land or whatever the hell they do all day when you’re slaving away to keep them in onesies with maybe a few bucks left over for a date night at the Olive Garden so you don’t go out of your freaking mind.
NOW, leftists tell us, you can change your gender by simply lopping off the relevant body parts, then bullying all the sane people into pretending that did the trick, until the gnawing suspicion that everyone is lying to you causes you to spray a crowded room with gunfire before blowing your head off.
And for those people who aren’t into meaningless self-mutilation — for some reason — leftists are also able to assist you in intimacy by recommending some fruitless sexual fetish that is sure to improve your love life if your love life currently consists of lowering baskets of lotion into an oubliette.
As an example, there’s a new movie out called &#8220;Pillion&#8221; which charts the sado-masochistic affair between two gay bikers. The Wall Street Journal calls it a “classic rom-com with warm and fuzzy feelings.” The Washington Post calls it a “surprisingly sweet BDSM romance.” And the New York Times hasn’t reviewed it yet, because their reviewer is still in the theater watching it over and over again. 
Now, don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against defining love as a man submitting to wearing a dog collar for another man, any more than I’m against defining dinner as repeatedly smacking a sirloin steak into your forehead. I just wish our leftist cultural overlords would occasionally heap such praise on a movie about, say, a wife submitting to the authority of a husband who makes her happiness his own. But they can’t. Because no one ever makes that movie.
* * *
This excerpt is taken from the opening satirical monologue of “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-andrew-klavan-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Andrew Klavan Show</a>.”
Andrew Klavan is the host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” at The Daily Wire. Klavan is the bestselling author of numerous books, including the Cameron Winter Mystery series. The fifth installment, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/After-That-Cameron-Winter-Mysteries/dp/1613166869/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3EGZUC370LG46&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Y_NI0mDOKeowShheDQTVx5NH-fAeimJoCD56_T0Acpl8C0mup7uJf-nGGSRLEItaaekoDnvS2vWLMa4Zd2UBXQ8Y-g-P502jOWz-Y8IX3ZQsdlO7WMLrg1xIhNoKmjCorSWUR4C2l_RbiZ7apJ1MfPzGOrrEf7AdAXX6xwnJRVP_XqUfWuMuVthTWscaU3P4vgmS86-96n-721enHfX12CFQWTajqFbVnrsDkexfUf4.6_gTH6h1Bb9Pn375QdF_VAVZSayDvjQBBKGXE-MTiFo&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=klavan&amp;qid=1754049918&amp;sprefix=%2Caps%2C80&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">After That, The Dark,</a> is NOW AVAILABLE. Follow him on X: <a href="https://x.com/andrewklavan" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@andrewklavan</a>.
The views expressed in this satirical piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Modern love

Love, Leftism, And The Tar Pit Of Physical Reality

Andrew Klavan

Entertainment

Gender

Humor

Movies

Satire

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
Nothing can disprove a belief in the interchangeability of the sexes like having children. When I had my first baby, I assumed my husband and I would split things as evenly as we could. I’d be breastfeeding, sure, but when it came to other tasks, the work would be 50-50. How idealistic I was.
Our baby was clingy and needy, as babies usually are. But the problem was that what he often wanted was not just to be held and rocked to sleep; it was to be held and rocked to sleep by mom — aka, me. I remember watching other fathers bounce fussy babies at church or on a plane and feeling defensive of my husband. He would like to be doing that too, I thought. But it just doesn’t work. (And here is where I add the disclaimer that he did often bounce our baby to sleep and was as involved as possible. But there are some things only moms can do.)
As much as we might like to be, people are not robots. We can’t organize our lives according to a theoretically optimal system without setting ourselves up for failure. Nothing puts that in such stark relief as a baby, who has no interest in holding his poops until dad is around so mom can skip a diaper change, or saving his latest bout of screaming for mom after dad has finally gotten him down to sleep. Babies want what they want, and they couldn’t care less about your so-called equality. 
This hasn’t stopped some parents from pursuing the elusive even distribution of work. A recent <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/01/opinion/baby-formula-marriage-equality.html">opinion column</a> in the New York Times offers a solution: “The Secret to Marriage Equality Is Formula.”
“It’s time to explicitly tell parents-to-be, before they’re in the trenches, that the two worthwhile enterprises of exclusive breastfeeding and equal parenting are a zero-sum game — and that it can be utterly life-changing to choose the latter,” writer Nona Willis Aronowitz concludes. 
She’s correct that the two are mutually exclusive; there is no equality in baby feeding when one parent is literally sustaining a child and the other is just there for moral support and water bottle refills. But she’s wrong in her implication that equality should trump other considerations where children’s wellbeing is concerned.
The problem appears to be one of perspective. “The bonding effect” of breastfeeding her first child “was real,” Aronowitz writes, “but it also meant my ability to understand the contours of her needs deepened as Dom [her husband] became more and more sidelined. The resulting resentment nearly broke us as a couple. The unfair burden and sleep deprivation nearly broke me.”
I can attest to overwhelming effects of sleep deprivation, having just gotten my second child to sleep through the night in the past month. I chose to exclusively breastfeed him knowing my husband would be able to sleep mostly peacefully while I was waking hour after hour to resettle our baby. Instead of getting up throughout the night, my husband was changing diapers and spending hours walking our neighborhood in desperate attempts to get our baby to take his naps. Was it equal? No. Did I resent my husband for it? Well, only until I’d had my morning coffee.
READ MORE FROM UPSTREAM: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/weight-loss-medication-may-have-dangerous-side-effects-i-dont-care?author=Bethany+Mandel&amp;category=undefined&amp;elementPosition=7&amp;row=3&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+News&amp;rowType=Vertical+Carousel&amp;title=Weight-Loss+Medication+May+Have+Dangerous+Side+Effects.+I+Don%E2%80%99t+Care.">Weight-Loss Medication May Have Dangerous Side Effects. I Don’t Care.</a>
My husband and I have been married for almost six years, and if there’s one piece of advice I feel qualified to pass down, it’s that the pursuit of equality is a path to a miserable marriage. It’s best to think of the workload in your marriage swinging like a pendulum: Sometimes the wife does more while the husband does less and vice versa. Sometimes the duties just look different. When it comes to small children, their mother is biologically wired to take on a larger portion of their childcare. For the kids’ sake, and for the sake of avoiding resentment, that’s worth accepting.
Brené Brown, the researcher most well known for her TED Talk on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o">vulnerability</a>, calls the idea of a 50-50 marriage “one of the worst myth[s] in the world.” She and her husband have two kids together and have been married since 1994, so I’m guessing she knows what she’s talking about. 
“Strong, lasting relationships are rarely 50-50, because life does not work that way,” she <a href="https://brenebrown.com/podcast/brene-on-comparative-suffering-the-50-50-myth-and-settling-the-ball/">said</a> on her podcast in 2020. “Strong, lasting relationships happen when your partner or friend or whoever you’re in relationship with, can pony up that 80% when you are down to 20, and that your partner also knows that when things fall apart for her, and she only has 10% to give, you can show up with your 90, even if it’s for a limited amount of time.”
Equality in marriage sounds nice, but it’s an ideal not rooted in reality. Husbands and wives get sick or sleep-deprived, take high-pressure jobs, have high-needs children, struggle with mental health issues, and more. Sometimes one spouse will be doing more than the other. And holding yourself to an unrealistic ideal will necessarily result in resentment. 
This doesn’t mean you can’t communicate your needs to your spouse. Quite the opposite. If there are ways in which the workload seems unfair to you, and your partner is able to do more, then he or she should. What you want is a spouse who is willing to step up when you’re feeling down, not one who is hyperfocused on making sure you each wash the same number of dishes. 
Marriage is a partnership, but it can’t — and shouldn’t — always be equal.
Have an idea for Upstream? We welcome submissions; interested writers can send pitches to upstream@dailywire.com.

parenting_equality_v1_720

The Marriage Myth We’ve Been Told To Believe — And Why It Backfires

Culture

Parenting

Cosmopolitan U.K. just <a href="https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-sex/relationships/a70301743/men-dating-icks-non-negotiables/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">published the findings</a> from their dating survey and unfortunately it’s even more depressing than expected.
The accompanying article comes with a primer on the dating lingo of today including discussions about having the “ick” and “non-negotiables.” There’s also an entire paragraph dedicated to ways that people keep their distance including “zombie,” “orbit,” “breadcrumb,” “bench,” and “pocket.”
No, this isn’t a joke. This is the absolute state of dating in the year 2026.
The survey asked 250 single men about their dating dealbreakers, and the responses ranged from reasonable (&#8220;being rude to people&#8221;) to oddly specific (&#8220;must not like tickling people&#8221;) to hilarious (&#8220;use of the word &#8216;ick'&#8221;). One man said he doesn’t associate with women who refer to themselves as &#8220;influencers.&#8221; Well, in that case, same.
Buried beneath all the modern dating terminology is a deeper issue: people are exhausted. Instead of just meeting someone, feeling a connection, and going from there, modern men are spending way too much time searching for something that doesn’t exist. They&#8217;re ghosting potential partners for taking too long to text back, and also for texting too often. At this rate, no one will ever move past the “talking phase,” and that’s a really big deal.
Now fewer people are dating, getting married, or having kids than ever before. We&#8217;ve turned courtship into a job interview. Romance, in the way it used to be understood, is dead.
All hope is not lost, however, and dating doesn&#8217;t have to be this miserable forever. It can even be fun again. You know, back when people actually talked to each other instead of swiping left on everyone with the tiniest hint of “ick” potential.
Enter Michael Knowles&#8217; <a href="https://store.dailywire.com/collections/michael-knowles/products/yes-or-no-dating-relationships-expansion-pack" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Yes or No: Dating and Relationships Expansion Pack</a>. This is a great way to interrogate your date about their dealbreakers in a fun way. With over 125 cards covering everything from interfaith marriages to whether &#8220;fur-babies&#8221; are replacing actual children, this game turns all that obsessive pre-screening into actual conversation.
Will you agree on whether watching porn is cheating? Is dating multiple people simultaneously fine if you&#8217;re not &#8220;exclusive&#8221;? These are the questions inspiring both laughter and deep conversations when everyone&#8217;s cards are on the table. <a href="https://store.dailywire.com/products/yes-or-no-dating-relationships-expansion-pack?_pos=2&amp;_sid=ebb86dcc4&amp;_ss=r" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Grab the deck now and save 25% off until Valentine&#8217;s Day!</a>
Dating should be fun, not terrible. So grab the expansion pack, pour some drinks, and remember that dating isn&#8217;t about finding someone perfect. It&#8217;s finding someone whose imperfections coordinate perfectly with your own.
Happy dating, everyone.
<a href="https://store.dailywire.com/products/yes-or-no-dating-relationships-expansion-pack?_pos=2&amp;_sid=ebb86dcc4&amp;_ss=r"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-1043353 size-full alignleft" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/Knowles-Dating-Game.png" alt="" width="394" height="512" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/Knowles-Dating-Game.png 394w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/Knowles-Dating-Game-231x300.png 231w" sizes=" (max-width: 394px) 100vw, 394px" /></a>

Pixelated broken heart on smart phone screens

Survey Reveals Modern Dating Is Even Worse Than You Thought

Daily Wire Shop

Valentine's Day

Wedding cake visual metaphor with figurine cake toppers

Conservative Influencer Cheating Scandal: Was The Manosphere Right All Along?

Andrew Tate

Catholicism

Conservatives

Matt Walsh

Social Issues

Western Civilization

Conservatives are used to being called names: racist, sexist, transphobic, and the list goes on. Typically, these charges are rooted in policy differences: If you oppose DEI and racial quotas, the Left will call you racist. If you oppose men competing in women’s sports, you’re a transphobe. These labels are weapons used to advance political narratives, and typically deserve the same attention as an unhinged, all-caps comment in your X feed. They should be ignored.
Yet when it comes to sexism, conservatives should consider how their messaging makes the sexist charge stick with women who otherwise might join our movement. Conservative leaders aren’t misogynists, but particularly when speaking to and about women, they are sometimes tone deaf.
Take the issue of marriage and family life. For good reason, conservatives frequently trumpet evidence showing the benefits of marriage and family formation. Children raised by married parents enjoy a long list of benefits. Married women and men are less likely to live in poverty, have better health outcomes, and report higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction than their single counterparts. This is important information for the public to have.
Yet efforts to raise awareness about the benefits of marriage and family formation frequently come across as denigrating childless or unmarried women. Conservatives may think they are countering nihilistic TikTok influencers and gender studies professors who seem driven to convince impressionable young women that marriage and children are the enemies of good mental health, while an OnlyFans career offers true fulfillment. Yet the persuadable women most likely to hear conservatives’ counter messages are women who already recognize the benefits of marriage and children, but who find themselves outside those institutions nonetheless.
Today, nearly 20% of women over age 45 are childless. According to a <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-experiences-of-u-s-adults-who-dont-have-children/">Pew survey</a> of childless adults, nearly 40% admit that they once wanted children. That’s almost certainly an understatement since many childless adults likely don’t want to admit, even to themselves, that they regret missing this irreplaceable part of the human experience.
Additionally, about one-quarter of children are being raised by a single parent. Those single parents don’t need to be told how much easier it would be to have another adult helping to give their kids all the love and support they need. They live it every day.
Touting the benefits of a happy family life can seem not so much instructive as rubbing it in. Done wrong, this messaging risks not only alienating childless and unmarried women, but all of those who love them. When women hear that messaging, they don’t solely think about how it impacts them, but also the people they love and worry about the most: their dear best friend who hasn’t found a husband; their beloved, recently divorced sister juggling kids’ schedules and costs. Married women with children will reject those who they see as dunking on their loved ones.
Conservative leaders should also keep this in mind when addressing work-life issues. Of course, parents should know how vulnerable children are in those first months and years of life, and why investing time in them is so beneficial. Yet, when done wrong, those messages can sound like attacks on working women — many of whom would love to downshift their careers but feel like they can’t afford to do so.
It is certainly true that facts don&#8217;t care about your feelings. Political leaders must make policy decisions grounded in clear-eyed reality. Yet it is also true that feelings are often unmoved by facts. That is why, when communicating about sensitive and deeply personal issues, policy leaders must be careful in how they communicate those realities, because poorly chosen words can do far more damage than good.
Republicans do not want to be seen as a party that only values married mothers or only women as mothers. The party also welcomes single women, widows, lesbians, and divorcees — any woman — so long as she shares the core conservative beliefs that personal responsibility, limited government, and free markets are the foundation of a flourishing country.
Republicans should be succeeding in winning women over. Democrats have spent recent years denigrating the very concept of womanhood — as if being a woman is a costume that you can put on and take off. Conservatives took the lead in defending women as a distinct group worthy of equal opportunity and protection under the law. Women saw this and recognized conservatives as the champions of common sense and core women’s rights.
Conservative policies are fundamentally pro-woman: Women thrive in a safe, secure society with a robust economy offering plentiful opportunities for people to pursue their own visions of happiness. This policy vision needs to be communicated carefully, in a manner that shows that women — all women, not just married mothers — are valued and can find a home in our movement.
* * *
Carrie Lukas is the president of the non-profit Independent Women&#8217;s Forum. Follow her on X at @carrielukas.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

TOPSHOT-US-VOTE-POLITICS-EARLY VOTING

When It Comes To Reaching Women, Republicans Aren’t Misogynistic. Just Tone Deaf.

When It Comes To Reaching Women, Republicans Aren't Misogynistic. Just Tone Deaf.

divorce

Family Values

Republican Women

Republicans

Comedian Jay Leno said certain people believe he should get a girlfriend to keep him company as his wife of 45 years, Mavis, battles dementia.
The former host of “The Tonight Show” discussed what he’s been hearing during a recent <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h361wQC3E4M">episode</a> of the “Life Above the Noise with Maria Shriver” podcast.
“I’ve said this a bunch of times: you take a vow when you get married &#8212; and people are stunned … they’re so shocked that you would live up to it,” Leno said. Mavis was diagnosed with dementia in 2024 and Leno was granted a conservatorship in April of that year.
“My favorite thing was … and this is the most Hollywood thing. A guy said to me, ‘So, are you gonna get a girlfriend now?’” the 75-year-old comedian said.
Leno said he responded by saying, “Well no, I have a girlfriend. I’m married. Been married 45 years.”
The person apparently pushed back, saying, “Yeah, but you know what I mean.”
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Jay Leno on Comedy, Cars and Caregiving | Life Above the Noise with Maria" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/h361wQC3E4M?start=240&#038;feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Leno went on to marvel at how people’s views on marriage have changed over the years. “No, we’re kinda in this together here,” he recalls saying. “Honey, I’ll be with my girlfriend! I’ll be back later,” he joked.
Leno said people now aren’t used to “just doing the right thing because you’re supposed to.”
“That used to be the norm, and then when you strayed, that was the out-of-whack part. Now the out-of-whack part is fairly common, and staying and doing what you’re supposed to do is stunning to people,” Leno told Shriver. “We kind of made a deal.”
“This is that thing of, ‘Okay, you’ve been pretty lucky up to this point. It’s been easy sailing. This is where it gets a little tricky,’” the former late night host added. “I’m glad I’m passing the test. Because you never quite know what you’re going to do in that situation. So I like to think I made the right decision.”

Jay Leno

Jay Leno Says People Are ‘So Shocked’ He’s Staying With His Wife Amid Her Dementia Battle

Jay Leno Says People Are 'So Shocked' He's Staying With His Wife Amid Her Dementia Battle

Celebrities

dementia

U.S.

Men, don&#8217;t rely on a woman&#8217;s Hinge profile to tell you what she wants out of a relationship. Lead, and date with the intention of marriage. 
At this year&#8217;s Turning Point USA America Fest, The Daily Wire&#8217;s Isabel Brown sat down with four Gen Z ladies who made that message loud and clear when it comes to what conservative women want out of a relationship: &#8220;Put a ring on it.&#8221;
“Waiting over five years to put a ring on the finger is not right,&#8221; Sophie Fuller said during The Daily Wire Dating Panel.
In a world where having a deep dating roster is considered a flex, conservative Gen Z ladies are dating for marriage (For non-Gen Z readers who don’t know what a dating roster is, it&#8217;s where people have multiple guys or girls to choose from, instead of dating someone exclusively). 
Dating for marriage means the girls aren&#8217;t going for just anyone. The four told Brown they want a Godly man, who is strong in his beliefs both spiritually and socially.
“We don&#8217;t have men who are strong in their convictions,&#8221; Katie Toepfer told Brown. &#8220;I think social media has had a huge impact on that.”
Caitlyn Harris is 19 and engaged to a man who did things more traditionally. He asked for her number instead of her Snapchat and took her to church.
&#8220;It was important to him before we even really started to date that I met his church family,&#8221; Harris said.
What? There are still people out there who want to do things the old-fashioned way? Settle down? Have some kids? Raise a Godly household? Turns out, a man of faith is the top characteristic the women on the panel are looking for in their future spouse, starting as early as high school. 
“I hope high school boys realize girls are paying attention to this,” Elle Anderson, TPUSA High School Student of the Year, said. “We are paying attention to how you treat your family.”
The four girls all agreed that God is the center of marriage. 
“You are connected to God more when you are married,” Fuller said. 
Wise women all around at this year&#8217;s AmFest.
Brown reminded the four ladies that what they are looking for in a marriage is exactly why Charlie Kirk emphasized marriage and family to young men so much. Kirk wanted marriages built the way God intended them to be, which is the man leading and loving his wife the way God loved the church. 
“It&#8217;s been an incredible journey being led by someone who wasn’t afraid to lead,” Brown said about her own marriage. 
So men, less focus on rizz and more focus on raising the bar when it comes to relationships. Flowers and cards are nice, but Gen Z women made it clear on the dating panel that they want something more meaningful. 
“I am so excited to see the younger half of Gen Z have such a huge heart for marriage and family,&#8221; Brown said. 
Conservative women want to get married, have children, and build a legacy. 
 &#8220;The truth is more than anything you will ever do, more than your college diploma, more than your job promotions … the greatest legacy you will ever &#8230; leave behind is how you love your family and being able to raise and shepherd this next generation,” Brown said.

The Daily Wire Dating Panel

Gen Z Ladies Talk Dating At AmFest: ‘Put A Ring On It’

Faith

Isabel Brown

Thanksgiving is a time when families thrive, and our conservative movement can learn key lessons from this uniquely American tradition as we move forward together.
Let’s begin with what’s best about the day: a shared table, familiar laughter, and the quiet grace of gratitude. Gratitude is not the fruit of harmony; it is the seed. Traditions renew; children grow up knowing the laugh of a cousin; and an uncle regales with stories of where the family came from. The mystic chords of memory, those invisible threads that bind generations, grow stronger and endure.
Thanksgiving is meant to be practiced. The meaningful work of breaking bread with people who vote differently, pray differently, and have different points of view preserves more than a holiday tradition. Amongst people you don’t always like but with whom you share a deep bond is where public deliberation starts — a practice foundational to American self-government. We keep the muscle memory of belonging to something larger than ourselves.
What’s true for our families is, of course, also true for our conservative movement and the nation we all endeavor to save.
Ronald Reagan is often remembered for saying, &#8220;All great change in America begins at the dinner table.” What is left out, however, is the line that follows: “So, tomorrow night in the kitchen, I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven&#8217;t been teaching you what it means to be an American, let &#8217;em know and nail &#8217;em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.&#8221;
Let the talking begin this week — and let our conversations be an invitation to those we love to once again find unity in our purpose, first as families and then as a nation. At Heritage, we’ve started this family conversation, centered around four questions plain enough to ask around the dinner table and significant enough to guide a movement and save a republic:
What does it mean to be a flourishing American family?
What does it mean to honor the dignity of work and secure the future of free enterprise?
What does it mean to have true national security?
What does it mean to be an American citizen?
At Heritage, we have a point of view, confident in our thinking and our institution’s 52 years of robust intellectual history. We believe that united, good-faith conservatives will engage in this discussion. We are also certain we know what a restored America looks like:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Marriage and family celebrated, not ignored or mocked.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Work dignified, wages rising, and two incomes a family choice, not a necessity.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Borders secure, military strong, enemies deterred.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Children learning truth — not ideology — in educational institutions that parents control.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Faith respected, civic virtue restored, patriotism the norm.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Government limited, debt shrinking, freedom expanding.</li>
</ul>
We call this Heritage 2.0 inside our organization, where every colleague contributed to its creation. We present it to you as our battle plan to save America.
Let there be no mistake; we are taking back Washington to save America. That puts a target on us — from the uniparty, the entrenched bureaucracy, and the deep state. Now may be a suitable time to reiterate with clarity our message to the purveyors of the status quo: Bring it on.
We sweat not for the elites, but for everyday Americans. We toil not to be keyboard warriors but to chart a course of national renewal. The future of conservatism — a fusion of old and new right — will succeed when we return power to the people.
Today’s populism didn&#8217;t emerge in a vacuum. It arose from failed leadership, calcified institutions, and elites who prioritized bureaucracy over everyday Americans. The people aren&#8217;t seeking minor fixes; they&#8217;re challenging the very credibility of the system, and often, they&#8217;re spot on. This ought to inspire our movement!
The clearest path to returning power to the people is through a wholehearted rejuvenation of federalism. We will never lose sight of the many millions who feel the weight of the world on their shoulders. More than any organization across the country, Heritage is fully engaged in the work required to ensure a free, self-governing people can raise families and engage in community and commerce with peace, principles, and prosperity.
Of course, the people will decide our future, as President Trump last week noted, appealing to the beauty of our American system. We are clear-eyed that our effort comes at a time of cultural and civic strain. But we’ve been here before. My friend and predecessor Ed Feulner wrote in his book The March of Freedom that conservatism is “a broad social movement of diverse but reinforcing beliefs, gathering travelers on the same journey — pilgrims who argue over the topography of their promised land but move in the same direction.”
As Vice President Vance also said, the forces arrayed against conservatives of all stripes have massive resources, and there is a point where infighting becomes counterproductive.
So, let us pull up chairs at the family table. Let us channel that turbulent passion and refine it with cool reason through public deliberation. Let us all be builders of a better America. Just as we will nurture the family tree through open dialogue, let us build America’s next 250 years under a thriving canopy of vibrant, interconnected branches rooted in self-governance.
Our Heritage is our future. Through it, together, we will save the republic and secure its future.
* * *
Kevin Roberts, Ph.D., is president of the Heritage Foundation.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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