If you&#8217;re a liberal Gen Z commentator, the last person you want to see on the other end of the debate stage is Isabel Brown.
And yet that&#8217;s exactly the position influencer Harry Sisson found himself in at the University of Virginia, when he joined The Daily Wire host for the latest installment on CBS News and <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/watch-the-gen-z-debate-with-harry">The Free Press&#8217;s</a> &#8220;Things That Matter&#8221; debate series. Brown and Sisson sparred on culture, economics, and the direction of Gen Z politics, with Brown pressing an argument rooted in culture and faith and Sisson leaning on conventional liberal talking points.
Brown opened by framing the debate at a civilizational level, rejecting the idea that current political and economic frustrations can be pinned solely on former President Donald Trump.
“It may be flashy and easy to say it’s all Donald Trump’s fault,” she said, “but in reality where we have arrived at today is because of the systematic removal of God from our society.” She returned to that theme repeatedly, arguing, “We lack the common shared humanity that bound us all together — that is, God.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/harryjsisson?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@harryjsisson</a> and his leftist counterparts like to chase clicks by blaming all of Gen Z&#8217;s problems on President Trump.
But <a href="https://twitter.com/theisabelb?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@theisabelb</a> identifies the root of the crisis facing Gen Z: the systematic removal of God from our society. <a href="https://t.co/LJBlDv1tlQ" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pic.twitter.com/LJBlDv1tlQ</a>
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDailyWire/status/2047284604017492384?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">April 23, 2026</a></blockquote>
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Sisson, by contrast, focused on attacking Trump&#8217;s rhetoric, claiming “Trump said Kamala Harris is going to import a million, gazillion people … and he said I’m focused on affordability … and none of that has happened.”
The debate sharpened when it turned to foreign policy. Sisson asked, “What war did Joe Biden get into?” Brown fired back: “Joe Biden directly propped up and funded foreign wars around the world … we sent money to the Iranian regime — we sent $200 billion to the war in Ukraine.”
While the exact figures are debated, it is well-documented that the U.S. committed over $180 billion in aid to Ukraine since 2022, according to a Defense Department<a href="https://media.defense.gov/2025/Mar/10/2003663371/-1/-1/1/OAR_Q1_DEC2024_FINAL_508.PDF#page=28&amp;zoom=70,-372,685" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> inspector general report</a> from 2024, alongside controversial financial transfers tied to Iran and the aftermath of the Afghanistan withdrawal — making Sisson’s implication of non-involvement difficult to sustain.
On domestic economics, Sisson claimed, “We now have less workers than jobs open right now,” echoing a common labor shortage argument. Brown immediately countered: “So why are 10 million Gen Zers unemployed?” As youth unemployment has remained persistently higher than the national average, and labor force participation among younger workers has lagged, complicating the simplistic “more jobs than workers” narrative.
“Immigrants in virtually every piece of economic data makes our country better, they make our culture better, they make us better as people,” Sisson claimed, drawing a sharp contrast with Brown’s argument that mass immigration can suppress wages in certain sectors, a concern supported in part by labor market research showing localized wage pressure in low-skill industries.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/harryjsisson?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@harryjsisson</a> DENIES that mass migration hurts Gen Z <a href="https://twitter.com/theisabelb?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@theisabelb</a>: &#8220;It is a system that has been consistently selling out the opportunities of our generation for everyone else around the world.&#8221;
HS: &#8220;The idea that immigrants are coming in and stealing jobs is just NOT TRUE.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/HeXoo8Kvow" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pic.twitter.com/HeXoo8Kvow</a>
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDailyWire/status/2047307000313225667?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">April 23, 2026</a></blockquote>
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Brown then shifted the conversation to culture and social stability, noting that “Young people, especially young men are looking for unafraid, on offense conservatism,” she said, outlining a platform of limited government, reduced foreign intervention, and education reform against “woke slop.”
Throughout the exchange, Sisson often defaulted to dismissiveness, responding, “I don’t even know what woke slop means.” Brown tied her argument on education reform to a deeper argument about meaning and social cohesion, warning against what she described as a drift toward “radical Marxism.”
As The Daily Wire has <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/education-dept-slashes-600-million-in-grants-promoting-divisive-ideologies" target="_blank" rel="noopener">frequently</a> <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-doj-spent-over-100-million-pushing-dei-restorative-justice-in-classrooms-report-finds" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>, the Biden administration spent millions promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in public schools, efforts the Trump administration has <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/a-privilege-not-a-right-trump-admin-gives-k-12-schools-ultimatum-on-dei" target="_blank" rel="noopener">worked</a> to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-takes-sledgehammer-to-dei-in-latest-round-of-executive-orders-targeting-education" target="_blank" rel="noopener">roll back.</a>
She also leaned on <a href="https://ifstudies.org/in-the-news/conservative-women-are-happier" target="_blank" rel="noopener">research</a> from scholars like the Institute for Family Studies’ Brad Wilcox, noting that “married moms are three times happier than unmarried childless women,” and arguing that declining family formation correlates with rising mental health struggles among young people — a claim that aligns with broader data showing higher reported happiness and stability among married populations.
Sisson’s arguments, by contrast, reflect a more familiar institutional liberalism that often assumes its premises rather than defending them. Claims like immigration universally improving outcomes or dismissing concerns about foreign entanglements land differently with a generation that has grown up through economic instability, pandemic disruption, and now renewed geopolitical tension.
The Trump administration, while still dominant within Republican politics, is navigating a complicated stretch, particularly on foreign policy as tensions with Iran continue to hang over the national conversation. For younger voters, especially those wary of prolonged overseas entanglements, that creates an opening and a risk. There’s a clear demand for a version of conservatism that is assertive at home but restrained abroad, something Brown explicitly nods to with her emphasis on “no foreign intervention” and keeping “American tax dollars at home.”

Isabel_Final-1

Isabel Brown Schools Liberal Harry Sisson In Free Press Debate

CBS News

Donald Trump

Free Press

Gen Z

Illegal Immigration

Isabel Brown

Marriage

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***
<a href="https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-and-living-alone-us/">Marriage rates</a> and <a href="https://govfacts.org/long-term-challenges-future/demographic-changes/declining-birth-rates/us-birth-rate-hits-historic-low-what-it-means-for-americas-future/">birth rates</a> are falling. Meanwhile, the <a href="https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/marital.html">average ages</a> 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 <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-pursuit-of-equality-is-ruining-your-marriage">comports with</a> 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, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/03/incredible-everlasting-institution-marriage/555320/">not its capstone</a>. 
Ignore the Mainstream Feminist Narrative
One <a href="https://unfinishedrevolution.substack.com/p/women-were-never-told-we-had-forever">mainstream feminist response</a> to a <a href="https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/they-lied-to-us-about-having-it-all-and-it-s-costing-us-our-children">recent Evie Magazine</a> 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 <a href="https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/in-pursuit-marriage-motherhood-and-womens-well-being">happiest</a> 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&#8217;s another problem keeping today&#8217;s young people from marrying early. Twenty-somethings of both sexes, but particularly men, are <a href="https://thedispatch.com/article/marriage-rates-socioeconomics-men-trailing/">suffering</a> 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 <a href="https://thedispatch.com/article/gen-z-parents-nihilists-gender-responsibility/">recently wrote</a>, 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 <a href="https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2025/11/99390/">gentle parenting</a> 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 “<a href="https://elizabethgracematthew.substack.com/p/less-gentle-parenting-03-your-kid">self-regulation</a>” 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 <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2025/06/26/boymom-catholic-sons-251015/">four sons</a>. 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 &#8220;When Harry Met Sally,&#8221; 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 <a href="https://fairerdisputations.org/overlapping-ribbons/">lives ahead of them</a> 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 <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/on-geriatric-pregnancy">third and fourth babies</a> by then. 
***
Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including <a href="https://elizabethgracematthew.substack.com/about">on Substack</a>.

GettyImages-1853741866

The Dating Reality Check

Upstream

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***
When my husband and I got married just six years ago, AI was more the provenance of sci-fi than scenes from everyday life. Today, it’s everywhere. We use it for everything from <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/i-tried-using-ai-to-simplify-my-life-and-it-made-things-worse">meal prep</a> to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/im-a-manual-driving-gun-toting-skeptic-and-im-glad-i-live-in-2026">research</a> to relationship advice and even actual relationships. So it should be no surprise that many couples admit to using large language models to help them write their wedding vows.
In a survey of over 200 engaged couples, “36% of respondents reported actively using AI in their wedding planning and 3 in 10 have used image-based AI tools for inspiration or planning,” <a href="https://www.theknotww.com/blog/future-of-marriage-2026-trends-to-watch-report/">reports</a> wedding website The Knot. “In last year’s 2025 Wedding Trends to Watch Report, we found that only 20% were using AI, pointing to the growing relevance of AI in the industry.”
And while AI can be a useful planning tool, the red flag appeared when an undisclosed number of those using it said they had it give them pointers for their wedding-vow writing. This has been happening for at least a few years: A 2023 article from CNN <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/12/tech/chatgpt-wedding-vows">proclaimed</a>, “Couples are using ChatGPT to write their wedding vows.”
The piece opened with Elyse Nguyen, a young woman who said she worked with AI to craft her wedding vows — with her future husband’s blessing. “It helped alleviate some stress because I had no prior experience with wedding vows nor did I know what should be included,” Nguyen said.
In an article from Cosmopolitan just last month, U.K.-based wedding celebrant Eleanor Willock <a href="https://www.cosmopolitan.com/relationships/a70772868/ai-writing-wedding-vows/">claimed</a>, “I see every one of my couples’ vows before their wedding day. I’d say around 30% this year have involved AI.”
Now, there are countless options for future brides and grooms struggling with writer’s block. The website <a href="https://toastie.ai/">Toastie.ai</a> promises to help brides capture their “love story in vows as beautiful and unique as your relationship — without any stress.” <a href="https://wedding.one/tools/ai-wedding-vow-generator">Wedding.One</a> has an AI vow generator that lets you input names and relationship details and select the appropriate length and tone. I put a few bits of information about my husband and me in, and the results were comical.
“Today I take you as my husband, promising to cherish our moments, from cooking together in our kitchen, to hosting friends with laughter and joy,” the vows began. “I vow to support you, to share in your dreams, and to fill our lives with the warmth of indie and folk music that echoes our love.”
Well, at least AI won’t be monopolizing wedding vows anytime soon. 
I also tried Google Gemini, without offering too much information about our relationship. The results were generic, clichéd, and boring.
“[Fiancé&#8217;s Name], standing here with you today feels like the best decision I’ve ever made,” it started. “Over our time together, you have become my greatest adventure and my safest place. We’ve done so much growing up together, and I feel incredibly lucky that I get to spend the rest of my life watching us continue to grow side-by-side.”
It went on, suggesting lines about being “your biggest cheerleader and your softest landing,” promising good communication (widely believed to be the most important element of a relationship, don’t you know), and forecasting “fun” and “friendship” and “laughter.” 
It’s not likely that anyone is taking vows straight from AI at its first effort, but the fact that so many people are now relying on it for such a sacred task raises several concerns. Most obviously, doesn’t asking your friendly neighborhood LLM for help indicate that you just weren’t willing to take the time and concentration to express how you, and only you, really feel? Imagine Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” but instead of his desperately romantic letter, Captain Wentworth copies a Rupi Kaur poem and calls it a day.
But beyond the clear issues with farming out your love letters to robots, there is a solution here that would make the stress of vow-writing and the temptation of an AI boost totally irrelevant. And that solution is traditional vows, the ones couples have been repeating for hundreds of years.
I grew up in the Anglican church and I had an Anglican wedding, so all I had to do was grab my Book of Common Prayer to remember what my husband and I <a href="https://bcp2019.anglicanchurch.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/BCP2019.pdf">pledged</a> to each other: “In the Name of God, I, [my name], take you, [my husband’s name], to be my husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death, according to God’s holy Word. This is my solemn vow.”
Some older vows say “I plight thee my troth,” which is old-timey for “I pledge to be faithful to you.” As one Episcopal rector <a href="https://livingchurch.org/covenant/and-thereto-i-plight-thee-my-troth/">explains</a> it, “The man and the woman are each saying to the other, ‘I promise, with all that I am, to be true to you; I stake my honor, my integrity — my troth — on keeping these vows.’”
No “I promise to put down the toilet seat” and no “I promise only to use your credit card on days that end in y.” A wedding ceremony isn’t the time to be glib; you’re making a lifelong commitment before God, your family, and your community. The jokes can come later at the reception — when everyone has had too much to drink and they&#8217;ll land better anyway. As for the sweet memories and shared stories, there’s a place for them too: in letters exchanged before the ceremony or toasts throughout the wedding weekend.
A marriage is not just about the couple entering into it but also the institution itself and the couple&#8217;s vows to God and their community. The ceremony is not the time for bespoke statements. It is the time to pledge fidelity to each other in the same way as countless couples before you. And that’s something AI can’t even attempt to replace.

bride and groom cake topper kissing on cake

I Tried Letting AI Write Wedding Vows, And It Showed Me Exactly What’s Missing

Wedding

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.
***
The New York Times calls plunging birthrates “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/us/politics/us-birthrate-decline-women.html?campaign_id=9&amp;emc=edit_nn_20260227&amp;instance_id=171724&amp;nl=the-morning&amp;regi_id=263851259&amp;segment_id=215895&amp;user_id=be0e9c6070d70a9915bd4f91d61f750a">a good thing</a>,” while New York Magazine highlights the stories of women who “<a href="https://www.thecut.com/article/women-regret-having-children.html">regret having children</a>.” If you looked at the mainstream media alone, you might think humans are looking forward to becoming an endangered species.
At the same time, however, there is a growing band of pronatalists who decry the coming consequences of a smaller, older population: safety-net programs will suffer, labor markets will contract, and elder care will face a shortage.
But these economic distortions aren’t the worst of it: Fewer people means fewer creators, lovers, and thinkers. In religious terms, there will be fewer image-bearers of God on this planet.
These are problems we should take seriously. But falling birthrates aren’t just a problem in themselves. They are downstream evidence of other, in some ways bigger, problems rooted in relationships, identity, and meaning. Family formation, faith, and fertility are all falling together.
While individual anecdotes — like those of teen motherhood featured in the New York Times — can paint a different picture, the bigger story around falling birthrates is a sad one. Many more people <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/to-have-kids-or-not-which-decision-do-americans-regret-more#:~:text=The%20final%20score?,whether%20currently%20parents%20or%20not.">wish they’d had more children</a> than those who regret having children in the first place. 
Most women today delay marriage and motherhood not because they watched their parents wrestle with teen parenthood, but because they are struggling to find a mate, or they are simply following the cultural norm of later marriage. Delayed marriage, for many, means delayed motherhood, which can often mean foregone motherhood.
Even for those who successfully bear children later in their childbearing years, there is a price: higher-risk pregnancies, fewer children, and less intergenerational overlap with grandparents. To suggest that women can simply cut and paste their fertility windows into later years is wrong.
While some people have always happily chosen the single life, <a href="https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/marino-geographic-variation-percentage-mid-life-never-marrried-adults-2021-fp-23-13.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recent years have seen an increase</a> in people living alone, and usually not as an intentional choice. Or, it is a strained choice that settles for singlehood when family life is less attractive or attainable. We should all be asking what has changed to make life’s most basic and natural human relationships less desirable. Fewer teen births are the silver lining, but this whole thing is a cloud.
The fertility crisis is <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/in_focus/3470061/marriage-solution-birth-rates-fertility-crisis/">a marriage crisis</a>. But it’s more than that. It’s a crisis of identity, purpose, and optimism. In 2013, when Jonathan Last wrote “What to Expect When No One Is Expecting,” he identified socialism (the redistribution of resources through programs like Social Security) and secularism as the main drivers of reduced fertility. Secularism has a <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231211031320">strong negative relationship</a> with fertility, both at the societal level and the individual level.
Many people derive a sense of meaning from their religious faith, and many faiths teach about the blessing of children. As the United States has become more secular, our fertility rate has fallen. We’ve lost an important framework that generations of people have relied upon for meaning. And while <a href="https://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/opinion/2024/07/13/politics-has-become-the-new-religion-in-america/74367173007/">political activism</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/VIBE-INK-Social-Justice-Pro-Active/dp/B07SJJDC72">secular creeds</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Woke-Racism-Religion-Betrayed-America/dp/0593423062">social justice movements</a> have offered something of a new secular religion, they’re hardly a replacement. Weekly church attendees still have the best <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/regular-church-attendance-associated-lower-030001242.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">mental health</a>, the strongest sense of <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4580713/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">purpose</a>, and the <a href="https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/02/13/married-churchgoing-couples-among-the-happiest-data-says/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">happiest marriages</a> of any group. They also have the <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide">most children</a>.
Christine Emba was correct when she wrote in 2024 that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/08/fertility-crisis/679319/">fertility is tied to meaning</a>. When people do not have a sense of purpose for their own lives, why would they create a new life for someone else? But this sadly seems to welcome a self-fulfilling prophecy: For many parents, their children become their purpose, or at least a big part of it. Fully <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/to-have-kids-or-not-which-decision-do-americans-regret-more#:~:text=The%20final%20score?,whether%20currently%20parents%20or%20not.">88% of parents</a> say having kids is “one of the most important things I have done.”
In the same vein, a new study <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6126426">shows a strong causal relationship</a> between national optimism and fertility. Indeed, many people are hesitant about welcoming a new child precisely because <a href="https://www.coloradopolitics.com/2022/08/06/cover-story-facing-hopeless-future-many-young-coloradans-turn-away-from-having-children-83765512-11ee-11ed-803d-a3618e39002e/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20thought%20of%20raising%20a,security%2C%20authenticity%20and%20happiness.%E2%80%9D">they believe the world is a hopeless, dark place</a>. Young people today are not optimistic about the world or about themselves: In a poll commissioned by Independent Women, the number one reason young adults said they didn’t want to have kids was “<a href="https://www.independentwomen.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/TDD_Survey-Results.pdf">I don’t think I’ll be a good parent</a>.”
None of this is to say that every childless individual lacks confidence or a sense of purpose. Indeed, there are many reasons that people might end up with fewer children than they’d hoped, including health challenges, financial constraints, or divorce. But there’s no denying that at the societal level, as we become more secular and atomized, children become less common.
Falling fertility will bring its own set of problems. But that’s not the real reason it’s problematic. Falling fertility is the result of frail families and failing faith — in God, our future, and ourselves. 
None of this can remotely be categorized as “a good thing.”
This is why we should all care about falling birthrates: not because there’s an ideal number of people for the planet, not because we need age balance across our labor force or tax base, but because our birthrate points to matters of the human heart, and many hearts are lost or lonely.
This diagnosis means — perhaps frustratingly — that falling birthrates can’t be fixed with baby bonuses, childcare subsidies, or paid family leave. It’s a far larger issue than that. Instead, we have to focus on cultivating relationships that last, hearts that serve a higher power, and minds that weigh our choices in terms beyond individual costs and benefits.
If we want tomorrow to have more humans in it, we have to have more humanity today.
***
Hadley Heath Manning is a senior fellow at <a href="https://www.independentwomen.com/">Independent Women</a>.

GettyImages-90833290

People Aren’t Having Kids, And One Reason Keeps Coming Up

Children

family

Fertility

I spent the day watching more of “The View” than I ever have before in my life.
Turns out, the insufferable hosts of this failing network show, on Disney-owned ABC, took it upon themselves to spend seven uninterrupted minutes on national television <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/daily-wire-host-fires-back-after-the-view-melts-down-over-her-support-for-young-families?author=Virginia+Kruta&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=2&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Daily+Wire+Host+Fires+Back+After+%E2%80%98The+View%E2%80%99+Melts+Down+Over+Her+Support+For+Young+Families">bashing me</a> by name, and anyone else with the audacity to promote marriage and parenthood to Gen Z.
I’ve been a content creator since 2019, covering some of the most contentious issues in the American culture war, and I’ve gotta be honest: I never thought this, my most wholesome, pro-America take, would be the thing I’d get attacked for.
Last week, I joined a panel of incredible women on stage at CPAC to discuss the importance of the American family, and was asked specifically to talk about what it’s going to take to save America. My answer was one <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/daily-wire-host-torches-the-view-over-claim-only-rich-women-can-afford-kids?author=Virginia+Kruta&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Daily+Wire+Host+Torches+%E2%80%98The+View%E2%80%99+Over+Claim+Only+Rich+Women+Can+Afford+Kids">I often repeat</a> in speeches or interviews, and reflects a simple timeless truth — we must renew the importance of the family as the cornerstone of society again to a generation that’s being lied to about it. Addressing a crowd older than myself, I said this:
<blockquote>If you’re not encouraging your children to grow up and have the courage to grow up to get married and have kids — more kids than they can afford, before they think they’re ready, it is high time to start.</blockquote>
Before long, Whoopi Goldberg &amp; company would be furious and virtually foaming at the mouth over the very idea that I promote marriage and motherhood to my generation, and dedicated an entire segment of everyone’s favorite “View-erless” show to launch an attack. 
The “anti-family” segment on &#8220;The View&#8221; opened with Whoopi predictably labeling me a racist – because, clearly, I must only want more white people to have children as a white woman myself. That’s obviously not true. 
But it’s a curious criticism coming from Whoopi Goldberg, an ardent supporter of the abortion industry, which grew in America specifically as a way to kill black babies in the womb at the hands of renowned and infamous eugenicist Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.
In 2022, Black women made up about 40 % of all abortions reported in the U.S. – in New York City today, as Whoopi Goldberg runs her mouth on television from the heart of Manhattan, you are more likely to be aborted as a black baby than you are to be born… all in the name of racial progress and equity, right?
Let me be clear: the only racial component to any of this is the continued desire by the abortion industry to convince black women it’s more empowering to end the lives of their children than to give birth to them.
Moving through the panel, Sara Haines spent her time on air reminding viewers that having kids is a choice. That’s true. But what about my choice, and that of literally billions of other women around the world, to get married and have children? The very notion is seemingly unfathomable to the women on this miserable panel.
In other words, if you make the choice to “want” kids – it’s the wrong choice. You’re less of a woman. You aren’t a feminist. You don’t support equality. You deserve to be publicly SHAMED, which is exactly what they proceed to do to me.
Ironically, every woman but one around that table has children of their own. And every one of them is either in a long-term relationship or has been married. They somehow make it work as working moms. They have had the courage to commit their lives to someone they love. They get to snuggle their babies at the end of a long day of work — so, why isn’t it worth pursuing for you?
For the rest of the segment, all of the hosts collectively wasted air throwing out every anti-natalist argument to see what would stick.
They lied, saying having children is somehow beneath women, that we as a sex (amazing, how suddenly we can all define woman, right?) have come “too far” to still be sucked into the innate, natural, instinctual desire to have a beautiful baby and share your life with someone.
They lied, claiming childcare costs a whopping $400,000 a year, so must be financially inaccessible to anyone outside of the 1% of the 1%. For the record, it costs about $10,000-$15,000 on average a year… but I wouldn’t expect a woman screaming at me in an $800 jacket to know.
They lied, saying if you want a baby you must be in an abusive, oppressive marriage to an evil, misogynistic man–and someone ought to help you escape with a divorce attorney. To clarify: I love my husband, and no one is more supportive of my motherhood journey or my career.
They lied, saying that I must not understand how tough having kids are because I have a mere one-year-old, who “just sleeps all day.” News to me, after over a year of my life not sleeping all the way through the night.
They lied, saying that breastfeeding ruins your boobs. I know Whitney Cummings remains deeply concerned about my breasts – after 11 months of breastfeeding my daughter, they’re doing just fine.
They lied, of course, to claim we’re facing an overpopulation crisis, which is objectively the opposite of our current reality. In fact, over half of the world’s countries and areas now have fertility rates below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. These countries represent over two-thirds of the global population, and that number is expected to increase to over 90% by the end of this century.
By 2030, nearly 45% of American women aged 25-44 are projected to be single and childless.
It’s not hard to understand why – virtually every single influencer, television show, movie, college professor, woke pastor, politician, and mainstream media outlet today is dedicating massive air time to trying to convince you NOT to have kids.
Why? Because they want you miserable and lonely. They are intentionally seeking to brainwash you into what my friend &amp; fellow mom Allie Beth Stuckey calls “Toxic Empathy,” so you think you&#8217;re a better person and more compassionate for essentially hating children.
In fact, getting married and having kids is better for everyone in the long term. One study found that having kids increases your wealth by 23% throughout your life. Young married moms are three times happier than their unmarried, childless counterparts. Statistically, married, religious couples with children have the most satisfying intimate lives.
Most importantly, the joy and purpose we experience in sharing our lives with our children is unparalleled anywhere else in our often empty and meaningless society.
How dare we want that for the next generation, right?
I further find no coincidence that this segment aired this week at the start to Holy Week as we walk toward Christ’s Passion on the cross this Friday and His resurrection into heaven on Easter Sunday. The family is the most beautiful example we have of God’s perfect design for humanity. His love is exemplified for us as we lay down our lives for one another, humbling ourselves to serve our spouses and our children. The family, as a result, presents an unparalleled threat to the demonic forces of evil and darkness in our world.
St. John Paul II said during his tenure as Pope, “As the family goes, so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live,” and “The future of humanity passes by way of the family.”
&#8220;The View’s&#8221; attack on the family and those promoting it is just the latest example of spiritual warfare being waged against what is good and true and beautiful, and we must remain deeply committed to sharing the timeless truth of God even in today’s culture.
Mother Teresa once famously said, “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.” These words have always been meaningful to me, but certainly have packed a huge gut punch this week as I reflect on the unexpected backlash to such a simple message I shared on stage last week.
It’s a call to action for all of us to ponder, and determine what course we will walk as we work to build our own American Dream as a generation among Gen Z.
The truth is, there’s no better advertisement for the joy of a God-centered marriage than the alternative being blast on full display from the set of &#8220;The View&#8221; – would you rather live among the misery, contempt, and judgment of these angry middle aged women, or pursue purpose and fulfillment in marriage and motherhood while you can?
So, thanks to the ladies of &#8220;The View&#8221; for giving me another opportunity to address this issue. In case it wasn’t clear, I stand by everything I said at CPAC. And in case you’re still unsure at this point, let me reiterate:
Have the courage to fall in love, get married, and make more babies.
It’s good for the world, and even better for you.

JOY BEHAR, SARA HAINES, WHOOPI GOLDBERG, ROBIN WRIGHT, SUNNY HOSTIN, ALYSSA FARAH

I Told Gen Z To Get Married And Have Kids — ‘The View’ Lost Its Mind

I Told Gen Z To Get Married And Have Kids — 'The View' Lost Its Mind

Feminism

Planned Parenthood

The View

Whoopi Goldberg

Large American Family Group Gathering

Why Kicking Your Kids Out At 18 Is Actually Insane

Family Values

Matt Walsh

Opinion

Parenting

Teenagers

We&#8217;re living in the middle of a gigantic online op.
It is an op designed to suck young men dry and leave them broken and stupid. It makes their lives actively worse. That op is called the manosphere, and it&#8217;s time to wake up to their matrix of evil.
Men without proper guideposts and durable moral institutions are being ushered into a world of stupidity and immorality by grifters and liars who traffic in lies, spiritual emptiness, and outright grift, who tell them they can be rich, famous, and have hot women hanging on their every word, lavishing their attention on you, demanding nothing from you in return.
All you have to do to get all of this is give the manosphere your money, your brain, and your soul.
All these folks are running the same scheme. Here&#8217;s how it works.
First, they tell young men that they are failing at life. Second, they tell the young men the reason they are failing at life is not because of anything they&#8217;re doing, per se, but because of the matrix, a system of power that&#8217;s out to get them. That system is what is depriving them of women, of money, of social mobility.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2391-sub?elementPosition=4&amp;row=6&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Third, these men act transgressively and provocatively. They violate all social stigmas and then magically seem to achieve all of the things the matrix has placed off limits to young men. Fourth, they inform these young men that they, too, can have all of these wonderful things: the hot women and the nice cars and the big houses — if only they join a fake university or some B.S. stock trading app, or donate money to the Kick stream.
Finally, they tell young men that anyone who says differently is part of the matrix.
If any of this sounds familiar, that&#8217;s because it&#8217;s basically cult recruitment tactics, just made viral online. Cults typically target people who are suffering from a life crisis. They target the vulnerable, and then they love bomb those people, saying, “You&#8217;re with us. We understand you.”
They offer the most obvious critiques of the world: the unfairness of life, the impossibility of overcoming challenges. And then they say, “You know, the way out of that is the cult.”
Cults encourage recruits to cut out all contrary information, and cults tell these people that people who oppose the cults are actually members of some nefarious outside force. They contend that if you join the cult, you are saved or enlightened or awake, and everyone else is a suppressive evildoer.
This stuff is seductive — and dangerous, because it also tells young men things that are not true, such as “women are disgusting and perverse,” but also simultaneously that women are “shamelessly available and completely pliant” if you just crack the code.
It says you can achieve wealth and fame, not over time by building a business, but instantaneously, this moment, simply by seeing through the matrix and eschewing the 9-to-5 hard job in favor of a get-rich-quick scam.
And, if you fail, it&#8217;s because of the matrix. You just need to give them more money.
That matrix, by the way, is just code for the Jews. Tapping into the antisemitism allows them to seem both transgressive and also illuminating. Which is why we have tons of clips of these “manosphere” influencers singing Ye&#8217;s “Heil Hitler” just a couple of months ago.
None of this is new.
You want to know what women want? I speak as a man who&#8217;s been married for nearly 20 years and has four children with a fifth on the way.
Women want men who actually love and protect and cherish and defend them.
It&#8217;s not all that difficult, by the way. That is the definition of manhood. The definition of true manhood is to love, protect, cherish, defend, and provide for your wife and for your family.
That definition of what a man should be is also a great definition of how to be a happy human being.
You know what women don&#8217;t want?
Scumbags who tell them to clean up their rooms while maintaining a harem.
That&#8217;s intellectual pornography for morons.

Two men are shaking hands at the outdoor gym, brotherhood and respect concept

Intellectual Pornography For Morons

Ben Shapiro

Cult

Documentaries

male

Netflix

Social Media

TikTok

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

Michael Knowles

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

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

College

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

Relationships

Shakespeare

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.

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