A clip of a bride reacting strongly to being called by her new husband’s last name went viral this week, with commenters saying it’s proof of how society disrespects men.
The viral post is overlaid with text that reads, “When they forget to tell the officiant that she isn’t changing her name…” The video begins with the officiant saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my honor to present the newly married couple, Mr. &amp; Mrs. Brandon Key!” 
At that moment, the bride whipped her head around in shock, said something to the officiant, and he quickly rolled his eyes before changing course and introducing the bride by her maiden name.
The interaction inspired discourse about name changes for women. It also raised questions about a man&#8217;s role in modern relationships. Many clip viewers noted the groom’s submissive-looking behavior in the video.
“Some really basic red flags that guys can look for ahead of marriage. So much heartache and misery could be avoided. Here’s one of the most basic red flags. If she won’t take your last name, don’t marry her. Very simple. Marriages where the woman keeps her maiden name are 50 percent more likely to end in divorce. There’s a reason for that,” Daily Wire host Matt Walsh <a href="https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/2087211116740968957">wrote</a> on X.
Daily Wire host Michael Knowles reacted too, writing, &#8220;&#8216;A quarrelsome wife is like the constant dripping of a leaky roof.&#8217; (Prov. 19:13) ‘Better to live in a desert than with a quarrelsome and nagging wife.’ (Prov. 21:19)&#8230; ‘A headstrong wife is regarded as a b*tch.&#8217; (Sir. 26:25).”
“If a bride doesn&#8217;t take the husband’s last name … and she makes a scene and corrects the officiant during the ceremony like a girlboss … that “marriage” is doomed,” one person <a href="https://x.com/TaylorRMarshall/status/2087201984185028991">said</a>. “The groom has his hand in his pocket and knows he has been publicly neutered.”
“The issue in this video isn&#8217;t whether she takes her husband&#8217;s last name or not. The issue is she makes a scene out of it instead of just going with it in the moment. This is unlikely to be a happy marriage,” another commenter <a href="https://x.com/Supersonics67/status/2087233288276738495">observed</a>.
Currently, about <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/marriage-was-supposed-to-mean-us-then-came-identity-politics">80% of married women</a> in America still take their husbands’ last names. Feminists have resisted this norm for decades, claiming it’s another symptom of the evil patriarchy.

Marriage

WATCH: Bride Freaks Out After Being Called By Her New Husband’s Last Name

Culture

Feminism

viral video

Marriage was once understood as a commitment that required sacrifice. Husbands and wives argued, disappointed each other, went through dry spells, and occasionally wondered whether they had married the wrong person. None of those experiences automatically meant the marriage had failed.
Today, many therapists tell clients the opposite.
As a practicing psychotherapist, I&#8217;ve watched my profession gradually redefine what counts as a healthy marriage. Instead of asking whether a relationship is fundamentally sound, many therapists encourage clients to audit it. Is every emotional need being met? Do you feel consistently validated? Is your partner helping you become the best version of yourself?
Those questions sound reasonable on their own. Together, they turn marriage into a performance review, and most marriages, evaluated that way, will fail.
Marriage begins with a vow. Too much of today&#8217;s therapeutic culture treats it like a satisfaction survey.
I&#8217;ve worked with couples who came to me after months, sometimes years, of absorbing messages from other therapists, social media, and self-styled relationship influencers. By the time they arrived, ordinary marital frustrations had already been reframed as attachment injuries, emotional labor imbalances, or proof that a partner was no longer &#8220;showing up.&#8221;
Clients often arrive speaking the language of therapy culture: &#8220;Protect your peace.&#8221; &#8220;You attract what you tolerate.&#8221; &#8220;This relationship isn&#8217;t serving you anymore.&#8221; Those aren&#8217;t conclusions they&#8217;ve reached. They&#8217;re scripts they&#8217;ve learned from therapists, social media, and self-appointed relationship influencers.
&#8220;Protect your peace&#8221; may be the slogan that best captures what&#8217;s gone wrong. It sounds like wisdom, but too often it&#8217;s permission to avoid difficult conversations, stop tolerating ordinary imperfection, and make personal comfort the measure of a marriage. A good therapist doesn&#8217;t encourage anxious patients to organize their lives around avoiding discomfort. Marriage deserves the same wisdom.
The problem isn&#8217;t that concepts such as attachment injuries or emotional labor are always wrong. Sometimes they accurately describe serious problems. The problem is that therapists have become remarkably good at turning ordinary marital dissatisfaction into psychological pathology, then treating the diagnosis as a reason to leave.
Therapy once emphasized resilience, responsibility, and learning to tolerate frustration. Today it often encourages people to treat dissatisfaction as evidence that something in their lives must change. Marriage is sometimes the first casualty.
The language of self-care has reinforced the shift. Healthy boundaries matter. Leaving an abusive relationship saves lives. No serious person disputes that. But those ideas are now routinely applied to ordinary marital conflict. Feeling criticized becomes emotional invalidation. Compromise becomes people-pleasing. Patience becomes settling.
Once every unpleasant feeling demands immediate relief, commitment starts looking like pathology.
Therapists know emotions fluctuate. Patients struggling with anxiety or depression are taught not to make major decisions based solely on how they feel in the moment. Yet that principle is too often abandoned when the subject becomes marriage. Temporary unhappiness is treated as evidence that the relationship itself is broken rather than something two committed people can work through.
Children are often an afterthought in these conversations, and that should concern every therapist. Most divorces do not involve abuse, violence, addiction, or betrayal. They involve two disappointed people who have lost sight of why they married in the first place. Before encouraging divorce, therapists should ask harder questions. Have both spouses genuinely tried to repair the marriage? Are expectations realistic? What will this decision mean for the children?
Children don&#8217;t need perfect parents. They need parents who know how to repair conflict, keep commitments, and show that love survives seasons of disappointment.
The irony should embarrass the profession. Effective therapists routinely teach people to tolerate discomfort, resist the urge to escape, and recognize that growth often comes from doing what is difficult rather than what feels good. Yet those same principles are often abandoned when the subject becomes marriage. Ordinary disappointment is reframed as evidence that something is fundamentally wrong. Commitment gives way to self-fulfillment. Endurance is mistaken for dysfunction.
Marriage has never promised perpetual happiness. It asks two imperfect people to honor a commitment, weather disappointment, and build a family and a life larger than either person&#8217;s immediate emotional state.
Therapists should be the first to remind people that feelings fluctuate, conflict is inevitable, and lasting commitments require perseverance. My profession, though, has lately been sending the opposite message. It encourages people to trust today&#8217;s emotions over yesterday&#8217;s vows and to mistake temporary dissatisfaction for proof that a marriage has run its course.
If therapists stop defending commitment, they shouldn&#8217;t be surprised when fewer marriages survive. And if the profession continues to redefine ordinary marital struggle as psychological dysfunction, it won&#8217;t simply witness the decline of marriage. It will bear some responsibility for it.
***
Jonathan Alpert is a psychotherapist in New York City and Washington, D.C., and author of the book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1335000658?lv=shuf&amp;channelId=500&amp;plpRedirect=mhFallback">“Therapy Nation.”</a> Find him on X <a href="https://x.com/JonathanAlpert" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@JonathanAlpert</a>.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" 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.

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Why So Many Therapists Are Getting Marriage Wrong

Upstream

Young Americans are increasingly told to postpone marriage. As a result, the idea of tying the knot is falling out of favor with my entire generation.
For many in Generation Z, this shift isn’t merely a product of cultural drift but rather one of well-intentioned guidance from the people we trust most: our parents, who urge an emphasis on financial stability long before marriage is even considered.
Back in the 1950s, Americans typically married in their early twenties. By 2019, the median age of first marriage had climbed into the late twenties and early thirties, and the nation’s marriage rate had <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/style/marriage-decline-delay.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/style/marriage-decline-delay.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1785268470596000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3Pt5mIK9kyz7StHOaEz-v9">fallen</a> to a 140-year low.
Aside from statistics, this advice often stems from sacrifice and good intentions. For many first-generation college students like myself, our parents worked hard to provide us access to an American education and greater opportunities for economic mobility. Their emphasis on financial security reflects a desire to ensure peace, stability, and prosperity for the next generation.
The American Enterprise Institute <a href="https://cosm.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/successsequencedisadvantaged.pdf?" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://cosm.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/successsequencedisadvantaged.pdf?&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1785268470596000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3bFNODLl9oj8nBxanudfdr">recommends</a> a “success sequence” to avoid poverty: earn a high school degree and secure a full-time job before getting married and having children. Among descendants of minorities and low-income families, 97% of young adults who follow the sequence avoid poverty by their thirties. A vast majority move into the middle class and beyond.
My parents’ advice reflected this success sequence, but they taught me to delay serious commitment further in pursuit of financial independence. “Don&#8217;t think about marriage until you are 27,” they said.
Of course, the pursuit of economic independence is a worthy and respectable goal that is not available to all women worldwide. Where I disagree is not that I should strive for financial success, but rather that I must do it on my own — or delay marriage until an arbitrary age.
My parents, like those of many others my age, even suggested living together before marriage as a practical step, keeping relationships casual and postponing long-term commitment. This perspective isn&#8217;t unique to my family. In fact, the Pew Research Center <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/11/06/marriage-and-cohabitation-in-the-u-s/?utm_source=chatgpt.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/11/06/marriage-and-cohabitation-in-the-u-s/?utm_source%3Dchatgpt.com&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1785268470596000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0JaWZ2-V9dxsY2V_N3htPt">reported</a> in 2019 that 85% of American adults view cohabitation as acceptable.
Views like these, rooted in care and a desire for stability, have subtly influenced how my generation approaches relationships. Following this well-intentioned guidance, many of us are expected to spend our twenties climbing the corporate ladder while approaching romantic relationships casually.
Over time, I began questioning whether financial security alone was enough to define a successful life. My perspective shifted even more after my conversion to Catholicism. It changed not only how I viewed marriage, but also how I understood success as a young woman. The desire for married life became essential to my understanding of human flourishing — something not always accompanied by the culture&#8217;s definition of “fun” or practicality.
The data <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/sorry-liz-gilbert-married-women-are-increasingly-happiest-of-all" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ifstudies.org/blog/sorry-liz-gilbert-married-women-are-increasingly-happiest-of-all&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1785268470596000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0lTRPiIvRpXaLOodDHwguj">support</a> this intuition. According to the Institute for Family Studies, married women “live longer, earn more, and report more meaningful lives, compared to single women.” Gallup research likewise found that married Americans consistently report higher levels of wellbeing than unmarried adults, regardless of age, race, or education.
The Catholic Church offers an explanation for why this might be true. It teaches that marriage is a vocation in which one spouse&#8217;s primary responsibility is to aid the other&#8217;s journey to heaven. This understanding of self-sacrificial love gives marriage a purpose that extends beyond personal fulfillment. If marriage consistently contributes to well-being, why has it become something to postpone until every other milestone has been achieved?
Gen Z is increasingly coaxed away from the altar by narratives that redirect this natural desire for commitment toward fears of economic instability, distorted understandings of gender roles and religion, shrinking job opportunities, and anxieties surrounding submission and self-sacrifice.
Marriage offers a stability that nothing corporate or financial can replicate. When the world offers women radical individualism on a silver platter, getting married in one&#8217;s twenties provides a unique opportunity to grow alongside someone else — financially speaking, a “start-up” rather than a “merger.” Through the years, spouses learn to serve one another, navigate challenges, and build a future grounded in shared values and enduring commitment as opposed to isolation and fear.
Gen Z must rediscover marriage as a path to human flourishing. Our culture should present marriage not as a luxury item or a bucket-list achievement, but as a foundation for shared values, mutual responsibility, and relationships built on a security that transcends the material.
Marriage should be a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-dating-reality-check">cornerstone, not a capstone, event</a> that can only come after every professional achievement has been unlocked. Entering marriage with intention in one&#8217;s twenties or thirties allows that bond to shape character, purpose, and a lifetime of shared growth.
***
Paris Apodaca is a student media fellow at the Network of Enlightened Women. She studies political science at the University of Washington and serves as president of her campus chapter of NeW.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" 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.

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The Marriage Lesson An Entire Generation Never Learned

Dating

Relationships

Last week, I <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/cant-buy-me-love-materialism-and-marriage">discussed the rise of materialism among teens and young adults</a> and how over-prioritization of money, possessions, and careers is playing an underappreciated role in disrupting family formation today. This week, I extend that discussion by addressing two ways that research has shown that materialism harms marriages and, most importantly, what can couples do to safeguard their marriage from these harms.
Most people assume that financial problems in marriage are simply an income problem. The basic belief is that if a couple has a lot of money, they won’t have financial problems, and if they don’t earn a lot of money, they will have financial problems. This is the core assumption of those who endorse materialism as a practical fix to the economic realities of modern life — you just need to make more money!
However, research has consistently challenged this assumption. This is because materialism harms marriages in two distinct ways — one obvious, one far less so — and understanding both is essential for any couple or family navigating the financial realities of modern life.
<h4 class="p3">The Spending Problem</h4>
First, the most obvious way that materialistic attitudes can have a negative impact on marriage and family relationships is because spouses who give a high priority to money and the accumulation of material possessions are more likely to create “real money problems” by over-spending and not living within their means. This pursuit of possessions is amplified by the misuse of credit cards and other forms of lending that lead to stressful debt, financial strain, and conflict between spouses.
<h4 class="p3">The Perception Problem</h4>
The second and less obvious way materialism harms marriages operates below the surface. Materialism quietly resets the perception threshold for what a spouse considers to be a financial problem in the first place. Simply put, the more you expect, the easier it is to feel distressed by financial limitations. Materialistic spouses carry a heightened sensitivity to financial matters that lowers the bar for what gets defined as a problem. For a highly materialistic spouse or couple, it takes less financial disturbance to trigger distress and dissatisfaction. This increased sensitivity then raises the stakes, making financial problems more likely to spill over into broader marital dissatisfaction.
In a <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1077727X06296625">study</a> my colleagues and I conducted with a nationally representative sample of 600 married couples, we found that about one-third of spouses can be classified as highly materialistic — and those spouses were approximately 40% more likely than their non-materialistic counterparts to frequently experience finances as a problem in their relationship. Nearly half of highly-materialistic spouses reported that financial matters were &#8220;often&#8221; or &#8220;very often&#8221; a source of trouble, compared to roughly one-third of low-materialistic spouses. And most striking of all, materialism proved to be a stronger predictor of perceived financial problems than the couple&#8217;s actual income level.
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1140699" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/07/carroll-materialism-chart--scaled.jpg" alt="" width="2560" height="2233" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/07/carroll-materialism-chart--scaled.jpg 2560w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/07/carroll-materialism-chart--300x262.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/07/carroll-materialism-chart--660x576.jpg 660w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/07/carroll-materialism-chart--768x670.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/07/carroll-materialism-chart--1536x1340.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/07/carroll-materialism-chart--2048x1786.jpg 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" /></div>
Let me say that again: materialism has a more profound impact on the perception of financial problems than income. The threshold for what counts as a financial problem in a marriage is not set by the bank account — it is set by the mindset. As family finance expert Dr. Bernard Poduska has <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/for-love-money-bernard-e-poduska/1101835546">observed</a>, “financial problems are frequently behavior and attitude problems rather than money problems.”
The practical implication here is that we need to stop assuming that all couples experience financial matters the same way. Couples who habitually compare themselves to those who have more are likely to feel a chronic sense of entitlement and resentment that contributes directly to marital conflict. Couples who can view their situation through the eyes of those who have less are far more likely to cultivate the contentment and gratitude that research consistently links to stronger marriages.
So, helping couples lower their financial expectations benefits marriages in two concrete ways — 1) spouses become more willing to avoid the debt-creating purchases that generate ongoing stress, and 2) they become more inclined to interpret their current financial situation with positive appraisal rather than chronic dissatisfaction. If a couple is already experiencing financial strain, scaling back expectations is often the most important first step toward regaining both financial stability and relationship peace.
<h4 class="p3">Joint Materialism Is Still Harmful</h4>
One natural follow-up question is whether the harm materialism causes in marriage is really just about conflict between partners who have different financial values. Is this just a problem for couples where one spouse is a spender and the other is a saver? Does shared materialism smooth things over?
In a follow-up <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15332691.2011.613306">study</a>, my colleagues and I looked at this relationship dynamic. Using a national sample of over 1,700 married couples, we created a 2&#215;2 typology of couple materialism that distinguished couples where 1) both spouses were low in materialism (congruently nonmaterialistic); 2) couples where both were high in materialism (congruently materialistic); and 3) two incongruent groups where spouses differed (husband high/wife low, and wife high/husband low).
We found that couples where both spouses reported low materialism were better off on every measured dimension of marriage quality — including better communication, more effective conflict resolution, less problem areas, higher relationship satisfaction, and greater relationship stability. Congruently materialistic couples, by contrast, consistently reported the most problematic patterns and the fewest positive outcomes across every measure we looked at. Incongruent couples — those where one spouse was materialistic and the other was not — fell in between. What this tells us is that each additional materialistic spouse in a marriage compounds the harmful effect of materialistic attitudes. It doesn&#8217;t seem to matter which spouse is the materialistic one — what matters is how many materialistic spouses there are in the marriage.
It is important to note that just like our previous study, materialistic couples with higher income levels still fared worse on relationship quality than non-materialistic couples with lower income levels. This is perhaps the most important finding of the study for couples to hear — a high level of financial resources does not protect a marriage from the corrosive effects of materialistic values. When we examined the character traits of the spouses, highly-materialistic spouses reported lower levels of other-centeredness and reduced emotional maturity, and placed a lower level of importance on their marriage compared to other pursuits.
In a more recent study, we again found that materialism was negatively associated with how important people perceived their marriage to be. And that diminished sense of marriage importance, in turn, predicted lower marital satisfaction. Materialism harms marriages, not because partners disagree about money — but because of what placing money at the center of a relationship does to a marriage. Joint materialism is not a shared value that bonds partners. It is a shared liability.
Our research also revealed something sobering about the prevalence of the problem. In our study, 1 in 5 married couples (20%) consisted of two partners who both self-identified as highly materialistic — and because congruently materialistic couples were significantly younger than their nonmaterialistic counterparts, these patterns are likely to become more pronounced as today&#8217;s younger, more materialistic generation moves into their prime marriage years.
<h4 class="p3">What Couples Can Do</h4>
Research on materialism and marriage doesn&#8217;t just diagnose the problem — it also points toward solutions. Drawing on findings from these and other studies, five recommendations emerge as particularly important for couples navigating the current financial environment.
1. Live Within Your Means Together
Materialistic values frequently drive overspending and debt, which in turn creates the real financial strain that damages marriages. Couples who build and follow a shared budget, approach debt cautiously, and maintain financial reserves avoid one of the most potent and recurring <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-currency-of-connection-moving-beyond-the-money-fight-to-marital-unity">sources</a> of marital conflict. Financial prudence is not just good money management — it is an act of care for the relationship itself.
2. Distinguish Needs from Wants
One of the most important things a couple can do is sit down together and honestly examine their spending through the lens of necessity versus desire. Consumer culture is extraordinarily effective at blurring this line — as the saying goes, “yesterday’s luxuries have become today’s necessities.” This doesn&#8217;t require asceticism, but it does require patience and intentionality. Couples who regularly revisit this distinction together are better positioned to make spending decisions that reflect true family needs, rather than cultural pressure.
3. Beware of Financial Comparisons
A recurring theme in the research is that materialistic spouses are more likely to evaluate their financial situation by comparing upward — measuring themselves against people who have more. This creates a persistent perception of deprivation even in the absence of genuine scarcity. This approach to life generates a sense of entitlement and resentment that can infect their relationship. Couples who habitually look downward — considering how fortunate they are relative to those with less — are more likely to cultivate gratitude and contentment, both of which are strongly linked to marital satisfaction.
4. Resist the Capstone Mentality
For younger couples and those approaching marriage, be careful about getting caught in the trap of believing that marriage and parenting should wait until every financial milestone has been achieved. Completing every educational goal, reaching a certain income, owning a home — when these become prerequisites rather than shared aspirations, they can delay or prevent marriages that might otherwise thrive. <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/capstones-vs-cornerstones-is-marrying-later-always-better">Couples willing to build a life together rather than waiting until that life is already built</a> often find that doing so strengthens rather than strains their relationship.
5. Put the Marriage Before the Money
While all families must pay attention to the financial realities of life, couples should regularly and intentionally invest in the marriage itself — through time together, expressions of appreciation, and protecting relationship rituals — rather than allowing the pursuit of financial goals to crowd out the relationship. Couples under financial strain often report that they stop appreciating the dimensions of their relationship that money can’t buy — conversation, laughter, shared purpose, physical touch, trust. Deliberately investing in simple, inexpensive relationship rituals, such as regular connection, daily expressions of affection, and a weekly date, tends to reinforce the sense that the relationship itself is the most valuable thing the couple has.
Economic pressures are real, and they do matter. But the answer to financial stress in marriage is not always more money. Sometimes, it is a <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-currency-of-connection-moving-beyond-the-money-fight-to-marital-unity">different relationship with money altogether</a> — one grounded in realistic expectations, delayed gratification, gratitude, shared purpose, and the recognition that the most important things in life can’t be bought.
***
This is republished with permission from the Institute for Family Studies. The original can be found <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/for-love-or-money-two-ways-materialism-harms-marriage-and-how-to-avoid-the-trap">here</a>.
Jason S. Carroll, Ph.D. is the Director of the Marriage and Family Initiative at the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. Dr. Carroll is a past recipient of the Berscheid-Hatfield Award for Distinguished Scientific Achievement given by the International Association for Relationship Research.

Save money for wedding and planning wedding concept. Sustainable financial goal for family life or married life. Miniature wedding on rows of rising coins, depicts savings or growth for new family.

The Marriage Issue That Has Couples Asking: ‘For Love, Or Money?’

DW Opinion

happiness

Personal finances

Last week, Christian apologist and Boston College professor Dr. Peter Kreeft, 89, gave heartbreakingly beautiful <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/pints-with-aquinas-ep-587?elementPosition=2&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+Show+Episodes+Carousel">marriage advice</a> in the wake of the passing of his wife, Maria. 
Kreeft, who was married for 63 years, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/pints-with-aquinas-ep-587?elementPosition=2&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+Show+Episodes+Carousel">told</a> The Daily Wire&#8217;s &#8220;Pints with Aquinas&#8221; host Matt Fradd that someone should only get married if he loves the other person&#8217;s soul, describing his &#8220;last view&#8221; of his wife and how he fell in love with her again in that moment. Kreeft&#8217;s wife died in May.
&#8220;What advice do you have for someone watching this who&#8217;s newly married or who is about to be?&#8221; Fradd asked Kreeft.
&#8220;Do you think, that when you are very old, and your wife is very old and ugly and wrinkled, and fat, and not very bright or even nasty, that you will still find her beautiful?&#8221; the author posed. &#8220;If so, marry her.&#8221;
&#8220;The last view I had of my wife in the nursing home about an hour after she died, I fell in love with her again. Here is a wasted, emaciated, wrinkled, suffering body — it&#8217;s as beautiful as a crucifix,&#8221; an emotional Kreeft said. &#8220;&#8216;Cause that body ain&#8217;t gonna last, but the soul is.&#8221;
&#8220;So if you don&#8217;t love her soul, but just love her body, don&#8217;t get married,&#8221; he added.
The moment was marked by deafening silence from Fradd, who looked overwhelmed with emotion.
Folks online had a similarly emotional reaction to the marriage advice.
&#8220;I sent this to my oldest kids this morning because it’s the perfect answer. Tune out the lost boys who say a never ending line of women is fulfillment. What this man describes is,&#8221; activist and filmmaker Robby Starbuck <a href="https://x.com/robbystarbuck/status/2077158435548778852?s=20">commented</a>.
&#8220;Ohhh my word. Instant tears,&#8221; conservative host Liz Wheeler <a href="https://x.com/Liz_Wheeler/status/2077066375680381151">said</a>. &#8220;This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard someone say.&#8221;
Pro-life activist Kristan Hawkins <a href="https://x.com/KristanHawkins/status/2077099882129793206">reacted</a>, &#8220;This was such a beautiful and profound moment on [Matt Fraad]&#8216;s podcast, Pints with Aquinas. When Matt Fradd asked Dr. Peter Kreeft what advice he would give newly married couples, his answer gave me chills. Every husband and wife and anyone who feels called to marriage should hear this.&#8221;
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/pints-with-aquinas-ep-587?elementPosition=2&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+Show+Episodes+Carousel">Watch Matt Fradd&#8217;s full interview with Dr. Peter Kreeft</a>

Peter Kreeft

Widowed Christian Apologist Gives Marriage Advice That Has Internet In Tears

Christian Apologist Whose Wife Just Passed Gives Marriage Advice That Has Internet In Tears

Death

Matt Fradd

Muniz 2

This Celebrity’s God-Awful Divorce Announcement Is A Lesson For Us All

Celebrities

divorce

Frank Muniz

Hollywood

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" 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 &#8220;Call Her Daddy&#8221; podcast empire is built on intellectual deceit, teaching that promiscuity is freedom and that a woman’s prime years should be spent mastering how to manipulate men sexually instead of discerning dating and marriage. It’s no wonder that the company’s internal dynamics reflect the toxicity of the propaganda that’s been peddled since the beginning.
Several young women who once idolized Alex Cooper and her vision for a feminist media company are now disillusioned after working for her directly. In an incriminating report published by <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/story/alex-coopers-mean-girl-problem?srsltid=AfmBOorY6lCSPQ3a8w4vrU2eSaMbdjgpciSDP2v1nIx24u9E--4wTpgk">Vanity Fair</a>, sources that include over 20 former and current employees of the Unwell Network, the parent organization of popular podcast &#8220;Call Her Daddy,&#8221; revealed that the sisterhood was not at all what it was marketed to be. While maintaining a public boss-babe image, Cooper allegedly deferred to her domineering husband on business matters and managing personnel. Instead of encouragement, verbal abuse and boundary-crossing were what the female staff said they experienced. 
But why would they expect to get professional nurturing from Cooper? Right from <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/6WeScBow0GCkh4eCN0Uw9f">episode one</a>, titled “Sext Me So I Know It’s Real,” Cooper sets up a relationship with her listeners that is sabotage masquerading as mentorship. To be fair, the show&#8217;s description says of its cohosts: “In their 20s, the two exploit the f*ck out of their lives, making you feel a hell of a lot better about yours.” It was a bit like reality TV but with some self-awareness, in which the actors know they are making fools of themselves for your entertainment value. No doubt they drummed up the provocative outbursts — such as “you’re just a hole” — to generate more buzz. 
But at what point does it go from being titillatingly weird content that’s hard to tune out of — like Alex Jones for sex and dating — to ideas you start to take seriously and internalize? Cooper often spoke in a paternalistic way, literally, to her loyal fans with her signature opening catchphrase, “What is up daddy gang, it is your founding father!”
After co-host Sofia Franklyn’s unceremonious exit from the podcast following the pair’s separation from Barstool Sports, Cooper tried to adapt the show into something more sophisticated, in theory. She appeared to be aiming for a millennial version of &#8220;The Ellen DeGeneres Show,&#8221; giving hot celebrities the safe space to spill their secrets. In reality, the only thing that changed was the aesthetics — boucle chairs and a proper microphone instead of a fratty corner office set-up. The same problematic topics persisted, whether it was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSThWkhtYqw">threesomes</a>, blackmail in the context of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foJ6Li8_fXg">orgies and escorts</a>, or the joys of single parenthood from a wealthy guest for whom the cost of childcare is immaterial. It mainly only matured in the sense that the horrible advice was in glossier packaging. But even if Cooper thought she had achieved the rebrand of the century, that doesn’t excuse the degenerate level she stooped to to get the show to take off. 
When the show declared in an early episode, “If you’re a 5 or 6, die for that d*ck,” the implication was that women of average attractiveness by contemporary standards should overcompensate with their bedroom skills to keep a partner&#8217;s interest. Cooper and Franklyn provided a lesson on how to go through a significant other’s phone in search of evidence of impropriety. In another episode, they warned their audience that if they’re not performing oral sex on their man, “someone else is.” For practical application, they described in the seminal “Gluck Gluck 9009” episode a technique that is “every man&#8217;s kryptonite.” 
Does this sound like a cute trust circle or like a cult leader stoking fear in women that their sexual prowess is their only hope of keeping a man’s attention, which is likely divided among other women anyway? 
Some of their advice is just laughably contradictory, but no less insidious. In episode 24, they talked about “how to cheat or catch a cheater.” How can you advance both positions simultaneously? You wouldn’t need to learn how to catch a cheater, which they imply is nefarious enough that it’s worth doing detective work to uncover, if cheating were in short supply in our culture. But here they were, giving step-by-step instructions on how to commit infidelity. This hamster wheel logic, like most of the show’s themes, was the opposite of empowering.
In episode 28, the hosts addressed faking pregnancies. The show had a baseline premise that most men are only seeking out sexual satisfaction, so the smartest strategy women can adopt is to weaponize their sexual nature to maximize their own pleasure and make mischief along the way. In the creators’ worldview, living among men is not about friendship or courtship but a game where there are only winners and losers. And winning, in the spirit of Samantha Jones in &#8220;Sex and the City,&#8221; meant achieving the best sex and then discarding the man before he could discard you. 
It’s hard to quantify the aggregate harm such a message has on the trust between young women and men in society today. If I were a young man, knowing that so many young women are disciples of a show that explicitly tells them men can’t be trusted so they have to be played, I would stay far, far away. 
Then there’s the matter of the message just not comporting with scientific reality, that women chemically bond to men during sex, making casual affairs almost impossible. Cooper and Franklyn seemed to acknowledge this truth, while insisting to women that they had to figure out how to fight it, in <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/0SW2sFSepDwCXOKRJHWksm">episode 30</a> where they “discuss the tricky art of how to not catch feelings…” What if you’re supposed to catch feelings for the person you’re intimate with, according to biology? The most prudent advice is to secure commitment as the price of that intimacy, so that the woman is not left with the bag, emotionally.
Some of the disgruntled Unwell staff reported that their interactions with Cooper’s husband were suggestive and uncomfortable. Again, how is this unusual, given the show’s history? In episode 23 titled, “Cuckolding, Everyone’s Doing It,” Cooper and Franklyn shared “a technology hack to help you get away with murder or better yet, cheating!” If anything, Kaplan was just being consistent, taking cues from the show’s legitimization of <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@callherdaddy/video/7508828899451620654">open relationships</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujo2BHqx0PY">polyamory</a>. Their entire business model was trafficking in engagement on raunchy stories that do the opposite of dignifying women or men. The show didn’t inspire better behavior on the part of either gender; it brought both down to new lows.
A common conservative argument since Cooper got married and pregnant has been that she pursued the most tried-and-true paths to sustained human happiness while offering her audience garbage dressed up as candy, the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/alex-cooper-told-women-to-delay-settling-down-now-shes-having-the-fairytale-ending">epitome</a> of a luxury belief. Cooper defends: What’s wrong with “having fun” in your 20s and then settling down in your 30s? But &#8220;Call Her Daddy&#8221; was not merely about having fun; it perpetuated a degrading hookup culture that leaves scars more than it builds character. Gender relations and happiness levels were <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/does-sexual-history-affect-marital-happiness">better</a> when sex was still something reserved for a one-and-only, something sacred. Based on the Vanity Fair story, it seems the couple behind Unwell is surrounded by <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/alex-coopers-reported-marriage-woes-spotlight-trend-stars-sleeping-apart-from-bette-midler-kaley-cuoco">moral and marital trouble</a>. I imagine it’s hard to be a part of an operation like that without it finding you. 
They made their bed; now they have to lie in it. 
***
Caroline Downey is a columnist and video personality at National Review. She is also a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and a 2025-2026 Novak fellow with the Fund for American Studies.

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The Scandal That’s Exposing The ‘Call Her Daddy’ Lie

Alex Cooper

Call Her Daddy

podcasts

There is good news about fatherhood in America today: dads are more engaged in their kids’ lives than ever, a fact heralded by scholars, advocates, and journalists. The Atlantic writer Derek Thompson <a href="https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-do-richer-dads-spend-more-time">saluted</a> dads who “became the parents their fathers never were.” Richard Reeves of the American Institute for Boys and Men <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/what-gender-war">points</a> to how men “have massively increased the amount of childcare” they are doing. Noting the time that married fathers are devoting to their families has tripled since the 1960s, the Institute for Family Studies’ Lyman Stone <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/american-dads-rock-fathers-are-doing-more-at-home-than-ever">put it</a> this way: “American Dads Rock.”
But there is also sobering news to report on the fatherhood front. Fewer young men are becoming fathers at all — we are seeing the rise of what might be called the “Vanishing Father.” In fact, a big reason that today’s dads look so good is that fatherhood has become much more selective, increasingly concentrated among men with the <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/x4j79_v2">financial resources</a>, social capital, or cultural commitments that make family formation a possibility and a priority. The ranks of the childless, meanwhile, are surging among younger, less-educated, liberal, and secular men.
In fact, the share of men in their prime family-building years (25-45) who are fathers has fallen from two-thirds in 1980 to 53% in 2024. This means that almost 1 in 2 men in this group are not dads. It also means that the number of men ages 25-45 who are childless has risen from 10 million in 1980 to 23 million in 2024, a record high.
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<div id="attachment_1119095" style="width: 2570px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1119095" class="size-full wp-image-1119095" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/1-finalfathers2545total--scaled.jpg" alt="" width="2560" height="1723" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/1-finalfathers2545total--scaled.jpg 2560w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/1-finalfathers2545total--300x202.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/1-finalfathers2545total--856x576.jpg 856w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/1-finalfathers2545total--768x517.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/1-finalfathers2545total--1536x1034.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/1-finalfathers2545total--2048x1378.jpg 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" />Credit: IFS</div>
This Institute for Family Studies (IFS) report spotlights the growing share of men who are not crossing the threshold into fatherhood, the ways age, class, and culture shape entry into fatherhood today, and the likely consequences of declining family formation among men for them and the nation. We draw on the General Social Survey (GSS), a decades-long survey of American adults run by NORC at the University of Chicago. For this analysis, we focus on American men ages 25 to 45. Data from the Human Fertility Collection suggests that over 80% of births are fathered by men between these ages. While the average age at childbirth is rising, and many men are delaying fatherhood, fertility data suggests younger cohorts will see higher rates of childlessness. We include younger men in our sample to see which groups are most likely to be affected by these projected declines in fatherhood.
<h3 class="p4">Declines by Age</h3>
Declines are most prominent among younger men. Whereas the majority of men ages 25–35 were fathers in the 1980s, just 38% are today. Part of this story is delayed parenthood. The average age of new fathers has been rising for decades, alongside that of women.
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<div id="attachment_1119097" style="width: 2570px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1119097" class="size-full wp-image-1119097" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/2-finalfathersagegrouped--scaled.jpg" alt="" width="2560" height="1723" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/2-finalfathersagegrouped--scaled.jpg 2560w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/2-finalfathersagegrouped--300x202.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/2-finalfathersagegrouped--856x576.jpg 856w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/2-finalfathersagegrouped--768x517.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/2-finalfathersagegrouped--1536x1034.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/2-finalfathersagegrouped--2048x1378.jpg 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" />Credit: IFS</div>
But delayed fatherhood isn’t the whole story. An analysis of the latest birth rate trends by IFS senior fellow Lyman Stone suggests that <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/1-in-4-projecting-childlessness-among-todays-young-women">1 in 4 young women today</a> will never have children, up from the 15% historic baseline. This dramatic rise in childlessness will be paralleled among today’s young men.
<h3 class="p4">Declines by Education</h3>
Historically, men in their prime family building years without a college degree were much more likely to be fathers than their college-educated peers. In the 1980s, 70% of men between 25 and 45 who did not have a bachelor’s degree were fathers, compared to just 53% of those with a higher degree. Today, 57% of men between ages 25-45 without a college degree are fathers, a 13-percentage-point decrease from the 1980s. Although less-educated men are still more likely to be fathers, they have seen larger declines than the college-educated. The share of college-educated men who are dads has only fallen by 8 percentage points.
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<div id="attachment_1119099" style="width: 2570px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1119099" class="size-full wp-image-1119099" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/3-finalfatherseduc--scaled.jpg" alt="" width="2560" height="1723" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/3-finalfatherseduc--scaled.jpg 2560w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/3-finalfatherseduc--300x202.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/3-finalfatherseduc--856x576.jpg 856w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/3-finalfatherseduc--768x517.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/3-finalfatherseduc--1536x1034.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/3-finalfatherseduc--2048x1378.jpg 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" />Credit: IFS</div>
Over the past few decades, the connection between marriage and fatherhood has also changed among working-class men. In the 1980s, the vast majority of working-class dads were married: 58% of less-educated men between ages 25 and 45 were married fathers — just 12% were unmarried with children. But unmarried fatherhood has risen since then, while married fatherhood has declined for this group of men. Today, 34% of working-class men between ages 25 and 45 are married fathers, and 23% are unmarried fathers.
By contrast, unmarried fatherhood remains just as rare among well-educated men today, at just 6%, as it was in the 1980s, at 5%. This means that declines in fatherhood among college-educated men are almost entirely declines in married fatherhood.
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<div id="attachment_1119103" style="width: 2570px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1119103" class="size-full wp-image-1119103" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/4-finalfathersstackededuc--scaled.jpg" alt="" width="2560" height="1723" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/4-finalfathersstackededuc--scaled.jpg 2560w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/4-finalfathersstackededuc--300x202.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/4-finalfathersstackededuc--856x576.jpg 856w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/4-finalfathersstackededuc--768x517.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/4-finalfathersstackededuc--1536x1034.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/4-finalfathersstackededuc--2048x1378.jpg 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" />Credit: IFS</div>
<h3 class="p4">Declines by Ideology</h3>
Class disparities in family formation get plenty of coverage. But today, cultural factors — ideology especially — are stronger predictors of entry into fatherhood than class. Using the latest GSS data, we find that just 37% of liberal men ages 25–45 are fathers, compared to 62% of their conservative peers. That 25-percentage-point gap dwarfs the 12-point gap between college-educated and less-educated men.
The divergence has widened sharply over time. Liberal men have seen fatherhood rates fall 21 percentage points since the 1980s — down from 58% — while fatherhood among conservative men has declined only 7 percentage points. When it comes to predicting which men are becoming fathers today, culture looks more determinative than class.
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<div id="attachment_1119107" style="width: 2570px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1119107" class="size-full wp-image-1119107" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/5-finalfathersideo-1--scaled.jpg" alt="" width="2560" height="1723" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/5-finalfathersideo-1--scaled.jpg 2560w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/5-finalfathersideo-1--300x202.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/5-finalfathersideo-1--856x576.jpg 856w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/5-finalfathersideo-1--768x517.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/5-finalfathersideo-1--1536x1034.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/5-finalfathersideo-1--2048x1378.jpg 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" />Credit: IFS</div>
There is little difference between married and unmarried fatherhood across ideological lines. We find that, today, 68% of liberal fathers between ages 25 and 45 are married, compared to 72% of conservative fathers. These differences are statistically insignificant. It should be noted that conservative men have seen a substantial increase in unmarried fatherhood since the 1980s, rising from 1 in 10 to around 1 in 4 fathers ages 25 to 45.
<h3 class="p4">Declines by Religiosity</h3>
Religiosity, measured by religious attendance, is another strong predictor of who is a father in America today. The latest data shows that 64% of men between the ages of 25 and 45 who frequently attend religious services are fathers. Just half of secular men in that age range have children. Both groups, notably, have seen similar declines in fatherhood in recent years.
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<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1119113" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/6-finalfathersattend--scaled.jpg" alt="" width="2560" height="1723" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/6-finalfathersattend--scaled.jpg 2560w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/6-finalfathersattend--300x202.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/6-finalfathersattend--856x576.jpg 856w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/6-finalfathersattend--768x517.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/6-finalfathersattend--1536x1034.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/6-finalfathersattend--2048x1378.jpg 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" />
<h3 class="p4">Men Without a Mission</h3>
After surveying dozens of cultures, the anthropologist Margaret Mead concluded that masculinity is not a natural state but a social accomplishment. Cultures had to work hard to channel men’s talents, energies, ambitions, and interests in prosocial directions. In <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=lWWHQgAACAAJ&amp;dq=mead,+male+and+female&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjqifXL0pPWAhViYpoKHfPjAEEQ6AEIMzAC">Male and Female</a>, published in 1949, she further argued that fostering prosocial masculinity was inseparable from family life — because “every known human society rests firmly on the learned nurturing behavior of men.” So long as it is tied into the fabric of family life, fatherhood, in her view, gives men something few other institutions can: a clear mission in life.
Half a century later, Nobel laureate George Akerlof made a similar case from economics. In his 1998 paper “<a href="https://academic.oup.com/ej/article-abstract/108/447/287/5128553">Men Without Children</a>,” he concluded that without the responsibility and commitment that marriage and fatherhood demand, men often tend to drift — toward atomization, idleness, and higher rates of crime and substance abuse. Recently, USC psychologist Darby Saxbe <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/06/opinion/dad-brain-health-fatherhood.html">put</a> the positive case well in the New York Times: engaged fatherhood cultivates in men “strength coupled with a willingness to look out for the young and vulnerable, to teach but also listen, to lead by example, to tackle daunting challenges and to persevere with grit.”
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<div id="attachment_1119117" style="width: 2570px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1119117" class="size-full wp-image-1119117" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/7-finalfatherhappiness--scaled.jpg" alt="" width="2560" height="1723" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/7-finalfatherhappiness--scaled.jpg 2560w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/7-finalfatherhappiness--300x202.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/7-finalfatherhappiness--856x576.jpg 856w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/7-finalfatherhappiness--768x517.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/7-finalfatherhappiness--1536x1034.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/7-finalfatherhappiness--2048x1378.jpg 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" />Credit: IFS</div>
There is no question that some men do not seem to require the disciplines of family and fatherhood to thrive — work, or sport, or faith is enough to orient these male lives in meaningful and fulfilling ways. But contemporary research confirms the wisdom of Akerlof, Mead, and Saxbe: for most men, life is better when it is grounded in family and fatherhood. Men without children are typically living lives that are <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ageing-and-society/article/childlessness-and-social-and-emotional-loneliness-in-middle-and-later-life/E412E2A2FAAA5AC4F0A0EDE5EA35CC0F">lonelier</a>, less <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250387523/dadbrain/">purposeful</a>, and less happy than their peers who are engaged fathers — most typically in the <a href="https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/briefs/ifs-wang-fatherstimebrief-oct2023-1.pdf">context</a> of marriage. Indeed, there is no question that married fathers are the happiest men in America today — they are more than twice as likely to be “very happy” with their lives, compared to their peers who are childless and unmarried.
The evidence, in short, suggests that separating men from marriage and family is bad for men — and, likely, bad for the country. That’s because such men are significantly more likely to succumb to <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-024-09699-2">idleness</a>, <a href="https://sampson.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum1841/files/sampson/files/2006_criminology_laubwimer_1.pdf">crime</a>, and <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231241275429">deaths</a> of <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/married-people-are-living-their-best-lives">despair</a>. And if current trends hold, it is younger, less-educated, liberal, and secular men who will pay the steepest price for the rise of the Vanishing American Father.
***
This is republished with permission from the Institute for Family Studies. The original can be found <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-vanishing-american-father-more-men-are-opting-out-of-fatherhood">here</a>.
Grant Bailey is a Research Fellow and IFS Insights Editor at the Institute for Family Studies.
Brad Wilcox is Melville Foundation Jefferson Scholars Foundation University Professor of Sociology and Director of the <a href="https://nationalmarriageproject.org/">National Marriage Project</a> at the University of Virginia, Future of Freedom Fellow and Director of the Get Married Initiative at the <a href="https://ifstudies.org/">Institute for Family Studies</a>, and a nonresident senior fellow at the <a href="https://www.aei.org/">American Enterprise Institute</a>.

A man wakes up on a sofa, surrounded by sheets and duvets and pillows. He rubs his eyes and face as he tries to rouse himself.

The Great Unfathering: American Dads Are Disappearing

Childlessness

fatherhood

Institute for Family Studies

Masculinity

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" 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.
***
If your only perspective on conservative women and family life comes from buzzy books such as <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-new-book-that-treats-traditional-wives-like-the-enemy">the bestselling novel “Yesteryear,”</a> which paints a portrait of traditional families as hypocritical and deeply dysfunctional, you’d think conservative women must be miserable in their marriages.
Your view would be further cemented if you read mainstream outlets such as the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/critics-at-large/the-trap-of-the-trad-wife">New Yorker </a>(“The Trap of the Trad Wife”) or <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/young-women-leaving-maga-new-right.html">New York magazine</a> (“The Young Women Leaving the New Right”). This perspective would only be confirmed if you read Helen Lewis’ new cover <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/06/conservative-masculinism-misogyny/686939/">story</a> in The Atlantic, “The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet,” featuring Lewis’ notes from her conversations with a handful of (largely) right-wing male social media influencers. Some of the men came across as boorish and intellectually silly, from suggesting women should lose the right to vote to openly mocking them.
While annoying, none of this is particularly shocking. Each person Lewis interviewed could be fairly described as an influencer — the shock jocks of the internet age. In other words, these were not exactly shadowy power brokers about to repeal the 19th amendment whose views required “unearthing.” As far as we can tell, these men are literally talking all the time to just about anyone who will listen.
To be fair, we know some are listening. One of us authors (Brad), a sociology professor at the University of Virginia, has watched a growing share of his male Gen Z students take a sharp right turn on gender — and yes, some of them are following the kind of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-real-reason-young-men-are-flocking-to-the-manosphere">manosphere</a> men that worry Lewis. Some tradwife influencers — Lauren Southern among them — have had terrible experiences with the most extreme, internet-driven versions of this lifestyle.
But the misogynists are in the minority on the Right. Nevertheless, Lewis&#8217;s message in The Atlantic was clear: These right-wing troglodytes are ascendant, men whining online about disenfranchising women belong to the same movement as those rolling back DEI overreach, and women everywhere should regard these men as a mortal threat.
But when you get offline, into the real world, and look at what we might call Normie Land, where men and women are choosing to live, work, and build actual families together, things usually look a lot better on the Right — and, actually, the Left too. For those of us who have worked our way through serious or minor differences, or found a way to live with them, things look much better than the online Gender War between the Right and Left would suggest.
We who live here are, apparently, the silent majority: neither convinced of one sex’s moral superiority or the other’s inherent inferiority, yet fully convinced that we are all, equally, lovely and annoying. Far from fearing, avoiding, or hating the opposite sex, we deliberately live with them: We are the Normie Marrieds, and we’re doing pretty well. Better than most, actually.
For example, last year, we at the Institute for Family Studies, in partnership with the Wheatley Institute, found that the <a href="https://ifstudies.org/press-release/married-moms-twice-as-likely-to-be-very-happy-than-single-or-childless-women" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ifstudies.org/press-release/married-moms-twice-as-likely-to-be-very-happy-than-single-or-childless-women&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1779891208954000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2ocql4F7Y-QuxfiftJ_fKF">happiest women in America are married mothers</a>. All married women, with or without children, were more likely to report being “very happy” than their unmarried peers.
Other research has found an even stronger link between marriage and happiness for men: Husbands are <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/why-marriage-is-good-for-men" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ifstudies.org/blog/why-marriage-is-good-for-men&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1779891208954000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2oHlPUukFUcmIHgRbpXwLh">almost twice as likely to say</a> they are “very happy” with their lives as unmarried men. Married fathers <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/who-is-happiest-married-mothers-and-fathers-per-the-latest-general-social-survey" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ifstudies.org/blog/who-is-happiest-married-mothers-and-fathers-per-the-latest-general-social-survey&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1779891208954000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3MQZb95a3bZXm84eUFd8o2">seem to have</a> an additional happiness advantage.
<div id="attachment_1103543" style="width: 392px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1103543" class=" wp-image-1103543" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/img-e90cfc8d-090e-4fe8-b577-95bbc4772106-300x202.png" alt="" width="382" height="257" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/img-e90cfc8d-090e-4fe8-b577-95bbc4772106-300x202.png 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/img-e90cfc8d-090e-4fe8-b577-95bbc4772106-856x576.png 856w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/img-e90cfc8d-090e-4fe8-b577-95bbc4772106-768x517.png 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/img-e90cfc8d-090e-4fe8-b577-95bbc4772106-1536x1034.png 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/img-e90cfc8d-090e-4fe8-b577-95bbc4772106-2048x1378.png 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 382px) 100vw, 382px" />Institute for Family Studies</div>
It gets even more shocking: Marital happiness is high across the ideological divide. New <a href="https://ifstudies.org/insights?id=4271" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ifstudies.org/insights?id%3D4271&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1779891208954000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1GId8nu116sEBL1-3_d2wp">research</a> from the Institute for Family Studies shows that among married American women, the happiest are those who identify either as clearly “conservative” or “liberal” — in other words, strong worldview convictions on both sides of the aisle are correlated to happier marriages. That means conservative couples — yes, those whom Helen Lewis might lump into the same category as her anti-woman influencers — are some of the happiest, just as liberal American couples are happy.
We hypothesize this finding suggests that marriages in which spouses have high, clear expectations of intention and involvement in family life from each other — often for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/opinion/sunday/happy-marriages.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/opinion/sunday/happy-marriages.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1779891208954000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0zAqM91NfWup2PSO8BBooT">feminist</a> reasons on the Left and <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/get-married-brad-wilcox?variant=43991601676322" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.harpercollins.com/products/get-married-brad-wilcox?variant%3D43991601676322&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1779891208954000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0wSLZC2GMDClmo9NzsraNQ">religious</a> reasons on the Right — tend to build successful relationships.
It brings to mind an incisive bit of marriage counseling from the late evangelical pastor Tim Keller. He <a href="https://x.com/timkellernyc/status/1428721989620015110" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://x.com/timkellernyc/status/1428721989620015110&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1779891208954000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0CPWGxrawK_l1VNMcjXIRT">wrote,</a> “If each spouse says to the other, ‘I will treat my selfishness as the main problem in the marriage,’ you have the prospect for great things.” The advice carries: Humility is the antidote not just to marital strife, but the perfect opposite of the fear-based, blame-obsessed gender war that is being stirred up by actors on the Right and Left.
Despite the noise from women-phobic men on the Right, and the overwrought &#8220;investigations&#8221; of them on the Left, we American men and women who manage to build relationships — sometimes across real ideological and political differences — remain the happiest and healthiest. That’s why we ought to continue to encourage younger generations to get off their devices, drop extremist gender takes (“men are toxic,” “women should lose the vote”), mix and mingle with a wide range of peers, date people who don’t align with them 100% on every issue, and then find their way to the altar with someone who would be a good friend and a great spouse.
Real life isn’t the gender-based fear and hatred we often see manifested in the online Gender War; it’s the steady contentedness men and women find talking across the kitchen counter. This is the place where many Normies — yes, including happily married conservative women! — are making marriages and families. It’s cozy in here.
***
Maria Baer is a contributing editor at the Institute for Family Studies. Brad Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, is senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Happy groom piggybacking bride in vineyard during sunset

The ‘Trad Wife’ Panic Is Running Into One Big Problem

Gender

The manosphere is <a href="https://rationalmale.substack.com/p/what-is-the-sexual-marketplace?r=30rvnp&amp;utm_campaign=post&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;triedRedirect=true">full of distortions and caricatures about the science</a> of evolutionary psychology: alpha males who dominate sexual activity, enabled by online dating apps; women whose sole interest in men is their capacity to provide financially; men whose only interest is in large numbers of very young sexual partners; women who marry men as providers (betas) but then have affairs with alpha males, and so on.
Alas, sometimes, evolutionary psychologists themselves seem to actively enable these caricatures. A recent paper by Mads Larsen and colleagues, published in <a href="https://www.scilit.com/publications/60117189b430a3a76783c5a605c1c7d8">Politics and the Life Sciences</a>, illustrates this tendency. While the authors make some valid points about sex differences, their psychological understanding needs to be supplemented with knowledge of the current empirical realities of marriage and the family in rich developed countries.
Individualistic Reproduction
Larsen and colleagues argue that extremely low fertility rates in developed societies — despite women’s continued desire for children — are due to the interaction of women’s economic empowerment, the availability of effective contraception, and evolved sex differences in mate preferences. These factors in combination have increased the tendency of women to reject the least desirable men as long-term mates, leaving many women (and men) unable to find a long-term partner.
The authors further suggest that dating apps exacerbate this dynamic: a small number of attractive men receive disproportionate attention, while many women are inundated with offers from men they find undesirable. At the same time, dating apps enable the most attractive men to “play the field” and not commit to the women they date. Reliable contraception facilitates both men and women following short-term mating strategies, which leaves many without a committed long-term partnership. Because women can now support themselves and their children independently — through either their own earnings or welfare provisions — the need for male parental investment has declined, further incentivizing women to follow a short-term mating strategy where they seek the most attractive male partners with “good genes” rather than male partners who would be reliable long-term providers.
Their rather startling conclusion is that the best way to increase fertility rates in modern societies is to facilitate childbearing outside of long-term partnerships. They write:
<blockquote>
If post-pair bonding nations like Norway are to significantly raise their fertility rate, we believe politicians must be far bolder and more innovative, and consider preparing for the future by funding limited experiments to boost — and learn what is required to motivate — single parenthood.
</blockquote>
They propose policies such as expanded support for single parents, round-the-clock child care for women, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World">Brave New World</a>-type solutions such as “state sponsored surrogacy for single men who want to become fathers” and “artificial wombs” to allow childless men to have children without female help.
What the Authors Get Right
At the core of Larsen and colleagues’ argument is that there are sex differences in mate preferences, a point that has merit. The finding that women are choosier about partners than men, on average, is <a href="https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-010418-103408">well documented in the evolutionary psychology literature</a>. The reason for this is that female fixed biological costs in pregnancy, childbearing, and child raising are much greater than male fixed biological costs. Because of this sex difference, over evolutionary time, women who were careful about choosing mates who were both willing and able to parent their children were more likely to have surviving offspring, leading to the selection of traits for greater choosiness and a <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/sex-differences-in-human-mate-preferences-evolutionary-hypotheses-tested-in-37-cultures/0E112ACEB2E7BC877805E3AC11ABC889">preference for reliable providers</a>. Additionally, their argument that the <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/making-good-men-harder-to-find-how-changing-wealth-inequality-affects-marriage-patterns">economic empowerment of women in developed countries is making it more difficult for low-status men to find long-term mates</a> also has some validity.
What the Authors Get Wrong
Beyond these points, however, the authors’ argument falters — largely because it overlooks contemporary sociological realities.
First, in all developed societies today, it is the highest-status men with the most financial resources who are most likely to marry and have children, and the least likely to divorce. This research on data from the U.S. shows that men in the highest income category are about 57 percentage points more likely to ever marry than men in the lowest income category, and about 37 percentage points less likely to divorce. Moreover, contrary to the manosphere claim that such men are merely income-providing “betas” whom women settle for while pursuing affairs with “high genetic quality alphas,” <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/on-internet-dating-sites-women-prefer-men-with-higher-incomes-and-more-education">data from online dating sites show that it is highly educated, high-income men who attract the most attention from women</a>, and thus presumably would be best able to follow a short-term mating strategy if they chose to do so. If dating apps truly created unlimited opportunities for high-status men to avoid commitment, as some authors suggest, these men should be the least likely to marry and the most likely to divorce. In fact, the opposite is true. The strategy of maximizing the number of sexual partners appears to characterize only a relatively small and atypical minority of men. Further, this evidence also suggests that women are using dating apps primarily to pursue long-term, reliable mates, and are not switching to pursuing short-term mates to the extent Larsen and colleagues argue.
Similarly, it is now the <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-marriage-how-breadwinning-matters-for-both-men-and-women-today">highest-income young women with the most access to resources who are most likely to marry</a> and have children (and they tend to marry high-income men). Assortative long-term mating is well-established, and the trend has become more pronounced in the last 50 years. By the authors’ logic, women with their own resources should be least likely to marry and stay married because they would be best able to live independently, but this is not what we see.
Second, declining fertility and marriage rates cannot be attributed to women’s empowerment alone, a point that Larsen and his coauthors themselves acknowledge. Other factors — including rising housing costs, cultural shifts, and widening educational gaps between men and women — play substantial roles. Public policy matters as well. For example, in Sweden, as documented by <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00324728.2022.2134578">Martin Kolk</a>, the transfers to women who have children enable them to take family leave and stay home to care for their kids. It does not enable women to work more hours, as women with the most children work the fewest hours over the course of their lives. High-status women are more likely to marry and have children, but this is largely because they enter motherhood with stable, high-status careers they can retain after having children, thanks to generous parental leave policies. This is government subsidization of female employment, which leads to more women working than would otherwise be the case. At the same time, these benefits in practice tend to advantage higher-status couples, effectively redistributing resources upward and likely exacerbating the difficulties lower-status men and women face in forming stable unions.
Third, there is little evidence that one of their proposals for low fertility — “more generous support to women wanting to solo parent” — would be effective at raising fertility rates. Even in societies where state support for single parents is most generous, such as in contemporary <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-018-9492-2">Scandinavian countries</a>, lower-status women are more likely to forgo childbearing altogether than to have children outside stable partnerships. If women generally favored raising children independently with genetically “desirable” partners, such patterns would be unlikely to emerge.
Further, the promotion of single parenthood is a poor solution to low fertility because substantial evidence shows that <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-structure-matters-for-rich-kids-too">stable, two-biological-parent families provide the best outcomes for children on average</a>, including lower mortality, <a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w33776">higher educational attainment, and greater adult earnings</a>.
Finally, Larsen and colleagues’ historical argument is also problematic. They suggest that arranged marriages in pre-industrial societies mitigated mismatches in mate preferences by overriding female choice. However, arranged marriage is primarily associated with agricultural societies, a relatively recent phase in human history. For <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Evolution-and-Gender-Why-It-Matters-for-Contemporary-Life/Hopcroft/p/book/9781138956162">the vast majority of human evolutionary history</a>, both men and women likely exercised choice in selecting partners. Indeed, the very existence of female choosiness implies that women historically had the agency to select mates; without such agency, there would have been no basis for this trait to be selected. Female selectivity and unequal mating outcomes for lower-status males are not novel phenomena but <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Evolution-and-Gender-Why-It-Matters-for-Contemporary-Life/Hopcroft/p/book/9781138956162">longstanding features of human societies</a>.
Men and Women Still Need Each Other
Thus, although sex differences in the choice of partners are a psychological reality, and women’s economic empowerment likely has promoted less marriage and lower fertility than in previous eras, Larsen and colleagues’ scenario of men and women pursuing short-term mating strategies as the primary reason for extremely low fertility overlooks the realities of marriage and parenthood in most developed societies. In fact, it is the men and women who are best able to pursue a short-term mating strategy and live independently without a long-term partner who are most likely to marry and have children.
The empirical evidence shows that most men and women today still find each other useful as long-term mates, and those who are successful at finding and keeping one are the most likely to have children who will be successful. The increased individualization of reproduction that the authors recommend is an unwelcome dystopian solution that is unlikely to be successful at improving reproductive outcomes at either the individual or societal level.
***
This is republished with permission from the Institute for Family Studies. The original can be found <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/lab-made-babies-wont-solve-the-fertility-crisis">here</a>.
Rosemary L. Hopcroft is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is the author of Evolution and Gender: Why it matters for contemporary life (Routledge 2016), editor of The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, &amp; Society (Oxford, 2018), and author (with Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber) of Not So Weird After All: The Changing Relationship Between Status and Fertility (Routledge, 2024).

New parents watching babies in hospital nursery

Love, Marriage, And A Baby Carriage

Fertility crisis

Leave it to the bloodthirsty, despotic mullahs running the totalitarian regime in Iran to turn the sacred institution of marriage into a grotesque assembly line for human shields.
On Monday, the Islamic Republic <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260519-iran-stages-mass-weddings-for-couples-ready-for-war-sacrifice">staged mass public weddings</a> across Tehran for hundreds of young couples. But this wasn’t a celebration of love or family; it was a sick, state-sponsored propaganda stunt designed to boost wartime morale. Under the shadow of a giant image of the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei — who inherited power after his father was eliminated on day one of the war — couples arrived at Imam Hossein Square in military jeeps mounted with machine guns.
These couples were there to enlist in the regime&#8217;s twisted janfada (&#8220;self-sacrifice&#8221;) scheme. By signing up, these brainwashed or coerced newlyweds literally pledged to sacrifice their lives for the state — agreeing to form human chains outside targeted power stations to act as shields against potential U.S. and Israeli airstrikes. One bride, clad in a white Islamic dress, spoke to state media as if this madness were normal, saying, “Certainly, the country is at war, but young people also have the right to marry.”
The sheer desperation of this tyrannical regime is entirely on brand, as the regime views its own population as completely expendable. Just two months ago, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/iran-sparks-international-outrage-turns-12-year-olds-into-expendable-tools-of-war?utm_source=chatgpt.com">officially lowered</a> the minimum age for military support roles to just 12 years old, deploying heavily armed, untrained children to roam the streets of Tehran with assault rifles.
The mullahs are pulling directly from their darkest, bloodiest playbook. During the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, the regime notoriously sent tens of thousands of children — some as young as 12 — into &#8220;human wave&#8221; attacks, handing them plastic &#8220;Keys to Paradise&#8221; before forcing them to detonate Iraqi minefields with their own bodies.
Now, facing a renewed existential threat from President Donald Trump, the regime is doing what it has always done: using the most vulnerable as meat shields. Whether it is 12-year-old boys at checkpoints or newlyweds in bridal gowns on the front lines, the survival of the dictatorship is all that matters to Tehran.

The Wedding Of SelfSacrificing Couples

Marriage As Martyrdom: Iran’s Mullahs Turn Newlyweds Into Human Shields

Iran

Millennials everywhere are letting out a collective &#8220;Feeny!&#8221; scream as news hits that the beloved &#8220;Boy Meets World&#8221; actor has an &#8220;open marriage&#8221; with his wife of nearly 75 years.
William Daniels, who played Mr. Feeny in the popular &#8217;90s coming-of-age sitcom, saw other people during his marriage, as did his wife, actress Bonnie Bartlett.
Now in her 90s, Bartlett discussed the arrangement with <a href="https://www.dailymail.com/tvshowbiz/article-15793313/william-daniels-bonnie-bartlett-marriage-hollywood.html">the Daily Mail</a>.
Bartlett explained that the pair &#8220;did go in different directions&#8221; early on in their marriage, but never formally discussed rules for the open marriage.
&#8220;There was never any discussion as to what we were going to do, but in 75 years, the two of you together, you know, it would be abnormal if you … weren&#8217;t attracted occasionally to other people,&#8221; she said.
&#8220;So there have been times, yeah, both of us, on both sides, yeah, and that is in the book,&#8221; the actress said. Bartlett released her memoir, &#8220;Middle of the Rainbow,&#8221; in 2023.
&#8220;It was non-spoken,&#8221; she said. &#8220;Bill and I never sit down and make rules. We never sit down and talk about these things. We just don&#8217;t. We just live our lives. And if he&#8217;s away for a year, he&#8217;s away for a year.&#8221;
&#8220;Our lives just went on, but we never got unhinged,&#8221; the 96-year-old continued. &#8220;We never got unhinged, but our lives did go in different directions occasionally.&#8221;
Fans of the show were quick to react to the news. For example, one account <a href="https://x.com/Howlingmutant0/status/2056457449490559485?s=20">posted</a>, &#8220;I got worried when I saw Mr Feeny from boy meets world was in the New York Post cause I thought he died but it turned out to be worse.&#8221;
&#8220;Oh no…Feeeney…Fah, Fah, Fah Feeny is a degenerate weirdo,&#8221; another account <a href="https://x.com/metathomist/status/2056502553911906727">commented</a>. 
Bartlett, who will celebrate her 75th wedding anniversary with Daniels in June, has previously discussed hardships the two have faced during their union, including the tragic death of their son. The child died just a day after his birth due to complications. Bartlett and Daniels went on to adopt two boys.
&#8220;That&#8217;s the best thing that ever happened to us,&#8221; she said of the adoption, during a 2024 interview. &#8220;And it happened after losing a child, after great pain and sadness, and then we got these two wonderful boys, and they have been a joy the whole marriage. I can&#8217;t imagine life without them.&#8221;

William Daniels Signs Copies “There I Go Again: How I Came To Be Mr. Feeny, John Adams, Dr. Craig, KITT, And Many Others”

Internet Grossed Out By Beloved ‘Boy Meets World’ Actor’s ‘Open Marriage’

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