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.
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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

Marriage

Upstream

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

Gen Z

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.

Modern love

Love, Leftism, And The Tar Pit Of Physical Reality

Andrew Klavan

Entertainment

Gender

Humor

Movies

Satire

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

parenting_equality_v1_720

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

Culture

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

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