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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About <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/07/about-eight-in-ten-women-in-opposite-sex-marriages-say-they-took-their-husbands-last-name/">80% of married women</a> in America still take their husbands’ last names. Some, by simply dropping and replacing their maiden names. (I did this.) Others, by dropping their middle names and replacing those with their maiden names, and then adding the new last name. (This is quite popular among my friend set.) 
But this norm of a marital name change for women has long met with resistance from <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12147-017-9183-z">some feminists</a>, who claim that marriage should not uniquely entail a woman’s forfeiture of her “<a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/19/health/last-name-change-marriage-reasons-wellness/index.html">identity</a>.” Why can’t women just keep their names? Or, if sharing a name is an important aspect of an enduring marriage, <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/can-sharing-a-last-name-save-your-marriage-it-depends">which some argue it is</a>, why can’t the whole family take the woman’s name instead of the man’s?
In my view, these questions themselves — far more than any practice around last names — undermine the fundamental unity that is supposed to be marriage. 
Here’s what I mean: I have no problem with a woman legally retaining her last name after marriage for practical or professional reasons. I can quite easily imagine the circumstances in which I’d have done so myself, had I gotten married <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-dating-reality-check">later than I did</a> or with more professional accomplishments under my maiden name. And, obviously, there are cultures in which it is customary for women to retain their names after marriage, and even for men and women to take one another’s names. None of this meets with any objection from me because I am not advocating for traditional Western naming practices per se. 
I am advocating for avoiding the temptation to let incoherent ideological inclinations infect personal relationships, particularly the marital ones. 
To me, the crux of the surname debate is not surnames. It is the turning of marriage into a forum for identitarian self-expression, when it is supposed to transcend the self by definition, for women and men alike. 
Name That Patriarchy 
The primary objection to the norm of women’s name changes upon marriage is that it rests on patriarchal foundations, the origins of which involve women having no individual rights and being essentially the property of their fathers before being transferred to their husbands. This is, of course, true, though I’d argue it’s not particularly relevant to today’s brides. Relevant or not, however, the patriarchal origins of Western naming practices cannot be overcome by women retaining their maiden names. 
A woman who keeps her own name rather than taking her husband’s is almost always keeping her father’s name. The patriarchal origins of said name are inescapable. So, the refusal to change a name on that score is futile.  
No one can change a distant past peopled by the long-dead. It’s unclear why anyone would want to let said past burden her most sacred relationship in the here and now. More importantly, women who enter marriage with a “his and mine, everything equal” mindset, searching for <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-pursuit-of-equality-is-ruining-your-marriage">egalitarianism and androgyny</a>, are setting themselves up for disappointment. 
When Two Don’t Become One
So much of today’s discourse on dating and marriage <a href="https://metropolitanreview.com/not-all-husbands/">pits women and men against each other</a> over concerns that really amount to a false gendering of the human condition. Men complain about feeling undervalued by women; wives complain about “the mental load.” Often, these accusations and our reactions to them take for granted that a war between the sexes is afoot, when in reality, many of these concerns simply reflect our shared humanity and its limitations. 
Feeling undervalued and overwhelmed are not gendered experiences, but gendering them gives us an enemy to blame. That’s more fun than admitting the truths at play. First, to be human is to exist within a fallen world shaped by our own fallenness; second, to be a husband or a wife is not to look for things to be an interchangeable 50/50 but to accept that (if you’re collectively doing what you ought), they’ll be a likely non-interchangeable 100/100. It’s not that there’s men’s work and women’s work; it’s that there is work that each of you, as specific individuals, will be better at. Who is the man and who is the woman will, if you are honest, be a factor in determining who does what. 
I would not want my son to marry a woman who wanted to keep her own last name rather than take his for pseudo-feminist reasons specifically. That’s not because I care about the name. It’s because I care about an adult relationship to reality, uncontaminated by a flimsily politicized lens that puts signaling some impotent blow against historical patriarchy ahead of signaling oneness with one’s husband today.
Within marriage, there is exactly zero room for him vs. her; it should be him and her vs. the world.
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Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including <a href="https://elizabethgracematthew.substack.com/about" target="_blank" rel="noopener">on Substack</a>.

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Marriage Was Supposed To Mean ‘Us.’ Then Came Identity Politics.

Marriage

Upstream

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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In my formative years, my perception of diamonds, engagements, and proposals was shaped largely by my favorite films from Hollywood’s Golden Age. From Audrey Hepburn in &#8220;Breakfast at Tiffany’s&#8221; gazing pensively into the Tiffany windows like a tourist craning up at the Sistine Chapel to Marilyn Monroe in &#8220;Gentlemen Prefer Blondes&#8221; enshrining the doctrine that “diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” these were the images that first taught me what romance was meant to look like. In such enduring portrayals, elegance came packaged in little blue boxes; they conveyed all the glitz and glamour a young romantic could imagine.
So when the time came to think seriously about proposing, the engagement ring in my mind had six prongs and a center stone, though I lacked the terminology to describe it as such at the time. And, as a willing victim of advertising, I did believe the best things came in blue.
Having since plunged into the world of engagement rings and diamonds, I have been reliably informed that I was mistaken. Jewelry is intensely personal, and an engagement ring is the most personal of all.
Women may still want the thrill of a proposal, but they generally also want some say — and final approval — over the ring’s design. They want to know it is coming, just not exactly when. Despite Hollywood’s portrayals, proposals are rarely shocking; more often, they are carefully forewarned surprises (sort of like the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound). If this strikes you as contradictory, I refer you to Oscar Wilde, who once remarked that women are meant to be loved, not understood.
In any case, fear not, gentlemen: I shall share what I have learned. Women, too, may glean something from it, as many of my own lessons came from consulting my girlfriend.
The engagement-ring market, as I discovered, is not a single industry so much as several overlapping ones. At the top sit luxury houses like Tiffany and Cartier, where one pays a handsome premium for heritage, branding (I soon learned the more apropos slogan is that the most marked-up things come in blue), and the carefully curated experience of buying there, right down to Cartier’s complimentary Champagne. Beneath them are the conventional retail jewelers found in malls, offering convenience and ready-made inventory but still carrying substantial markup. Then come wholesale independent jewelers, who source stones directly and can create custom rings, usually without grand showrooms but with greater flexibility and better value. Finally, there is the vintage, estate, and resale market, where buyers seek out older or previously owned rings for their character, individuality, or potential savings.
For the uninitiated, natural diamonds are typically judged according to the famous four Cs: cut, carat, clarity, and color. Carat refers to weight, though most people understandably think of it as size; roughly 0.9 to 1.5 carats is a common range. Cut, confusingly, does not refer to shape, but to how well the stone has been fashioned to catch and reflect light. Shape is its own category: round is the old standby, while cuts such as cushion, oval, pear, and emerald drift in and out of fashion with the tides of taste. Clarity and color, meanwhile, measure the degree of internal imperfections and tint, ranging from the visibly flawed to the nearly immaculate.
To put this in perspective with actual prices, a high-quality one-carat diamond ring from Tiffany — say, G color, VVS1 clarity, and an excellent cut — starts at around $20,000. If, instead, you skip the luxury tier and visit the sort of jewelry store your mother might browse in the mall while your father is off trying on shoes, a similarly specced ring will run closer to $8,000. Then there is the route I ultimately took: an independent jeweler recommended by a recently wed friend. There is no grand showroom, so it requires more preparation; you need to know what you want. But, as I learned, you can show such a jeweler the $20,000 Tiffany ring of your dreams and have it replicated for $5,000. Mine even told me that, if I were desperate enough, he could source the Tiffany box and papers, too. “I know a guy,” he said.
But knockoff Tiffany papers are not the only route to discount luxury in the jewelry world. You may have heard of lab-grown diamonds. With recent leaps in technology, lab-grown diamonds in the late 2010s were to the diamond industry what quartz watches were to Swiss horology in the 1980s: a major disruptor and a tech-driven solution to a laborious and difficult-to-source product. They have become so uniformly high in color and clarity that the old precision of diamond grading increasingly feels beside the point. As one jeweler explained to me, they are visually flawless diamonds, cost roughly $100 per carat to manufacture, and retail for somewhere between $500 and $1,500 per carat. They are cheap, plentiful, and readily available — ideal, if your ambition is to tone your fiancée’s arm by weighing it down with a baseball-sized behemoth that, if naturally mined, would fetch a price rivaling that of an exotic sports car. Even affluent clients, the jeweler told me, often opt for lab-grown when faced with the choice between spending $5,000 and $300,000 on what is, to the naked eye, effectively the same stone.
Given the striking disparity in cost and virtual lack thereof in appearance, why would anyone opt for a natural diamond over lab? Some bleeding-heart voices will still invoke the specter of blood diamonds. But with the Kimberley Process — the international certification scheme for rough diamonds — now covering roughly 99.8% of global rough-diamond production, it is exceedingly difficult to turn your proposal plans into a vehicle for financing African warlord insurgencies, even if you were so inclined. The decision instead comes down to preference, provenance, and resale value. They say diamonds are forever, but not all diamonds hold their value forever. Though no diamonds should be thought of as investments or reliable stores of value, natural diamonds will at least retain some fraction of what you paid; their lab-grown counterparts, however, retain virtually no resale value at all.
There is also something undeniably romantic about a natural diamond being more than a billion years old. In a world of fast and disposable fashion, it has an advantage over modern consumer goods in that it predates civilization and will certainly outlast it. If that connection to older, grander, and less synthetic worlds appeals to you, old mine-cut and old European-cut diamonds are also worth considering over the modern brilliant cut.
These were styles associated with the Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, and Art Deco eras, evolving from the squarish, hand-cut old mine style to the rounder old European before the modern brilliant arrived with the technical precision to maximize sparkle. The older cuts were fashioned to be admired under candlelight, before the widespread adoption of electric bulbs, giving them a softer, moodier glow. They feel closer in spirit to the sparkling socialites of the Gilded Age than to the moneyed influencers of social media. In the end, the European cut was the one we chose. It was a beautiful and singular stone and, as the jeweler explained, much harder to come by in such higher-grade colors and clarities: “I can get 10 of these brilliant-cut diamonds for you tomorrow. This European one? I can maybe find a handful a year.”
The jeweler also explained that, in certain friend groups and social circles, there is increasing pressure toward larger stones. “If all her friends are showing off massive three-carat diamonds, maybe she doesn’t want a quaint 1.2-carat natural.” Thankfully, this was not my predicament; none of my girlfriend’s friends are married yet.
Lab-grown diamonds, for all the snobbery they may still attract, have also democratized entry into a world once guarded by prohibitive prices. A young man no longer needs to bankrupt himself or delay proposing for a decade to participate in marriage. Engagement rings may be, in part, an offshoot of marketing and media, but they are now as fixed a feature of our culture as diamonds themselves, and, like refusing to read the directions or carrying all the groceries from the car in a single trip, seem to have become one of those things expected of us men.
The old Tiffany fantasy still has its charm, but romance, as it turns out, is not a faithful reenactment of a Billy Wilder script. Rather, it is learning what the woman you love actually wants and then finding a way (within budget) to give it to her. By the way, she said yes.
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Harry Khachatrian (<a href="https://x.com/harry1t6">@Harry1T6</a>) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at <a href="https://www.betweenbottles.com/">BetweenBottles.com</a>.

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Inside The Diamond Game, Where The Same Ring Can Cost $5K Or $20K Depending On One Choice

Special Reporting

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 Cut has a knack for repackaging relational instability as self-discovery. The women-focused online arm of New York Magazine that brought us pieces like “<a href="https://www.thecut.com/article/non-monogamy-equal-parenting.html">Could Opening Your Marriage Lighten Your Mental Load?</a>” and “<a href="https://www.thecut.com/article/women-regret-having-children.html">I Regret Having Children</a>” is at it again — this time with E.J. Dickson’s essay “<a href="https://www.thecut.com/article/its-good-to-have-crushes-when-youre-married.html?utm_source=insta&amp;utm_medium=s1&amp;utm_campaign=nym">The Secret to a Great Marriage? Crushes on Other People</a>.”
In it, Dickson begins by describing a co-worker named Phil, whom she compares to a swarthier Jake Gyllenhaal, and who, she notes, didn’t know what a “nut graf” was. She emphasizes that she did not know him well: by the time they stopped working together, they had exchanged only about 40 words, most of them about Steely Dan.
She mentions him occasionally to her husband of nearly 10 years, who would joke about her “frissons of nervous energy” when asked if Phil had been at work that day. When she knew he would be in the office, she found herself lingering a little longer in front of the mirror — adding lip tint and mascara, taking extra care with her hair before meetings.
Actually, much of the piece focuses on workplace dynamics and so-called “work husbands and wives.” One interviewee, Jill, 32, recalls that her now-husband once confessed to having a minor crush on a co-worker. At the time, she was feeling sexually bored in their relationship, and she describes the admission as unexpectedly “deeply erotic.” The couple later folded the subject into their pre-sex conversations. Jill said it “recalibrated” how she perceived him.
“A crush while you’re married is like a little sweet snack that gets you through the 4 p.m. slump,” said Cara, 35. “It’s harmless and invigorating,” she said, “and reminds you you’re alive and kicking and yearning and thinking.”
While some pushed back on the piece in the comments, most others were predictable: “Brace for puritan moralism,” one said. “Sad to see so many people missing the point,” wrote another, “it’s not about infidelity.” And finally: “It’s not that deep man … having crushes is human. Enjoy.”
I was surprised to feel my body tense as I read the article through for the first time. I had lived out this theory as a college student, and the lessons were still living in my muscles — little &#8220;frissons of nervous energy” that I recognized now for what they were: alarm bells. 
During a long-term relationship, I found myself co-creating a new music festival with an older mentor and friend. At first, it was innocent: writing grants after class, trading notes in a shared Google Doc. I admired his drive, his obvious talent. But admiration has a way of slipping its bounds. Soon, I felt that familiar, muscle-melting pull at the mere mention of his name.
As the months passed, we were pulling all-nighters, contacting venues, creating floor plans, evaluating artist applications, united in a common purpose and building a shared world from scratch. I found my mind wandering: what other worlds might we be capable of sharing? Electric fingers grazed my leg under the table. I was sick with confusion, regret, desire. I was in trouble. 
If this wasn’t “that deep, man,” how did I get here? From ruminating on a nagging desire to indulging it? From a passing thought to a habit of mind; from a shared project to a divided interior life; from keeping a little secret to hiding whole chambers of my heart? 
What I thought was rare, even clandestine, was anything but. Some estimates suggest that as many as 85% of affairs begin at work. “Now we have a shared purpose,” psychologist John Delony <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reels/DHEDYfFgQC_/">explains</a>. “We’re talking about how we feel about things. We have a goal, we have metrics. I’m spending more time with her or him than I am with my spouse. Of course it happens at work.” 
Conservative politicians have gone to great lengths to avoid precisely this kind of entanglement, most famously Mike Pence, who has said he avoids dining, traveling, or spending one-on-one time with women who are not his wife. Even among my closest friends, this rule tends to draw skepticism, dismissed as a relic of the aforementioned “Puritan moralism” or an overcorrection bordering on paranoia.
But is it overkill? The Christian ethic has never limited fidelity to outward behavior alone; it presses much deeper, into the interior life. Scripture consistently treats the heart as the true seat of fidelity, as Proverbs says: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23). Jesus sharpens the point, saying, “anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28).
Desire untethered from discipline, he points out, is not neutral; it is formative. Thoughts become patterns, patterns become habits, and habits, eventually, become actions. Crushes aren’t “harmless”; they’re the beginning of disordered desire that reshapes the heart and threatens our fidelity.
“Take every thought captive,” Paul writes (2 Corinthians 10:5) because what you dwell on begins to shape what you want, and what you want begins to shape what you do. To indulge a wandering emotional or imaginative life is, in a real sense, to erode the foundation of a covenant that is meant to be steadfast regardless of passing urges. In other words, master your desires, or they will master you.
This ethic serves another purpose: It keeps us from subtly turning one another into objects. The logic of the “crush,” as the article itself admits, depends on a kind of selective vision: “You’re getting to focus on the desirable parts of that person while ignoring the parts that wouldn’t actually be fun to deal with in reality. That’s super-sexy … Relish in the fantasy.” 
That same logic appears more explicitly in other work by E. J. Dickson. In her 2016 article for the Washington Post titled &#8220;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/10/12/dont-worry-about-sex-robots-they-wont-ruin-sex/">Don’t worry about sex robots. They won’t ruin sex</a>,&#8221; she entertains the possibility that even deeply disordered desires might be safely redirected onto objects, writing that technologies like child sex robots could “serve as such an outlet.” 
The mistaken assumption is that desire can be indulged, even trained, so long as it is displaced onto something non-human; that objectification is not only harmless, but potentially therapeutic. But to “relish in the fantasy” is, almost by definition, to flatten a person, to strip them of their full humanity and complexity and recast them as a vehicle for your own emotional or erotic gratification.
In our marriage, my husband and I have resisted this ethic in ways that might seem excessive to secular friends: There are songs I no longer play because of the memories they evoke, restaurants we no longer visit because of vignettes they hold. We’ve chosen, deliberately, to build a shared world. And with each quiet act of discipline, each decision to honor him in thought and action, my desire is shaped and redirected, returning to the person it was always meant for. Every time, my crush on him grows deeper.
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Grace Salvatore is the senior editor of media, arts, and culture at Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Restoring the West and a contributor to Independent Women’s Voice.

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No, Crushes Won’t Help Your Marriage

If you&#8217;re a liberal Gen Z commentator, the last person you want to see on the other end of the debate stage is Isabel Brown.
And yet that&#8217;s exactly the position influencer Harry Sisson found himself in at the University of Virginia, when he joined The Daily Wire host for the latest installment on CBS News and <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/watch-the-gen-z-debate-with-harry">The Free Press&#8217;s</a> &#8220;Things That Matter&#8221; debate series. Brown and Sisson sparred on culture, economics, and the direction of Gen Z politics, with Brown pressing an argument rooted in culture and faith and Sisson leaning on conventional liberal talking points.
Brown opened by framing the debate at a civilizational level, rejecting the idea that current political and economic frustrations can be pinned solely on former President Donald Trump.
“It may be flashy and easy to say it’s all Donald Trump’s fault,” she said, “but in reality where we have arrived at today is because of the systematic removal of God from our society.” She returned to that theme repeatedly, arguing, “We lack the common shared humanity that bound us all together — that is, God.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/harryjsisson?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@harryjsisson</a> and his leftist counterparts like to chase clicks by blaming all of Gen Z&#8217;s problems on President Trump.
But <a href="https://twitter.com/theisabelb?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@theisabelb</a> identifies the root of the crisis facing Gen Z: the systematic removal of God from our society. <a href="https://t.co/LJBlDv1tlQ" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pic.twitter.com/LJBlDv1tlQ</a>
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDailyWire/status/2047284604017492384?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">April 23, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
Sisson, by contrast, focused on attacking Trump&#8217;s rhetoric, claiming “Trump said Kamala Harris is going to import a million, gazillion people … and he said I’m focused on affordability … and none of that has happened.”
The debate sharpened when it turned to foreign policy. Sisson asked, “What war did Joe Biden get into?” Brown fired back: “Joe Biden directly propped up and funded foreign wars around the world … we sent money to the Iranian regime — we sent $200 billion to the war in Ukraine.”
While the exact figures are debated, it is well-documented that the U.S. committed over $180 billion in aid to Ukraine since 2022, according to a Defense Department<a href="https://media.defense.gov/2025/Mar/10/2003663371/-1/-1/1/OAR_Q1_DEC2024_FINAL_508.PDF#page=28&amp;zoom=70,-372,685" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> inspector general report</a> from 2024, alongside controversial financial transfers tied to Iran and the aftermath of the Afghanistan withdrawal — making Sisson’s implication of non-involvement difficult to sustain.
On domestic economics, Sisson claimed, “We now have less workers than jobs open right now,” echoing a common labor shortage argument. Brown immediately countered: “So why are 10 million Gen Zers unemployed?” As youth unemployment has remained persistently higher than the national average, and labor force participation among younger workers has lagged, complicating the simplistic “more jobs than workers” narrative.
“Immigrants in virtually every piece of economic data makes our country better, they make our culture better, they make us better as people,” Sisson claimed, drawing a sharp contrast with Brown’s argument that mass immigration can suppress wages in certain sectors, a concern supported in part by labor market research showing localized wage pressure in low-skill industries.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/harryjsisson?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@harryjsisson</a> DENIES that mass migration hurts Gen Z <a href="https://twitter.com/theisabelb?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@theisabelb</a>: &#8220;It is a system that has been consistently selling out the opportunities of our generation for everyone else around the world.&#8221;
HS: &#8220;The idea that immigrants are coming in and stealing jobs is just NOT TRUE.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/HeXoo8Kvow" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pic.twitter.com/HeXoo8Kvow</a>
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDailyWire/status/2047307000313225667?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">April 23, 2026</a></blockquote>
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Brown then shifted the conversation to culture and social stability, noting that “Young people, especially young men are looking for unafraid, on offense conservatism,” she said, outlining a platform of limited government, reduced foreign intervention, and education reform against “woke slop.”
Throughout the exchange, Sisson often defaulted to dismissiveness, responding, “I don’t even know what woke slop means.” Brown tied her argument on education reform to a deeper argument about meaning and social cohesion, warning against what she described as a drift toward “radical Marxism.”
As The Daily Wire has <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/education-dept-slashes-600-million-in-grants-promoting-divisive-ideologies" target="_blank" rel="noopener">frequently</a> <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-doj-spent-over-100-million-pushing-dei-restorative-justice-in-classrooms-report-finds" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>, the Biden administration spent millions promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in public schools, efforts the Trump administration has <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/a-privilege-not-a-right-trump-admin-gives-k-12-schools-ultimatum-on-dei" target="_blank" rel="noopener">worked</a> to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-takes-sledgehammer-to-dei-in-latest-round-of-executive-orders-targeting-education" target="_blank" rel="noopener">roll back.</a>
She also leaned on <a href="https://ifstudies.org/in-the-news/conservative-women-are-happier" target="_blank" rel="noopener">research</a> from scholars like the Institute for Family Studies’ Brad Wilcox, noting that “married moms are three times happier than unmarried childless women,” and arguing that declining family formation correlates with rising mental health struggles among young people — a claim that aligns with broader data showing higher reported happiness and stability among married populations.
Sisson’s arguments, by contrast, reflect a more familiar institutional liberalism that often assumes its premises rather than defending them. Claims like immigration universally improving outcomes or dismissing concerns about foreign entanglements land differently with a generation that has grown up through economic instability, pandemic disruption, and now renewed geopolitical tension.
The Trump administration, while still dominant within Republican politics, is navigating a complicated stretch, particularly on foreign policy as tensions with Iran continue to hang over the national conversation. For younger voters, especially those wary of prolonged overseas entanglements, that creates an opening and a risk. There’s a clear demand for a version of conservatism that is assertive at home but restrained abroad, something Brown explicitly nods to with her emphasis on “no foreign intervention” and keeping “American tax dollars at home.”

Isabel_Final-1

Isabel Brown Schools Liberal Harry Sisson In Free Press Debate

CBS News

Donald Trump

Free Press

Gen Z

Illegal Immigration

Isabel Brown

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.
***
<a href="https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-and-living-alone-us/">Marriage rates</a> and <a href="https://govfacts.org/long-term-challenges-future/demographic-changes/declining-birth-rates/us-birth-rate-hits-historic-low-what-it-means-for-americas-future/">birth rates</a> are falling. Meanwhile, the <a href="https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/marital.html">average ages</a> for marriage and motherhood are rising. Fewer women are getting married and having children, and those who do are usually older and more educated than ever before. 
Many even within the left-inflected mainstream are willing to acknowledge, if reluctantly, that marriage and birth rates in free fall are serious societal problems. Fewer outside conservative circles, however, are able to recognize that a ratcheting up of what is deemed an appropriate age and stage for marriage and motherhood is a concern unto itself.
There are two main reasons for this. First, ideological prepossession is getting in the way of reality and reason. Mainstream feminism has begotten generations of women who tacitly determine whether something is good by asking themselves whether it <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-pursuit-of-equality-is-ruining-your-marriage">comports with</a> what they’ve been taught constitutes female empowerment, rather than subjecting that mainstream feminist dogma itself to scrutiny.
Second, extended adolescence and arrested development among young (and not-so-young) people across the political spectrum foster legitimate concerns about youthful readiness for marriage. This, in turn, creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of both genuine unreadiness and a ratcheting up of standards for readiness that, together, inculcate an inertia and purposelessness that, sadly, transcend even our political divides. 
Fortunately, meaningfully protecting women’s agency over their lives and producing marriageable young men and women share a cultural prescription: Return marriage to its status as the cornerstone of adult life, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/03/incredible-everlasting-institution-marriage/555320/">not its capstone</a>. 
Ignore the Mainstream Feminist Narrative
One <a href="https://unfinishedrevolution.substack.com/p/women-were-never-told-we-had-forever">mainstream feminist response</a> to a <a href="https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/they-lied-to-us-about-having-it-all-and-it-s-costing-us-our-children">recent Evie Magazine</a> article about delayed motherhood and its costs argued that conservatives who want women to be informed about the realities of fertility and age are actually harming women’s well-being. Those who advocate for younger marriage and motherhood, the author alleges, want women to “start “looking for a husband by 25” rather than “building a life — deepening friendships, falling in love, figuring out who you are, establishing some kind of economic footing.” There is an alleged conspiracy afoot here, of course: “a world in which women’s freedom is narrowed” and their “dependency is normalized” in part because they are led toward “partnership with older and more established men.” 
The sleight of hand here is masterful: Women cannot build a life, deepen friendships, fall in love, or figure out who they are while prioritizing marriage? Looking for a husband by 25 is oppressive? This kind of arrogant, belittling overgeneralization comes not from conviction but from fear.
This is fear not of women’s oppression, but of their happiness outside the bounds of mainstream feminist zeitgeist. Married mothers are the <a href="https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/in-pursuit-marriage-motherhood-and-womens-well-being">happiest</a> young women in America. Most of them aren’t oppressed trad wives marrying men 10 years their senior. In fact, the women getting married at all are increasingly women on equal, if not superior, educational and professional footing in relation to their husbands. And many of them choose to prioritize marriage, family, and motherhood anyway. This is why Sheryl Sandberg has started taking shots directly at stay-at-home moms: She realizes that they aren’t oppressed victims, but formidable opposition to her soulless, androgynous project. 
I married my husband when I was 25, and he was 26. We were both college graduates and, at the time, on our way to terminal degrees. We had our first child when I was 27. I worked full-time in higher education until I was nearly 35 and a mother of three. Now 38 with four kids, I am a stay-at-home mom and a writer. We prioritized the upward trajectory of my husband’s career over mine at every step along the way; for me, we chased stability, good health insurance, and flexibility to accommodate primary caregiving.
Maybe if I’d “started looking” for a husband well after 25 (or never), as mainstream feminist advice dictates, I’d have had an established career without the flexibility I could prioritize as a young wife and mother with a second income in the house. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt “ready” for motherhood until I’d achieved the next rung on my erstwhile solo career ladder. Maybe I’d have had fewer children because I started well into my 30s, and then found it difficult to justify prioritizing primary caregiving, since our home and family would have been manageable enough with two kids, even alongside a less flexible career. 
Maybe I would never have known that it is coupling up young, as reflexive equals and co-creators of one shared life, that confers true agency rather than a shallow imitation thereof. Then, maybe, I’d be humming along with the mainstream feminist de-prioritization of marriage and motherhood. After all, that would be easier and less painful than acknowledging that I had missed out — not on oppression, but on degrees of freedom. 
Reject Peter Pan Syndrome
There&#8217;s another problem keeping today&#8217;s young people from marrying early. Twenty-somethings of both sexes, but particularly men, are <a href="https://thedispatch.com/article/marriage-rates-socioeconomics-men-trailing/">suffering</a> from arrested development. There are many economic and cultural reasons for this, but one is that it’s been a while since we expected them to do otherwise.
As I <a href="https://thedispatch.com/article/gen-z-parents-nihilists-gender-responsibility/">recently wrote</a>, a secularized society subsumed by moral relativism and absent respect for legitimate authority is a civilization destined for ever more nihilistic individualism. When grown-ups lack sufficient confidence in their own moral and practical authority to compel corresponding grit, commitment, and maturity from their children, hallmarks of virtuous adulthood inevitably fall by the wayside. 
This nihilistic individualism that militates against the capacity for marriage begins at home. College-educated <a href="https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2025/11/99390/">gentle parenting</a> often centers feelings above behavior. Meanwhile, working-class non-parenting often allows screens to eradicate emotional discomfort, lessening the need to establish firm boundaries for conduct. Many parents of all educational backgrounds now do some combination of the two. 
This anti-formation continues in institutions. Left-coded social and emotional learning inculcates flimsy “<a href="https://elizabethgracematthew.substack.com/p/less-gentle-parenting-03-your-kid">self-regulation</a>” that establishes forgiving environments and therapies for poorly parented (mostly male) children, in place of the self-discipline regardless of environment that is actually required for functional adult life. Meanwhile, right-coded “manosphere” content takes aim at these inane educational interventions as “feminized” and thereby excuses boys from the behavioral habituation that would render them unnecessary. 
Together, today’s homes, schools, technology, and media unintentionally conspire to produce self-indulgent young people. If we are going to get serious about a return to the cornerstone marriage, we have to reestablish as a society that the point of having children is to produce adults. Not just women, but also, and even more pointedly, men. If “the future is female,” then there is by definition no future.
I am raising <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2025/06/26/boymom-catholic-sons-251015/">four sons</a>. I want them to start looking for a wife at 18. That doesn’t mean they’ll get married at 18 or should! It also doesn’t mean they will forfeit deepening friendships or figuring out who they are. They’ll just — if they’re very lucky — do those things alongside people they meet at 21 and marry, not begin looking for, at 25. 
In the 1989 romantic comedy &#8220;When Harry Met Sally,&#8221; the two protagonists harbor a trendy disdain for love before falling in love with one another. In his eagerness to convince Sally that he is truly reformed, Harry abandons his blasé indifference to romance and says, “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” 
We should be helping young people of both sexes couple up with as much of their <a href="https://fairerdisputations.org/overlapping-ribbons/">lives ahead of them</a> as they can. It’s best for them, it’s best for society, and it means that we’ll need fewer articles about how easy it actually is to have a first baby after 35. Because we’ll have a lot more couples empowered enough to have <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/on-geriatric-pregnancy">third and fourth babies</a> by then. 
***
Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including <a href="https://elizabethgracematthew.substack.com/about">on Substack</a>.

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The Dating Reality Check

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

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

Wedding

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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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.
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Hadley Heath Manning is a senior fellow at <a href="https://www.independentwomen.com/">Independent Women</a>.

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

Children

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Fertility

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

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

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

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

Feminism

Planned Parenthood

The View

Whoopi Goldberg

Large American Family Group Gathering

Why Kicking Your Kids Out At 18 Is Actually Insane

Family Values

Matt Walsh

Opinion

Parenting

Teenagers

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

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

Intellectual Pornography For Morons

Ben Shapiro

Cult

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male

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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.

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

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