The decline in marriage and parenthood is emerging as one of the great challenges of the current era. It is found nearly everywhere in the world, though some places have it much worse than others. (It seems correlated with level of female education. As women become more educated, they produce fewer children. One can debate whether that is good or bad for society as a whole, or even for the particular woman. Here the focus is on what is best for society as a whole.) A substantial shrinking of a nation’s population creates plenty of problems — especially in the modern welfare state that relies on taxing a large population of workers to pay for its ever expanding population of entitled nonworkers, including old people, and people with disabilities, and unemployed single mothers.
Several months ago this substack had three short articles commenting on the shortage of marriageable men. It is plausible (though hard to prove) that modern young men are less appealing as husbands than those of previous times. The third of those comments delved into the possibility that young men are less driven than in the past to become desirable husbands. If true, that change would likely have multiple causes. But one of them might be that it’s not worth it, as much as in the past, because the wife will not be as good for him as his grandmother was for his grandfather.
Let’s turn the question around, in contrarian spirit. Is there a shortage of marriageable women? After all, if men and women aren’t partnering up for marriage and family, perhaps both of them are having difficulty finding a desirable mate. Perhaps modern young women, and not just young men, are less appealing than in the past.
This was recently articulated in a hard-hitting substack by the Australian writer Bettina Arndt. Arndt has bravely taken on the role of advocate for men’s rights and men’s issues. As a woman, she does not get the immediate silencing and condemnation that male writers get if they try to speak up for men. (She does get plenty, however.) It’s worth reading the full thing yourself: here.
Of course, there are literally billions of women in the world, also billions of men, and no doubt there are plenty of fine specimens and plenty of ones to avoid, in both the main genders. (Probably the same in the other genders too!) Nevertheless, averages do shift over time. Arndt takes a hard look at the average modern young woman in the Anglosphere and considers what’s on offer. Her title articulates her sad conclusion: “No wonder men are opting out.” She says if a rational young man looks at his prospects for finding a loving wife or girlfriend, he might well give up and go play video games.
The harsh verdict is laid out in her “prospectus” of the modern woman. First, she says, modern women are exceptionally miserable, anxious, and insecure. High rates of mental illness are well documented, and even those without clinical diagnosis have plenty of negative emotion to share. These patterns are indeed much more prevalent than in the past. It’s no fun to live with a frequently unhappy wife. (A classic psychology research study accidentally stumbled on the finding that, over time, the randomly assigned college roommates of depressed people became depressed themselves. So if you live with a depressed person, your happiness is likely to decline.) A man might fairly ask himself, am I happier mostly alone and unattached, or attached to a woman who gives me unpleasant emotions?
Then, says Ms. Arndt, there’s the finding that once women settle into a long-term relationship, many of them lose interest in sex. Her own early notice of this pattern was confirmed in a pair of five-year longitudinal studies of newlywed couples. The average young husband’s sexual desires, both toward women in general and toward his wife specifically, remained about the same over five years. But the young wife’s sexual desire diminished, on average, some more than others. (More if the wife gave birth, understandably, but the decline in sexual interest was also significant among childless wives.) Thus, insofar as men marry to get regular sex, they may get less and less.
Previous generations of wives accepted that having sex with her husband was part of a wife’s duty, but that’s gone. (Arndt was one of the first observers of this pattern, as documented in her book The Sex Diaries. It included a touching story of a man who tried everything he could to interest his wife in sex and finally said he would wait until she initiated it. He was still waiting, nine years later. His marriage vow turned into a vow of celibacy.) Men used to get married in order to have sex, but now there is a substantial chance that marriage will mean a brief splurge and then pretty soon the end of sex. More likely, on average, the wife will be amenable to having sex maybe twice a month, though maybe not. Is that good enough for the man? And if he wants more, as most men do, should he (a) just accept the lower amount and resulting frustration, (b) masturbate, possibly with pornography, (c) find another woman on the side, (d) hire a call girl, (e) other? (And if other, what exactly?)
Another point Bettina makes. Plenty of women dislike men in general, and indeed recent research has confirmed that women dislike men more than men dislike women (despite all the fact-free talk about misogyny). I’ve been told about recent studies (not yet published) consistently showing that women hate or dislike men much more than the reverse. Young women also tend to embrace left-wing political views and won’t consider a man who might have different views. They know very little about actual history but have absorbed a highly dubious feminist theory of the past, which feeds their sense of entitlement and dislike of men.
I won’t cover all of Arndt’s points, but the last one is also notable: Modern women are quite well versed in how to profit from divorce. I don’t know the evidence on this, but false accusations of abuse are not uncommon, because they keep the father away from his children and save the woman from the hassle of joint custody. It definitely happens but it’s hard to know how common it is. (Anecdotally, some divorce lawyers say it is common though certainly not universal.) Nevertheless, some young men are surprised to be falsely accused of brutality and end up separated from their children. Warren Farrell put it aptly: Many divorced men find themselves working long hours at a hard job to earn money that is mainly sent away to support a few people who hate him. (The wife teaches the children to despise the man she divorced.) This is a very bad point in life for a man to come to, especially if he was well intentioned and innocent and tried to do his best for his family, but was discarded by his wife who was brought up to be full of negative emotions and to hate men in general.
Whether young women today are really less able than earlier generations to become good wives is a complicated question, and as social scientists always say, it depends on how you count. All I have tried to show here is that it is possible to make the case that modern young women are less appealing than previous generations as potential wives. Combine that with my earlier articles making the converse case, that modern young men are less desirable husbands than their forebears, and we have a tough road to overcoming the fertility crisis. The people who are responsible for raising and educating modern children need to re-think what and how they are teaching them. What they are doing is not working, even toward the basic requirement that they create enough people who will keep society going.
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REFERENCES
Arndt substack:
Unexpected finding about depression being contagious: Joiner, T. E., Alfano, M. S., & Metalsky, G. I. (1992). When depression breeds contempt: Reassurance seeking, self-esteem, and rejection of depressed college students by their roommates. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 101(1), 165–173. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.101.1.165
See my own substack archive for 3 columns on shortage of marriageable men.
McNulty, J.K., Maxwell, J.A., Meltzer, A.L., & Baumeister, R.F. (2019). Sex-differentiated changes in sexual desire predict marital dissatisfaction. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 48, 2473-2489.
Researchers have done plenty of studies documenting men's use of pornography and correlating that with marital unhappiness, but for some reason, these researchers are too afraid to look at women's use of social media and marital unhappiness. The narrative always ends up being that men are bad and are doing bad things which is bad for marriage and society. There is never any similar treatment of women in studies
As far as I can tell, Arndt's insights only apply to Western societies, specifically the Anglosphere. If my assumption is correct, then I suggest that men start voting with their feet by looking for women from non-western cultures or other societies without all of the first world cultural baggage.