At party some months ago, a bachelor friend remarked how charming and rare it was that my wife and I had a traditional marriage with five kids and such. For me, this is just a normal aspect of a life well lived. But for many, it is as out of reach as a cottage in the Hamptons, as weird as being in a Bay Area sex cult, and as niche a hobby as painting minifigures. Has something gone wrong here? It seems wrong to me. My immediate thought was "none of you are going to make it" and then later "some of you guys are alright, don't go to sodom tomorrow".
San Francisco has the lowest fertility among US cities at less than 1.5 children per woman. Vancouver is less than 1.0, the lowest in the western hemisphere. Among people I know in these cities, fertility is even less. Once they actually get and stay married they do alright having 2-3 children, but most people don't get there. It seems we have a "mating crisis".
I could roast all the 'cels endlessly for individually bad values. I think most proximally it is about individual values. If you really want it, you go get it. But values have their own material genealogy and it's not lectures about bootstraps. I suspect the best analysis is at the level of the social fabric that creates and implements the values. What kind of social fabric creates life, and what do we have instead?
My hypothesis is that the key missing piece is social infrastructure visibly dominated by couples and parents. If being a parent is easy, visible, and respected, it will be desirable.
This used to be provided by church and more broadly the social dominance of parents. When everyone checks in with the local parish every week, gets taught the holistic life wisdom, and interacts with functional families who help each other out in the quest for love, and all the institutions and social fabric are dominated by those same values, it's much easier to get the idea that you should overcome practical barriers to have children. Communities who still do this have high fertility, and those who don't do not.
There are a few reasons this is no longer the thing: the first is that few really believe in Jesus "that way" since Nietzsche and Darwin, removing the big intrinsic motivator to keep it all going. The second is that the dominant worldview in most institutions since the post-war revolution of 1945-1975 is anti-western crypto-marxism which is opposed to the traditional family and its infrastructure. I believe all the internet-driven atomization is downstream of these.
In some communities, there is now effectively zero social fabric dominated by heteronormative sexuality. Everything is free love polyamorous dating culture sex work, even when people don't think about it that way. The lasting legacy of the 1960s sexual revolution is that when opinionated parents encounter "that", they just check out and leave. They don't want to associate with it, and they don't feel the social authority or desire to fight it. It's understandable at least; parents just spent the last 100 years getting pushed out of every sexual and social authority, and getting a bayonet in the back when they refuse to go. We're well trained at this point. The result is the mating crisis, with the unmarried singles having zero guidance and the married parents having zero infrastructure.
The one exception is that some schools remain dominated by parents, but this doesn't help young singles who don't interact with them, and schools are also rapidly becoming more expensive and hostile than they already were.
The post-war revolution is now failing at the political level though, so it's a good time to fight it at the sexual level, by rebuilding the social infrastructure of high fertility as a counterculture. Could it be done? What would it take?
"There is no turning back the clock, unless we want to stop educating women" - LKY
Being "culturally conservative" or rather revolutionary, as the default is now anything but actual monogamous relationships for the sake of posterity, doesn't really help. You need legal coercion or endogamous norms such that the result resembles de facto legal coercion. I am unfamiliar with any counterexamples. People like to bring up Israel, but as far as I'm aware the fertility among secular ashkies continues to drop.
So your social infrastructure better look like a radical revolutionary organization with strong norm enforcement, or else it will just look like the country of Georgia. Liberalism but we get to keep the customs and standards from pre-liberal society doesn't work, for obvious reasons. You can probably hack something together as an individual, but trying to build anything like this without separating your group seems equivalent to trying to cool down a house using air conditioning while leaving the windows and doors open. Entropy wants in, you have to pay the price to sealing it out.
In my experience, there are high-fertility subcultures, or at least higher-fertility, and they aren’t really all or maybe even mostly motivated by religious reasons.* For some people who have lots of kids and go to church, I don’t think they have lots of kids because they go to church, but rather, they go to church because they have lots of kids. These people aren’t overlapping with your "free love polyamorous dating culture sex work" communities, because they want a good community for their kids (other kids for them to be around) and there is little utility in hanging out with childless libertines. They mostly don’t live in the places childless libertines do (i.e., the urban core of cities), because, certain outlier families notwithstanding, revealed preferences indicate it sucks raising lots of kids in small spaces with few other children in the community for them to play with and no opportunities for kids to be outside unsupervised.
Maybe what you’re really asking is: how do I get people in my childless libertine communities to want to get married. You want to make getting married and having kids more alluring to them, or at least more visible. Or alternatively, and to the “more visible” point, maybe you want more people who are married with kids to opt into your childless libertine subcultures.
In the latter case, simply there being more places for them to physically live in those cities with kids that isn’t unpleasant without having tens of millions of dollars might help. (In Primates of Park Avenue, the author describes a high-fertility subculture in the UES, and the thing they have in common is extreme wealth — 4+ kids is a status symbol. See also: “the Atherton four”.) You have to be able to afford space. This is well-trod and frankly boring territory.
The former case is maybe what you’re really asking, how do we make more people like me, who are parents, but still occupy these childless libertine subcultures for some reason, primarily by converting the childless libertines into parents, rather than than trying to entice people for whom the “benefits” of being in an urban area dominated by childless libertines does not outweigh the costs to their family (which is the above case). So what “social infrastructure” would make these people want to get married? Maybe they see that if they did get married, they feel they’d have to move, and they don’t want that, thus reducing the problem to the first case. Maybe the right thing to do is ask why are you the outlier — a large-family man living among the zero-fertility city dwellers. What do you find so compelling about occupying the intersection of these two circles by yourself? Why not just go ahead and move to the places where what you want (high-fertility subcultures that aren’t particularly religious) is already the norm and studying the difference? Conversely, why try to save people who do not want to be saved?
* I live in a neighborhood where 3 kids is normal, 4 is not uncommon, and a large fraction have 5 or more. Some in that community are religious to varying degrees, but some aren't. Those that are, aren't all the same religion, and they don't go to the same churches. It's a high-end neighborhood with million-dollar homes in it. The parents are highly educated and high-earning. Sometimes the wives work (usually something like interior design or philanthropy) but often they don't. I’ve spent time in other neighborhoods where parents dominate but the norm is more like 1-2 kids. Most of the people I know from grad school and work are married with 2 kids. One thing most of these people have in common is that they’re in places with single family homes with varying degrees of space, and many of these places are either unaffordable for most people, or in places the city-dweller disdains.
>>5501 Agreed. I think this topic is sometimes over-intellectualized? We want young men to have status and owned space. I'd blame gerontocracy more than feminism, but one could make the case for a bunch of things. And then also becoming a 'patriarch' should be viewed as the culmination of a life well lived for those young men who succeed. This is already a natural instinct (for both men to aspire to and for women in who they choose to marry) and its happening to some extent as you point out.
The book Hannah's Children contradicts this directly, saying the /only/ high-fertility highly-educated subcultures left in America are religious ones. Very curious where your neighborhood is, or more generally, what you think causes it to be high-fertility. It sounds like the big thing is space - so am assuming an affluent exurb of a major metro area, probably in a red state.
It's worth admitting that many young adults simply have no significant exposure to babies and children; their experience is largely stained by loud and unruly children they encounter in restaurants, planes, etc. People remember the noisy infant on a flight; they don't even register the dozen other children behaving nicely.
In my experience in the UK, friends that formed families ended up "matriculating" into a circle of parent friends. This cloistered group would centre on playdates and family outings. Naturally, no bachelors are invited to these things; the remaining singletons stay their course of pub drinks, video games and the like. Not quite "free love polyamorous dating culture sex work", but just as nihilistic.
I'm reminded of the Lancet study where they gave young girls electronic dolls. To the researchers' surprise, these dolls drastically increased the liklihood of pregnancy in these adolescents.
I fully believe that this same concept could be applied to most teens and upimg adults: exposure to children in ordinary, loving environments instils a greater desire for parenthood. Instead, our current time's social structure stymies this desire.
Lifelong monogamous marriage does not make sense in the world where the average age of first marriage for women is 32 and the social expectation is that everybody has 15 years of sterile sexual experimentation interspersed with not so emotionally sterile "committed relationships". Lifelong monogamous marriage is an insane contract that we could only barely make viable in the pre feminism, pre birth control era. We haven't yet come to terms that the arrangement doesn't make sense any more and we have no new socially sanctioned way of family formation. As usual, the devout rationalists are the only ones who seem to consciously understand this, taking American sexual ethics to their full logical conclusion. Everybody else subconsciously understands the implications of our sexual norms.
I am extremely doubtful of visible "heteronormative sexuality" convincing anybody of anything. Do people go to church regularly and then get married? Or do they attend church after they've gotten married with kids?
I don't have any solutions. I think we're just going to have to experiment with new lifestyles, including polygamy, IVF + surrogacy a la Elon Musk or devout religious belief. Of these I am most skeptical of devout religious belief for your friends who are all presumably scientific materialists.
Lifelong monogamous marriage still works perfectly fine. Lots of couples do it successfully. Peter Pan syndrome peaked with millennials. Younger men and women are getting married earlier.
I agree there is some room for cultural experimentation. BAP’s fertility cult idea is an interesting provocation. We have to put the sex back into fertility.. taking a woman and fucking a baby into her is hot. Till death do us part is hot.
It’s not just something for slightly chubby Honda Odyssey people.
>>5634 >>5635 It is true that lifelong monogamous marriage doesn't work these days, and also that it works just fine and it's the only thing that possibly can. People who manage to do it will survive and reproduce. Most will not. Those who don't figure it out have already entered the suicide pod. The millennials and zoomers have mostly entered the suicide pod. This is a condemnation of them, not monogamy.
>I am extremely doubtful of visible "heteronormative sexuality" convincing anybody of anything. The thing people need to be convinced of, most fundamentally, is that they will be safe in the community if they bring their kids. That they will not be groomed by whores and wierdos. The incel bystandards being inspired to have real sex is an aspirational addition, but if that's too much to ask, it would constitute an adequate sexual counter-revolution to even get parents to associate with each other and dominate space socially. They do this in some churches, but now even at the conservative churches they teach that "Christianity is the prototype of bolshevism. The mobilization by the jews of the mass of slaves with the object of undermining society", so this is obviously incompatible with continued existence.
>Of these I am most skeptical of devout religious belief for your friends who are all presumably scientific materialists. I have devout religious belief in scientific materialism, so I have many kids. The childless ones are mostly confused about what they believe, and have various idolatrous commitments to money, status, feelings, conventionality, etc. They lack the courage to be scientific materialists.
> Lifelong monogamous marriage still works perfectly fine. It works for a few people who get lucky with the right partner or shut off their minds to the material realities of the contract. Most people in the circles OP is talking about know deep down that it's a bad deal. This is what I mean by "doesn't make sense". You cannot observe the few who get married and have 4 kids and then say the ones who don't could have simply achieved that if they have the right attitude. The attitude and the outcomes are endogenously determined.
> Peter Pan syndrome peaked with millennials. Younger men and women are getting married earlier.
This is not true. Refer to the image. The trend is not stopping, it might even be accelerating. This is consistent with my hypothesis that lifelong monogamous marriage is being phased out slowly and we are in a period of experimentation trying to figure out what to replace it with.
> I agree there is some room for cultural experimentation. BAP’s fertility cult idea is an interesting provocation. We have to put the sex back into fertility.. taking a woman and fucking a baby into her is hot. Till death do us part is hot.
Putting a baby into a woman is hot. Sadly, most women will not agree to this with *you* unless you spend a couple years with them convincing them of your love. Til death do us part is hot when it's real. Telling your 32 year old girlfriend "til death do us part" while there is nothing, not social norms, not the state, nothing, that enforces it is just fake.
>It’s not just something for slightly chubby Honda Odyssey people.
I hope you don't think I believe marriage is for chubby Honda Odyssey people. This sounds like some kind of midwit millenial meme which I don't believe. I believe real, fruitful marriage as practiced by most civilizations for the last two thousand years is anything but fake and gay. It's a great institution where the highest of masculine ideals meets the highest of feminine ideals. You don't need to convince me that marriage is for "cool people". I am arguing that what we call marriage in 2026 America is completely different from the marriage your ancestors understood and it's also structurally unsound, headed for eradication. If you look at their actions, most people agree with me despite what they may say in public.
>It is true that lifelong monogamous marriage doesn't work these days, and also that it works just fine and it's the only thing that possibly can. People who manage to do it will survive and reproduce. Most will not.
Yes it works for some people under very specific circumstances. I don't know why you believe it's the only thing that can work. Even while marriage and children is still normative, we have some cases of people opting out of this and succeeding. Trump and Elon come to mind. Anonymous sperm donation and single motherhood is also rising. The gays and high earning women pay $200k per child, why not encourage your affluent straight male friends to do this? It is barely any different from elite men of the ancient world having children with concubines and multiple wives.
I believe the suicide pod is actually all the people who insist on lifelong monogamous marriage as the only possible arrangement and that sterility is better than experimenting. These are the confused people.
>The thing people need to be convinced of, most fundamentally, is that they will be safe in the community if they bring their kids. I have no objections to this, it's probably a good thing. Maybe on the margin some people have an extra kid when they have this social backing. My thoughts are directed towards those who are not yet parents. I am skeptical that any single, childless man or woman is considering the social backing they may have when they have kids before they partner up. It's the partnering up that is the bottleneck.
>I have devout religious belief in scientific materialism, so I have many kids. The childless ones are mostly confused about what they believe, and have various idolatrous commitments to money, status, feelings, conventionality, etc. They lack the courage to be scientific materialists.
It appears we agree on this premise, but somehow we ended up at different conclusions. Why, under the scientific materialist standard, is lifelong monogamous marriage the "only thing that can work"?
>>5637 > I have devout religious belief in scientific materialism, so I have many kids.
>>5640 > It appears we agree on this premise, but somehow we ended up at different conclusions. Why, under the scientific materialist standard, ...
I'm the opposite of 5640. I agree with OP's conclusion on kids, but reject "scientific materialism," and 5640 illustrates why. For most (in contrast to OP), "scientific materialism" is taken as license not to rigorously examine and take seriously empirical observation of how humans work collectively over time, especially reasoning about stable equilibria. Instead, it's taken to license a lazy jump from "humans are just material beings" to "there are no strong norms concerning how humans work as the particular kind of being they are."
>>5643 >For most (in contrast to OP), "scientific materialism" is taken as license not to rigorously examine and take seriously empirical observation of how humans work collectively over time, especially reasoning about stable equilibria. Instead, it's taken to license a lazy jump from "humans are just material beings" to "there are no strong norms concerning how humans work as the particular kind of being they are."
Humans have strong inclinations and there are indeed stable equilibria. You've suggested that these two facts alone should let you conclude that lifelong monogamous marriage is the obviously correct family lifestyle. Yet, LMM is dying and in some subcultures, completely dead. So certainly something must have changed that led this formerly stable equilibrium to not be so stable anymore.
