The growing disdain for marriage, and with it, parenthood, bodes badly for the future

I

was nearly 30 when my first son was born. And that was 45 years ago last week. But I can still remember the joy of coming to pick him up from his crib when he was a few months old. Babies that age often enter into a spasmodic movement, lifting their knees to their chests repeatedly, as if they are going to burst from happiness, when they see a parent for the first time that day. And that joy is fully reciprocated.

My excitement over Micha’s early morning greetings were often tinged by a touch of sadness as well, as I thought of the women with whom I had been friendly in college, few of whom were yet married and even fewer of whom were mothers. I felt that they had, in many cases, been sold a bill of goods about the necessity of prioritizing career over children, and feared that many of them would one day be filled with regret.

What was only anecdotal then has hardened into data today. According to the Survey Center on American Life, single American women are far more likely than their male counterparts to say they aren’t dating because they have “more important priorities.” Thirty-eight percent of women under 40 think that marriage is outdated versus 29 percent of men, and that disparity is tracked at earlier ages as well, with younger women more likely than younger men to say that they never intend to marry. By 2030, 45 percent of American women between 25 and 44 will be living alone.

In a brilliant article in The Free Press, “It Used to be ‘Get Married.’ Now It’s ‘Stay Single’” Freya India explains, “Fundamental to liberalism is a suspicion of restraint, which inevitably becomes suspicion of human relationships. It promises liberation from every last tie until we are free of everything, including each other.”

As a consequence, “the dominant pressure in liberal culture is to delay, to detach, to stay permanently available. We are permitted only one loyalty, and that’s to ourselves.”

Even the parents are discouraging marriage. If a young woman tells her parents that a relationship is serious, her parents will fret that she is “closing down options.” She will be made to feel that she has betrayed the ideal of “endless possibility” and “consigned herself to something, surrendered somehow.” She will feel compelled to reassure her parents, “I won’t lose myself; no, I won’t fall behind with my work; yes, I have escape plans and exit strategies.”

That is the vibe of the entire society: “The pressure today is to avoid anything that might stick, to run through life without getting snagged on any responsibilities, without getting tethered to someone else too early. It’s as if one must plead for permission to take responsibility.”

“The charm and insolence of youth,” Ortega y Gasset wrote more than 100 years ago, “is that it is everything in potentiality, nothing in actuality.” The youth stand before a series of doors, afraid to go through one because it will foreclose others. Modern society has turned what was once a stage to go through into an ideal. “The position we idolize is one of being permanently suspended, in time,” writes India.

A GREAT DEAL of contemporary culture is devoted to reinforcing these attitudes, as Kat Rosenfeld details in a follow-up piece to India’s at the Free Press. Marriage comedies have been replaced by divorce memoirs, in which divorce is an act of heroic self-assertion. The New York Times publishes pieces on the burdens of taking care of a man, as if “they were dissatisfactory pets, not worth the price of their care and feeding.”

During Covid, a young woman named Daisey posted on Twitter how much she was enjoying the opportunity to have coffee in the garden with her husband. She garnered responses worthy of someone who had committed a capital offense. A woman who describes choosing to overlook her husband’s habit of leaving his socks on the floor, is accused of being “a slave to the patriarchy.” And a man who praises his wife’s baking is accused of being a lazy manchild who has never washed a dish. Those who turn to the internet in search of advice on negotiating a marital conflict are most likely to be told that it is not worth the effort.

In sum, the message is: “The universal and eternal human yearning for love” makes one into a loser.

The revolution of the 1960s that promised to deliver a hitherto undreamed of state of human liberation has only turned men and women into enemy camps, deeply suspicious of one another, and with little desire to spend time in one another’s company, much less marry. With women outnumbering men by a 3:2 ratio in higher education and many of the higher paying professions, there is an increasing number of men who are simply not viewed as marriage material at all. And those who are too often view their “market value” as a permission slip to treat women in a cavalier fashion, thereby further souring relations between men and women.

THE GROWING DISDAIN for marriage, and with it, parenthood, bodes badly for the future. Every single OECD country today, with the single exception of Israel, has below replacement fertility levels. That means fewer and fewer young workers to support the burden of an expanding elderly population. Younger workers will inevitably come to view themselves as suckers.

As fewer and fewer marry, and those who do marry produce fewer children, there is an ever-smaller cohort of citizens invested in the future and building a better world for their progeny to inherit. Such a society will inevitably lack dynamism, and is likely to pursue a foreign policy that is both isolationist and appeasement oriented. If the timeline of one’s concerns extends no further than one’s own lifetime, then it makes sense to grant adversaries what they want, as long as the consequences will not hit hard until after one has shuffled off this mortal coil.

THE EMERGENT attitudes and practice with respect to marriage could not be further from those of the Torah community. Whenever Orthodox Jews gather to discuss communal challenges, the “shidduch crisis” or “older singles” are at the top of the list. The failure to find a spouse is universally regarded as a tragedy.

Attitudes toward marriage would rank at the very top of any list of differences between Orthodox and secular societies based on Rav Noach Weinberg’s adage, “In an insane world, we are the least insane.” Taken to their extreme, the growing negative attitude toward marriage and family formation in the secular world would end in the extinction of the human race.

The pressure on secular young women today, writes India, is not to marry, but rather to “self-actualize alone. Pressure to become whole, healed, enlightened. Pressure to get comfortable alone, to learn to be happy alone. Pressure to love ourselves, pressure to solve ourselves. Pressure to become the ‘right version’ of ourselves.” And with that goes “pressure to leave people behind, pressure to take them for granted.”

From a Torah point of view, self-actualization alone is an oxymoron. One cannot self-actualize in isolation apart from a community, and, ideally, apart from a life partner. From the very beginning of creation, Hashem recognized that “it is not good for man to be alone.” Neither man nor woman can reach their full potential by themselves.

Rav Moshe Shapira ztz”l frequently spoke of Hashem’s world as one of interconnectedness. The great sin of the people of Sodom was their assertion of a radical independence of each person from his fellows. Failure to reach out to help others, not its opposite, is a breach of Hashem’s plan for the world. As Rav Itzele of Volozhin writes in the name of his father, in his introduction to Nefesh Hachaim, we come into this world to help others.

Does building and sustaining relationships take work? Of course it does. That is why in Eretz Yisrael today, it is almost de rigueur for avreichim, including the top learners, to sign up for courses in marriage and parenting from respected educators.

In a home in which the husband is still in full-time learning, husbands and wives do not compete over who is earning a bigger salary. Each has his or her realm in the shared goal of building a home based on Torah. And if that requires flexibility in taking on tasks, so be it. In neighborhoods with large numbers of avreichim, it is commonplace for husbands to bring their children to school, doing much of the shopping, and taking the kids to the park on a short Erev Shabbos. And few would be embarrassed to be caught making the cholent either.

India notes that some of the hesitancy about marriage today comes from those who are children of divorce. Their parents may tell them, or they may conclude, that their parents married too young, committed too early. But, she observes wisely, the problem may not have been too early commitment, but from insufficient commitment.

Our young people, however, know, in theory and hopefully in practice as well, that according to the effort is the reward. And for those of us now past the primary pressures of childrearing, what greater reward can there be than to have built a family together and to have a spouse with whom to share the nachas.

Kat Rosenfeld gets it. In her essay (“Giving Thanks to Your Husband”), she writes of cultivating gratitude “for love when we find it . . . in [sitting] with your husband in the garden. . .  A place where you learn that there is deep joy to be found in connection. In interdependence. In planting something with strong, deep roots and watching it grow – until, one day, you sit together beneath the protection of its branches, and look around, and marvel.”

Tonight, b’ezras Hashem, I’ll be attending the first wedding of the next generation of Rosenblums. The kallah’s grandparents, my much younger brother and sister-in-law, were married as undergraduates at Yale, and each of their children married young, and in most cases, their first shidduch. Life hasn’t been without challenges for them, first and foremost, my brother’s stroke. But when you witness the glow when they are surrounded by their large family of children and grandchildren, one has no doubt about the wisdom of their youthful choices.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1089. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)