Forecasts that one in three young adults in the U.S. today
will never marry signify a closing of the “American heart,” a leading marriage researcher said Saturday.
“Love and marriage have fallen on harder times of late,” observed Brad Wilcox, a sociologist who directs the
National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, during a panel discussion titled “Why Have Children?” at
New York Encounter, an annual conference organized by members of the Catholic movement Communion and Liberation.
Wilcox, author of the 2024 book,
Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, was joined in the discussion by Nicholas Eberstadt, chair of political economy at the American Enterprise Institute, and Margarite Mooney, associate professor of congregational studies at Princeton Theological Seminary.
According to Wilcox, the
drop in the U.S. fertility rate to well below replacement level is symptomatic of an American culture predicated on “giving people more freedom to live their best lives, often as single people.”
Eberstadt, who researches and writes extensively on demographics and economic development, said that “it’s not impossible when the returns come in for 2024 that the entire planet, on average, will be below replacement fertility.”
Noting a “striking” correlation between falling fertility rates and the proliferation of smartphones, Eberstadt said he is concerned that most people aware of the downward trajectory of fertility “don’t really seem to understand yet what this is going to mean for their society.”
“They certainly haven’t thought about either adapting to this or changing it,” he added.
Yet as young people face such challenges as rising economic inequality and an inability to detach themselves from social media, Wilcox asserted, marriage and family “matter more than ever,” and not just for the sake of children, but for adults, as well.
Drawing from personal experience
In an interview after the panel, Wilcox told CNA that he and his wife, who were married at 24, had hoped for a large Catholic family but struggled with fertility. After four years of marriage, they went on to adopt five children. Then, by surprise, they became pregnant with twins before going on to have two more children.
While Wilcox acknowledged that the growth of his family was “a big adjustment,” and that there have been marked challenges in raising adoptive and biological children, he ultimately described his experience of fatherhood as “magical.”
“I think, really realizing that parenthood just opens up new experiences and new vistas that are before you,” Wilcox reflected. “You really don‘t see the fullness of life, I think, for many of us, until you’ve had children and you're raising them and seeing the world through their eyes as well.”
“The fundamental point I would make,” he told CNA, “is to think about your dating strategy as intentionally as you do about your education and work.”
Whether at work, church, or somewhere else, he observed, it is ideal to meet and ask people out on dates in the context of a larger social network, “where you’re all on the same team,” and where “you can get a formal thumbs up or thumbs down from friends who know the people.”
The sociologist said he generally disapproves of dating apps because they “can give people an unrealistic expectation about the person that they could meet or should meet.” In his view, when “people are just dating and hanging out with people in a real-world context, it's easier to find a good symmetrical fit.”
Ultimately, he believes, since people are “much more distanced from a marriage-friendly culture” today,” those who do aspire to marriage and family life have to be more intentional about planning to meet people and go on dates.
God has a ‘beautiful plan’
In an interview with CNA, Mooney shared her own experience as a woman who wanted to have children but did not get married until her late forties, encouraging people to remain open to marriage even at an older age.
“Because I came from a family with a lot of children, I always knew that children are a blessing and a joy and a lot of work,” she said. “And as a single person, I just sought out friends like Brad Wilcox, who had large families.” Mooney and Wilcox attended graduate school at Princeton together.
“Maybe I was used to the chaos, and I found it comforting to be with a big family at dinner and crafts happening, and somebody just sits on your lap that you haven't seen in a while,” she said.
“For me,” Mooney told CNA, “when my friends were getting married, and I wasn‘t, I had to consciously fight any sense of jealousy or even that God was leaving me behind and realize that there’s a bit of selfishness in those hurt feelings and that I needed to honor the desire to build relationships with children, but they weren't going to be my biological children.”
Reflecting on her experience, Mooney said she looked to priests and religious men and women who renounced biological children, but maintained their maternal and paternal instincts in their work with children and youths.
“Rather than thinking about the child as fulfilling me,” she reflected, “it was more God fulfilling me through finding a way to express that desire."
Ultimately, she said, marriage and family are not guaranteed. “But I do want women to know that that doesn’t mean God doesn’t have a beautiful plan for your life,” Mooney said.
“Be open,” she advised, “to what joy might come into your life if you reach the age or the situation where you‘re single or single without children or married without children, and it wasn’t what you planned.”
“When you’re older, it’s harder to risk yourself, but you can,” she added.
