I attended a wedding last weekend, celebrating the nuptials of the fourth of my college friends to get married since we graduated in May of last year. The countercultural nature of young marriage isn’t lost on me or my friends. As vows are increasingly delayed and fertility rates linger well below replacement, there’s less and less certainty around the schoolyard rhyme that “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage.”
Brides like my college friends — 22 or 23 years old — were the norm around 1980, but the average age of marriage has increased over the past four decades for men and women alike. Today, the average American woman gets married at age 28, if she gets married at all. A record 22 percent of 40-year-old women have never been married, and that number is projected to increase. (READ MORE from Mary Frances Myler: Whitmer Signs Michigan’s Green New Dystopia)
With younger generations seeing marriage as a capstone event for their young adulthood, men and women are devoting more time to building a career, attaining financial independence, or just “adulting.” Marriage is increasingly viewed as a cherry on top, not a foundation upon which to build. And with this change in priorities, couples are having children later in life. The average age of first-time mothers was 21 in 1972, increasing to age 26 in 2018 and 27.3 in 2021.
No Babies, No Future
As family formation is delayed — not just in the U.S. but across the world — fertility rates continue to fall. Currently, American fertility hovers around 1.784 births per woman, a marginal increase from 2022, and researchers project a continued decline in population growth over the next 30 years. When fertility dips below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman, society is headed for transformation, either through demographic distortion where the elderly outnumber the young or through mass immigration promoted to fill a shrinking workforce.
While American fertility isn’t ideal, it’s far from the imminent nightmare facing South Korea. Forty years after the country’s fertility fell below replacement, South Korea hit a new low just this year: 0.7 births per woman. Unless things turn around soon, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat explains, the country is heading for “a depopulation exceeding what the Black Death delivered to Europe in the 14th century.”
“The current trend in South Korea is more than just a grim surprise,” Douthat writes. “It’s a warning about what’s possible for us.”
Knowing us, Americans won’t heed the warning, but South Korea’s neighbor to the north certainly is. Under Kim Jong Un, North Korean fertility is approximately 1.6 births per woman — below replacement but not dissimilar from the fertility rates of many western nations.
Recently, the North Korean dictator acknowledged the falling birth rate and encouraged women to have children, saying, “When all mothers clearly understand that it is patriotism to give birth to many children and do so positively, our cause of building a powerful socialist country can be hastened faster.”
Only time will tell whether Kim’s natalist plea will be met with more children. My hunch is that he’ll fail, if only because altruism doesn’t seem to be a major factor in the decision to have kids.
DINKs and Postmodern Narcissism
The environmentalist anti-natalist position is familiar — don’t have kids because you’ll only strain the world’s limited resources, accelerate climate change, and doom your heirs to a dismal life on a dying planet — but it doesn’t seem to be all that popular in real life. If people aren’t having kids, they’re making that choice for far more selfish reasons.
Over the past week, videos of “DINKs,” millennials with “dual income, no kids,” circulated on TikTok and X/Twitter. If young people aren’t eager to start a brood, it might have less to do with climate change and more to do with money and near-total freedom.
“We’re DINKs,” one couple said, “We go to Trader Joe’s and workout classes on the weekends.” They can “go to Florida on a whim,” they boast. And take up golf, and vacation in Europe, and get a full night’s sleep, and buy 8-dollar lattes. (RELATED: DINKs Are Going Viral: That’s Not Good for the Human Race)
There are going to be a lot of “DINKs” in the future in their 50s to 80s that are going to be regretting this strategy.
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— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) December 5, 2023
Another couple shared a similar litany of the perks of childlessness: going out to eat, buying their favorite snacks from Costco, spending money on themselves instead of a kid, not having to arrange childcare.
You’re both genetic dead ends congrats pic.twitter.com/IACLvQzp1v
— ᴡᴇϟ (@offtheraiIs) December 4, 2023
Taking into consideration the pressures of wage stagnation, increased housing prices, and the decreased possibilities of one-income households, it’s understandable that younger generations face significant hurdles in their pursuit of the traditional American dream. But while there’s certainly nothing wrong with enjoying the phases of life and marriage that precede parenthood, the glorification of the DINK lifestyle simply puts mediocre adolescence on a pedestal. Freed from children and the corresponding obligations, these millennials can make money and spend it on, frankly, petty expenses.
Children don’t exist to provide fulfillment to their parents, and it’s wrong to treat family size as conservative or religious bona fides, but a society that prizes unhampered independence over family formation will ultimately collapse in on itself. Though his main goal is the production of more workers for his communist hellscape, Kim Jong Un at least has the rhetoric to express why children are good. It’s not much, but the expression of civic duty is far more compelling than the DINK treatment of children as obstacles at worst, accessories at best.
Amid these utilitarian views of children and fertility, the words of the Catholic wedding Mass stand out. Prior to exchanging vows, the bride and groom stand before the congregation and declare their commitment to “accept children lovingly from God and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church.”
Just as countercultural as young marriage — perhaps even more so — is this radical openness to life as a gift from God. It takes humility, maturity, and the willingness to lay down one’s life for another. Children aren’t guaranteed, and they are not primarily a social duty or a hazard to avoid. They’re a gift. And I, for one, am excited to see my friends and their husbands accept those gifts lovingly from God and bring them up to be lights in a dark world.
Mary Frances Myler is a writer from Northern Michigan now living in Washington, D.C. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022.
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