In public policy debates, it’s often assumed that women freeze their eggs in order to put off childbearing during the prime time of their careers. According to new research, however, more and more educated and successful women are choosing to freeze their eggs because they cannot find a man they want to marry. Many men are “missing” from higher education, work, and church – and are just not marriageable.

As a single woman, I am interested in the causes of this “missing men” phenomenon. While I think the Church and society should focus on forming men to be more marriageable, I am also concerned for the Catholic women who are single and want to get married. What should Catholic women do in this situation?

It is easy to become disheartened – even to despair – about the apparent lack of marriageable men in our culture. I’ve met many beautiful and intelligent single women who are worried they will never get married or they will get married too late to have children. They are willing to leave their careers behind in order to be a wife and mother, yet they simply cannot find the right man.

This is something new to our generation. It never occurred to my mother and her friends that they would never find a spouse. Most of them were happily married by their mid-twenties.

I won’t argue here about why egg freezing is immoral (that’s for another article). I’ve pondered, however, what Catholic single women should do in this culture of “missing men.” Here are some alternatives that I have found to be helpful in my own singlehood.

“Missing Men” and the Ticking Biological Clock

[O]ur present culture, which makes war on marriage and the family, is also making war on genuine manhood. In spite of its own braggadocio, modern culture doesn’t really make war on things such as “sexism” and the abuse of women and children because it encourages the machismo that turns men into abusers while simultaneously discouraging the familial and paternal responsibility that turns men into good husbands and fathers. Such a culture does not only make men miserable, it makes women and children miserable too—and all in the name of the pursuit of freedom and happiness! It’s all so pathetically funny. A tragedy that is also a divine comedy because it shows that virtue is the only way of getting to the happy ending.

Beyond Machismo to Manhood: The Challenge of Real Masculinity

Culture of death. Ozymandias

If the loosening of sexual mores was a good thing, why do men and women, outside of their own marriages, spend so little time expressing gratitude or admiration for the opposite sex? Let’s suppose that you have two tribes, the Comanche and the Shoshone, and that before some particularly bloody battle, the Comanche used to say good things about the Shoshone, and the Shoshone used to say good things about the Comanche; and that they generally did so, though they did not always get along. Wouldn’t you conclude that the battle had poisoned their relations? Suppose the feminist insists that relations between men and women have never been better, because before she came into the world to enlighten us, all they did was quarrel and abuse whatever power the one had over the other. That’s absurd, but grant her the jaundiced view not only of history but of every single human culture that has ever existed and that exists even now, besides that of the feminist-influenced west. Fine; now we ask the feminist the obvious question. “If what you say is true, why don’t you spend most of your time expressing gratitude or admiration for men—for their accomplishments, their strengths, and their gifts to women? Why are you not in a tizzy of wonder? If your movement has sweetened everything, why are you so sour?” She is a walking and talking self-refutation.

Normal people want young people to get married, have children, and stay married. They may differ on what to do in the case of extremely difficult marriages, but at base they agree that marriage is a very good thing, and should neither be rare nor fragile nor subject to needless threats from without. Now, it is clear that in the aftermath of the sexual revolution marriage is in steep decline. Normal people would view that as at least worrisome and at worst calamitous. The question to ask, when the town sewer has backed up and water of dubious color is spurting out through everybody’s kitchen sink, is not, “How should we label our outhouses?” Anybody who would distract you from the main question, the pressing trouble, is either a fool or a knave. The question is, “How do we repair the town sewer?”

The question for us is, “What customs, and the laws that corroborate and promote them, give young men and women the best chance of getting married, bearing children within wedlock, staying married, and raising their children in a clean and sane household?” If, when the water is foul, somebody at your ear persists in asking about what to do with old paint or whether mixed-use zoning is a good thing, you will look at him as if he had lost his senses. “Now is not the time for that!” you would say. If he were at your ear saying that the new kind of water was really pretty good, and that only prejudice kept you from liking it, you would be sure that he had lost his senses, you would order him off the premises, and you would return to your task at hand.

Time for frank talk about the sewage, filth of the sexual revolution

The “sexual revolution” is part of the culture of death.

Though young people take a variety of paths into adulthood—arranging school, work, and family in a dizzying array of combinations—one path stood out as most likely to be linked to financial success for young adults. Brookings scholars Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill have identified the “success sequence,” through which young adults who follow three steps—getting at least a high school degree, then working full-time, and then marrying before having any children, in that order—are very unlikely to become poor. In fact, 97 percent of millennials who have followed the success sequence are not in poverty by the time they reach the ages of 28 to 34.

Sequence-following millennials are also markedly more likely to flourish financially than their peers taking different paths; 89 percent of 28-to-34 year olds who have followed the sequence stand at the middle or upper end of the income distribution, compared with just 59 percent of Millennials who missed one or two steps in the sequence. The formula even works for young adults who have faced heavier odds, such as millennials who grew up poor, or black millennials; despite questions regarding socioeconomic privilege, our research suggests that the success sequence is associated with better outcomes for everyone. For instance, only 9 percent of black millennials who have followed the three steps of the sequence, or who are on track with the sequence (which means they have at least a high school degree and worked full-time in their twenties, but have not yet married or had children) are poor, compared with a 37 percent rate of poverty for blacks who have skipped one or two steps. Likewise, only 9 percent of young men and women from lower-income families who follow the sequence are poor in their late twenties and early thirties; by comparison, 31 percent of their peers from low-income families who missed one or two steps are now poor.

Even more significantly, it appears that marriage in itself reduces millennials’ chances of being poor. Why? Young men and (especially) women who put “marriage before the baby carriage” get access to the financial benefits of a partnership—income pooling, economies of scale, support from kinship networks—with fewer of the risks of an unmarried partnership, including breakups. By contrast, millennials who have a baby outside of marriage—even in a cohabiting union—are likelier to end up as single parents or paying child support, both of which increase the odds of poverty. One study found that cohabiting parents were three times more likely to break up than were married parents by the time their first child turned five: 39 percent of cohabiting parents broke up, versus 13 percent of married parents in the first five years of their child’s life. The stability associated with marriage, then, tends to give millennials and their children much more financial security.

. . .

If young adults make bad choices about education, work, and family, all the jobs and policies in the world will not give them an equal shot at realizing the American Dream as their peers who follow the sequence to success.

Marriage Matters

While I appreciate the alleged sentiment behind this list—namely, that people shouldn’t rush into making a big decision like marriage—it is precisely this sort of navel-gazing that has contributed to the less-than-favorable views on marriage my generation has embraced.

Notice that nearly everything in this list is inwardly focused. It’s all about me. My potentially unfulfilled desires. My potentially missed experiences. The horror of possibly having some minor regrets about how I spent my time in my teens and twenties. The implication here is that the worst mistake someone can make is to prematurely devote their lives to the betterment of someone else’s or to the raising of a family.

I’m fully supportive of any wise counsel that prompts young people to think through what they want out of life and who they want to spend that life with. But the constant refrain of “don’t marry until you are 100% satisfied with your job, and had the maximum number of travel and sexual experiences” has so far had an unhealthy impact on society and culture.

Marriage is about two becoming one. It is about voluntary sacrifice. It is about loving your neighbor as yourself. No one likes to hear or think about this anymore, but it is undeniably true. And where it is not true, you tend to see broken marriages, families, and dreams.

Don’t Listen to People Who Say You Should Wait Until You’re 30 To Get Married

No creature, no matter how wonderful or beautiful, can fulfill our longing for the original source of wonder and beauty: God. Our desire for such goods are infinite, and creatures in their meager finitude fail tragically to deliver. Still, most of us want to be proven wrong, even if only unconsciously. And the result: we slog blindingly down a path of rampant, romantic idolatry.

Of course, de Botton speaks of marriage as a social institution, not as a sacrament instituted by God. While no marriage will be perfect — and our spouses will disappoint us in ways we lament — the Christian view of marriage does offer a mystical and beautiful dimension that the article fails to touch on. We learn to love through this sacramental “institution,” a love that is responsible for one of life’s greatest gifts: the creation of life. I think de Botton’s article treads closely along the banks of despair, while the Christian understanding of marriage — fallen human beings notwithstanding — is more hopeful.

No one is called to seek perfection in their potential spouse, but there may be a “right person” (or group of potential “right people”) whom God invites us to marry for his purposes. Again, this person is not a flawless mate, but a companion with whom to experience joy, sorrow, love and disappointment while working toward heaven. Not only is this a more hopeful understanding of marriage, but also it’s — rather ironically — a more romantic one. Marriage is much more than a medium for solidifying an emotional high or having our egotistical needs met; rather, it’s something that allows us to love like God does.

Why Marrying the “Wrong Person” Is Reason for Hope

The differences in life prospects between children brought up in married-parent households vs. those raised in the new ordinary chaos of American family life are pronounced, correlating with everything from income to felony convictions. In this age of “Do It For the Children” social posturing, the one thing we won’t do for the children is be decent parents, giving them the benefits of a stable, safe, nurturing home. A hashtag campaign is no substitute for that.

Of all the stupid and destructive products of 1960s-style liberation politics, the effective abolition of marriage (and hence of family, properly understood) will, in the end, turn out to be the worst. And spare me your banal self-justifications: “I divorced my child’s mother, but I’m a good father!” “I was never married to my child’s father, but I’m a good mother.” I’m sure you think you are.

You aren’t.

Statistically speaking, your domestic situation is about as healthy for your children as would be your picking up a drug habit. (Yes, yes, I’m sure that you are the special-snowflake exception to the rule. One of these days, a three-legged horse might win the Kentucky Derby, too.) The numbers are the numbers.

Strange thing: Wildly different philosophical and religious orientations all point to the same central fact of human life. In Genesis, it’s “male and female he created them.” In Plato, we spend our lives seeking the lost half of ourselves from which we were separated by the gods. In good ol’ Darwinian terms, the getting of healthy offspring is the very purpose of life itself. We parted ways with the chimps a few eons ago, and somewhere along the way we developed habits and institutions that helped us to connect our libidos with one of our most useful and uniquely human traits: the ability to engage in long-term planning, even beyond our own lives.

And then, around 1964, we said: “To Hell with it, let’s just be chimps.”

And here we are.

. . .

Social constructs? That’s a glib way of refusing to talk about reality. And the reality is that men and women are happier when they and their opposite numbers are given the opportunity to be what they are. You can do your damnedest to create an androgynous society, but little boys are still going to reach for the toy gun before they reach for Barbie.

Against Valentine’s Day

Religious affiliation is less important than regular religious attendance when it comes to predicting divorce.

. . .

Shared prayer is even more strongly associated with higher relationship quality, such that men and women who report praying together frequently (almost once a week or more often) are 17 percentage points more likely to say they are very happy together. Joint prayer is likely to engender a heightened sense of emotional intimacy, communication and reflection about relationship priorities and concerns, and a sense of divine involvement in one’s relationship. However it works, shared prayer is a stronger predictor of relationship quality than other religious factors in our statistical models.

Better Together: Religious Attendance, Gender, and Relationship Quality

Ozymandias

Fr. Robert Barron on Marriage and Relationships

Fr. Barron is the Fulton Sheen of our time!

Marriage & Incompatibility – Archbishop Fulton Sheen

…maybe it’s time for counseling.

Also see “‘Casablanca’: Love, Truth, and That Cosmic ‘Hill of Beans’”

And for you singles in your 30’s, see “Happy Valentine’s Day! Now Cut Your Losses.”

One of the less-recognized core purposes of marriage is to structure the sexual behavior of the unmarried. In the past it may have been easier to see this structuring, since the basic message was, “Don’t do it until you’re married.”

But even today the prospect of marriage shapes young adults’ sexual behavior—it’s just that the shape has been turned inside-out. Instead of waiting until marriage, you’re supposed to try a few different sexual partners. You prepare for marriage not through chastity but through sexual variety.
. . .
Regnerus and Uecker draw out the beliefs about the self which shape this ethical norm: for example, the belief that you should only marry when you’re done with “life,” done with change and personal growth.

The End of Premarital Sex

Premarital Sex in America:How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying – Google Books

This post is about identity. How to see yourself. How to figure out if you can remake yourself. How to make a life that is true to yourself. And, put more bluntly, how to get the best deal in a wife given who you are.

For men, there are three choices: breadwinner, and stay-at-home dad, and shared responsibilities.

How to pick a wife if you want to have kids
Oh, and don’t kill your children in the womb.

You cannot pick a husband to have kids with until you know if you want to work full-time while you are raising them. Some women will say they know for sure that they do want to work full-time. Most women will say that they don’t know for sure. But there are actually only two choices: be a breadwinner or marry a breadwinner. Then, within those two choices, there are a few strategies you could use.

Scenario 1: Be a Breadwinner
. . .
Scenario 2: Be Home with Your Kids
. . .
Scenario 3: Denial. Don’t do this.

How to pick a husband if you want to have kids

Hypergamy. Reality. Deal.

Having children is nothing like having a dog or cat. A child is not an accessory.

“Look before you leap.”
“Get yourself on the right track.”
“Finding a good man is like finding a needle in a haystack.”

“We’re looking for you, gonna find you”