America is missing children because it’s missing marriages. However, fixing our fertility gap won’t happen by pressuring or humiliating singles. It requires fixing the broken dating cultures that are delaying marriage formation and leaving men and women feeling resentful of each other. The vast majority of young adults want to get married, but more and more find it isn’t working out as they expect. As a result, half of America’s drop in fertility is explained by the drop in marriage formation.
Most young Americans hope to be married at some point, but few have reliable social scripts for dating that could help them make marriage a priority. It’s a bigger problem for liberals than conservatives. When the Pew Research Center surveyed registered voters in June of 2024, only one in five Biden supporters said that “society is better off if people make marriage and having children a priority.” Downplaying marriage is an overcorrection from the time when marriage was the default and it took strong, countercultural movements for women to find a place in the workforce. Today, twenty-somethings need to make a plan for actively pursuing marriage and children, just as they already make deliberate choices to further their career.
The default dating culture does not serve potential parents well. Parents of teens and twenty-somethings need to know that the dating and marriage advice that worked for them is unlikely to work as well for their children. Online dating has surged as the source of relationships, but it has serious drawbacks compared to meeting through friends and offline communities. While connections made through people you already know and like come pre-vetted, online dating means sifting through a carousel of strangers. Connections through existing communities are necessarily limited in scope; apps offer a paradox of choice where men take spammy approaches, knowing their chances of getting a reply are slim. Apps can intensify animosity between the sexes, as men become dispirited and resentful due to constant rejections and women become guarded and angry as they are bombarded by explicit or abusive messages.
As one popular tweet put it, “do married people watch gen z dating and feel like they caught the last chopper out of Nam?” The load-bearing supports for dating and marriage have eroded. Building new ones requires a long-term project of cultural revival. In the meantime, pro-natalists need to be frank about the lack of support and encourage countercultural experimentation and, yes, a little bit of weirdness.
One modern turn toward deliberate pursuit of relationships are the “date me” Google documents that recently spread through the California rationalist community. In the absence of parents, peers, or Sen. Chuck Schumer facilitating introductions, singles wrote up detailed descriptions of themselves, what they sought in a partner, and how they hoped to build a life together in public, “view-only” Google docs, linked on social media. The details and the explicit encouragement make it easier to reach out oneself or introduce a well-suited friend.
Even better, it prompts people to try out low-stakes dating, where you ask someone else out experimentally, to see if you’re a fit, rather than nursing a one-sided crush while you work up the nerve. This is how I snagged my own husband: I suggested he ask me out because I thought well of him, and I fell in love while dating him, not before.
Some of the dating landscape will have changed by the time my own children face it, but I expect our conversation about dating will parallel the one we’ll have about advertising and images of the human body. The airbrushed (or AI generated) images they’ll see on display meaningfully distort reality. If accepted uncritically, they will disrupt my children’s relationship with the goodness of their given bodies. In a similar way, the stories and scripts they will encounter as the default for dating and marriage will serve them badly.
American pro-natalists need to bushwhack a better (and often earlier) path to marriage if we want to help people have the children they already long for. It doesn’t start with shaming, but by commiserating that young people have been handed a map that doesn’t work. They’re frustrated, and they’re right to be. Pro-natalist support should be aimed at helping young singles avoid the disappointment that’s unfolding for the cohort that preceded them. One good way to start is to make marriage-seeking as much an explicit, planned pursuit as college and career.
Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of Arriving at Amen and Building the Benedict Option.
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