The Complicated Question Of What "Fulfills" Us
If you spend some time chronically online in the esoteric corners of the Interwebs, you may have seen Brad Wilcox. He is a professor dude at University of Virginia, where he runs some center for marriage and family. Now he has a book, with the basic premise that people should get married because it’s more indicative of a stable society, and he’s making the rounds promoting it and fighting with anti-marriage people and chatting with Savannah Guthrie and all the stuff you do when you have a book that a few people might care to read. He covers a lot of aspects of marriage and relationships, including various cross-sections of research.
Well, the image associated with this post is from Pew Research and not from Wilcox, although I believe Wilcox has discussed it in some of his media hits. The basic idea is that young people think the path to life fulfillment is a job, not marriage or kids. Moral Panic Time! There’s a few things that need to be unpacked here, though.
Achievement vs. Fulfillment
While these might sound like synonyms to most people , they are actually different things, and I think a lot of these studies confuse the two and thus butcher the results. The study from Pew, above, seems to actually be asking about “achievement” in the conventional sense. Marriage is probably less of an achievement to young people these days, seeing as how the divorce rate has hovered near 51% for generations now. They saw their parents get divorced, so why would they view that as an “achievement?” Meanwhile, everyone and their mother is complaining about how broke they are and how $300,000/annum is the new $100,000, so of course people are gonna mention jobs and money, because they think they’re talking about “achievement.” If you defined the terms of the survey and said “fulfillment” was akin to “contentment” or some such, more people would probably say friends, kids, marriage, etc. Some of this is semantic.
Yes, Many Of Us Feel Broke
This especially comes up a ton during national election years , so it’s in people’s heads — and thus they’re gonna answer related to money and jobs.
Marriage Is Not Dying, But It’s Spasm’ing
Ironically at the intersection point of many of these topics , a big argument in favor of modern marriage is that being single feels financially impossible. Not the sexiest or best reason to get married, no, but still a reason.
Marriage is not dying and I still think most people will do that over staying single long-term. But marriage is at a weird intersection around various trend lines: third-wave feminism, the decline of men as educational and motivated creatures, porn, video games, young women become libs as young boys become MAGA, finances, later marriages impacting fertility (“geriatric pregnancies”), the horrors of online dating, ICK lists, and more.
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We might be doing a full reversal back into “marriage is an economic construct,” which we had for centuries before “marriage is romance, and your partner shall provide you everything you need.” That last part didn’t quite work out for everyone, so now we may be back to the original idea of combining family assets. Why else are we discussing “trad-wives” so much of late?
The Kids Thing Is Tricky
No one will say this part out loud, but most kids are inherently a miracle . I sound like a pro-life billboard in Kansas, so let me explain. What I mean is, for you to exist, basically your parents had to meet and want to copulate, but also their parents had to meet, and their parents, and their parents, and then even within your parents having sex, it had to be timed properly and the sperm count had to be right and the motility had to be right and the egg had to drop right and the sperm had to meet the egg and then you had to be carried to term. All of this shit is essentially, again, a miracle . It’s not as easy as they tell you in high school sex Ed.
Well, the miracle gets narrower as:
Also, it cannot be ignored that every single society in human history that got wealthier also started having less kids. Them’s facts, yo! So the kids thing will ebb and flow. You will always have two people come together who want 10 kids, but you will increasingly see people come together who want no kids, or who want 1–2 kids but can’t get there. The whole rise of the DINKs thing has become a culture war issue, too. I have no idea why.
As such, I could see the percentages be skewed on thinking “kids” mean “achievement.” In reality, most people essentially only have kids to “achieve” something — a legacy, the acceptance of their parents, 1K Instagram likes, etc. — but then they hide behind the Bible or “wanting to extend the love of their family” or something. Most people do shit they want to do, for themselves. Right now, maybe kids isn’t A-1 for everyone.
“Close Friends”
What’s a close friend, man? I’m glad this at least came in №2.
What’s your take on these results?