There's a Playbook for College. There Should Be One for Marriage.
The costs of putting off marriage and children don't show up for decades — and by the time they do, the window to choose otherwise has often closed.
We all know we are going to die, but when we are young, that doesn’t mean anything to us.
For a long time I said I didn’t want to have kids. What that might mean for me down the road as I got older didn’t really register. It wasn’t a consideration.
I was in my early 30s when my grandfather died. I was sad, but it didn’t cause me to reflect on my own mortality. Then, when I was about 40, my grandmother got sick and was hospitalized. My mother called to ask me to come down and take shifts staying with her. Several family members did likewise, so she had someone staying with her in the hospital 24 hours a day.
When I was with her and looked at her lying in that hospital bed, for the very first time in my life it hit me. When I’m old and lying in that hospital bed, who is going to come stay with me? The answer was, nobody. Nobody would be coming to stay with me. That was a sobering thought.
In my observation, it’s not until people get to be roughly 35 years old that they gain the ability to really understand that they will change in the future, and to emotionally connect to the future story arc of their life.
Younger people know how much they’ve changed in the past - Oh, how much I’ve changed! How much I’ve learned! How much I’ve grown! - but not how much they will change in the future. Nor can they really emotionally relate to the later-in-life consequences of decisions made today.
I don’t think we ever fully outgrow these tendencies. We all suffer from the so-called “end of history illusion” in which we underestimate how much we will change in the future. But I do think there’s a transition around our mid-30s where we gain a sense of new perspective.
This has profound implications around decisions we make about two of the biggest elements of life: getting married and having kids. People make critical decisions about whether or not to pursue them at a time in life when they cannot understand that their desires may well be different in the future, and before they can emotionally connect to the full implications of the decisions they are making.
Beyond that, the positive consequences of forgoing these elements of life - more freedom, more fun - arrive immediately whereas the negative ones don’t show up for potentially decades. This is very unlike decisions around college or career, where real-world feedback arrives quickly if you make a mistake.
Add it up and it’s a recipe for many people to only have the magnitude of what they have done fully hit them at a time at which there’s only a limited runway to change course - or even when it’s too late.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal helps illustrate this. It’s a profile of Amy Kant (gift link), a non-profit fundraiser and artist in Massachusetts. She’s a single, childless, 65-year-old woman dealing with the health challenge of an extended recovery from heart surgery. The piece tells the story of how she arrived there.
Kant “didn’t set out with a master plan.” Unmarried, she “long cherished the freedom that came with being single.” In her 20s and 30s, her friends with kids envied her life. She was able to choose work that gave her time for her art rather than focus on making money. Still, she ended up with an MBA, a successful fundraising career, and significant retirement savings.
By her 40s she was starting to feel more strongly the desire for children, and even considered adoption. By her 50s, she regretted she hadn’t actually done it. Now, facing health issues, she’s forced to juggle her friend network to call on for help. The Journal says, “A longtime college friend serves as her healthcare proxy, and Kant maintains a spreadsheet of friends to coordinate visits when she’s ill. Still, she understands the boundaries of a chosen family. Her friends have their own households to manage; some have already died.” She’s also worried about whether the amount she saved will really be enough, and struggling with what to do in making a will.
A financial person might talk about discount rates, and say that the value of 20 years of fun times a single, childless person has will outweigh the net present value of 30-40 years or more of regrets and challenges after that. But I wonder if Amy Kant’s younger self had known then what she knows now, if she might have been more intentional about making a plan to get married and have kids.
As the Journal notes, her story is far from unique. There are 12.5 million people aging alone, and that number is only expected to grow. This includes many men, who might have a much more challenging time of it than Kant, since they may well not have the close friends that she has been able to call on.
In the past, getting married, and then having kids, tended to “just happen” naturally, without anyone having to have a “master plan.” It was part of the culture and rhythms of life, backed up by social pressures.
This is no longer the case. Family formation and fertility rates are in decline. There’s growing polarization between the sexes. People have soured on dating apps, which have become the leading way people meet. Terms like “heteropessimism” have emerged. Permanent singleness or childlessness is now socially normalized. Many people have sworn off marriage or having kids. One of the earliest subcultures of the manosphere was “Men Going Their Own Way,” those young men who explicitly argued against marriage as a bad deal. Others plan to defer marriage until after getting established in a career and gaining some enjoyment of life as a young single, the so-called “capstone” model of marriage. Parents may be as likely to advise against getting married too young as to wonder where the grandkids are. The evangelical church inveighs against the “idolatry of the family.”
The degree of difficulty dial on life has been turned up for younger generations. Kids growing up today can no longer expect the major elements of life like college, a career, marriage, or home ownership to arrive organically. They require much more focus, intentionality, and effort to obtain.
We become cognizant of this in some areas, like college. Parents and children today understand that good grades and high test scores are no longer enough. They know how to build a compelling résumé, what to put in their application essay, which schools they can realistically hope to get in. We provide young people with a script and guidance to give them the best chance of success here.
But we have not done this for other areas, notably finding someone to marry and have kids with. There’s still an expectation that young people will simply meet someone and fall in love. People rely on apps as their dating strategy. And there’s an implicit belief that there’s plenty of runway to get married and have kids. If anything, the capstone marriage model is the norm for the college-educated. The promise of fertility treatments seems to suggest to people that even the biological clock is not what it used to be.
Young people are thus left alone to fend for themselves in a world where dating is difficult, there’s growing polarization and conflict between the sexes - at a time when they are ill-equipped to understand the whole life implications of what they are doing. No surprise that coupling is in decline and fertility is falling.
We need to provide young people with the same sort of structure for finding a spouse that we’ve given them for getting into college. And they need to understand the degree of effort and intentionality required to get married.
One reason we have been hesitant to do this is that the traditional pressures to get married seemed overly restrictive and confining. Social pressure to get married makes those who are not, whether by choice or bad luck, feel bad. Making fun of “old maids” can be cruel. Some people legitimately aren’t cut out for marriage, or simply don’t want to be married (or have children). In a free country, that’s a choice we want people to be able to make. People in their 20s don’t like getting pressure from parents to get married and start making babies.
We aren’t going back to the old model of social pressures to channel people into conformity with a single life script. None of us really wants to go back to that world. Many people will be perfectly happy being single or childless for life. These aren’t for everyone.
But college isn’t for everyone either. Yet we educate our high schoolers on the economic value it can bring, the prestige of various schools, the likely career prospects of different majors, the realistic schools one could attend and how to get into them. We could do something similar for marriage. In fact, we could tack some of that onto the college advice. We should let young people know that college is a once in a lifetime opportunity to meet large numbers of high quality singles who are potential future spouses, for example. And we should also stop mindlessly promoting the capstone model for marriage.
Marriage, if not for everyone, is probably for more people than the average twentysomething American might believe. We don’t want a 38 or 43-year-old person to one day suddenly realize where the road they are on leads and say, “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
We can’t abandon them to make profoundly consequential decisions in partial ignorance. We must equip young people with the tools and knowledge they need to make good decisions that are made with the full awareness of what they are doing.
Aaron, thank you for continuing to beat this drum. The hospital bed argument is worth making, and I'm glad someone is making it to audiences who need to hear it.
I want to add something that I think sits underneath your argument, something I couldn't have articulated in my 20s but that decades of marriage and fatherhood have made undeniable to me.
Marriage and children don't just provide for your future -- they form you. They pull you permanently out of the center of your own story and install obligations you can't set aside when they become inconvenient. There are days when you don't feel loving toward your spouse or your children, but you show up anyway, because they need you and you made a commitment. That gap between feeling and action, navigated over and over across years and decades, is where the formation actually happens — and it's extraordinarily hard to replicate voluntarily. You can choose to be generous. You cannot choose your way out of your child needing you at 3am when you're exhausted.
I believe that a society composed of people who have been through that crucible has different properties than one composed primarily of people whose primary obligation is to themselves. Not better people necessarily — but people who have learned to love someone they didn't choose and can't unlove. People with skin in the future because their children will live in it.
The hospital bed is a real consequence. But I think a critical parallel argument is what marriage and children do to us along the way, and what that does to the world we share.
Re: We all know we are going to die, but when we are young, that doesn’t mean anything to us.
Unless death comes entirely too close. My mother died of cancer when I was nine. My father of COPD when I was in college. And when I was still quite young I had an awfully close call myself. I sometimes say I have a medieval mindset in one respect: that death was not stranger to me even at a young age.