The Absolute State Of Dating Today - Louise Perry (4K)

There's a Wall Street Journal column about marriage as a mirror of human nature that says 40% of young adults say marriage has outlived its usefulness.

Hmm.

What do you think is going on?

I mean, I'm not surprised, 'cause these are young adults who've, like... I think, so I think in London now, and this would be true in lots of parts of the West, um, about half of kids will reach the age of 15 not living with their biological father. Half. So I guess these young people just look around and they're like, "Well, it's, like, evident to me that marriage isn't working." So-

Mary Eberstadt's got this idea about, um, motherhood and family life as a mimetic desire.

Hmm.

That the dearth of mothers and families causes fewer people to see them, which causes fewer people to want them, which causes fewer people to, to, to, to, to, to all the way down.

I think that's definitely true. And you can see that in data actually with, um, like if your sister or your close friend has a baby, you're more likely to have a baby in the year or two following, and vice versa. So if, if the people around you are not having children, you're less likely to have children yourself. I think, and that's, it, I think that's so interesting because there's always been this assumption by demographers up until birth rates started really crashing in recent decades, that people would just spontaneously decide once they had access to contraception or whatever, to have 2.1 kids, that that was, like, the natural settling point for the human species, that we'd all, we'd all reach there and we'd just stay there.

Mm-hmm.

And that's clearly not true, because so many countries now are falling way below replacement. And I think it's because actually there's no law of nature that says that people should want 2.1 kids. People look around them and they're like, "Oh, okay, everyone here has one or zero or six." And then that becomes, as you say, the mimetic desire. I think that becomes what's considered normal. And humans are completely obsessed with what's normal. Which is why I'm just genuinely quite, generally quite skeptical of the idea of, um, of people having this, like, absolute agency or abso- Yeah, I mean, we, we do clearly have, we do clearly have free will. But I think that what we consider to be desirable, normal, the life template is so incredibly dependent on what other people around us think.

Mm.

Um, which is, I think exactly why we've got into this downward spiral in terms of fertility.

There's a... I love your analogy or y- your conception of prudishness and licentiousness, that there's, we kind of flip-flop between the two.

Mm-hmm.

Which one do you think we're in now?

Uh, licentiousness transitioning to prudishness, I think.