For the first time in recorded data, American high school boys are more excited about getting married than girls; we don't know about Australia, but it is likely to be the same. That claim alone should stop you in your tracks.
According to the latest Pew Research Center analysis of the Monitoring the Future survey, only 61% of 12th-grade girls in 2023 say they expect to marry someday, down a staggering 22 percentage points from 83% in 1993. Boys? Essentially unchanged at 74–76%. The gender gap has not just appeared; it has inverted. Young women are now the ones pumping the brakes on the institution that, for millennia, has been the primary engine of family formation and social stability.
This isn't some minor cultural blip. Every objective measure of human flourishing, financial security, mental health, life satisfaction, even longevity, improves dramatically when people (especially men, but women too) get and stay married. Decades of research from scholars across the ideological spectrum (from Brad Wilcox on the Right to Raj Chetty on the Left) confirm the same boring, stubborn truth: marriage is the single most reliable predictor of happiness and prosperity we have. Children raised in stable, two-parent married households crush every alternative arrangement on virtually every outcome we care about: education, income, crime rates, emotional well-being.
Yet an entire generation of young women is being taught, explicitly and implicitly, that marriage is a trap, childbearing a burden, and lifelong commitment an outdated relic of patriarchal control.
Where did this come from?
The answer is hiding in plain sight. Since the 1990s, elite culture (academia, media, HR departments, pop feminism) has sold women a very specific story:
Prioritise the "girlboss" career above all else.
Marriage can wait (or be skipped entirely).
Children are a lifestyle choice, not a biological or social imperative.
Sexual liberation means sleeping around without consequence (thanks to abortion and contraception as "empowerment").
Monogamy itself is suspect; why settle for one person when you can "live your truth"?
The result? Women are now more educated than men, out-earning young men in many cities, and delaying (or forgoing) marriage at unprecedented rates. The median age of first marriage for women is now over 28 and still climbing. Fertility rates have crashed below replacement level (1.62 births per woman in 2023 and still falling). And now even teenage girls, before they've entered the workforce or experienced adult relationships, are already opting out of the entire script.
This is not organic. This is the predictable endpoint of third- and fourth-wave feminism's war on the family disguised as liberation.
The human cost
The irony is brutal. The same ideology that promised women freedom has delivered record levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Women's self-reported happiness has been declining for decades, the opposite of what the "you don't need a man" narrative predicted. SSRIs, therapy culture, and "situationships" have replaced husbands and children. The strong, independent woman who was supposed to "have it all" increasingly has a cat, a wine fridge, and a string of situationships that leave her emptier with each passing year
Men, meanwhile, are checking out entirely, retreating into video games, porn, and low-ambition lifestyles because the deal on offer ("marry a 35-year-old career woman who may or may not want your kids") isn't compelling.
The civilisational cost
A society that stops reproducing at replacement level doesn't just decline, it dies. Slowly at first (empty playgrounds, shrinking classrooms), then all at once (collapsing pension systems, imported labour that doesn't assimilate, cultural erasure). Japan and South Korea are already living this nightmare. Europe is next, then Australia. America is on the same trajectory, and the sharpest drop in family-formation enthusiasm is coming from the very group that has always been its most reliable engine: women.
You cannot import your way out of demographic collapse forever. You cannot tax a shrinking workforce enough to pay for an exploding elderly population. And you certainly cannot maintain a first-world civilisation when the majority of your college-educated women decide that marriage and motherhood are forms of oppression.
The way back (if there is one)
Reversing this will require telling young women some unfashionable truths:
Your career will not keep you warm at night when you're 45 and alone.
Your fertility window is brutally short and non-negotiable.
Children are the most meaningful thing most people ever do, and yes, that includes many high-achieving women who thought they wanted something else.
A good man who commits to you and your children for life is the single best deal most women will ever be offered.
None of this is complicated. It's just radioactive in a culture that equates traditional family life with subservience.
The data are screaming at us. Young women are walking away from marriage and motherhood at rates never seen before, and they're doing it because they've been told it's empowerment. History will record whether we had the courage to call this what it is: a catastrophic own-goal sold to an entire generation under the banner of liberation.
If the trend continues, the crisis is already here. We just haven't felt the full weight of it yet.