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#Post#: 363062--------------------------------------------------
New surveys about boys and girls re marriage
By: LabPartner Date: December 9, 2025, 9:42 am
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HTML https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/12/09/men-women-marriage/
Emily Jashinsky is the Washington correspondent for UnHerd and
co-hosts the daily news show “Breaking Points.”
UnHerd is a British news and opinion website founded in 2017 by
conservative commentator Tim Montgomerie and hedge fund manager
Paul Marshall. It describes itself as a platform for slow
journalism which draws from both left-wing and right-wing
perspectives, while others characterize it as conservative and
right-wing.
The sexes appear to be drifting apart before adolescence even
ends. Strange as it may seem, young men today are more
interested in marriage than young women. This trend is a recipe
for social chaos.
Last month, Pew Research Center compared data from 1993 and
2023, finding 12th-grade boys are more likely than 12th-grade
girls to say they want to get married someday, a flip from three
decades ago. Boys’ plans for marriage have barely budged since
1993, dropping to 74 percent from 76 percent. Girls, however,
swung away from marriage by double digits. In the early 1990s,
83 percent of girls wanted to get married. In 2023, 61 percent
said the same.
In 2012, I worked for Christina Hoff Sommers on the rerelease of
her landmark 2000 book “The War Against Boys.” Part of my job
was to check the footnotes for outdated research. When the first
edition came out, I was one of the kids in Christina’s book: a
7-year-old public school girl whose education had been designed
to uplift young women and help us get to college. As Christina’s
intern, I was a university student surrounded by rudderless men
with bubbling anger.
As I watched Christina chart the course of boys from 2000 to
2013, when the rerelease hit shelves, I learned that her warning
at the turn of the millennium proved prescient. Girls will not
be helped if boys are hurt. Ultimately, as she documented, boys
tend to like different books than girls; they prefer tinkering
and hands-on learning; many thrive in technical education
programs; and they need more recess and play.
Pew’s findings should be considered alongside an NBC News survey
published in September that found lifestyle preferences falling
along partisan lines. “Gen Z men who voted for Trump rate having
children as the most important thing in their personal
definition of success,” NBC News reported. “Gen Z women who
voted for Harris ranked having children as the second-least
important thing in their personal definition of success.”
Unsurprisingly, young women are also more likely to identify as
liberal, and the margin is widening. As the New York Times
reported, “Today, around 40 percent identify as liberal,
compared with just 19 percent who say they’re conservative. The
views of young men — who are more likely to be conservative than
liberal — have changed little.”
What seems to be changing is women’s expectations, and the
likely culprit is men’s prospects. If 6 in 10 girls still say
they want to get married, what’s going on with the two who
changed their minds since 1993? A January paper summarized by
the American Institute for Boys and Men found: “Historical data
show that when men’s educational and economic outcomes decline,
it is women without a college degree who experience the sharpest
declines in marriage rates.”
Women’s perceived appeal as marriage partners is not declining,
but men’s is. So, as some men struggle for economic opportunity,
women are adjusting their expectations and desires. It’s true
that pop culture’s libertine ethos often suggests marriage and
child rearing are outdated goals that need not weigh too heavily
on the modern woman. This probably makes it easier for some
women to say they’re less interested in these goals, although
research continues to show that married mothers and fathers are
the happiest among us.
But that messaging has been around since the 1970s, and
monoculture is dead. The “tradwife” phenomenon sees
traditionalist influencers attracting cultlike followings in
niche corners of the internet, where it’s cool to run farms and
have eight kids who home-school. Gen Z is having less sex, too.
Young women consistently report higher levels of anxiety. The
NBC News survey found that “one-third of young women said they
feel anxious ‘almost all of the time,’ and an additional third
reported being anxious ‘most of the time,’” while “just under 2
in 10 Gen Z men reported feeling anxious all of the time.”
Looking out on a pool of less marriageable men, young women are
turning their backs on the institution, bolstered by cultural
messaging from academia to Hollywood that remains critical of
more conservative lifestyles. While the country rightfully spent
recent decades boosting the educational and economic prospects
of women, it deindustrialized, axing and outsourcing jobs in
heavily male industries, and leaving men and women increasingly
out of step with one another. Efforts to make the workforce and
education system more friendly for girls have led to emphasizing
literacy and verbal skills, a hemorrhaging of male teachers, and
the decline of shop classes and vocational programs.
The problem seems poised to worsen. The marriage gap between
rich and working-class Americans is becoming a gulf as the
education system adapted to help girls without adjusting to
maintain best practices for boys.
A paper published by the American Institute for Boys and Men in
January found that “as college men have become increasingly
scarce, college women have maintained stable marriage rates by
marrying economically well-off non-college men. Meanwhile,
economic outcomes for other non-college men have sharply
declined, accompanied by a drop in marriage rates for
non-college women.”
The trend line of women reporting a declining desire to marry
may indeed reflect pessimism about their prospects rather than
the institution itself — and not for ideological reasons so much
as practical ones. If the last several decades have taught us
anything about the battle of the sexes, we should remember the
“war on boys” is also a war on girls.
#Post#: 363065--------------------------------------------------
Re: New surveys about boys and girls re marriage
By: MidwestmikkiJ Date: December 9, 2025, 9:47 am
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Well, no conservative slant there.
And this surprises anyone?
Why wouldn't girls be less enamored of marriage when they
finally have more options available to them?
Part and parcel of what is clearly becoming a war on women who
don't choose to marry, have kids, and stay home to raise them.
#Post#: 363072--------------------------------------------------
Re: New surveys about boys and girls re marriage
By: AbidingDudev4.1 Date: December 9, 2025, 10:10 am
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I guess this is just another way the 'conservative' movement
drives a wedge between people and pits 'us' against 'them' to
keep 'us' from pointing at the correct 'them'
The key part in this, to me, is that when economic outcomes
increase for everyone, people are happier and more likely to
couple up, but increasing economic outcomes for everyone hurts
rich people somehow so we can't have that.
#Post#: 363081--------------------------------------------------
Re: New surveys about boys and girls re marriage
By: northbayteky Date: December 9, 2025, 10:34 am
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What utter bullshit:
[quote]What seems to be changing is women’s expectations, and
the likely culprit is men’s prospects[/quote]
That is assuming that all women choose their marriage mate based
on their income/prospects. All women always.
Another piece of bullshit: "The war on boys"
That's saying that propping up girls, allowing girls their own
goals and ability to seek their own goals based on their own
interests and abilities is necessarily putting down boys.
[quote]
they need more recess and play.
[/quote]
Who TF doesn't do better with more recess and play?
They proved no causal link between these outcomes and assumed a
lot.
#Post#: 363148--------------------------------------------------
Re: New surveys about boys and girls re marriage
By: animaniactoo Date: December 9, 2025, 1:12 pm
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[quote]The NBC News survey found that “one-third of young women
said they feel anxious ‘almost all of the time,’ and an
additional third reported being anxious ‘most of the time,’”
while “just under 2 in 10 Gen Z men reported feeling anxious all
of the time.”
[/quote]
Gee. Consider there is an ACTUAL war on women and their choices
and self-determination (and has been for a long time). Uh... no
wonder young women feel anxious a lot more often than young men
do? They all can see how things are going and what they are
facing.
There was never a war on boys. Only on the idea that they were
the only people that mattered. It's the same thing as making
room for more POC at the top of our businesses and institutions
does not mean there is a war on white people.
#Post#: 363158--------------------------------------------------
Re: New surveys about boys and girls re marriage
By: AbidingDudev4.1 Date: December 9, 2025, 1:55 pm
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I hate this but it does not matter whether there is an actual
war on boys or on white people if they think there is one. And
they buy it because it's easier than looking in the mirror.
If you convince them that there is just the pie, and you are
going to increase opportunities for x group that is not them it
is a really easy sell that that takes away from their own
opportunities and if you are not explaining how you are going to
grow the pie, and how inclusive opportunities grow the pie for
everyone, if you just yell at them for buying into the divisive
ideology that it's men v women, or white people v. non white
people and they should gladly accept that means less for them,
or that they owe it due to people two hundred years ago doing
bad things, well you get 64% of white men under thirty voting
for the party that panders to that.
It's terrible messaging.
But it's cathartic to yell at them, I guess.
You'll note that men aren't more pro-marriage here, they dropped
2% too.
Whatever our society is doing, and it's mostly a horror show,
the more we divide into men/women, white/nonwhite,
christian/non-christian, north/south urban/rural married/single
whatever division they find that works, the more the gaps will
grow.
We're not just failing men, or failing women, we're failing
everybody, because we're all interconnected and maybe that can
be the lesson when the horror show ends.
Change everything we're doing.
#Post#: 363174--------------------------------------------------
Re: New surveys about boys and girls re marriage
By: animaniactoo Date: December 9, 2025, 2:30 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=AbidingDudev4.1
link=topic=3890.msg363158#msg363158 date=1765310133]
I hate this but it does not matter whether there is an actual
war on boys or on white people if they think there is one. And
they buy it because it's easier than looking in the mirror.
If you convince them that there is just the pie, and you are
going to increase opportunities for x group that is not them it
is a really easy sell that that takes away from their own
opportunities and if you are not explaining how you are going to
grow the pie, and how inclusive opportunities grow the pie for
everyone, if you just yell at them for buying into the divisive
ideology that it's men v women, or white people v. non white
people and they should gladly accept that means less for them,
or that they owe it due to people two hundred years ago doing
bad things, well you get 64% of white men under thirty voting
for the party that panders to that.
It's terrible messaging.
But it's cathartic to yell at them, I guess.
You'll note that men aren't more pro-marriage here, they dropped
2% too.
Whatever our society is doing, and it's mostly a horror show,
the more we divide into men/women, white/nonwhite,
christian/non-christian, north/south urban/rural married/single
whatever division they find that works, the more the gaps will
grow.
We're not just failing men, or failing women, we're failing
everybody, because we're all interconnected and maybe that can
be the lesson when the horror show ends.
Change everything we're doing.
[/quote]
I guess I am frustrated with the inability to see that we have
more in common than we don't, and that we are only "competing"
for the same slice of pie because the people "in charge" of the
pie have mostly chosen to offer thin(ner) slivers throughout our
lifetimes of a very limited range of pies. Instead of, you know,
more variety and larger slices.
However, as I write that, no, I am also pissed at the entrenched
idea that it's perfectly fine to keep (almost all) the slices of
pie that are available.
Yes, we need different messaging. But we also need some freaking
compassion and openmindedness.
#Post#: 363213--------------------------------------------------
Re: New surveys about boys and girls re marriage
By: kkt Date: December 9, 2025, 5:00 pm
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"War against boys" is bullshit. There's no war against boys.
Women are still interested in sex and relationships. Just less
likely to get married to a husband they'd be carrying, and who'd
blame them for that? Maybe call it "War against marrying down".
#Post#: 363664--------------------------------------------------
Re: New surveys about boys and girls re marriage
By: Queenie Date: December 11, 2025, 7:41 pm
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Barely tangential:
The young people in my life are either coupled or really lonely.
It's hard to meet people to date, I guess? I think the
pandemic was huge here.
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