Opinion | Why Aren’t More People Getting Married? Ask Women What Dating Is Like.

Discovered: Nov 22, 2023 11:47 Opinion ¦ Why Aren’t More People Getting Married? Ask Women What Dating Is Like. - The New York Times <– Read the whole thing! –> QUOTE: There are policy solutions that can help everyone: family allowances to curb child poverty, child care to support working and single parents, retraining out-of-work men, higher-ed reform for people who want to attend college but can’t afford the cost. In the process, these policies might encourage marriage by providing economic stability. But to truly address the decline in heterosexual marriage, we must attend to the details — to acknowledge the qualitative aspects of relationship formation. And, in particular, we should listen to the experiences of women who are attempting to find partners. We should care about the interior lives, not just the educational attainment or the employment status, of the men who could be those partners. ... All of this is a much trickier proposition, with no clear policy solution in sight. It requires taking the stories of single women seriously and not treating them as punchlines — something for which there is little historical precedent but which a handful of scholars are slowly beginning to do. But unless we pay attention to the granular experiences of people in the dating trenches, simply advising people to marry is not only, frankly, obnoxious for the many women out there trying; it’s also just not going to work.