A swift loss of conventional knowledge

“All of Andrew’s scenes could get cut. Who knows? It’s Hollywood Baby,” smirked Rachel Zegler when speaking to reporters about her Snow White co-star Andrew Burnap. The comment launched the now infamous backlash against Disney resulting in more rewrites than it took to draw the original animated film in 1937. Zegler was excited to play a version of Snow White who was “not gonna be saved by the prince” but instead would become “the leader she knows she can be.”

This posture towards romantic love is part of a flourishing cluster of feminine celibacy trends. Constrained by female empowerment on one side, and bad dating algorithms on the other, more and more women are cutting their losses and moving on. “Boy sober,” for example, is “about reprioritizing your time and attention away from endless swiping and noncommittal DMs and toward activities that are more fulfilling.” Or, in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, many women rushed to TikTok to declare themselves 4Bs—no sex, no dating, no marriage, no children, no happily ever after.

The problem, though, goes deeper than dating apps and disappointment. The Wall Street Journal points to “a rise in earning power and a decline in the social stigma for being single.” Many women “would rather be alone than with a man who holds them back.” In fact, the Journal reports, “Over half of single women said they believed they were happier than their married counterparts.” Others are simply tired. Dating, explained one woman, is “the only thing you can put 10,000 hours into and end up right where you started,” that is, without a partner who loves you enough to stick with you until death.

Add into the mix that more women are earning college degrees than men, and with higher education comes a greater desire that men share equally in household chores and childcare. Men, by contrast, do not seem committed to altering their natural inclinations to the same degree as women, at least not enough to adopt wholeheartedly the traditionally feminine preoccupations of furniture arrangements, kitchen flow, and the nurturing of infants and young children. The mismatch is proving disastrous for True Love. It’s “easier” to go it alone, especially for women who earn more than the men they might consider living with.

One woman, “Katie,” discovered that men “either seemed turned off by her ambition or weren’t career-oriented enough for her.” Her “male friends similarly said they expect their future wives to prioritize their families over their jobs.”

The thing that interests me, being the boringly married Gen-Xer that I am, is how swiftly a generation can lose conventional knowledge. I am about to marry off one of my children and every day I encounter people who are shocked—horrified even—that he is getting married without first living with his fiancé. I, the mother, must have been negligent and a little immoral for not encouraging the pair to “try each other on for size” as I believe the expression goes. What will happen to them?

I think what will happen is that they will be happily married for as long as they both shall live, the way my grandparents were, and the way I am. My grandparents were married for over 70 years, serving the Lord on the mission field for many decades, building up the church back home, humbly laboring for the glory of God. They didn’t think of marriage as an act of self-fulfillment. The whole concept of “self-fulfillment” would have baffled them.

If self-actualizing self-care is your guiding principle, it is unlikely that you will be able to be happily married. Dating will certainly be a chore. The path to married happiness is self-forgetfulness, being so caught up in the life and interests of the other person that they become your own. And then, if children come along, their all-absorbing care requires another kind of love represented by fleeting moments of gratitude. You end a long hard day grateful that you didn’t take that much-needed shower because if you had, you would have missed the wee babe smiling for the first time.

And yet, in one generation, this crucial knowledge is slipping away, so much so that many people “believe they are happier” by remaining single on purpose. It may or may not be true that single people are happier than married people—but the single person wouldn’t be the one to know. The promiscuous single woman who has never given herself to a man—body and soul—in the spiritual covenant of lifelong marriage doesn’t know that about which she speaks. It’s like feeling sorry for people as they are dying, about to meet Jesus face to face, instead of sorry for yourself for losing them. As the kids these days say, it sounds like “Cope.”