A new Pew poll has revealed a striking shift: over the past 30 years, the share of 12th-grade girls who say they’re likely to get married someday has fallen from 83% to just 61%. Young men, meanwhile, are holding steady at around 75%.
Other surveys tell a similar story. The Survey Center on American Life recently found that most single women think single women are happier than married women, while most single men think the opposite. Clearly, something has changed in how young women view marriage — but why?
Most explanations fall into two camps. In one, the problem is men. In the other, the problem is feminism.
Camp 1: “The Boys Aren’t Cutting It”
Many feminist commentators argue that women still want marriage — they just can’t find enough marriage-ready men. They point to falling rates of male college completion, declining labor force participation, rising addiction and loneliness, and the struggles many young men face with emotional communication. Add in online porn and endless gaming, and the picture becomes even bleaker.
These concerns aren’t unfounded. Many young men are struggling, and this affects their ability to show up in relationships. Marriage rates have dropped most sharply among working-class Americans, while college-educated couples — regardless of political leanings — continue to marry at higher rates.
Camp 2: “Women Just Don’t Want Marriage Anymore”
There’s also an ideological component. Marriage has fallen most among politically liberal women, who are less likely than conservative women to marry, have children, or even want either. A recent NBC News poll found that liberal Gen Z women rank marriage and children as two of the lowest priorities for a successful life — far behind financial security, career fulfillment, and emotional well-being.
Some feminists celebrate this trend. Marriage, they argue, leaves women with disproportionate domestic responsibilities, a “mental load” that never ends, and less earning power. In this view, opting out is empowerment.
Marriage can indeed be hard — and often unequal. Research consistently shows women shoulder more of the household labor. Working mothers report feeling overstretched and undersupported. But difficulty is not the same thing as misery.
What the Happiness Data Actually Say
Research from the Institute for Family Studies finds that the women who report the highest life satisfaction in America are married mothers. They are nearly twice as likely to say they are “very happy” compared to single, childless women.
This pattern holds across political lines. Even among liberal women — the group most skeptical of marriage — married mothers are dramatically happier than their single, childless peers. Meanwhile, happiness among unmarried liberal women has declined sharply in the last decade.
The paradox: the women most likely to believe marriage undermines happiness are, on average, the least happy group.
But There’s Another Explanation We’re Missing
The real story isn’t just “men are failing” or “feminism changed everything.” The overlooked culprit is Big Tech.
We don’t just live online — we learn how to live by watching life online. And that’s reshaping both men and women in ways that make marriage harder to desire and harder to sustain.
For men, the internet provides endless dopamine loops: porn, gaming, gambling-like investing apps, and now even AI “girlfriends.” Psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes this as a pipeline of digital addictions that make it harder for boys to grow into thriving men capable of real relationships.
For women, especially those who spend more time in digital spaces, online culture also distorts reality. There’s “divorce porn,” where leaving your marriage is billed as a power move. There’s lifestyle media glamorizing child-free independence while portraying married mothers as beaten down and unhappy. Influencers proclaim that “heterosexual motherhood is a game no one wins.”
Both sexes are being trained — subtly, constantly — to see long-term commitment as unappealing, outdated, or even dangerous.
The Virtues Marriage Requires Are the Very Skills Tech Undermines
Marriage demands patience, sacrifice, communication, forgiveness — qualities built through real-life relationships, not online consumption. The internet celebrates instant gratification; marriage thrives on delayed gratification. The internet rewards outrage; marriage rewards empathy. The internet promotes escape; marriage promotes responsibility.
Psychologists have long known that deep happiness comes from meaning, not momentary pleasure. The online world pushes pleasure. Marriage offers meaning. No wonder the two are in tension.
A Different Kind of Role Model
There’s a powerful counterexample in the story of Sofie Berzon MacKie, an Israeli mother who survived 19 hours in a bunker with her daughters during the October 7 attacks. After her rescue, she described emerging with a profound clarity: not fear, but a deeper desire for life — including the desire to have another child.
Her story isn’t about perfection or romanticized motherhood. It’s about meaning — the kind that comes from commitments bigger than ourselves.
The Bottom Line
Young people today face real challenges in dating, relationships, and family life. But the answer is not to surrender to the digital forces shaping their expectations and emotions.
If both men and women want more connection, more happiness, and more meaning, they’ll need to loosen Big Tech’s grip on their time, their attention, and their assumptions about life.
The loudest voices online — the pornographers, the manosphere influencers, the bitter divorce gurus — are not credible guides to happiness. Their stories are curated, edited, and often deeply cynical.
The people living real lives of commitment and meaning — often quietly, off-camera — are the ones worth listening to.
Marriage is not the only path to happiness, but it remains one of the richest. And in a world that feels increasingly unstable and fragmented, it may be one of the few analog sources of joy we still underestimate.