Is that a love letter in your mailbox or a letter from the government urging you to have a baby before it’s too late? For young adults in France, it could be either. The French government is sending letters to every 29-year-old in the country to encourage them to have children younger, i.e., now. Nothing says happy Valentine’s Day like a collapsing birth rate.
It won’t work — and not just because there is nothing less attractive than a bureaucrat lecturing about family planning. It’s not going to work because in Western countries with flagging birth rates, nothing, so far, has worked. For all the governmental attempts with housing strategies, tax incentives or egg-freezing subsidies, nothing has reversed the trajectory of birth rates in a lasting way.
In the absence of clear answers, human sciences have taken over. This week alone has brought doomsday reports about the perils of the “dating decade” and the horrors of the “dating recession.” In Britain, marriage of young men is in “total collapse.” It seems the largest emerging market in the United States and Europe is not for artificial intelligence, but the heart-starved think piece. Individualism, smart phones, progressive politics, girl bosses and modernity are the usual culprits in a long list of explanations for why the U.S. marriage rate has fallen by 32 percentage points since its peak in 1949, or why the birth rate per woman hovers 0.5 percentage points below the 2.1 replacement rate.
Perhaps these components have played some role in America’s increasingly single society. But none of them may be anywhere near as consequential as this element that defies statistical definition: luck.
Luck is inconvenient to address. For all the books and essays written about the demise of the family, the role of luck in romance goes unexamined. It undermines the usefulness of traditional advice — get married in your 20s, have kids young — that is undergoing a spectacular renaissance in some quarters.
But ignoring luck is an egregious oversight in social commentary, not least because it plays an oversize role in modern dating culture compared with just a few decades ago. For most of human history, being lucky in love was an irrelevant factor, or at best a minor factor, in the decision to get married and start a family. Now, it is the factor, and it is largely out of anyone’s control.
Many assume that couples have been marrying for love for hundreds of years — that Romanticism in the early 19th century really did turn romance on its head. It didn’t. In most cases during the Romantic era and the decades that followed, marriage was not optional. The economic imperatives of marriage, which still exist, almost always triumphed over fluttering feelings or, more often, no feelings at all. Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” is the best-read romance book of all time not because it told a familiar story but because marrying for love was considered incredibly rare, which is to say, lucky.
Love has always been hard to find. But there were once many other reasons to marry — some practical, many coercive — that we have only recently stripped away. In Austen’s time, marriage was still tethered to survival.
Even in America, women have only been able to practically access credit, open a bank account and buy property on their own since 1974. Yet we act baffled that by age 45, nearly 80 percent of non-college-educated women born in 1930 were married, compared with just 60 percent of those born in 1960 — as if women aged 25 in 1955 and 1985 were able to make the same kind of choice.
Despite all the relationship doom-mongering, the large majority of young adults still say they would like to marry someday; only 8 percent say they don’t. That fewer of them are doing so is less likely to be a widespread act of rebellion and instead a reflection of how the healthier reasons to sign up to marriage are also the harder ones to find. The organization Independent Women notes this week that 72 percent of adults age 50 and over who never had children say “It just never happened” or they “Never found the right partner.” These honest answers are hard to engage with: that chance and circumstance matter. So they are rarely engaged with at all.
A long-term, successful relationship is not a product of luck. The amount of kindness, forgiveness and good faith required to get two people to their 50th wedding anniversary undoubtably takes a tremendous amount of effort. But meeting that person — someone you both like and love, find attractive, who aligns with your values, who shares your broad goals, who wants to commit till death do you part, and for whom you also want to make that vow — is a tall order. It’s made a lot taller when politicians and pundits put a tight time frame on it. Get married, they say, and have kids when young. Great, with whom? The advice works only if luck has already played its part.
This all might sound like hopelessness, but I find it cheering. For luck can change on a dime. And to a limited extent, we create our own luck. Look up from the phone, go outside, talk to people, go to parties, enter rooms and spaces that reflect a desirable life, on the chance that a person who might want to share that life will be there.
And if you do happen to find someone — that’s very lucky.
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