(The Daily Signal)—Is the next generation of romantic comedy viewers … boys?
Two recent surveys suggest that it’s younger men, not women, who are more focused on getting married and having children.
Seventy-four percent of 12th-grade boys say they will likely choose to get married, according to a November Pew Research Center analysis. In contrast, only about 6 out of 10 senior girls feel the same way.
Meanwhile, when young adults aged 18-29 were asked what they viewed as most important for having a successful life, men ranked getting married and having children higher than their female peers did in a September NBC News Decision Desk poll.
That disparity became even more stark when looking at women who voted for Kamala Harris compared to men who voted for Donald Trump. Among men who voted for Trump, having children was seen as the top indicator of success, while getting married was considered the fourth most important (out of 13 options).
Young women who voted for Harris had decidedly different priorities: They saw getting married as the 11th most important and having children as the 12th most important indicator of success. Harris’ young female supporters, instead, prioritized fulfilling careers, financial success, and emotional stability.
What is going on? Can we expect to see TLC launch a “Say Yes to the Tux” series? Will groomzillas become the new norm?
Whatever the reasons, it’s clear there’s a major cultural shift. In 1993, 83% of 12th-grade girls thought they’d be likely to choose marriage, as did 76% of 12th-grade boys. In other words, about 4 out of 5 12th-grade women planned to get married in 1993, and now only 3 out of 5 do.
If those 12th-grade girls are accurate Cassandras, it could have massive ramifications. Already, the U.S. marriage and birth rates are in significant decline—and it’s married women who are most likely to have children. The U.S. birth rate is currently 1.6 children per woman, a historic low and one that portends a declining population for our nation, which will bring economic and societal challenges.
But are these young women off base to be dubious about marriage?
I always wanted to get married—and yet I also always wanted a happy marriage, and to be with a husband I shared religious and moral values with and respected.
I ultimately didn’t marry until I was 37. If you had asked me during large chunks of my young adult years if I thought I was likely to choose marriage, I’m not sure how I would have answered.
As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes, the survey wording suggests that “most of the 22 percentage point drop in girls saying they want to marry reflects a rise in girls saying ‘no idea,’ not girls saying certainly not or probably not.”
When I was younger, I often felt like I was in some cruel numbers game that no amount of hopeful swipes on any dating app could necessarily overcome, just based on the stats. After all, a 2024 survey from Barna Group and Pure Desire Ministries found that 75% of Christian men viewed pornography. I noticed at church that it often seemed young women outnumbered the young men attending. (Although interestingly, new research suggests that men are now going to church more than women.)
I was open to dating and marrying a man who didn’t have a college degree, as the number of women with college degrees rapidly outpaced the number of men among millennials. But at least in my experience, I didn’t encounter a lot of men who had forgone college but had steady careers in say, construction or plumbing, and who also possessed a love of reading or podcasts or trivia.
And like many women, I was deeply uneasy over the manosphere surge. I completely agree that feminism is highly problematic, and that boys and men often receive unfair treatment in our modern culture. I had no issue with men who raised those flags. At the same time, I could not condone—or stomach—a man who would listen to some of the openly misogynistic blowhards who thrived in the ugly manosphere subculture. The answer to today’s unfair treatment of men is not to degrade and trash women.
So perhaps some of those 12th-grade girls are thinking along similar lines. Maybe they would prefer marriage—but not at any price, to any man.
Or perhaps they are thinking along entirely different lines. If the NBC News poll is accurate, maybe this isn’t about a scarcity of good men—but about a true values shift, where women no longer see marriage and children as critical to a fulfilling life.
That’s a shame—because there’s plenty of research that suggests women are ultimately likelier to be happy if they are married with children. Among married women with children, 19% were very happy, while among single women without children, only 10% were, according to an August Institute for Family Studies report. That same analysis also found that 47% of married moms found life enjoyable, compared to 34% of single, childless women.
Another study, the 2022 General Social Survey, also showed that marriage and children were correlated with happiness. Among women who were married with kids, 40% were very happy and 47% were pretty happy (87% total). Among unmarried women without children, 22% were very happy and 54% were pretty happy (76% total).
Of course, these numbers do demonstrate that some single childless women are happy. (I certainly had plenty of joy in my own single years.) Conservatives will only look foolish if they argue that happiness is incompatible with singlehood.
But what the data does show is women are more likely to be happy as married moms. That’s the message we should be giving to anxious young women—even as we simultaneously encourage marriage-minded young men to be the best men they can be.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
