Ask A Genius 940: Marriage, Kids, and Scotty

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/12

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: Yesterday, we discussed the possible reasons why birth rates are declining globally. You are 32, correct?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: No, I am 34.

Rosner: I see. At some point, do you wish to have a wife and children?

Jacobsen: It is a good idea.

Rosner: We could examine why you do not feel a sense of urgency and compare that to my generation and my desperation to have a girlfriend, which eventually extended to having a wife.

Jacobsen: I would like to preface this by stating that I had recently ended a relationship before I was about to travel from Montreal to New York and then the rest of the States. I am currently in an emotional transitional period because it has not been that long.

Rosner: All right. We do not have to discuss that if you are uncomfortable, but we could if you wish.

Jacobsen: It was a mutual, healthy parting. She reached out weeks ago, and we are on good terms.

Rosner: My mother used to say… she was born in ’33 and had her first child, me, at 26. For her generation, 26 was generally the average age of a mother’s last child, so people started much earlier. People also often died sooner, so the timeline was condensed. But not so much sooner to explain the difference between entire generations getting married at 19 or 20. I do not know the average age at first marriage, but it has to be in the late twenties.

Jacobsen: I am not sure. It depends on the country. In America, it might be women’s in late twenties and men’s in early thirties.

Rosner: Yes, that is what it was for Carole and me. She married at 26. I was 30. We had been together for almost five years. We got together early for our generation, but we each probably had lower-than-average self-esteem, at least in finding partners, making people more inclined to stay together. You want to stay with who you have because it is a struggle to find the next person. Or you think it is going to be.

Jacobsen: That might be another reason for less permanent coupling up.

Rosner: Maybe dating apps have raised everybody’s social self-esteem, at least in terms of hooking up. Take Tinder.

Jacobsen: My days of trying to hook up long preceded Tinder.

Rosner: But you use it, correct? It is not necessarily for casual hooking up but for meeting and talking to people.

Jacobsen: That is true. I am proud of the profiles; I have created over time. I find them amusing and entertaining.

Rosner: Do you think that, if we take someone who was a nerd back in 1978, if you put that person on Tinder today, people would be interested in him? You are not particularly nerdy and are not a good test case. It would depend on the person. Tinder is primarily comprised of men. Also, everyone suffers from always thinking something better is around the corner.

Rosner: Right.

Jacobsen: If women are being flooded with men liking their profiles, then it will be gendered in a way that exaggerates normal gender dynamics where many men are offering, and women pick and choose from those offers.

Rosner: Do you think men act more manly than they would in real life?

Jacobsen: That is not exactly what I am saying. I am saying men act as they would, but given the number of people participating in Tinder; those numbers artificially exaggerate normal behaviour without being exaggerated in any behavioural sense.

Rosner: Let me be more specific. Let us take a guy who is 24 or 25. He has his hair; he is a little bit soft-bodied, but not horribly so. He can type out a reasonable sentence. He is not an idiot and can eventually figure out how to talk to people on Tinder. He is not a muscle man. He is not a chiselled blonde god. He is a regular-looking guy who might be awkward if you met him in person. That guy could meet up with a woman at least every few months, right?

Jacobsen: I suspect so. At the same time, even though people have more sexual variety, they are having less sex on average. It is even more true for people who are 24 now. It is a strange phenomenon where people are having more varied versions of sex at lesser rates. It is peculiar.

Rosner: I do not know where that guy fits into the reproductive ecosystem in each case. In 1978, he was nerdy. He tries because there are not many substitutions for trying. He eventually gets with someone who might be okay with him, might even like him, and he stays with that person. He figures it is a good deal for him because he has difficulty meeting women who want to be with him. When someone does, he wants to hold onto them. Now, move that guy to the present day. Does he feel like he can be a bit of a player? He meets a woman on Tinder and has coffee with people. Maybe he has drinks with people. Not all the time, but every few weeks, and perhaps a few times a year, he has sex with someone. Occasionally, someone he previously had sex with reaches out, or he reaches out, and they have sex again. Does the current availability for awkward guys mean they are less likely to hook up permanently at a younger age, at the age they would have hooked up in 1978, 24, or 25? This increased availability of a variety of women to nerds and awkward women, is that enough to keep people playing when, in previous generations, they would have settled down? Or does it matter, given all the other possible reasons for people not partnering up?

Jacobsen: Social acceptance of nerds, geeks, and dweebs makes dating apps different because many women are also nerds, geeks, and dweebs now, much more than before. With the opening of that social acceptance and the media portrayals and the open access to many well-paying jobs for many of them, I believe the natural inclination is to assume, following that data, that the chances are greater now than before for that type of person.

Rosner: I was particularly desperate in high school to get a girlfriend. When I returned to high school, I sat next to a kid in chemistry class at Highland High. He was a good-looking guy, and he had a cool car. He just talked about hanging out in parking lots with other guys who had cool cars. It was Albuquerque, and there wasn’t a lot to do. By this point, I was frustrated that returning to high school wasn’t working for me, so I just said whatever I wanted. I turned to him and asked, why aren’t you more worried about not having a girlfriend? Or why aren’t you trying harder to get a girlfriend? You’re a perfectly acceptable guy. He said, “Dude, you can’t worry about everything.” That attitude was probably more reasonable than mine in all my desperation and possibly was more common than mine and certainly is more common now. With you, a perfectly acceptable guy with a lot going for him, your attitude is when and if it is correct, it will happen. You give yourself opportunities via Tinder when you feel like it, but you do not think it is necessary to fulfill life goals by a certain age by partnering up and reproducing.

Jacobsen: Right, in some sense, I have no stake in the end. If the path is to remain a bachelor or to get married and have kids, I do not have a significant emotional stake in that outcome. I have been content in partnering up and not for a long time. It has never been an issue. I adapt to the circumstances and context of what life presents to me at that time.

Rosner: At least some of that. Now, some of that is you, as a person who has interviewed countless people, explored various ways to live life and come to your conclusion. However, I would say that there are also changes in societal reinforcement. Would you agree that society has not pushed you as hard as it would have pushed someone in my mother’s generation to partner up?

Jacobsen: There have been obtuse people in my hometown who said certain things that were callous or asked dumb questions, some kind of pseudo-penetrating, but not really.

Rosner: For example, why isn’t a handsome boy like you married yet? Is that what you mean?

Jacobsen: Things to that effect, said in more offensive ways. You get used to it. Then I imagine asking myself other questions and reflecting on them: Do they know what courses I have taken? Do they know any interviews I have done? Do they know what I have for breakfast? They are just subject to cultural stereotypes and imperatives.

Rosner: So they put that pressure on you.

Jacobsen: It is similar to — not in degree, but in style — people standing outside of abortion service providers, saying that they are killing babies because that is their imperative within their particular frame of what is and is not a life. I take it in that context where these people come from a specific frame. I believe they have the freedom of speech to say that. And I have the freedom to feel and think that they are jackasses.

Rosner: Do you think there is truth to Hillary Clinton’s saying that it takes a village to raise a child? Do you think the breakdown of the village structure of society where, in my mother’s generation and mine, you had face-to-face neighbours, face-to-face friends, small communities, and all that electronic friends have replaced? Does the breakdown of traditional communities mean that traditional coupling patterns, the influence of people, and everybody being coupled up, especially people older than you, play a part in people not coupling up as much?

Jacobsen: It is a factor. For a long time, the church was the center of American life.

Rosner: Okay.

Jacobsen: A remnant of the past that you can give or attend, get out and become political. They are seen as extremists. We see this in the demographics, or it is not entirely stable. In Canada, the church is an extraordinarily diminished institution. If you look at my hometown, it is undoubtedly the evangelical heart of Canada. It had a small community, an evangelical Christian community, and an older community, with medium-sized families for the most part. Those structures of pressure were in place. I would not necessarily say that I felt extreme pressure. I would argue that much of the pressure talked about in past generations’ narratives did not exist for me, out of just a few very obtuse parts of other people.

Rosner: In America, what has happened to at least the evangelical Christians has thoroughly discredited them in the eyes of a majority of Americans. I would say that the majority increases among younger people. People are walking away from the church at huge rates because of many evangelicals and it is not fair to all of them, but the loudest ones continue to embrace Trump, even as Trump becomes more disreputable. This discredits the church because Trump is as ungodly as you can get. Trump is a recent enough phenomenon that it is too soon to say that he is putting a damper on people coupling up. It is hard to tell the influence of Trump on the evangelicals. He certainly has not helped, and how the evangelicals are in America has undoubtedly given Christian familyhood a black eye.

Jacobsen: I am not a stranger to relationships. I have had, off the top of my head, eight relationships.

Rosner: Yes. So that is not a small number.

Jacobsen: Carole found that to be more than enough [Laughing].

Rosner: I met Carole when she was 21. It was very unusual for us to still be together for our generation.

Jacobsen: You met at a Jewish singles dance when you were 25?

Rosner: Yes. It was April 5th, 1986, so I was a few weeks away from turning 26. Carole was three months away from turning 22. In counselling, it has come up that maybe I wish she had more experience with problematic boyfriends so that her expectations of me would have been lower. It is unfair to wish Carole a relationship misery so that I will look better in comparison. But still.

We have reached some conclusions here. Modern dating technology reduces pressure, and neighbourly and churchly pressure fades. Are we done with this?

Jacobsen: One more thing to cover. I want to get your reflections on this, too. When I have had those moments of social behaviour, they were minute moments of acute pressure. They had the opposite effect, in my opinion. They made me feel, “Oh, forget you, I am not going to do it.”

Rosner: That makes sense. If evangelicals were telling me what I needed to do, I would feel resentment. I understand that.

Jacobsen: Expand it to a cultural phenomenon where the messaging is like that broadly, especially with declining birth rates and married people being in the minority. This could have an accelerated, deteriorative effect – opposite of the intended direction of those messages.

Rosner: I can see that. We have discussed how older people in America, people over 45, have all the material wealth in America. When you run into a relative you have not seen in a while, like your aunt, who is 60 or 58, they ask, “When are you going to get married?” You look at the aunt wearing jewelry, living in a four-bedroom house, driving a BMW, and might be retired from a well-paying job. Meanwhile, you are working at a startup, getting paid $850 a week with some stock options, and your rent is half of your take-home pay, and you live in a small apartment with roommates. When you hear this aunt making what to her seems like an innocent comment, you might think, “Fuck you, aunt. It is different now, and I cannot do what you did, and I do not want to, given that you guys messed us over.” Is that a reasonable possibility?

Jacobsen: That is probably true. It might be gendered as well. Many in the current generation are getting more educated, especially women. Men are expected to uphold some traditional stature of masculinity. Yet they are given conditions and resources under which they can never attain that. There is much resentment, but it is directed in misguided ways, like toward women making the right choices about getting an education.

Rosner: That brings up another possibility you just mentioned — the juvenilization of men. When my mother met my father, it was 1954. He would have been 23, and he might have been third in command on a B-36 bomber that was flying around. This plane was designed specifically to fly nuclear bombs around, and he was in charge of a bomb. He started with A-bombs, like the ones they dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which could kill 150,000 people at once. Later, they shifted to H-bombs, the most potent weapon ever deployed. One of these things, however big a city you dropped it on, would kill just about everybody in that city, up to five to seven million people. A 23-year-old was the navigator bombardier, and the rest of his crew was not much older. They might have had a major in charge of the plane who was, I do not know, 27 or 28, but they were all young people in the 1950s flying city-killing bombs around and looking fully adult with neatly combed, Brylcreemed hair. Carole and I have been going through their love letters, and they were playing at being full-grown adults. That was what society exemplified. America dominated the world, and the idea was to get married, start a family, get a good job, and move into a house you could afford back then on one salary. They were playing at being adults. Now, men do not. There is less pressure to appear as a fully grown adult. At age 23, I did not graduate high school for the last time until I was 27. I epitomized not growing up peculiarly.

Jacobsen: Right, we agree there. The symptoms of juvenilization are relative to prior roles, yet the pathways for those roles no longer exist. They are both victims of cultural change and of taking that honest resentment and anger and directing it to the wrong group. 

Rosner: When women joined the workforce, jobs began paying less because employers only wanted to spend so much. If the workforce is doubled, that will dilute the money available to pay people. But it is undoubtedly harder to survive on one job, on one employed family member. Oh, Lance likes to say that. It is probably half true; as Lance says, many things are half true.

Jacobsen: Many conversations argue about wage stagnation, a human choice. People are being put in competition in the developed world with the developing world, where rights are violated all the time.

Rosner: Okay.

Jacobsen: How can you compete with super-exploited labour in the third world?

Rosner: That is something that has only in the past 30 or 40 years, maybe less, become a significant factor. Before the internet, it was strict to the point of being rare to be able to outsource work overseas. We touched on it last night that jobs that alone can support a family, especially for someone under 30, are rare. Have we discussed this enough? We have discussed it thoroughly, laying out the landscape and identifying ten interrelated causes. When you take them all together, regardless of their ranking, they make a convincing case that what is happening should be happening given all the pressure in that direction — that people are having fewer children. When you tell people this, they are not surprised. The end, I guess.

[Recording End]

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