It is astounding to me how the general reaction of all you white, liberal young males is to (A) take it personally (B) kill the messenger on this one rather than recognizing that this is a demographic study underlying not why you're shiftless, but why the deck is stacked against you. Here, let me make the booboo all better by adding the words "african american" to the title: There! See? All you happy honkies are paradigms of virile virtuosity, ready to bust out 1.8 kids and a mortgage at the next available opportunity! It's those shiftless darkies that are all the problem! You don't really believe that, though. African American fathers were just the leading edge. They had lower incomes, they had lower education levels, they got to wear the title "baby daddy" first. But guess what, whitey, destiny is coming for you, too. You know you were triggered by the happy hipster white couple in the picture We've been down this road before. Elizabeth Warren and her daughter wrote a book about it fifteen years ago. Fundamentally, it has been getting progressively harder to raise middle-class children since the OPEC shock of 1973. You can say "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" and everyone's all "where's my pitchfork" but you say "demographics are killing marriage for men" and y'all take it personally. It's not your fuckin' fault. But the next time you feel like voting Republican, know that this is their fuckin' wet dream and has been since Herbert Goddamn Hoover so get busy, get up, or get out. You can't fight demographics. But if you try hard enough you can defeat it.
Hmm. Maybe cause this graph ends in 2010, but I could have sworn I read marriage is in an upswing here in The States. Or I might be remembering it wrong. Maybe divorce is on the down swing? Random Wikipedia graph shows both are on a down swing, but that ends in 2007. Maybe people are being more cautious about marriage.
