BACHELOR NATION: 70% of Men Aged 20-34 Are Not Married. “The high percentage of bachelors means bleak prospects for millions of young women who dream about a wedding day that may never come. ‘It’s very, very depressing,’ Crouse told CNSNews.com. ‘They’re not understanding how important it is for the culture, for society, for the strength of the nation to have strong families.'”

I wonder if she’d be willing to say the same thing about single mothers, that they don’t understand how important strong families are. After all, they’re choosing to have children without getting married.

(In the United States in 2013, four out of ten births were to unmarried women, and “only half of all single mothers had ever been married.” And to those who say that the fathers should have “manned up” and married those loose women, one should ask, “Should women who get pregnant after premarital sex expect the men to marry them?” Short answer: No.)

At the very least, these women should be more considerate of the wellbeing of their own children:

When compared with children in intact married homes, children raised by single parents are more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems; be physically abused; smoke, drink, and use drugs; be aggressive; engage in violent, delinquent, and criminal behavior; have poor school performance; be expelled from school; and drop out of high school. Many of these negative outcomes are associated with the higher poverty rates of single mothers. In many cases, however, the improvements in child well-being that are associated with marriage persist even after adjusting for differences in family income.

And what about the wellbeing of men? Upon the original article Helen Smith comments, “It seems that Crouse and her crowd are watching too many Say Yes to the Dress episodes. So what matters is that women’s dreams are shattered? What about the bleak prospects for millions of men across the country who get very little legal or psychological protection from marriage?”

In other words, while marriage might be important (in Crouse’s words) “for the culture, for society, for the strength of the nation,” it isn’t necessarily good for the individual men whom we expect to get married. Instead of commanding them to take one for the team, maybe we should try making marriage to be something worthwhile for them.