Something extraordinary has happened to the lives of young Western women. They have become more educated, economically independent, and professionally successful than any previous generation of women. At precisely the same time, however, they have retreated from marriage and family formation on a remarkable scale. In America, the median woman married for the first time at 21.1 years old in 1975. By 2025, that had risen to 28.4. Among Americans aged 25 to 29, 50.0% were married in 1993. Thirty years later, only 29.0% were. Among those aged 30 to 34, the proportion fell from 63.0% to 51.0%.

The same broad transformation is visible across much of the Western world. In England and Wales, the median woman entering an opposite-sex marriage in 2023 was already 33 years old. The proportion of adults who were married or civil partnered fell from 51.5% in 2014 to 49.5% in 2024, with declining marriage among 25 to 34-year-olds contributing to the change. Marriage has therefore shifted from something routinely entered into during early adulthood towards something increasingly postponed until much later, or never entered into at all.

Data for South Africa is limited but it is fair to assume that something similar is happening among the country’s best-educated progressive elites.

Part of this transformation has been economic and technological. Women have gained unprecedented access to universities and professional careers, reliable contraception separated sex from reproduction, and women's economic dependence on husbands has diminished dramatically.

Housing became more expensive, young adults remained in education for longer, and the economic foundations of early marriage weakened. But culture matters too, and one cannot understand the scale of the change without confronting the ideological transformation that accompanied it.

For the past decade especially, progressive, or woke, thought has subjected traditional marriage and motherhood to intense criticism. Marriage has frequently been interpreted through the language of patriarchy and unequal domestic labour, while motherhood has been discussed in terms of the career opportunities, earnings, and autonomy women supposedly sacrifice to undertake it.

By contrast, professional achievement, financial independence, and freedom from traditional expectations have been celebrated as measures of female progress. The cumulative cultural message is difficult to miss. A woman who spends her twenties building a career is an example of success to emulate. A woman who prioritises finding a husband and starting a family at the same age is a failure.

The danger is that the consequences of these choices are radically asymmetrical. A career can often be started at 25, 30, or 35. Biological fertility operates under a different constraint. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists says women's peak reproductive years extend from their late teens through their late twenties. Fertility starts declining at around 30, and the decline accelerates during the mid-thirties. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine puts a healthy 30-year-old woman's chance of conceiving at about 20% in any given month, and a 40-year-old's at about 5%.

A 25-year-old woman deciding that children can wait another decade is not merely shifting motherhood 10 years down a calendar. She is moving from some of her most fertile years towards a period when conception becomes more difficult and miscarriage and chromosomal abnormalities become more common. Technology can help some women, but fertility treatment cannot make biological ageing disappear.

Family formation also requires much more than the ability to conceive. A woman who hopes eventually to have three children does not merely need sufficient fertility at the age when she decides to begin. She ordinarily needs to meet somebody suitable, develop a relationship, determine whether that person would make a good spouse and parent, establish sufficient trust to marry, and then leave enough time for the number of children the couple wants. The cultural instruction to postpone family formation therefore compresses a complicated series of enormously important decisions into a progressively narrower period of life.

Most young people have not actually abandoned marriage. Polls from Pew, a polling group, found that 69% of young adults in America who have never been married say they wish to get married someday. This creates an important distinction between rejecting marriage and continually postponing it. Millions of young adults appear to remain attached to the idea of eventual marriage while behaving as though the opportunity to achieve it will remain roughly constant indefinitely.

Evidence from older adults suggests that assumption deserves far more scrutiny. Among Americans over 50 who never had children, only 32% said they had never wanted children. Another 38% said there had been a time when they did want them, while 25% said they had been unsure. Among those who had once wanted children, but remained childless, 51% said a major reason was that it simply never happened while 41% said they had not found the right partner.

People in those later categories are often miserable and regret their life choices.

Longitudinal American research following people from adolescence into their thirties has found married participants generally displaying greater economic security, better health, less problematic substance use, and fewer psychological problems by their mid-thirties than single participants. Researchers appropriately caution that marriage cannot automatically be credited with causing all these differences because people who marry differ from those who do not. Yet the broader point remains that stable marriage is associated with a package of social and economic advantages that deserves at least as much cultural attention as its constraints.

This is where woke culture has produced a strange imbalance. Young women have been given endless warnings against becoming financially dependent on men, sacrificing their careers, undertaking unequal domestic labour, and losing their identities inside marriage. Some of those warnings are legitimate. Yet they hear considerably less about the possibility that a successful career may not compensate for the family they deeply wanted but never formed, that finding a compatible spouse may become harder rather than easier with time, or that reproductive technology cannot guarantee children at 40.

The consequences of postponement are particularly deceptive because many are delayed and the costs can become more serious as the years pass. The woman who always intended to marry and have children may eventually find herself trying to accomplish everything at once. She must establish or maintain a demanding career while searching for a suitable partner, building a serious relationship, and confronting a narrowing reproductive window. Instead of escaping pressure, postponement can concentrate it into the very period when the biological clock becomes least forgiving.

Marriage, by contrast, offers the possibility of building a household with another person over most of adult life. Children create relationships that, in successful families, extend into middle and old age, and eventually produce another generation of family relationships. Raising children imposes enormous demands in terms of money, time, sleep, and responsibility, particularly during early adulthood. Yet those demands form part of building something that can endure for the remainder of a person's life.

What this means is that Western culture should stop pretending that every life decision is indefinitely reversible. If a 25-year-old woman genuinely does not want marriage or children, she is entitled to construct her life accordingly. But if she wants a husband and children eventually, treating those ambitions as something to pursue only after every educational, professional, financial, and personal objective has been completed is a gamble with consequences.

Almost everywhere else in life we understand the value of starting early. We tell young people to begin investing early because compounding rewards time. We encourage them to establish careers early because experience accumulates and to look after their health before chronic problems emerge. Yet with perhaps the most consequential relationships they will ever form, woke culture has increasingly encouraged young adults to behave as though time scarcely matters – and by the time they realise the consequences it is often too late to reverse these.