Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews Brad Wilcox at NRO. Excerpt:

[Wilcox]: Media accounts, such as Lori Gottlieb’s essay in The Atlantic, suggest that the most common pattern behind maverick motherhood is that a thirty-something woman finds she cannot find her soulmate, realizes her biological clock is winding down, and decides to move on to motherhood without marriage.

So it’s not motivated, by and large, by a rejection of marriage. But Gottlieb argues in her new book, Marry Him, that some of these women, herself included, set standards for their Mr. Right that were too high, and thus find themselves without a husband in their late 30s or early 40s.

So I think the emergence of a “soulmate” model of marriage, where young men and women hold very high expectations for a future spouse, helps to explain why more women — especially highly educated women — find themselves without a husband and a desire to have a child as their biological clock winds down. …

Categories: Fatherhood, Marriage, Motherhood

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