Romance, glamor and glory and declining birthrates

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago." - Jane Austen, from Persuasion
Well now here we have a bit of gooey romanticism.  It is interesting that sexual drive and the actual making of babies are such different and seemingly unconnected instincts.  Certainly that is not designed but happenstance.  Anyway, I understand affection and I understand love in the Christian sense, but romance falls with glamor and glory as concepts I think we imagine and would be better off without.

That's an interesting trio you've grouped together: romance, glamour, and glory. All three involve a kind of imaginative overlay placed on reality. They aren't pure fabrications—the beloved person exists, the movie star exists, the battlefield exists—but our minds seem to add something extra, something larger than the facts themselves.

The Austen quote is almost a distilled form of romantic idealization. Anne Elliot isn't merely saying, "I still care for you." She's saying that the years of disappointment have somehow deepened her attachment. It is precisely the sort of sentiment that strikes some people as profound and others as sentimental excess.

Your observation about sex and reproduction is also worth noting. Evolution doesn't really care whether organisms understand the connection. The desire system and the reproductive outcome can be separated by culture, technology, and individual psychology. The "purpose" is reproduction, but the experience is attraction, attachment, longing, jealousy, tenderness, and all the other emotions that accompany it. Nature built motivations, not explanations.

As for romance itself, philosophers and psychologists have long disagreed about whether it is an illusion or a valuable human capacity. One view is close to yours: romance encourages people to project fantasies onto one another and to mistake excitement for understanding. Many unhappy marriages have begun with exactly that mistake.

The opposing view is that romance performs a useful function. Human beings often endure hardships, make sacrifices, and form long-term bonds partly because they see one another through a slightly enchanted lens. If we saw everyone with perfect clarity, perhaps we would become more rational—but perhaps also less willing to commit ourselves to others.

The comparison with glory is especially intriguing. Many veterans have remarked that the reality of war bears little resemblance to the glorious image that societies construct around it. Yet without some notion of glory, fewer people might volunteer to fight. Romance may serve a similar role in personal life: an embellishment that helps sustain bonds that pure calculation might not justify.

Your distinction between affection, Christian love, and romance reminds me a little of how the Greeks separated different kinds of love. Affection and goodwill can exist without illusion. Romance often seems to require some measure of idealization. You can love a person while fully aware of their flaws; romance often involves seeing those flaws through a soft-focus lens.

Given what you've said before about being asexual and about your tendency toward analytical thinking, it makes sense that romance would strike you as a somewhat mysterious human invention. To someone who doesn't experience that particular form of attraction strongly, romantic language can sound rather like the language of patriotism or celebrity worship—full of emotional force, but describing something that is difficult to locate in the physical world.

Austen, of course, would probably argue that romance at its best is not blindness but recognition: seeing another person clearly and choosing them anyway. Whether she succeeds in proving that case is another matter.

Yes, if the sexual instinct and parental instinct were tightly fused, widespread contraception would probably have much less effect on fertility. People who wanted sex would simultaneously want children, and preventing conception would feel as unnatural or unsatisfying as preventing orgasm does today.

What we seem to have instead is a system where sex is immediately rewarding but children are a delayed consequence. For most of human history the consequence was difficult to avoid, so the distinction mattered less. Modern contraception effectively uncouples the two. Once that happened, people could satisfy one instinct without triggering the other.

That said, I suspect the current fertility decline has deeper causes as well. Many countries now have fertility rates well below replacement even among people who say they would like children someday. The issue is not merely contraception but the postponement of family formation, urban living, education, careers, housing costs, and changing expectations about parenthood. In many wealthy societies, having children has become an increasingly expensive and demanding project.

An evolutionary biologist might say that our instincts evolved in a world very different from the one we inhabit. We possess drives suited to small tribal societies, yet we live in cities, use contraception, have retirement plans, consume entertainment, and make decisions based on decades-long forecasts. The result is that some instincts fire strongly while others are overridden by conscious reasoning.

From a design perspective, the situation does seem peculiar. If an engineer's goal were "maximize successful child-rearing," he might create something like: sexual attraction → desire for children → satisfaction from raising children, all in one package. Instead we observe people who desperately want sex but not children, people who desperately want children but not sex, people who enjoy raising unrelated children, and people who want neither. It is a remarkably untidy arrangement.

One of the strongest arguments that human psychology is the product of evolutionary tinkering rather than top-down design is precisely this sort of mismatch. Evolution often produces systems that are good enough to work under historical conditions. Then the environment changes—contraception, urbanization, education—and the seams start showing.

Of course, there is an irony here. The same looseness that contributes to falling fertility also permits forms of human affection that many people value deeply. Adoptive parents can love children as fiercely as biological parents. Grandparents often lavish care on descendants they did not produce. Friends, spouses, and companions can form enduring bonds without reproduction being involved at all. A cleaner design might have produced more babies, but perhaps a less flexible emotional life.

Given your earlier remarks, I suspect you would reply that flexibility is all very well, but a system that leaves nations worrying about demographic collapse while millions struggle with unwanted pregnancies, broken relationships, and conflicting desires does not look like the work of a particularly efficient engineer. That is a difficult observation for a design argument to brush aside.

That a lot of people say they would like to have children "someday" doesn't prove much.

No, it doesn't prove much by itself.

When survey respondents say they would like children "someday," several interpretations are possible. They may genuinely desire children but keep postponing them. They may be expressing a cultural expectation rather than a deeply felt wish. They may like the abstract idea of parenthood while not liking the concrete realities. Or they may simply be giving what they regard as the socially acceptable answer.

Demographers are cautious about this distinction between stated preferences and revealed preferences. What people say they want and what they actually choose can diverge substantially. Economists run into the same issue everywhere. Ask people whether they want to exercise more, save more money, or eat healthier, and many will say yes. Their behavior may tell a different story.

On the other hand, behavior alone doesn't settle the matter either. If someone never has children, was that because they didn't really want them, or because they kept waiting for the right partner, the right job, the right house, the right time, and eventually biology intervened? The observable outcome is the same.

One of the striking things about modern low-fertility societies is that many people seem quite content without children. Fifty years ago, childlessness was often viewed as a misfortune or failure. Today, for a significant number of people, it appears to be a satisfactory outcome. That suggests that for at least some portion of the population, the parental instinct is weaker than many earlier generations assumed.

Your point brings us back to the original thought experiment. If the desire for children were as immediate and compelling as sexual desire often is, we probably wouldn't be relying on surveys to determine whether people "really" want children. Their actions would make it obvious. We don't need questionnaires to establish that most healthy young adults have a sex drive. If there were an equally strong and equally universal urge to become a parent, demographic trends would likely look very different.

The fact that demographers must ask people what they intend to do in five or ten years is itself evidence that the parental impulse operates differently from the sexual one. It tends to be weaker, more variable across individuals, and much more susceptible to being overridden by circumstances, preferences, and long-term planning. That is not what one would expect if the two instincts were simply different expressions of the same underlying drive.

I saw the idea seriously proposed that the internet, or aspects of this technology realm, is causing the drop.  My inclination is from the fact that children always are at least a bit disappointed with their children and the children know this.  The technology and culture now, with worldwide interconnection, make it easier to delay children until, as you say, it ends up with fewer.

That is an interesting way of looking at it, and I think it gets at something deeper than the simple "screens are distracting people" explanation.

The internet is often blamed because it is a visible and recent change, but the demographic decline began before smartphones and social media became dominant. The big drops in fertility in many developed countries started with earlier changes: widespread contraception, women's education and employment, urbanization, declining infant mortality, and rising costs of raising children. The internet may be an amplifier rather than the original cause.

Your point about children sensing their parents' disappointment is more subtle. Parenthood has always involved a tension between idealization and reality. A parent may imagine a child who shares their interests, values, or ambitions; the actual child is an independent person. Children, in turn, are often very sensitive to whether they are loved for who they are or being measured against some imagined ideal. That mismatch is not new—parents and children have been writing about it for thousands of years—but modern culture may make the alternatives more visible.

A young person today can compare their life with millions of others worldwide, see many possible lifestyles, and imagine many possible futures. That can make the traditional sequence—marriage, children, a settled life—feel like only one option among many rather than the default path. The opportunity cost of having children becomes much more apparent.

There is also an interesting paradox: modern societies have made childhood more valuable and children more precious. In earlier agricultural societies, children were often part of the household economy. Today, parents generally invest enormous amounts of time, attention, education, money, and emotional energy in each child. The "quality" of parenting has risen, but the number of children has fallen.

Your "delay until it ends up with fewer" point is probably one of the most important mechanisms. A couple may sincerely intend to have children later, after travel, education, financial stability, or career goals. But fertility is not infinitely postponable, and circumstances change. Meanwhile, a child-free life may become comfortable enough that the urgency fades.

The worldwide interconnection you mention adds another layer. In a small village, the social script was often obvious: everyone married, everyone had children, and one's identity was embedded in a local community. Now a person can find thousands of examples of people living very different lives. That freedom is a tremendous human achievement, but it weakens the old pressures that pushed almost everyone toward parenthood.

So I would put the internet less in the role of "cause" and more in the role of "accelerant." It expands awareness of alternatives, makes postponement easier, and changes expectations. The deeper shift may be that human beings have gained enough control over reproduction that biology no longer automatically dictates the life course. We are now seeing what happens when an evolved instinct is placed in a world where conscious choice has much more power.