lthough there has been a recent tick upward in marriages, they have been declining for several years. What are
some of the reasons for these declines? There is a generational gap here in
perception as part of the problem based on the benefits of marriage. Somehow
we're not getting the ideas of the benefits of marriage down to the younger
generation. And of course, what is the role of religion? As religion steeply
declines in the United States and in the West, marriage seems to go right along
with that. What are the messages to teenagers and young adults that we need
to be giving about marriage? Why is it so important? Why not push it off? Because that's what's happening or an
overall choice for careerism, for example. And lastly, AI companions.
These are a real threat. It's already happening. and they're a threat to our
own individual spirituality and of course a threat to marriage. In this
episode, I bring on Brian Willoughby, an associate professor in the School of Family Life at Brigham Y Young
University to discuss his research on these issues. Now, this episode is
brought to you by Go and Do Travel and the Wavemakers podcaster cruise. We are very excited about this. It's coming up
in November on the 15th to the 22nd going down the Mexican Baja. We'll be
bringing the online community face-toface with the content creators,
listening to several presentations and having a fantastic time. Go to quickdia.com, cwycia.com.
At the top, it's trips and events. Scroll down to wave makers and find out more. Here we go.
[Music]
So marriage rates have dropped by nearly 41% in the US since 1970. Can you walk us through what the reasons are behind
such a sharp decline? Yeah, there's there's really kind of two big things that that happened kind of
sequentially. Um, the first thing kind of going back the 80s, 90s, early 2000s
that really started to shift and really started to change things is that marriage used to be kind of the norm.
It's it's basically what everybody did. Not that every single person got married, but there's this very strong
cultural norm once you got to your 20s that this is what you were expected to do. Marriage was kind of this necessity
to adulthood. It was kind of this expectation of if you're going to be a a functional adult, you're going to be
married and start a family. Um, once we get past the the 70s and all the kind of anti-establishment things that happened
in the United States and other places, uh, marriage was was viewed much more as kind of an optional thing. Um, and and
once it got viewed as an optional thing, what what particularly young adults started to do is they started to delay
it and push it back. And so we didn't necessarily see a huge decline yet in the marriage rate, but it did start to
go down. What we really started to see was a delay. People pushing marriage back. The average age of first marriage
back in the 60s was around 21 to 23, 24, early 20s uh and went all the way to the
late 20s in just about one or two generations uh as that kind of social norm started to go away. And then the
the other big change has been more recent in the last 20 years. Um, and that change has been really shifting
from viewing marriage not only not as a necessity or something that you would delay, um, but something that might
actually get in the way of your life. That it's been a a relatively recent development where more and more young
adults now view marriage as what I and my colleagues call a transition of loss, which means it's something that you
lose. You lose freedom, you you might lose uh financial well-being in some in the view of some young adults. And so
once kind of those two things happen where marriage was no longer needed, you could delay it and then marriage was
something that could uh potentially for the view of a lot of young adults harm me in some ways or or make me lose
things. Um marriage became a lot less appealing and because it was something that I didn't need to do anymore, that's
where we've seen kind of this exodus uh away from marriage. We've seen that rate really decline.
So what is the cause of that though? So I mean you go back and you talk about the delay of marriage going into the say
' 70s ' 80s 90s and then and then maybe a complete cultural shift in viewing
marriage after that in the last 20 years what is the cause of that you know is is it is it more people
going to college is it uh is it is it a tougher time getting jobs I would say today there are
economic issues certainly that I didn't have uh when when I got married I more
opportunity. I think there were more job options available at the time. But what what would you attribute to that to?
Yeah, I think it started with a lot of those things. It started kind of benign with just a lot of shifts in what young
adulthood was looking like. Like you said, more and more people in the the 90s and 2000s were going to postsecary
education. They were going to trade schools, going to university. Uh kind of our economy in the United States and
other places around the world kind of necessitate that. kind of needed a college degree or a trade degree of some sort to get what a lot of young adults
kind of viewed as a good stable job. Um, and because of that, uh, marriage kind
of just naturally started to get delayed because young adults were worried about their finances. They were worried about
college. Uh, one of the big changes actually related to both those things is that um, 20 or so years ago there was a
big shift in financial independence of young adults. uh most people in their 20s, you know, 30, 40, 50 years ago were
financially independent. And then all of a sudden, because of some of these economic factors, most people in their early to mid20s were still relying on
their parents financially. And so they thought to themselves like, I can't support a family. I can't get married. I
can't even support myself. So I think that's where a lot of this started. Uh again, more recently, I I think there's
there's something else that's starting to happen. It's those economic factors are still there, but now there's much
more of a choice that's coming along for young adults and teens where they're actively saying, "I don't want to get
married." Um, what's interesting is 15 years ago when I was studying this, I would talk about what I call the
marriage paradox, which is most young adults at the time would say, "I really, really want to get married, just not
right now. I'm nervous. I don't feel like I'm ready." There was this kind of gap between what they were saying, what
they were doing. Um, but now more recently, we're starting to see a shift where more and more teens, young adults
are saying, you know what, I might get married. If it happens, great, but I'm not sure I want to anymore. And and and
that's been more of a a psychological shift. Now, is that because of what would the
cultural shift there be? I mean, we've talked about economics, we've talked about college, etc., but it what you're
talking about seems to be a view. It's not just something hindering them as far
as an obstacle in their way, but it's something that they view as being not as
big of an opportunity. It's not it's not a as high of a value, so to speak, than they may have for independence or wealth
or whatever it might be. Yeah. I I think there's a a lot of factors. I'll talk about some of the bigger ones that that I think are
happening, particularly for our our young adults and and teens. Um I think some of this is generational. And what I
mean by that is that I hear all the time that that young adult and teens are getting strong messages from their
parents or even just watching their parents and marriages that they see is is less optimal, not ideal, unhappy. Um,
and they're they're getting kind of both verbal and indirect messages from their parents of maybe marriage isn't the best
type of relationship. I I hear that a lot uh from my college students is is parents that are incentivizing their
kids to not get married. uh talking about delaying marriage kind of giving these very negative messages um around
marriage that I think is a part of it. I think another huge part uh goes into a much larger cultural discussion
happening in my field right now with teens and young adults uh which is about digital experiences in in digital
worlds. Um and I think when it comes to relationships, you know, we talk a lot about social media and smartphones and
the effect that has on kids in terms of mental health and anxiety. Uh but I also think a huge effect that it's starting
to have is in these relational spaces uh between pornography, AI companions,
social media. Um all of those things create a lot of interesting um mindsets
when it comes to relationships and and where a lot of those things intersect is more and more people as they get to
their 20s have been so used to relationships being customized on demand. I I I I view, you know, whether
it's pornography or media or other things that are constantly giving me everything that I want when I want it.
And they want relationships to be the same way is what I call ondemand relationships. Right? This idea that
when I start dating someone, I want to be a perfect partner where I don't have to compromise anything. They don't get
in my way. They they don't get in my way with education, career, hobbies. Uh, and those of us that have been married know
that's not how real relationships work. And so I think a lot of those online spaces are are another big contributing
factor for some of our our younger uh youth that are are kind of uh have
having more negative attitudes about dating and relationships because of some of those um digital alternatives that
have have really changed how they think about relationships. Now, that seems to trickle down all the way down to
teenagers because there there's a there's a massive decline in the number of teenagers who have even dated by the
time they've graduated high school. Would you would you apply the same thought process with them in terms of,
hey, here's here's social media. I've got an iPhone. This is completely
different. I mean, Jonathan Hyde talks a lot about this in terms of mental well-being, but but also on the dating
side of things. Has this pulled away a desire for dating? I mean, is it is it
are you getting enough feedback and enough digital relationships that it compensates for a desire to have a
personal relationship? Yeah, I I think absolutely. And particularly when you talk about teens,
uh again, we're having a mental health crisis with with our teenage population and young ill population uh because of
things like smartphones and social media. um they're dealing with a lot of anxiety and and a lot of fear about a
lot of things in their life. And so I hear a lot of a lot from teenagers that relationships feel scary. They feel
stressful and and and they don't want more stress in their life. They're saying, "I'm already feeling all this anxiety, my personal life, school, with
my my friendships. I I don't have the coping mechanisms that that we did want, you know, in previous generations
sometimes." Um, and so for many of them, the easiest thing to cut out of their life is dating because dating is
stressful. You have to negotiate with another person. U, there's an acceptance aspect of dating that's very big for
teenagers because once I put myself out there in a romantic setting, I could be rejected. And when I'm already
struggling in my life with acceptance and rejection and anxiety and mental health, why would I voluntarily, that's
how they oftentimes view it, why would I voluntarily put myself in a situation where I could feel worse than I already
am? Um, so I I think that is a big, you know, piece to what's happening because
then that trickles into young adulthood. Um, and oftentimes what I see in young adulthood is people in their early 20s
trying to flip this switch. Say, okay, I've I've tried to ignore dating for my entire life so far. I'm gonna flip this
switch when I'm 22 and magically quickly find someone that I'm compatible with.
And what they find out is no, dating's hard. And it's a struggle. And now, now what happened is I didn't get the skills
that previous generations got by being rejected when I was 16, 17. I haven't
figured out how to navigate that. And so now, not only am I trying to to learn a new skill, I'm trying to do it in a much
harder contexting adulthood where there's even more responsibilities and stress. Now, you mentioned
parents that have given a negative view or or implications of of negativity for
marriage to their marriage uh aged kids, right? I mean, those that are maybe in
their 20s. Does that also apply to dating? Do the are the parents also
speaking to their teenagers saying, "Look, just hold off. You don't really need to you don't really need to date." Yeah. My my sense is that's more of an
implicit message. There's a disconnect parents have sometimes. I I I ask in my my classes a lot, how many of your how
many of your parents have incentivized you in some way to delay or put off marriage? And it's it's about half of my
students, an even larger percent of my female students in particular. Um, and a lot of that, I think, from parents is is
pretty well-meaning. They're they're worried about particularly their daughters getting married, dropping out of school, what happens if it doesn't
work out, if you end up with a divorce, can you support yourself? There's a lot of kind of well-intended fear from
parents, too. Um, and oftentimes, I don't think parents necessarily equate that to dating. They aren't necessarily
putting restrictions or incentivizing, hey, don't date. Um, they're just not saying anything about it. And and so I
think a lot of young adults get that more implicit message and say, "Okay, if my parents are so negative about marriage and particularly if I'm in a
college environment where, you know, if I actually go on a date, that would imply I have some inclination or or some
desire for a long-term committed relationship. Maybe I don't want to do that either." Because really, the
message I'm getting from my parents is have fun, figure yourself out, and focus on yourself. and as soon as I date, I
have to focus on another person. So even though I don't think parents are oftenimes explicitly saying don't date,
I think a lot of times young adults get that message implicitly.
You know, applying this to the church. Uh you know, when I was dating as a teenager, there was still the rule and I
think it's still going today. There was this idea of, well,
do group dates, right? Only group dates. you go out on group dates, don't go out
one-on-one. It's not It may not be appropriate. You can get into trouble. A number of different things. My parents
never supported that. They I I would date individually consistently. And it was really good for me, right? It was
important for me to understand how do I treat a girl? How do I go out oneon-one?
I can't rely on my buddies. I can't rely on a group where where I can spread the
responsibility of conversation and everything else. I had to do it on my own
and and then when my kids are who are all adults now were growing up um we did
the same thing. It's like I you know we have our own guidelines you know that that we have the kids
follow when they when they date but um I always thought one-on-one dating was
important. Does the and that's what we would always hear from them in in high school and in college. Well, Dad, not
very many people date anymore, right? They're not dating more. What we do is we hang out. It's a bunch. It's a group
of people. We just hang out all the time. Does that play into things?
Yeah. I I mean, you got you've got the the famous uh Elder Oaks at the time talk about, you know, encouraging young
adults to not hang out and to actually date. Um and even now, you know, in in adolescent populations, they'll talk a
lot more about talking. You know, we're talking to each other. It's interesting because date has almost become this
negative word. It's not just an old old-fashioned word for a lot of teenagers. It's it's really this word
that like I said has this kind of negative connotation like I can't have fun. I can't hang out with my friends.
It's way too serious. Um because they have a lot of fear and anxiety about that. Um you get this really weird
ambiguous thing right now with adolescence and a lot of young adults uh as well. um where oftentimes people are
kind of confused about what they are because people don't stop having romantic feelings towards each other. Those feelings are still there. Um no
matter what we're doing culturally, they're still going to be there. But there's a like I said, I think a lot more ambiguity uh that's happening
because like you said, I I hear from my kids too who are teenagers and young adults that the ones that have attempted
to go find dates have a hard time, you know, outside of school dances or more formal situations. Um because there's
this immediate resistance to you want to go on a date with me. I don't know if I want to do that. You know, I'll hang out
with you. You know, we'll we'll we'll we'll talk. We'll, you know, kind of do other things, but but as soon as you
label it and kind of put in this more formalized setting, there's a lot of resistance to that because of the
negative connotations it has. So, is there a messaging problem? Then you
talk about the parents, but is there a cultural messaging problem for young adults and for teenagers then? Because
you know I'm going through a number of the things that you've written here, right? You found that married millennials as an example report a 16%
higher life satisfaction, right? 13% better physical health, 11%
more optimism, right? Can you elaborate on why marriage continues to yield this kind of outcome
and yet marriages are declining in number? Because if they're looking at it
as well, this is a problem. This is I'm afraid of sacrifice. I'm afraid of getting rejected.
Is the message of the return on investment here not strong
enough? 100%. I think that's a big thing. And and and part of it is that oftentimes
parents don't realize the counter message that that our youth are are are
getting. I mean to the benefits like you you you just said that book that you're you're referencing that I wrote on on
millennial couples. The reason I wrote that book is is because in my field is a very famous book that came out in 2000
called the case for marriage. uh and it laid out in in in great detail all the social science evidence we had at the
time that showed that marriage was beneficial. Married couples were happier, they were wealthier, they lived
longer. Um and as I was getting all this research from young adults in in in the research that I was doing saying all
these fears and anxieties and worries, I had this question of for millennials,
you know, in their late 20s, early 30s at the time, were they even seeing the benefits of marriage? They they kept
telling me they were worried. they were stressed. They thought that marriage wasn't what it used to be, that it didn't help them. So, I really wanted to
see if marriage still benefited people. And like you said with some of those numbers, um that's what I found almost
universally in their early 30s, the couples that were married compared to
dating couples and and millennials that were single um had better outcomes across everything that I looked at,
mental health, uh risk-taking behavior, financial well-being, um physical
health, um they were still better. marriage still has all these benefits, but to your point, I don't think we talk
about them very often. It's not the message that young adults get. They don't see oftentimes the the the
benefits that a strong, stable marriage comes because unfortunately um sometimes they're boring. They're they're not the
things that are going to get uh our attention in media uh particularly in social media u and even the more
romanticized versions of romantic relationships um are starting to disappear. I love movies and one of the
stats that I often times share with people is that the number of romantic comedies has drastically declined in the
last 20 years and and the reason that happens is because we're not interested in them anymore. We used to be worried
that we were giving kids this this kind of romanticized version of love that was going to make it harder for them to form
relationships, which was partially true. Uh but now they're not even getting that oftentimes. And so so oftentimes young
adults lack these clear role models and messages about the benefits of marriage. And then like I said what we oftenimes
miss is the counterprogramming they are getting back to social media back to pornography back to these other online
environments. Um what all those things are teaching kids is that instant gratification is where happiness lies.
that I you know whether it's reals or other things their their their brains are being trained that I want instant
gratification in my life. If you think about, you know, our youth in the world that they've grown up in the
entertainment, any movie show they want to watch, they can watch it right away. Any food that I want, I can call.
Anywhere I want to get. I don't have a car. I've got Uber. I can get any all these different aspects of our life that
make life easier. These young adults that have been raised in this world, everything in their life is instantly
available. It goes back to that on demand piece. And so, not only am I not getting the messages about how long-term
committed hard relationships will eventually benefit me in my life,
they're things that take work, take decades of time, take sacrifice. I don't
want that. I want things that can help me today, next week, next month. And so it's it's harder and harder for teens
and young adults to put themselves in a position at 40, 50, 60 and say, "Hey,
you any of us with kids kind of know how this goes, right? Try to have a conversation with a 19-year-old and say,
but think about when you're 50, you know, whether it's about investing or dating, it's it's harder and harder to
have those conversations." Now critics sometimes argue that the
benefits that we're speaking of here are due to selection effects, right? How
does your data control for that and explain selection effects? Yeah, so selection effects are basically
the idea that we see these kind of benefits because only certain people tend to get married. So, so for example,
education is a big one, right? Because people that go to college have higher education are more likely to get
married. So maybe the reason they they see these benefits are because they're more educated and have higher incomes
and marriage is what we call a spurious variable. It just happens to be there. And so if you look at it, you'll see the
the benefits. Um and in the social sciences, we've got a very easy way to to address that. It's never going to
completely take that out of the equation. Um but we essentially control for it in in all the things that we do.
We control for things like religiosity because religious people are also more likely to get married and have positive
benefits in their life. Uh we control for education for income. So for example in that book that I wrote um all those
convers or all those um comparisons that I made were controlling for a large
segment of of background economic financial educational uh factors and
then we look to see once we control for all those things out do we still see something there statistically which we
still do. it tends to lower the benefit, but it's still there. And so, we're pretty confident that there is uh a
marriage benefit even when we factor all those things out. So, moving to kids here, you said
marriage is the bedrock for child development. What recent data best demonstrates how married parent
households affect child health and well-being? Yeah. Um well, the big factor with this
is stability. uh we know from we know a lot about child development and child well-being and all the factors that lead
to healthy development whether it's physical, emotional, psychological health. Uh and the the strongest
predictor of all those things is stability in a child's life. When a when a child has stability uh which means
that they can count on the people around them, things don't drastically change that much in their life, um that tends
to be the best predictor of of child outcomes. And so where marriage comes into the picture um is that marriages
are just significantly more stabilizing in a child's life than any other form of
relationship. Uh single parents, cohabiting parents, uh they cohabiting
parents tend to to break up at much higher rates than marriages. Single parents tend to move around, have other
economic disadvantages um much more than than married parents that that oftentimes have uh not just emotional
support but financial support from a partner. And so, uh, marriage just provides a stable foundation, uh, for
kids. That's a big factor. Um, another factor, and this goes back to some research I I did with my adviser, uh,
Dr. William Dhy at the University of Minnesota. Um, we were also finding that there there's a gendered piece to this
too, um, that when kids are raised with with strong male and female role models,
both boys and girls benefit from that. Boys benefit from from being socialized by a strong woman in the home. Um women
benefit by having a strong ro male role model in the home. And so as soon as you lose one of those pieces um there's some
risk involved. So marriage I think is also bringing a really strong socializing agent um into a child's life
that also really helps them have a greater likelihood of success later on.
Now there was a study that was done in Norway during COVID saying that married households there in Norway fared better
than others. How how does that finding scale to other
national and cultural context? Why why does that matter? Um I think that that Norway study
actually matters a lot simply because the cultural setting it it happened in. um kind of back to what you were saying
about selection effects is is one of the things in the United States um that oftentimes gets thrown into this
conversation is that we know that single parents uh and even cohabiting parents are kind of culturally disadvantaged a
lot in the United States. So a lot of our um you know cultural um structures
are are meant to support married and stable families and so it can be harder sometimes uh if if you're not a married
couple um to have social support for example. Uh but in Norway, in a lot of those Scandinavian countries, those are
countries where in particular cohabiting two couples that live together romantically but don't ever legally get
married is extremely culturally accepted. There there's almost no stigma. There's none of the shacking up
uh mentality. Um and those cohabiting couples uh oftentimes then look very similar to married couples because
there's so much cultural acceptance. So the fact that in Norway with a a culture
that's so accepting of other types of relationships can still find some of
these benefits of of marriage again just speaks to me of the power of of that
relationship that that almost no matter what you say in whatever the setting is
marriage is kind of the cream that rises to the top of of relationships and families. Uh there's there's just all
these types of studies like this that show us that there are benefits that sometimes we don't even realize. We
didn't have studies on pandemics uh before COVID. Uh but lo and behold, we
start to get some of the co studies out and they show that yeah, by the way, marriage was a great resource for people
during the pandemic. You know, I want to back up again back to the to the role models, the male and the female. Is there
any difference between both on the male side and the female side in terms of dedication to work? So for example, for
a father that is very careerdriven or
not very careerdriven or a father that is making at least a median income or
above and providing benefits etc that go along perhaps with a job um to all the
way down to unemployment. And then on the other side for a woman who is either in the home or is working part-time or
continuing through the spectrum working at a good job or even highly driven in a career. Uh are there differences in
those levels of employment and engagement in their work and does it vary by gender?
Yeah. So, there's there's kind of two two factors there that that all parents have to kind of find a way to balance
that that ties into the research on on this. Um, one is income. Um, income, financial resources do matter um to kids
and and to the well-being of a family. Um, you know, doing a lot of things as a family takes resources. Family
vacations, for example, are great. And not that your vacations have to be lavish beach resorts, but even small
stuff, going camping costs some money. um you know, putting your kids in extracurricular activities that could be
good for them as long as you're not overdoing it. Costs money uh particularly in the United States. Uh so
financial resources matter. Um there there's a lot of research that says that kind of uh eventually peters out a
little bit. There's a ceiling effect. Uh but certainly like you said is is for both men and women being driven and and
working and bringing in financial resources to a family matters. Now, what parents have to balance that with is
time. Because the other thing we know really matters for kids of all ages all the way up to young adults is time. The
more time parents spend with their kids, the better. The more open conversations, the more role modeling, the more support
you can show them, um, the better. And that goes for for dads and moms. Sometimes I'll I'll talk to dads and
like, "Oh yeah, mom's at home. She spends all the time. I can, you know, work my 70 80 hour week and bring in all
the money and that's great." Uh research shows that's not awesome for your kids. They need you in the home. They need the
dad in the home, like I said, uh just as much as mom. So, parents oftentimes have to balance as they're figuring out their
career um configurations. How do we balance bringing in enough resources financially to, you know, have a stable
home and resources for our family, but also having time. Now the one gender
caveat to that to to the second part of your question, we also still continue to get a lot of strong research that say
for young kids having mom in the home is is really important. Um the having that that mother figure when kids are are
young uh from attachment uh purposes and other things. Um there's there's pretty clear res research out there um that
shows that that in particular is really important for kids. Not that dads are important. Dads are important, kids are
are young, too, but there there is kind of a critical period where it seems like mom is is of particular importance.
Now, moving on to technology here. We've got a lot of technological advances that
are oftentimes liberating. They're often times focused on convenience.
uh you know going back all the way to things that would would would help a
woman in the home with domestic duties so to speak that now liberate her give her more time more freedom more options
in her life right all great things right and then you move on and you go to what
I think is the biggest ever technological change to culture and that is the pill coming in late 50s early 60s
and this is where we start seeing a massive difference in in in the decrease in in marriage numbers starting this
1970 and then and then you move on to social media and and the iPhone, right?
The iPhone and social media really starts taking off around 2012
and and now we've got AI companions and this is something that Elder Bedar, for example, spoke on not too long ago in
talking about the danger of this. I kind of thought at the time this was I mean I actually did an episode on that but I
just thought okay I'll listen to him see what he has to say. But this is something that is growing and could be a
problem. You've got data here that says that one in three young men and one in
four young women have chatted with an AI romantic companion.
Now, what does this say about their views on real relationships?
Yeah, I think and by the way, I just did another big data collection um that's uh
just wrapping up right now just because I want to verify those numbers and the numbers got worse um not better.
Yeah. Um but I I think it ties into to all these things, right? Is is is what isn't
going away for any of us, including our kids, is the desire for emotional
connection and just connection in general. It's a basic human need that's never going to go anywhere. So even as
as we've talked about how marriage and dating has changed and is is is maybe uh
more young adults are are moving away from it, the need to connect is still there. And so I what I think you're
seeing with these AI companion numbers um is the early
indicators of a of a shift towards what I'll call heavy experimentation
with finding that connection through AI. uh because what we're seeing is that
there there certainly already is a portion of our teenagers and young adults who are using AI romantic
companions compulsively. That that's already a thing that we're starting to see. I think the numbers are higher than
most people realize. Um but for a vast majority of young adults, I think we're
still in that experimentation phase. They're they're they're dabbling with it. They're they're seeing how it goes.
Um, but what the early indications are also telling us is that the response from them is very positive. And that
that's a hard thing I think sometimes for older adults that I talked about this to understand that why why would a
teenager or young adult why would they engage with a romantic AI? Like what what would be the appeal of that? And
what they forget sometimes is that these these teenagers and young adults, they
interact with most people in their life electronically. They're texting their friends. They're DMing their friends.
They're on social media. That's how they communicate with most people in their life. And these generative AIs mimic
that and they do a very good job of doing it. They've been specifically designed to trigger emotional
connection. There's some fascinating social psychology research that's starting to come out um that shows that
when someone engages with one of these romantic AI companions, they they form very quick emotional bonds because
that's what they're trained to do. They they know all the science we have about validation and emotional connection and
that's all they're doing and and but they're doing it in a very one-sided way. So, if we kind of circle back to
some of the early things in the conversation, if I'm a young adult and I want connection, I I desire connection
just as a human, but I'm scared to death of other people. I don't have the skills
to date or I'm worried about dating or every time I do it. I'm dealing with these people that require me to
sacrifice and compromise with them. And so I I jump on chat GBT or I jump on
Replica or I jump on a companion app and I just try it out. And what I find there
is someone who is always taking my side, who is always making me feel better, and
I never have to compromise with them. Affirmation. Yeah. And so you can see how appealing that would be. And if I'm
just experimenting with it, I think we're going to see more and more young adults that that get in deep with it
before they even realize it's happened. Now, another big concern with AI is it's
kind of taking pornography to the next level. And you've got pornography, which is also already just a just a huge
poison for society. and putting that you've got a one study here that shows that 53% of respondents have viewed AI
generated sexual images right how might this change future expectations for a
real sexual relationship with a spouse yeah I mean we already know that that's
one of the major negative effects of of pornography use is changing expectations about intimacy that that what kids are
viewing with pornography is is not showing them what healthy sexual relationships look like Um, and we know
that for most of our youth now, not only is pornography their first sexual experience, it's their main sexual
educator, um, by the time they have a real partner. And so what the AI component is doing, uh, it's simply
exaggerating a lot of those negative effects because it feeds back into that personalization, uh, that online
pornography today is already vastly different than it was 20, 30 years ago, uh, because of just the volume of it.
there's so much volume of it on these on these pornographic websites uh that it's very easy for for me as a teenager or
young adult to to go find whatever I'm looking for. You know, go find thousands of videos for whatever I'm looking for.
But what AI is going to add to that is now I don't have to look for it. It's just going to be given to me. It's going
to learn what I want and it's going to feed it back to me on this this constant powerful. That that's tough. That is so
tough. Yeah. So that that personalization that customization of relationships I think is just going to get uh stronger. And
then I think there's a whole another concern I have about the AI piece when it comes to sexual content uh which is
the role playing piece. I I I recently presented to a group of uh professionals that deal with sex offending youth. Um
and I shared with them some of the data we have on some of these apps that um allow youth and young adults to roleplay
any situations that they want. And and because they're AI, um there's no regulate regulation on them in the
United States or elsewhere. Um which means that if I'm a a youth that's um at
risk for sex offending, I can go on to one of these AI apps and I can play out
any dark fantasy that I want and it will play along with me for as long as I want. Um and there's some I think real
danger um for some of that too that like I said has has very little regulation right now.
What about the mental health through AI? You've got over 60% of women and over
50% of men using AI relationship apps report risk of depression and high
loneliness. Is there a cause and effect here? Do do you have the same individuals that would already have that
higher level of anxiety and depression? Are they going to be more drawn than others to an AI companion or does the AI
companion and working in a digital relationship outside of reality cause
the anxiety and the depression? Yeah. Um I think you've got some of both going on. Certainly people that are
struggling with depression and loneliness are going to be more drawn to AI companions. And so I think you've got some of that happening and then and then
that AI companion is oftenimes just going to probably exaggerate a lot of the symptoms that they're struggling
with. But I also think you'll get other people that generally are are doing fine and functioning well and and just aren't
really engaging in in in human relationships and like I said are experimenting with AI um that find
themselves kind of caught in this trap. And I do think we'll eventually find that there is a risk to someone's mental
health because, you know, as a relationship expert, uh, this is essentially empty calories. And what I
mean by that is is it's like candy is I'm I'm getting that instant gratification, uh, but I don't have to
put anything into it. And so I'm not really working my relationship muscles. Um, and so eventually I think most
people will find that it's a pretty hollow relationship. It's very one-sided relationship. I don't really get
anything. I and and whether I figured that out at 19, 30, 35, 40, um I think
you'll see that that uh component start to happen as well where people said, hey, I've really really gone into a deep
dive of engagement with an AI companion for the last five years and suddenly I had that moment where I realized, man,
I'm I'm really lonely. I'm I'm really struggling with things. I' I've realized this isn't a real person. Realize this
is hollow. Um, you know, we don't have that research yet because it's so new, but I think we'll probably be getting it
in the next couple years. Yeah, you've got a you've got another another study here, which is odd to me,
but it says 42% of users say AI is easier to talk to than people. It seems to me like that would be 100%. But and
then 43% say it listens better. And I think that would be 100% too. And and
it's I don't know that I think beyond just the idea of dating, it's those that are already in a
relationship, those that are already married. I mean, if they're starting to explore and go out into getting these AI
companions and starting to compare them to their spouse, you're you're walking into some pretty dangerous territory
there. I mean, I I try to listen as best I can to my wife. I do what I can. I'm
not the perfect at it. I don't think I'm going to be able to compare to an AI companion,
right? Yeah. Uh, in fact, this is a scenario that I share with people um, just to help them understand kind of where we're at with this technology. Um,
you can use the technologies that exist today. If I'm a married person, we've been married for 20, 30 years, um, I can
I can feed these programs, a younger version of my spouse, it will generate pictures for me of that younger version
of my spouse and it can talk to me. So, you could essentially cheat on your spouse with a younger version of your
spouse right now with the technology that exists today. But you're right, we actually have found um that right now
that experimentation with AI companions um it's not just single people, people in relationships, married people seem to
be using it just as much as people that aren't in relationships because like we've talked about, it's a very easy
resource to turn to of had a fight with my spouse. They're not willing to listen to me. This companion will listen to me.
But then I'm not ever learning to work things out with my spouse.
Yeah. And I I it it's it's like anything. I mean, I
can see us going through the exact same fa same phase as pornography or anything else where it's kind of like you kind of
have a a certain group of say therapists that are going to say, "Sure, but you can use this a little bit to help you
get through problems with your spouse, right? You can rely on this a little bit to help keep you uh uh from from just
being mad all the time or um being disagreeable with your spouse if you use
this a little bit. I mean, you could just see this happening because you get this already in the therapy industry
where they're saying, "No, pornography can really help out your sex life and or it can really help you out if if uh um
you know, your wife isn't say putting out enough, whatever it is. It's like
it's it's going down the same track.
Yeah. And and to be clear, um I I think there are areas of life where these AI
um systems can be helpful for people. Um you know, mediation, for example, in therapy um settings in a very closed
monitored uh way, assessment uh help for clinicians. I think there's ways where
this technology could be used in positive ways. Um but like most things and like you said with pornography that's not what most people are doing.
Um you know it was interesting in the more recent study that we did we asked people you know what platforms are you using? Um and the most common one that
people are using for a romantic companion is just chat GBT right now which you know isn't specifically
designed for that. Uh but it's an open generative AI platform language predictive model that says okay this is
what you're looking for I'll I'll do it. Yeah. Yeah. And if you get the pro version on that, because I I use this
for writing and for for outlines for episodes and everything else, it's it's going to learn you. It's going to learn
you quickly and and it's uh it's going to do a very good job of it. And then it's going to produce again whatever you
want to hear, whatever is good for you. Yep. And going back to affirmation. Now, this is another thing that I find is
fascinating is is marriage and religion and how they're coupled. You know, we've always seen this in history. Marriage
has always been a religious institution. We get married still in chapels and
churches and temples etc. What does the data show about marriage outcomes
for those that are highly religious as compared to those that are non-religious over time?
Yeah. Um kind of like marriage has this kind of very robust positive effect that
we talked about. Religion is kind of the same way. Um, religion tends to be a very positive benefit in people's life
when it comes to to outcomes. Um, and in particular, uh, some of my colleagues have have really been looking into this
in the last five years. Um, they found that inhome worship is in particular really powerful. So, so being very
religious and engaging in inhome religious practices, you know, reading religious texts in the home, praying in
the home. Um, when people do that, they tend to have just positive benefits in their life in general. So when you kind
of um I guess I'll use a pun, marry those things, right? Where where now we're married and we're religious um you
tend to oftentimes get the most positive outcomes we see. That's generally what we see is that married religious couples
um tend to have just about the most positive a on average outcomes um in
their relationship, in their families, uh with their kids. Certainly there's exceptions to to that, but on average um
that's what we see. Um and one of the big reasons for that is a term that we call sanctification. Uh which is that
religious people tend to put divine significance to things in their life. And so when you pair that with marriage,
religious people oftentimes think of marriage in a divine way that marriage isn't just this relationship of
convenience. It has holier significance. Obviously in the temple that's a very clear example of that. Um and when
couples see that and they view their marriage in that way. Um, the big thing it tends to do that leads to a lot of
these positive outcomes is it's extremely motivational. I'm much more engaged in putting effort and motivation
into my relationship because I view this we put this in a Latter- Day Saint context. Um, in eternity I'm I'm with
this person with eternity. I I don't want to be unhappy for eternity. So that that's very motivational for me to work
out conflicts with my wife and to engage with her. not not uh even adding the
benefit of joint prayer, joint temple service together. Um those things just
create unity in a relationship that make everything else parenting etc just a lot easier.
Now you cite the Silverstein study where this is actually really seems really high to me but 90 97% of highly
religious men were married by the time they were in their mid-40s versus 65% of non-religious men. Now
you've talked a little bit here about some of the the the attributes of religiosity and how that might change and strengthen marriage. But I look
right now today at at at men that are in their 20s and their 30s. I don't think we're going to end up at 977%
marriage. The numbers seem to be so much higher of those that are not married yet. Um that it would be natural to
think that okay 97% might be pretty high for what they can expect we can expect as a society going into uh those men get
you know turning 40 say 45 years old. Um
what going along with that religion is
decreasing quite a bit in the west and and so if your religiosity is dropping
we already have a drop in marriage having a drop in religiosity isn't that
going to add to a drop in marriage as well oh yeah uh in fact this is where I start
talking to some of my students about marriage the word I I start using is endangered species. Uh there's there's a graph I I like to
show people when I I start to talk about some of these trends and the intersection with religiosity. Uh it's
just the sheer number of marriages in the United States, not the marriage rate, uh just the number of marriages in the United States. Um and typically
those kind of graphs, the reason we don't use those kind of raw numbers uh in demographic charts is because of
population increase. It just tends to go up no matter what happens. Might go up less or more, but tends to go up. um
that graph with marriages plateaued um in the early 2000s and has been decreasing ever since. And so marriage
is truly starting to not just be less and less popular. It's starting to go away. And a lot of that, like you said,
um is is the lack of of religious affiliation and religiosity because that ties back to what we said earlier about
norms. Uh as people get less religious, is marriage is a a a relationship of
choice? Uh oftentimes it's our religious institutions today that are kind of the last bastion of push towards any form of
institutional marriage. Meaning that hey, this is kind of expected. It's kind of what you're supposed to do. And so as
more and more people disengage from religious institutions, they're getting put into this larger secular culture uh
where marriage is kind of very much pushed into the the back burner. And the other piece to that is what we're
getting now, particularly in young adulthood, is more and more young adults that are professing religiosity. They're
saying, "I'm religious." They're saying, "I have this affiliation with faith." But back to inhome worship, when you
actually look at how they engage with their faith. You look at how they they approach their faith. um they're they're
coming at it from a very individualized perspective. Meaning they're approaching their religion saying, "I'm part of this
religious group, but I'm only going to take this 30% that I like." You I'm going to exercise the other 70%. Um, and
so now what's happening is you get more and more young adults that are are saying they're religious, but oftentimes
the one of the key things they're exercising is the religious or is the the marriage and dating norms and
saying, you know, for example, in the church I I'm a Latter-day Saint and and I I have a testimony of that and I go to
church every Sunday, but I really don't like when the prophets encourage us to get married. It kind of rubs me the
wrong way when they they make such a big deal about marriage being such a important thing. I don't I'm not sure
how I feel about the fact that you have to be married to get into the celestial kingdom. So, you get this kind of uh
it's what one of my colleagues coined congregations of one where they're kind of creating their own individualized
version of their religion. Um that I think it's just another thing that's that pushes dating and marriage on the
back burner. You know, you you've you said marriage is it fundamentally
changes who we are. I fully agree with that. Right. And it does it through sacrifice, right? you've got to stretch
yourself. Um, you have you you in the immediate now you have
issues like a spouse checking you on certain things, right? But what people
don't realize if they haven't gone through that is that yes, you go through that, but it is for your benefit
typically. I'm not saying in every situation I there's extremes and and things that don't work out well, but in
the most for the most part as far as your personality, the less selfish you are, the better human being you are. And
and and nothing does that better as kind of a lab for charity, right? Than than
than family does. Now this is something that is still taught I would say reduced
even in the church but in in religion more broadly it's still taught in that
regard. Uh is this message at all resonating or even produced outside of
religion? Um, I I think in in certain ways I think there's still a a general sense in in
Western culture, even with as much as we embrace individualism of kind of a broad
moral ethical code. Um, but I think oftentimes people struggle outside of religious settings because um that idea
of being a good person is immediately counterbalanced with but don't judge anyone for what they think is the right
thing. Um, and so I think a lot of young adults and adults have to kind of grapple with this idea of, okay, I you
know, we still believe in these kind of moral absolutes about murder, kidnapping and, you know, kindness and and
generosity, these kind of, you know, Aristotle type virtues. Um, but we also very much live in a culture that is one
of the worst things you could do is be judgmental. Um, or say that there is absolute truth because as soon as you
say there's absolute truth, then there is wrong in the world. and and and things become less relative. Um so I
think there's a lot of of struggle with that and I think even like I was saying within religious circles um that's
that's a struggle as well. Um, and and like you said, tying it back to marriage is uh in messaging is I I think it's
hard to to resonate some of these messages because in some ways it it almost feels like a fantasy to a lot of
young adults that this relationship that's going to be hard and is going to require sacrifice and and heartache and
is riserly risky because at any moment my spouse could decide to leave. um that
that experience could help me at a fundamental level
like you said be be a better person. One of my favorite graphs that I I I show people sometimes in marriage classes is
a math or it's a a graph about generosity and that and specifically the
generosity towards a person and it was called marital virtue that kind of develops in a relationship. And it's a
study that showed that when couples go through hardship and trials, losing a
child, losing a job, um you know, whatever it might be, when they have
developed this sense of generosity towards their spouse, their life satisfaction actually went up when they
went through a trial. And and people that lack that or were single didn't get that benefit. And and
and that's a hard thing to get people say, "Hey, by the way, being married in a in a strong, stable marriage, what
it's fundamentally going to do to you is that when you go through something hard in your life, it's going to actually
allow you, if you want to put this in gospel language, it's going to allow the refinement to actually take place. It's
going to help you refine yourself in a way because you have to navigate that
with another person that that sometimes is a lot harder when
you're just trying to do it by yourself. But that seems so abstract and and oftentimes you're talking about the
future and and you're talking to young adults that, like I said, are already so averse to trial and adversity in the
first place. It's like, okay, so you're you're telling me that the main pitch you have to marriage is that when I go
through hard things, it's going to be easier. I'm trying to avoid the hard things completely as it is. I don't want
anything to do with the hard things. So, I'm I'm going to try to stay in this single lane over here where my primary
goal is to avoid all possible hardship if I can, which is just going to make hardship
harder for you, right? There's no resilience that's built up in that case at all. There's nothing. It It's It's
like putting you in the uh the plastic box your whole life and never being
exposed to any kind of a bacteria or anything. It's your your emotional and
spiritual immune system is useless, right? Yeah.
In that type of a scenario. So, it's Yeah. That that is
that's concerning. That's that's really concerning. Now, you have called and are an advocate for pro-f family policies
being put into place. I've thought about this. I've brought up things before on the on the show on these types of
things. the big beautiful bill, all of its good and bad in there. One of them, I think, is a I don't know, it's
something small, a 200 or a $500 tax credit, I can't remember what it was, per child. But, uh, what type of
policies can be put in place to help support growth in families?
Yeah. Um, I I think there's there's obviously two big ones and and I'm not a
a financial policy expert, so I'm not going to even pretend to propose any specific legislation, but I I think the
principles are we have to at the the least not punish people for getting
married and having kids. I I I think that's a I don't think that's a good level to be at, but that that's a base
level to get at. uh whether it's tax rebates, whether it's other things is as soon as people look at getting married
and having kids as a as a net loss. Um that's a problem. Um I think we can do
better than that. Um I I think that governments can um and should look for
ways to incentivize families. Um, I always want to be careful with this because I don't think
financial incentive. I'm using the word incentive broadly because I'm not sure financial incentives are the the best or
only way to go. In fact, we can just look at Europe uh many Asian countries that are going through a fertility
crisis right now. They've primarily tried to use financial incentives uh to
deal with that and they've been complete failures. Hungary Hungary has really pushed this and it hasn't done very well.
Yeah. Um because people look at and say, "Well, you can give me, you know, a couple thousand dollars to have a kid,
but that doesn't give me my time back." Um and so I I think it goes beyond just
financial incentives. And we have to think more structurally, you know, back to something I said earlier about time with kids. Um are do we have policies in
place? And and this doesn't have to be federal policy or even state policy. This could be corporation, corporate
policy. Do we have policies in place that help people spend time with their families and kids, mom and dads alike?
Uh those could be leave policies. Those could be work family balance uh things. Um I I think we can think more broadly
about creating spaces for people to prioritize their family over other
things that they might need in in their their life. And part of that can be financial, part of that can be time
incentives. U I think another huge policy thing that's completely lacking is educational. Um, and I know as soon
as we talk about education, we get into some controversial territory of I don't want the government to tell me what I
should be teaching my kids about marriage or relationships. U, but I I I always find it fascinating. We spend so
much time teaching our teenagers, you know, financial literacy, how to drive a car, we have driver's ed, and we teach
them nothing about interpersonal skills. So, I'm not talking about relational education about the value of marriage or
pro-f family things that are going to, you know, have a lot of people fighting it. I'm talking about basic
communication skills, conflict resolution skills. Um, you know, maybe a little bit of the benefit of committed
relationships in marriage. Um, I think that's something that is completely missing um in in certainly United
States, in most parts of the world. Uh that can be another thing we can look at in terms of of of policies that can
start to to again even if it's not mandated incentivizing states incentivizing counties to say hey
if you put relationship education and offer it we can provide benefits for you to do that by by saying that you want to
help people have healthier relationships. Does the fertility rate bother you?
Yes. Um it it should bother everyone. Uh again, as I mentioned before, um
unfortunately in the United States, this is barely getting much attention. It's starting to get some attention. Um but
if you want to see where we're heading, look at uh Southern Europe, look at Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, u
look at the crisis that is starting to emerge in those countries, and you'll see where we're probably going to be in
10 or 15 years. Um I I hope we start talking about it more before we get to
that point, but it's it's it's something that that worries me a lot. Yeah. Yeah. I and I I've said this I'm
beating a dead horse here to my audience, but it is the number one temporal issue. I believe you can tie it
spiritually, but it's just even looking at it temporally. I think it is the number one temporal issue on earth right
now. I think it is very very concerning. But uh all right, wrapping up here.
If you could summarize your research, all your findings and and you're in class
speaking to a a group of of Zoomers, Gen Z, can you what how would you explain
things to them just opening up within like 60 seconds? Yeah. Um I think one you got to help
them see real quick. Marriage is good for you. Dating is good for you. But then acknowledge that it's scary. The
the two words I use at the beginning of every class that I teach on this is that confidence and awareness is what is
critical for young adults to develop. You have to be aware of what's happening around you, aware of the skills that are
needed to have healthy relationships and then build confidence in yourself to go out and be willing to be rejected. Um
when you do that and you use resources to build those things then then you don't have to worry that much. I think
that's the key message is, you know, two religious Latter-day Saints that marry in the temple and have a good education
and love each other, their divorce rate is, it's not zero, but it's pretty close.
Yeah, absolutely. Great. Great to hear, Brian. Really appreciate your time, your expertise, all your research and
findings on this. This is I hope that people really focus more and more on these numbers. the numbers are
overwhelmingly solid in terms of teaching us what is going on in our in the West especially
and down to the United States even in Utah right in your state the numbers the last numbers show that they they were
the largest drop in the fertility rate in the entire country and it's it's
concerning we we need to really take a look at these things but really appreciate your time and where can people find you where is your book
available um I've got two books the marriage paradox testimonial marriage. I believe both are available on Amazon. Um and uh
I've got a website at BYU. If you just search the school of family life and go to faculty directory, you can find me.
It's got all my research listed there. Awesome, Brian. Really appreciate it. Yeah, great to be on.
