HO YI JIAN sits in a trendy café in Kuala Lumpur, swiping through images of single women on Tinder, a dating app created by millennials. On the balcony outside, models in Islamic headscarves are taking part in a fashion shoot.
Malaysia, like much of the world, is a confusing mixture of piety and tradition on the one hand and secular individualism on the other. In the countryside sharia courts sentence adulterers to canings. City people are more liberal. Mr Ho, who works from home as a freelance researcher, uses his smartphone to find single women who live nearby. But he observes that unlike Westerners, Malaysians use the app to arrange dates, not hook-ups.
Young people’s experience of sex, love and marriage is undergoing gigantic shifts. The most visible one is that dating apps allow them to fish in a larger pond than their parents did. Three other trends are less obvious but more important. First, puritanical attitudes to sex (and the variety of human yearnings) are mostly in retreat. Second, marriage is evolving from a contract between families into a contract between individuals. And third, couples are having fewer children, later.
In some parts of the world the traditional approach to all these things remains dominant. Sex before marriage is still frowned upon or even outlawed. Gay people are persecuted. Marriages are arranged between families, sometimes without the bride’s (or, less commonly, the groom’s) consent. Women give birth early and often.
Consider the story of Aisha Abdullai. She lives in north-east Nigeria, where women have on average 6.3 babies. Ms Abdullai was forced to marry young. “My stepmother did not like me,” she recalls, “so they thought it was better to marry me off. He was 50 and I was 13. I kept running away but they brought me back to him. He was lying with me when I was 13. I didn’t start my period until I was 14, and at 15 I got pregnant.” Her education ended abruptly. She spent all day cooking, cleaning and caring for her stepchildren.
Her husband eventually divorced her for refusing to sleep with him any more. Her child died. Her parents made her marry another man, with whom she had two more children. His family did not like her and he, too, divorced her. She is angry at her parents for making her marry men she disliked. Had she remained in school, she says, she “could have done something” with her life. She is 28.
Not now, darling
Stories like Ms Abdullai’s are growing rarer. The proportion of young women who married before they were 15 fell from 12% worldwide in 1985 to 8% in 2010, according to UNICEF. The share who wed before their 18th birthday fell from 33% to 26%. Women are becoming more educated, which makes them less likely to put up with forced or early marriages.
Arranged unions are declining, too. At the beginning of the 20th century at least 72% of marriages in Asia and Africa were arranged by the families. That figure has fallen by 40% or more, estimates Gabriela Rubio of the University of California, Los Angeles. In some countries, such as China, Japan and Indonesia, they have all but vanished. “It’s my marriage, not my family’s,” says Lu Xinyan, a Chinese student.
In other places, such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, arranged marriages (defined broadly) are still at least 95% of the total. But they are evolving. In India, parents used to suggest a suitable match and their children could say no. Now, at least among educated urbanites, the children are more likely to find their own partners, whom the parents may veto. This is not yet Western-style individualism, but it is a big step towards it.
An argument often advanced for arranged marriages is that parents can make a more clear-headed choice, unfogged by lust, so they can filter out the charming drunkard or the selfish beauty. Yet the institution has always had an economic rationale, too. Marriages cement ties between families. This can act as a kind of insurance, Ms Rubio argues. If one family raises pigs and the other grows rice, the pig farmers can help the rice-growers in years when the rice crop fails, and vice versa.
As societies grow richer, the calculation changes. Economic security comes from staying longer in school, not forming alliances with pig farmers. So young people are marrying later, in order to complete their own education, and having fewer children, so they can lavish more education on each of them.
A preference for smaller families has taken hold nearly everywhere, even in poorer countries. The global fertility rate has halved since 1960, from five babies per woman to 2.5. The pressure to educate children is bound to intensify further as technology advances, so families will keep getting smaller. “I’d like to have two children eventually. I’m not sure I could afford more and still give them a good education,” says Hiqmar Danial, a student in Malaysia, where the fertility rate has fallen from six to two since 1960.
The spread of liberal attitudes to love and marriage empowers individuals, especially young women, but it causes its own complications. One is the increasing fragility of the nuclear family, especially in the rich world. The proportion of children born outside marriage in OECD countries tripled between 1980 and 2007, from 11% to 33%, and divorce rates doubled between 1970 and 2009. Many women can now walk out of disagreeable or abusive marriages, so men have to treat their wives better. But the lack of a stable family can be disastrous for children. Those who do not live with two biological parents do worse at school, earn less as adults and raise less stable families of their own. In rich countries, working-class families have grown far more fissile than middle-class ones. Only 9% of births to American women with college degrees are outside marriage; for high-school dropouts the figure is 57%.
The most educated and ambitious couples delay having children the longest. Some leave it too late and find they cannot have any. The only way for young women to combine high-powered careers with parenthood is for men to share domestic tasks equally, says Cristina Fonseca, the young founder of Talkdesk, the Portuguese technology firm. Men her age, she explains, “are clearly adapting. They cook and do laundry.” Surveys bear this out. American fathers who live with their kids do 2.6 times as much child care and housework as they did in 1965, according to the Pew Research Centre.
Some scholars fret that young Westerners are so self-absorbed that they find parenting harder than their own parents did. Keith Campbell, Craig Foster and Jean Twenge analysed data from 48,000 respondents and found that once children arrive, young American couples today suffer a greater drop in marital satisfaction than previous generations did. “When you’re used to calling the shots, and then the baby dictates everything, it’s hard to keep your sanity, much less get along with your spouse,” writes Ms Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University.
Another possibility is that middle-class parents are stressed because they set themselves such high standards. They invest more time in their children than their own parents did, shuttling them to extra maths and flute lessons in the hope that they will get into a good university. Bryan Caplan, the author of “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids”, argues that middle-class parents in rich countries would be happier, and do their children no harm, if they let them run wild a bit more.
This article appeared in the Special report section of the print edition under the headline "Smaller, smarter families"
From the January 23rd 2016 edition
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