William Costello

I just think we had very strict kind of, you know, stricter lines around role mates.

And it was people were happy to kind of live in that world, you know.

There's a really good book by a psychologist called Eli Finkel called The All or Nothing Marriage.

And it talks about how in recent decades, we've began to put such a high stakes on our marriages that we demand them to be all things.

Your partner must be sexually fulfilling to you.

Your best friend help you fulfill your potential.

All of it, all in one package.

Whereas for most of our ancestral history or in recent decades or recent centuries, your partner was a rolemate that you chose to go through life with.

There wasn't so many options to choose from in your city.

You didn't have access to the whole world on a dating app to choose from.

So it's a very, very evolutionary novel mating market we're in now and one we really need to think about.

I think you hit on some real accurate cultural forces and the kind of cultural rhetoric that's happening with the male default being what we're encouraging women to aspire to.

Every week you see this article about how much better life is for women not having been straddled with a family and things like this.

And it's just not clear to me that that goal is what women will want forever and always.

It might be throughout their 20s, but most women are equipped with evolved psychology to want to start a family.

So I'll give you some maybe folk wisdom from Mami Costello, my mother.

She raised three boys.

She didn't have any daughters, but she told me that if she had a daughter and she was facing this problem, she would advise her,

You can have it all, but not at the same time.

So for women, I think that's very important, is that this boss bitch energy, paper chasing throughout your 20s is running up against a ticking clock that people are kind of reluctant to talk about because it's seen as quite sexist to highlight that women have a narrow window to get their biological kind of needs met in terms of starting a family.