Love & Marriage: What Went Wrong? | Abigail Shrier, Suzy Weiss, and Larissa Phillips

Young people are lonelier than ever. According to an APA poll, 30 percent of 18-34-year-olds feel lonely every day or several times a week. Less than half of American households are headed by married couples, down from nearly 80 percent in 1949. Birth rates are cratering: We’re below replacement rate. And despite all the therapy—and we’re more therapized than ever—we are sad. Over 60 million Americans experienced mental illness in 2024, according to Mental Health America.

To get into all of the above, Suzy Weiss is sitting down with two FP writers—in fact, two of the most beloved women in the FP universe—who've been thinking deeply about these topics for many years.

Larissa Phillips is a writer who left the city to live on a farm with her family in upstate New YorkNY. She also founded the Volunteer Literacy Project, which teaches adults to read. Larissa has written for us on marriage, deciding to hang her American flag, being a wife, and killing chickens.

Abigail Shrier is with us, too. She is a journalist and the author of two incredible books, Bad Therapy and Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters— perhaps one of the more banned books of the past five years. She’s a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a lawyer, and she recently published a piece in The Free Press about what she learned about motherhood when her 6-year-old needed surgery.

Both of them are here today to talk about what we’ve lost and what we need to get back when it comes to all things love and culture.