Something that Matt didn't mention, which Bryan alluded to with the Mormon comment:
What is Matt's faith? If he is Christian, then seeking a wife through the church is a great option, and you're more likely to find a woman there who is open to a large family. The same is likely true in other religious communities, though I don't claim to know as much about them (I am Christian myself).
If Matt is secular and looking for a secular wife, that could be tough. My understanding (please correct if wrong) is that secular women who want large families are pretty rare.
Edit: But maybe Mrs. Caplan would have a good idea of where to find them?
I'm confused about the part where he prioritizes willingness to have a large family, mindfulness, socialness, and generosity... and then later mentions it's hard to find "economically literate, open-minded libertarian women" on dating sites.
This sounds like too many criteria; if anything I'd expect that (in women who expect to be doing most of the child-related work) interest in raising lots of kids will be anti-correlated with interest in economics and libertarianism.
So my wife and I originally wanted more children, but health conditions have limited us to 1.
It's better to have a wife you love and 1-2 kids then run the very real risk of having no wife and no kids or a wife you don't really like and 5 kids.
Also, if you have had dozens of dates in 3 years it seems you have not had a long term relationship, which is much different than dating.
I would reset my expectations. 1. Find a woman you love who wants kids. 2. Maintain a long term relationship of 2 years to see if marriage is viable.
This is likely more difficult than you expect. You might get close and fail once or twice.
Once you have obtained this, I think you will find your life will be full of meaning and happiness regardless of the exact number of kids you two decide to have.
This seems like a very reasonable question to me. Thoughts:
1. An advantage to online dating is that you could put "wants 3 or more kids" right in your profile. This could save you a lot of headaches. If women don't want kids, that info is public. If you meet a woman the old fashioned way, then it might be awkward to bring up that fact until you've gone on many dates.
2. Would this man be willing to be a stay-at-home dad? Does he specifically want his wife to be the primary care giver and not work? Might be worth clarifying that.
3. "high in extraversion, fairly low in conscientiousness" seems like a red flag. Is he low in the ability to stay home and read "Cat in the Hat" over again for several years straight with a good attitude? Does he, really, want to raise more than two kids? He should find a program for young children that will let him volunteer. (Besides wouldn't that sound cute to tell women on dates?) My husband and I did volunteer work once a week in a 3-y-o classroom for a while before we had our first kid.
The obvious answer is "At church." (Or synagogue, etc.) If Matt is seeking an atheist wife who wants many children, he is seeking a rare personality indeed. If a large family is extremely important to him and he is currently secular, he could convert. Just as "rationality meetups" have more men than women attending, churches often have more women than men in attendance -- and those women are much more likely to want marriage and large families. Conversion not only opens up many more marriage options but provides a community for any future children that teaches morals and pronatalist values, and a lot of research shows that religious people are happier, healthier, more likely to act ethically, and live longer. Of course, remaining secular may be more important to him than having a big family. But if he's open to joining a religious community (and doing so *genuinely* -- I wouldn't advise living a lie), he will have a much easier time finding a wife who shares his dream of a large family.
One doesn't have to go "Full PUA" to point out that most people commenting here are using a ... less than perfectly complete and accurate ... model of how procreative outcomes come about. One need not limit oneself to scenarios of trying to find single women who are already committed to having lots of kids. Most who could end up having lots of kids eventually don't think that will be true when they're younger, and have good reason to hesitate before setting inflexible rare goals. Women change their minds about such things as they mature, often in completely radical ways, constantly remarking, "if you would have asked me 20 years ago if I would X, I would have never thought so in a million years." If you believe in something to your core, live your beliefs with conspicuous passion and insistence, filter your social scene to be reinforcing of those attitudes, then people will follow your lead, embrace that outlook, and enjoy doing so without even noticing it, coming up with retroactive rationalizations for how they changed their mind on their own or something.
First match up with someone with a compatible personality and of the best quality you can muster. Then worry about moving along that path together. Like dancing, you are better at leading than you think which you'd realize if you practiced more, and if you do, most will happily follow.
A useful advice is to invest (time, effort, called favors and/or money) into a great dating profile. Many men have awful profiles. Many more have decent profiles, but online dating has a winner-takes-it-all dynamic and you want your profile to be great. Trying to date online with a 5/10 profile is like chopping down a tree with a blunt axe.
A great profile is usually all about the pics. Going from having decent pics to having great pics makes a huge difference in results (no matter if you're ugly, average or top 1% in appearance). Many men seem to have a strategy when creating a profile that's "I'll go through my phone and pic all the pics where I look decent": this doesn't work. You want to do dedicated photoshoots with a friend who has decent photo skills (or a pro).
Here's a non-exhaustive list of typical mistakes I see again and again in male online dating pics: selfies, sunglasses, pics without the person in them, group pics with focus on someone else, way too many pics (six is more than enough for tinder), bad grooming (especially beards), bad angles (camera too high or low, facing away from camera), bad light (strong sunlight, backlight or indoor light), bad cropping (top of head missing, too much of the torso remains in a portrait), bad style (hoodies on grown men, random t-shirts, shorts and ankle socks, backpacks), bad posing (slouching, effeminate poses, hands in pockets, squinting), no attraction (looking too friendly/"nice guy" and not anything else), signaling nerd interests with bad gender ratios (if you pose with a Warcraft orc, women will think you 're filtering for a partner who likes Warcraft).
To readers: PM me a link to your profile and I'll review it for you. (I won't share your info or pics with anyone, it's free, I won't try to sell you anything.)
If you want more than three kids: Do it the Bryan Caplan way: "Put in ten times the effort"; ie: Do every nightshift with every baby - show her you're for real! (I did less than 1%). Though I have no idea how this is possible for a man. When we met in Hanover, I forgot to ask Mrs. Caplan, if that claim is somehow true. ;)
Serious question for Matt: are you willing to be the primary caregiver for your children? Most women, especially educated women, prefer to work as well as have children, and most men don't pull their weight, so if you want an intelligent woman who wants kids you're going to need to demonstrate that you're willing to do* at least* half of the childcare effort.
As many other commenters have said, the easiest place to meet such women is in a church. Churches are very enriched for people who want multiple children.
If the person requesting advice is a Christian, then it's as simple as that. If, however, they are a young nerdy atheist, and this seems very possible given their interest in Bryan's work, you have to recognize that a very small number of young nerdy atheists also want a lot of children.
If the group of people most like you is very unlikely to want children, it seems inevitable that you're going to have to look outside that group. You will need to think about how far outside that group you're comfortable looking. There are lots of people who are culturally or nominally Christian and have some of those values without strongly identifying with the belief system. You could consider going to a more progressive or agnostic-friendly church, where such people are more likely to be found and where you aren't as likely to be pressured to live a Christian lifestyle or have Christian beliefs.
Now, I suspect that some very progressive churches (e.g. UUA) will actually not have that many people who want several kids, but there's a sweet spot, perhaps some more moderate mainline Protestant denominations , perhaps some Catholic churches, and even some anabaptist groups (e.g. progressive mennonites). I don't have first-hand experience of all these different flavors of Christianity, so take this with a grain of salt. There are also some non-denominational evangelical churches that are very friendly to people who are skeptical of literalist readings of the Bible. In a city the size of Chicago, you can probably find a church that is sufficiently conservative to be full of people with traditional childrearing mores, but sufficiently liberal to be okay with your non-belief.
Walt Bismarck has an interesting take on this. According to him, promiscuous liberal women sometimes reemerge as Tradwives as they settle down with a high status man. The logic here is that high status men value promiscuity in women, but when they marry, they prefer a trophy wife or Tradwife rather than a woman with a successful career (Walt also notes how conservative women could be less feminine and more career focused due to "modesty").
The caveat here is that the high status man needs to be able to provide the Tradwife a glamorous lifestyle, including hiring help (nanny and cleaner), as being a stay-at-home mom while "cleaning poop and puke all day" is not glamorous at all.
I don't have much experience with high status people living in arrangements like that, however the majority of women in my slightly-upper-middle class social circle are both conservative and career-focused and therefore don't want many children.
1) Choose a co-ed peer group that prizes big families and spend time with them. You are choosing a peer group and not a girl at first, you will later find the girl within the peer group.
2) Preemptively move to a part of the country where you would want to raise your large family. Obviously, this must be balanced against other factors, but note that relocation is never easier then when you are young an unattached.
3) See if you can find a woman that has already frozen her eggs. Failing that, one that is at least strongly interested in doing so.
Concurrent, freeze some of your own sperm. The at-home kits make this easy and relatively cheap (an HSA will pay for it). This is obviously easier for you to do later then egg freezing, but why not get it done now.
It is highly unlikely that you will want to conceive natural children in the future. Any rational person will want to do IVF and embryo selection. I would make sure you find a girl that sees eye to eye on that (this doesn't necessarily rule out Christian conservatives, only a small % are really against IVF).
Lol, father of 5 here (my wife has just 3), I am right now looking for a German friend to find a spouse (an "international" one, obviously; the money he spent on German "parship" did not help). My findings: 1: Obviously, okc is no longer the wonderful option it once was. If you do not enjoy paying: don't do it. If you pay, it may be fine, still very international 2. Pinalove and thaifriendly seem to be one company, both offer free messages "every 10 minutes". And you can write your (dating) whatsapp in the profile. I found him a few ladies who do live in Europe. (most who put "Germany" do NOT live there, I presume it is same for "USA" - but they are all very willing to relocate: "else I'd use another app"!). Most want kids! And how many it will be, will depend much on circumstances: her age, her job-prospects (may be worse for her if you move to her place, thus more kids are more likely), your age + 'how many free bedrooms' can be an important limiting factor! And "I would like 2, maybe 3 or more" is a much better opening than "5 at least". - And yes, go south if you speak Spanish! Look for math-teachers ;) they are always the loneliest. And your kids will be smarter.
Something that Matt didn't mention, which Bryan alluded to with the Mormon comment:
What is Matt's faith? If he is Christian, then seeking a wife through the church is a great option, and you're more likely to find a woman there who is open to a large family. The same is likely true in other religious communities, though I don't claim to know as much about them (I am Christian myself).
If Matt is secular and looking for a secular wife, that could be tough. My understanding (please correct if wrong) is that secular women who want large families are pretty rare.
Edit: But maybe Mrs. Caplan would have a good idea of where to find them?
I'm confused about the part where he prioritizes willingness to have a large family, mindfulness, socialness, and generosity... and then later mentions it's hard to find "economically literate, open-minded libertarian women" on dating sites.
This sounds like too many criteria; if anything I'd expect that (in women who expect to be doing most of the child-related work) interest in raising lots of kids will be anti-correlated with interest in economics and libertarianism.
So my wife and I originally wanted more children, but health conditions have limited us to 1.
It's better to have a wife you love and 1-2 kids then run the very real risk of having no wife and no kids or a wife you don't really like and 5 kids.
Also, if you have had dozens of dates in 3 years it seems you have not had a long term relationship, which is much different than dating.
I would reset my expectations. 1. Find a woman you love who wants kids. 2. Maintain a long term relationship of 2 years to see if marriage is viable.
This is likely more difficult than you expect. You might get close and fail once or twice.
Once you have obtained this, I think you will find your life will be full of meaning and happiness regardless of the exact number of kids you two decide to have.
This seems like a very reasonable question to me. Thoughts:
1. An advantage to online dating is that you could put "wants 3 or more kids" right in your profile. This could save you a lot of headaches. If women don't want kids, that info is public. If you meet a woman the old fashioned way, then it might be awkward to bring up that fact until you've gone on many dates.
2. Would this man be willing to be a stay-at-home dad? Does he specifically want his wife to be the primary care giver and not work? Might be worth clarifying that.
3. "high in extraversion, fairly low in conscientiousness" seems like a red flag. Is he low in the ability to stay home and read "Cat in the Hat" over again for several years straight with a good attitude? Does he, really, want to raise more than two kids? He should find a program for young children that will let him volunteer. (Besides wouldn't that sound cute to tell women on dates?) My husband and I did volunteer work once a week in a 3-y-o classroom for a while before we had our first kid.
The obvious answer is "At church." (Or synagogue, etc.) If Matt is seeking an atheist wife who wants many children, he is seeking a rare personality indeed. If a large family is extremely important to him and he is currently secular, he could convert. Just as "rationality meetups" have more men than women attending, churches often have more women than men in attendance -- and those women are much more likely to want marriage and large families. Conversion not only opens up many more marriage options but provides a community for any future children that teaches morals and pronatalist values, and a lot of research shows that religious people are happier, healthier, more likely to act ethically, and live longer. Of course, remaining secular may be more important to him than having a big family. But if he's open to joining a religious community (and doing so *genuinely* -- I wouldn't advise living a lie), he will have a much easier time finding a wife who shares his dream of a large family.
One doesn't have to go "Full PUA" to point out that most people commenting here are using a ... less than perfectly complete and accurate ... model of how procreative outcomes come about. One need not limit oneself to scenarios of trying to find single women who are already committed to having lots of kids. Most who could end up having lots of kids eventually don't think that will be true when they're younger, and have good reason to hesitate before setting inflexible rare goals. Women change their minds about such things as they mature, often in completely radical ways, constantly remarking, "if you would have asked me 20 years ago if I would X, I would have never thought so in a million years." If you believe in something to your core, live your beliefs with conspicuous passion and insistence, filter your social scene to be reinforcing of those attitudes, then people will follow your lead, embrace that outlook, and enjoy doing so without even noticing it, coming up with retroactive rationalizations for how they changed their mind on their own or something.
First match up with someone with a compatible personality and of the best quality you can muster. Then worry about moving along that path together. Like dancing, you are better at leading than you think which you'd realize if you practiced more, and if you do, most will happily follow.
I found the "fairly low in conscientiousness" somewhat troubling. I wonder if that has anything to do with his lack of success.
A useful advice is to invest (time, effort, called favors and/or money) into a great dating profile. Many men have awful profiles. Many more have decent profiles, but online dating has a winner-takes-it-all dynamic and you want your profile to be great. Trying to date online with a 5/10 profile is like chopping down a tree with a blunt axe.
A great profile is usually all about the pics. Going from having decent pics to having great pics makes a huge difference in results (no matter if you're ugly, average or top 1% in appearance). Many men seem to have a strategy when creating a profile that's "I'll go through my phone and pic all the pics where I look decent": this doesn't work. You want to do dedicated photoshoots with a friend who has decent photo skills (or a pro).
Here's a non-exhaustive list of typical mistakes I see again and again in male online dating pics: selfies, sunglasses, pics without the person in them, group pics with focus on someone else, way too many pics (six is more than enough for tinder), bad grooming (especially beards), bad angles (camera too high or low, facing away from camera), bad light (strong sunlight, backlight or indoor light), bad cropping (top of head missing, too much of the torso remains in a portrait), bad style (hoodies on grown men, random t-shirts, shorts and ankle socks, backpacks), bad posing (slouching, effeminate poses, hands in pockets, squinting), no attraction (looking too friendly/"nice guy" and not anything else), signaling nerd interests with bad gender ratios (if you pose with a Warcraft orc, women will think you 're filtering for a partner who likes Warcraft).
To readers: PM me a link to your profile and I'll review it for you. (I won't share your info or pics with anyone, it's free, I won't try to sell you anything.)
If you want more than three kids: Do it the Bryan Caplan way: "Put in ten times the effort"; ie: Do every nightshift with every baby - show her you're for real! (I did less than 1%). Though I have no idea how this is possible for a man. When we met in Hanover, I forgot to ask Mrs. Caplan, if that claim is somehow true. ;)
That was my first thought. At my church 3+ kids is very common. We are unusual (but not so unusual as to be an outlier) with only 1 kid.
Edit: this was meant to be a reply to Edmund.
Serious question for Matt: are you willing to be the primary caregiver for your children? Most women, especially educated women, prefer to work as well as have children, and most men don't pull their weight, so if you want an intelligent woman who wants kids you're going to need to demonstrate that you're willing to do* at least* half of the childcare effort.
As many other commenters have said, the easiest place to meet such women is in a church. Churches are very enriched for people who want multiple children.
If the person requesting advice is a Christian, then it's as simple as that. If, however, they are a young nerdy atheist, and this seems very possible given their interest in Bryan's work, you have to recognize that a very small number of young nerdy atheists also want a lot of children.
If the group of people most like you is very unlikely to want children, it seems inevitable that you're going to have to look outside that group. You will need to think about how far outside that group you're comfortable looking. There are lots of people who are culturally or nominally Christian and have some of those values without strongly identifying with the belief system. You could consider going to a more progressive or agnostic-friendly church, where such people are more likely to be found and where you aren't as likely to be pressured to live a Christian lifestyle or have Christian beliefs.
Now, I suspect that some very progressive churches (e.g. UUA) will actually not have that many people who want several kids, but there's a sweet spot, perhaps some more moderate mainline Protestant denominations , perhaps some Catholic churches, and even some anabaptist groups (e.g. progressive mennonites). I don't have first-hand experience of all these different flavors of Christianity, so take this with a grain of salt. There are also some non-denominational evangelical churches that are very friendly to people who are skeptical of literalist readings of the Bible. In a city the size of Chicago, you can probably find a church that is sufficiently conservative to be full of people with traditional childrearing mores, but sufficiently liberal to be okay with your non-belief.
Walt Bismarck has an interesting take on this. According to him, promiscuous liberal women sometimes reemerge as Tradwives as they settle down with a high status man. The logic here is that high status men value promiscuity in women, but when they marry, they prefer a trophy wife or Tradwife rather than a woman with a successful career (Walt also notes how conservative women could be less feminine and more career focused due to "modesty").
The caveat here is that the high status man needs to be able to provide the Tradwife a glamorous lifestyle, including hiring help (nanny and cleaner), as being a stay-at-home mom while "cleaning poop and puke all day" is not glamorous at all.
I don't have much experience with high status people living in arrangements like that, however the majority of women in my slightly-upper-middle class social circle are both conservative and career-focused and therefore don't want many children.
See Walt's original post here for more: https://newaltright.substack.com/p/stop-being-mean-to-slutty-women
1) Choose a co-ed peer group that prizes big families and spend time with them. You are choosing a peer group and not a girl at first, you will later find the girl within the peer group.
2) Preemptively move to a part of the country where you would want to raise your large family. Obviously, this must be balanced against other factors, but note that relocation is never easier then when you are young an unattached.
3) See if you can find a woman that has already frozen her eggs. Failing that, one that is at least strongly interested in doing so.
Concurrent, freeze some of your own sperm. The at-home kits make this easy and relatively cheap (an HSA will pay for it). This is obviously easier for you to do later then egg freezing, but why not get it done now.
It is highly unlikely that you will want to conceive natural children in the future. Any rational person will want to do IVF and embryo selection. I would make sure you find a girl that sees eye to eye on that (this doesn't necessarily rule out Christian conservatives, only a small % are really against IVF).
Lol, father of 5 here (my wife has just 3), I am right now looking for a German friend to find a spouse (an "international" one, obviously; the money he spent on German "parship" did not help). My findings: 1: Obviously, okc is no longer the wonderful option it once was. If you do not enjoy paying: don't do it. If you pay, it may be fine, still very international 2. Pinalove and thaifriendly seem to be one company, both offer free messages "every 10 minutes". And you can write your (dating) whatsapp in the profile. I found him a few ladies who do live in Europe. (most who put "Germany" do NOT live there, I presume it is same for "USA" - but they are all very willing to relocate: "else I'd use another app"!). Most want kids! And how many it will be, will depend much on circumstances: her age, her job-prospects (may be worse for her if you move to her place, thus more kids are more likely), your age + 'how many free bedrooms' can be an important limiting factor! And "I would like 2, maybe 3 or more" is a much better opening than "5 at least". - And yes, go south if you speak Spanish! Look for math-teachers ;) they are always the loneliest. And your kids will be smarter.
“Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth” by Catherine Pakaluk
https://www.regnery.com/9781684514571/hannahs-children/
Great interview here: https://www.louiseperry.co.uk/p/five-children-or-more-catherine-pakaluk