Charlie Calkins waited. He waited for the stars to align. He waited for the right woman to appear, for the perfect partner to materialize. None of it happened. So he improvised. He became a father anyway.

This is America in 2025: a country where men bypass marriage as if it were a tollbooth. Where fatherhood is recast as a consumer choice. Where children risk becoming accessories to adult ambition.

The real question facing modern masculinity isn’t how to become fathers without wives. It’s how to become men worthy of wives in the first place.

The Atlantic tells Calkins' story in its recent celebration of this trend , dressing it up as progress, as evolution, even as a solution to masculinity’s supposed crisis.

But it isn’t progress. If anything, it’s the very opposite.

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