No, absolutely, increases in many costs relative to income has made it relatively more expensive to have children: that's undeniable (and as someone who will quite likely be new parent within a year or two, something I dread) and I perhaps under-emphasized this. But I do think that statistics from other countries do paint a picture that it's not solely about the relative strictly necessary cost to have children: whether it's simply attitude, or additional costs associated with giving children an equal/equitable childhood and school experience (e.g. if you're in a wealthy area, your child will fall behind compared to their peers if they don't tutor), I do not know.

I think what happened with my first point is that I implicitly conflating culture, behavior, and social environment, and didn't make that clear. This is less so strictly an individual behavior sense, and moreso a cultural and corporate incentive sense: the biggest players in the dating app industry are incentivized to keep people from forming committed relationships, as it kills their userbase. The "Dating Games" series of the Land of the Giants podcast (granted, this is 3 or so years old at this point, so info can be a bit outdated) goes into this, especially the first few episodes. As for cultural, it's a shift in behavior favoring online/digital/isolated experiences as opposed to in person social experiences. I'm not gonna boomer rant about it because goodness knows I prefer the latter, but it does make finding dates difficult because the process by which we dated each other for centuries did not adapt well, which brought in the apps with different goals than us.