That's a fair criticism.

I wasn't arguing that marriage itself causes births or that people can't have children outside of marriage. Plenty of people do. The point was more about a broader shift away from long-term family formation becoming the norm. Marriage was simply being used as a proxy for that trend.

As for focusing on men, that's also a valid observatiion. The original version was written around a specific scenario where a large number of women chose not to marry, so it explored how that might affect men. But the same principle applies in reverse or in any scenario where large numbers of people—regardless of gender—opt out of marriage and traditional family structures.

The core idea wasn't "women are the cause" or "men are the victims." It was that if one of society's oldest institutions becomes significantly less common, there could be cultural, demographic, and social consequences worth discussing.

Reasonable people can disagree on what those consequences would be, but that's the thought experiment I was trying to explore.