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Notes -
This is called "conditions that existed in the late 1950s US".
TFR was 3.0.
Teenage pregnancies were at an all-time high.
Graduating high school qualified you for the vast majority of jobs; heck, even passing grade 10 was enough.
People intermingled enough in sufficiently popular third spaces that there probably was someone there for you.
Effective contraceptives existed (the Pill was a late-50s invention).
The truth doesn't actually care whether or not you believe it.
Capital gender now has to compete with the wirehead, and labor gender has more freedom (from capital gender- female but empowered by a smaller male fraction) when wearing it. Monthly wage pays rent (or a mortgage), buys food and utilities, and keeps the wirehead running. The fact that the labor gender are sufficiently satisfied by this arrangement to just do it until they're dead may be an inherent problem with the labor gender... but it's a problem only the capital gender can ultimately solve. And being capital, they won't.
(For the record, I think a low TFR is neither unexpected nor undesirable- technology combined with our current social edifice means that very few people are required to run it, and the resultant economic forces are doing the rest. The wireheading and the general hostility of the parties doesn't help, but as TFR in the 20s and 30s was running down close to 2 neither is required for this to happen- not that the first thing women did after getting the franchise in the US was "destroy the most popular male third space", but I'm sure that was a one-off and not indicative of how political interactions between men and women in similar economic circumstances were going to go 100 years down the line.)
And do those conditions remain, today? How many couples can afford to have a non-working outside the home member? People make economic decisions based on what they would like, and what they can get. Mortgages for houses generally assume a dual-income couple. Renting is a problem as well (see housing shortages, space for kids, etc.) The cost of living requires that there is some kind of income stream from both spouses, which often leads to the ridiculous result that the wife's earnings largely go on paying for childcare so that she is free to work.
In some ways, I'd have no objections about going back to the 50s or 60s. But you can't stuff all women in a time machine and send them back, while leaving men in 2023. Both together, or not at all, else we won't fix anything and we'll be back at the 50s tradition also of men wanting to sow their wild oats before getting baby-trapped into marriage. Look, for example, at the 1960 movie (so right on the cusp of the turnover of the decade) The Apartment: it's described as a "romantic comedy" but what's so romantic about the premise? men will cheat on their wives because marriage is boring and dull:
The "romantic" part is that the characters played by Lemmon and MacLaine end up together, but what kind of augury is the rest of the movie for their marriage? Now he's one of those execs who want a bit on the side for some excitement, and she will either be the boring housewife who let herself go after marriage (so he's justified in having an affair) or she will cheat herself, given that she already has been engaged in adultery before marriage. The ending message tries to be "true love wins" but the rest of the time has been undercutting the very idea of marriage and fidelity: nearly all the men in it are adulterers, and the image of the "swinging playboy lifestyle" is what will be promulgated in the new decade.
And here we are after the Sexual Revolution, and I wish you well of it.
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