> More free time is filled up increasingly by more work. Finding a partner and staying together takes a lot of time. This was my thought through the whole arti

> More free time is filled up increasingly by more work. Finding a partner and staying together takes a lot of time. This was my thought through the whole article. There's some value to the basic observation here - that this isn't purely a career decision - but everything after that feels like a false dichotomy. It's not just "having a kid means spending less time at the office, so I'll miss a promotion". It's "having a kid, and everything leading up to having a kid, is an enormous time sink that I can't sustain with the job I've already committed to". That's a standard explanation for the demographic issues of, say, Japan, but it somehow disappears when we're talking about professionals in the US - even though it's far more obvious than implying that career and dating are somehow opposing explanations.