My college son has an answer: Guys and girls his age tend to separate along political and religious affiliations and this dynamic leads to fewer social engagements and meeting of minds and hearts.

He offered this insight when I asked why young people are reportedly having less premarital sex (which is good), getting married later or not at all, and having children well below population replacement levels. The question was prompted by an email that had just come to me from the Institute for Family Studies, which cited a study that found, for the first time, more teen girls than boys were not expecting to get married.

My son suggested that guys and girls are still interested in sexual relations, but there are other things to potentially divert their interest and energy, such as career pursuits, financial security, social media connections and expressions, bodily autonomy, psychological security, and political stances and advocacy.

He expressed this view in such a matter-of-fact way that I felt my wife and I had failed to prepare him to face all these competing values to marriage and family. But he lives and swims in that 20-something atmosphere and was surprised that I didn’t know all these trends. He didn’t say, “OK, Boomer!” but he might well have.

Born at the tail-end of the Baby Boom, I came of age during the height of the Sexual Revolution, when amped-up appeals for sex, drugs and rock-and-roll were intermixed with evening news images of the Vietnam war and campus riots. I turned 12 during the 1969 “Summer of Love,” old enough to see what was going on, yet too young to be directly involved, and I viewed the Woodstock rock gathering as a muddy mess of self-important young folks who thought the world revolved around them.

Still, I admired some unmistakable attributes of the crowd—they had life, ideas, ideals and energy, despite how misguided they may have been. They put the motto, “Make Love, Not War,” into rather graphic action with a natural human passion that struck me as admirable at my still-innocent age. The Woodstock anthem by Joni Mitchell expressed a strain of Edenic longing:

We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.

The song is rife with other religious imagery from the “child of God” walking the road to the dangers of a “devil’s bargain.”

Such idealism, energy and religious idioms were infectious to one just beginning to brim with social and sexual interest, and I was fortunate to take these attributes to heart and not the more self-centered views of what would soon be called the Me Generation.

So now, as a Medicare-eligible, still fulltime working father of two sons, I look at the young folks and wonder. There may be idealism, there may be energy, there certainly are Edenic longings that surface in every generation—but where is the natural human passion that a generation needs in order to, well, regenerate itself?

Along with most nations in the West, the United States is no longer reproducing at replacement levels. This indicates a demographic cliff on the horizon, for sure. But more deeply, it is a red flag about the spiritual, emotional and moral state of the younger generations.

Who would have predicted in 1968, when we were warned about The Population Bomb of too many people inhabiting the earth, that the farthest-reaching result of the Sexual Revolution, some 60 years down the road, would be a demographic implosion rather than explosion?

Not to jump on the popular bandwagon of blaming Boomers for everything wrong in our society, but it does seem that the inward-looking, self-serving, pleasure-seeking aspects of the Sexual Revolution are the reason for the current malaise.

Predictably, the sexual energy and idealism of the ‘60s sputtered out when it failed to connect to the deeper values of human nature and longing. The positive elements of the revolution were swallowed up by the contraceptive pill and abortion on demand that swept society in the ‘70s, along with a radical feminist agenda. Decades of school-based “safe sex” classes have reduced what was once a rich mystery of love to a sterile piece of curriculum.

There is a natural context for sex. Separated from marriage and babies, it cannot sustain for long the interest of men and women. It becomes another commodity in the marketplace of pleasures, pursuits, and personal fulfillments with which young people are bombarded today. And in our age of online gratification and pseudo identities and affiliations, male-female relationships bring with them the burden of face-to-face time, making plans, and putting up with a host of give-and-takes involved in dating and wooing.

It may be true that guys and girls are going in different directions on a number of issues, but, to be fair, that’s been the case since Adam and Eve. There used to be a basic sexual instinct and social expectation to overcome the Venus/Mars dichotomy and drive men and women to come together toward love, marriage, and the baby carriage.

Maybe it’s my Boomer perspective, but I still have hope that things will change through another basic human instinct—the rebellion of the young against the status quo.