February brings Valentine’s Day, and the Christian writer whose advice 21 years ago left lots of valentines unsent has revised his thinking.

Kenneth Ly sat on the couch with his girlfriend, watching Courageous with her, but his mind wasn’t on the movie. It was on his arm, which was down by his side but itching to slide across his girlfriend’s shoulders. Ly had been courting Katie for about five months, but still hadn’t dared touch her. Then three older men separately advised him to pursue her physically—some physical affection need not be sexual, they assured him.

Australians have voted in favor of same-sex marriage in a postal survey that could lead to legal reforms before the end of the year. Australia’s Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday announced 61.6 percent of voters supported same-sex marriage, while 38.4 percent voted against it. Nearly 80 percent of more than 16 million registered voters cast ballots in the mail-in referendum. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called on lawmakers to heed the “overwhelming” result and commit to pass a same-sex marriage bill by next month.

The price of sex has plummeted, throwing the “mating market” into a tizzy, according to Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus.

“It turns out that a world in which it is possible to satisfy our sexual desires much more immediately carries with it a number of unhappy and unintended consequences,” wrote Regnerus, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, in a Wall Street Journal editorial.

I was 16 when I first saw the cover of I Kissed Dating Goodbye—that picture of a man looking down, his hand tilting a brown fedora and obscuring his facial features, that dark background adding shades of allure to an already-enigmatic man. That’s real good marketing, I remember thinking. Every girl likes a man with some mystery shrouding him, and boys probably look at that suave, dapper man and want to be him.

As a 16-year-old, Diana Frazer wrote a letter to her 18-year-old high-school boyfriend Gary Frazer to let him know she was pregnant. He had recently graduated and moved from their hometown in eastern Iowa to Missouri. She didn’t hear anything for some months. Then one day as she was walking out of her high school, there was Gary, waiting for her. He asked her to marry him, and she said yes.

Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, is a University of Virginia sociology professor and author or co-author of many books: The most recent is Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos. Here are edited excerpts of our interview before students at Patrick Henry College.

Marriage rates are down and the percentage of children born out of wedlock is up. What’s going on in American culture?