1) We can't afford it. 2) There isn't really a "dating scene" anymore. 3) I'm not starting a family in this country.
and that's the end of things because we either can't or won't address their concerns.
Point 1 about affordability is directly contradicted by the fact that low income households are having the most children (except for a tiny minority of ultra rich), and those kids are rarely starving to death.
Point 2 is true, and probably a factor, but even married couples and partners sharing a household are having less children than before.
Point 3 is another excuse: fertility rates are low in _all_ industrialized nations in the world, from Canada, Italy, to Australia, to Japan, with perhaps Israel as the only exception. Meanwhile the countries with high fertility rates are absolutely terrible places to live like Afghanistan or Somalia.
Every person who chose to have kids had to make some lifestyle adjustments. If "we cannot afford kids" just means "if we had kids we'd have to make some lifestyle adjustments" then practically nobody could afford kids in this sense, including the overwhelming majority of people who _did_ have kids and are doing fine.
That shows that "we cannot afford kids" is not really the reason you're not having kids. More honestly it's "we prefer having more time and money over having children" which is not even an objectively bad preference, but people don't like phrasing it that way because it sounds selfish.
So they say "we cannot afford it", suggesting "we _would_ have kids if we had more money", except in reality they still wouldn't, because at a higher income level they'd be making exactly the same argument, too. Which is why we see fertility rates _decreasing_ with income levels, up to a household income of approximately $500K/year in the US.