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Sunday, February 7, 2016

The declining institution of Marriage




When I was born people in my geographical zone were given very little time to live by actuaries. Because of our lifestyle and our access to health care, and the quality of health care, I was expected to live to a maximum age of forty-seven. That placed a lot of pressure on me to get my primary and secondary education done, and to get a job, find a woman, get her pregnant and have our children before we dropped dead. Consequently I married at age seventeen.

Fast forward to today when it is forecast that today's babies will have a maximum life expectancy to age 85. Today's babies have all the time in the world to get the same things done, so when I noticed that people were getting married at much later stages in life I naturally presumed that was the reason.

In many cases I suppose that is the reason, among others like economics, but it appears there is another much darker reason. In the Western world, particularly in America, home of the super independent woman, men are pushing back against a trend that has seen ruined lives almost guareented from the time he marries the love of his life.

Women naturally want equality with men and they want their own economic independence. You may say there's nothing basically wrong with that, except if they don't need a men to depend on, do they need a man at all? There has been a trend and a trap against men where he marries, participates in bringing children into the family, and then finds himself forced out of the house and into a life of financial servitude to a family from whom he is barred.

Because we men are our own worst enemy we will make it easy for a wife for whom this is the ideal situation. We are bound to do something stupid where we run head first into the wall of intolerance. To make matters worse, the first thing we do when forced out of the family is to look for another woman.

Men are on strike! They are refusing to make The Proposal because they simply realise that they will most likely be shooting themselves in the foot. The woman can still have her children, but she will have to fend for herself in finding a home. He will give her child support, which will leave him money to live on, but he is very reluctant to tie himself up legally because there hasn't been any such thing as happily ever after for a long time.

The pendulum has swung too far to the other side. In most things the ideal is in the middle, so one can only hope that there will be movement back from the abyss. However, these things take time and they don't well advertise themselves. It has taken my whole lifetime to move away from the traditional to what we have now, but it need not take another lifetime to move the needle to the centre.

In the name of happiness and hope, sooner would be better than later.

Copyright (c) 2016
Eugene Carmichael