There is a big thread at Metafilter arguing the merits of BusinessWeek’s article on Unmarried America. To some it is an eye-opener. Today CSMonitor has a story about The power of 1 and how singles shop. Lost in all this discussion (and it seems strange to be reading about it from multiple sources simultaneously) – is that human beings will seek out ways to satisfy the the needs that marriage met for previous generations no matter what.
We have unstoppable needs for community, for anchoring, for knowledge of self and the sharing of experience with others. Have many replaced marriage to spouses and families with marriage to work and the temporary community it provides? And where that doesn’t do the trick, with other temporary associations? For better and for worst?
Got to get back to work 🙂
I think there are a couple sides to this thought.
Yes, while there are those of us who are more into “what can I do for me” than “what can I do for another” there seems to be motivators behind this way of thinking. Too many to mention, some of the more prevalent ones are work and more so the moral breakdown in our society.
Work demands more of us than ever before. The 40 hour work week is a thing of the past. The math doesn’t lie. If we wind up spending the majority of our “awake” time at the job, how can we nurture a marriage, let alone a family? This of course become even more so in the “unmarried” who cannot nurtire a relationship into something more profound. These things take time and in our work hungry obsessed society, the importance of finding this profoundness, as been demephasized to nothing more than “leisure.”
ALl of that of course leads to morals and values. I don’t think we are blidnly abandoning our morals and values like many republicans will have you beleive, but rather we are focusing those morals and values on other things. Again, work comes into play. Society as a whole has placed work as the number 1 priority in life above God and family and friends. Again, it takes time and patience to instill family values and morals into a child. It cannot be done between your 12 hour work day and the new episode of friends and american idol. Hell, it cannot be done effectivly after a 12 hour work day period. How many of us actually have daily regular sit down dinners at home anymore?
Along with all of the other stimuli, work has broken down what is most important in our lives. America is going in the wrong direction and it seems nobody really cares.
I agree with ya for once. It’s kinda messed up to think about. Most folks in the Metafilter thread are caught up in a bunch of red herring arguments – which is a shame really.
What bothers me about some of the early comments at metafilter is how they are weighing the financial, social, etc. benefits of marriage, when it is not really about that. For me, marriage in itself is a much more profiund and spiritual thing than any of that, and those people there are ignoring those most important points of marriage. One can argue many point of “when” and that is fine but how one can argue “why” without really touching upon the realy values of marriage (other than financial and social), makes me question where we as a society have gone and are headed. Have we really become this cold and impartial to the “romantic” and spiritual side of things that everything we think about has to have some physical value?
How sad for us if we do.