Posted on 08/09/2013 11:52:26 AM PDT by Kaslin
Every generation confronts its own obstacles. My parents eloped because they couldn't afford to get married, and they hid the nuptials from their families for a year. They finally bought a big bed and moved it into the house of my father's parents. They were grateful for a nice room, but Mom suffered the lack of independence, and she didn't like having to help my grandmother in the kitchen with the kosher meals.
It was a hardscrabble time. My father clashed with his father, and soon my parents found a small apartment, and a male friend moved in to share the rent. They were all in their early 20s, and the arrangement was not unusual in Depression times.
But they celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary with their two children and six grandchildren, having lived comfortably in a big house of their own, bought when their children were young. They couldn't have glimpsed their future in those early days of marriage, but the cultural values of the time, and the country's growing economic prosperity, enabled them to live the American dream as first generation immigrants. They enjoyed a long marriage in a house they owned, their children got their diplomas and degrees and graduated with no debt. My father was obsessed with earning enough money to support his family; his sense of manhood depended on it.
That was a long time ago. The expectations of today's generation growing into adulthood are quite different. Marriage is much delayed. Many single adults are "Boomerangs," moving back with their parents after college. More surprising are the numbers of children who don't leave home at all in their early 20s.
Fully 36 percent of the Millennial generation -- young adults aged 18 to 31 -- live at home, as measured by the Pew Research Center. In 2012 only 23 percent of that age group were married and living on their own, a sharp decline from yesteryear; in 1968, fully 56 percent were married and on their own. The reasons vary, but a poor economy is a big part of it. Many of these young adults attend college, running up debt, and can't afford to live independently. In five years, marriage declined 5 percent among the Millennials, from 30 percent to 25 percent since 2007.
In a surprise, more young men than young women live with their parents, 40 percent compared to 32 percent. While Pew measures the trends through a combination of economic, educational and cultural factors, it doesn't investigate the why or wherefore. That's left for the literary investigators.
The oldest among the Millennials, those who have forged their lives for better or worse without marriage, are beginning to look back to grapple with their emotional perceptions, often through novels to see how others do it, observing how cultural changes affect the sexes in different ways. The emancipation of women flourishes among men as well as women, but the liberation distributes disappointment unequally. The passion my parents felt, that moved them to elope and that caused many members of their generation to marry and confront the obstacles of a conventional commitment, is often quickly dissipated today in casual sex. Nothing new there. But what seems to have caught women by surprise is how easy it is for men to slide into the older chauvinist attitudes they thought were gone with the feminine mystique.
The narcissism imbedded in the masculinity of chest-thumping, no matter how camouflaged by a designer shirt from a metrosexual thrift shop, has merely taken on new forms. The novelists characterizing the experiences of the Millennials demonstrate that feminism may have changed the message, but it didn't strip away the old male privileges. "Boys will be ashamed of being boys," observes literary critic Marc Tracy in The New Republic. "But they will be boys."
With insight and wit, Adelle Waldman, age 36, captures the moment in her novel, "The Affairs of Nathaniel P." Her male narrator, using his generation's dating experiences, observes the acute injustice of current sexual mores. Prepare for the cringe when she describes the way women in their 30s take diminishing interest in their careers and seek a committed relationship just as the men lose interest in the diminishing sexual attraction of the "aging" female body in tight jeans and sleeveless dresses.
If, in this scenario, 30 is the new 20, it nevertheless suffers some of the emotional pain of the old 40s, as women confront the self-centered immaturity of their men. This generation finds itself stuck in drawing room comedy without the drawing room. Maybe Thomas Wolfe was right, you can't go home again. But many Millennials do, and there's the rub.
I believe that a global financial collapse is the “reset button” that the US desperately needs. This nonsense has got to stop, and our political leaders don’t have the will to do it.
The Millennials is the group that is supposed to lead out of our current dilemma. (If The Fourth Turning has any credence.)
God help us.
2) Millenials are stuck living at home.
3) Men are chauvinist pigs, and this is the really interesting part of the story, because while you may have thought that the metrosexual indoctrination might have changed things, in point of fact human nature has not changed and men are still as yucky as ever, and it is still safe to blame them for everything that goes wrong in the world.
So many reasons for this... parents babying their children instead of insisting they learn to work and be responsible for their actions and learn how to deal with failure and mistakes, girls giving “it” away, dumbing down of education so that people need a master’s degree to get a real job, government schools that don’t educate, government policies that are strangling the economy and encouraging dependency, and the insistence on the part of the young that they have everything they want without working or saving for it.
Not keen on how groups of people are labeled according to some subjective idea of a generation. People are individuals and they can’t be defined by when they were born. Times change, as they say.
The Millennials is the group that is supposed to lead out of our current dilemma. (If The Fourth Turning has any credence.)
God help us.
Millennials have been lied all their lives, the lie was “if you go to college you will be handed a job on a silver plate”
Academia lied to them to increase their own power, ie. The college bubble....
Family. Either you benefit from it or you don’t. What you learn as you grow up determines your life. Either you are loved by a father and mother or you aren’t. Either you learn about deferred gratification or you don’t. Either you learn thrift or you don’t. Either you learn to value others or you don’t. The Left’s success in largely destroying the family guarantees an increasingly bleak future for more and more people. Will there come a breaking point for society? You tell me. But the new Elite Culture of the coastal wealthy has already created two Americas.
The lousy results of the past three decades of “progressive” theories of “improving” society will be the impetus for either recapturing our morals or being destroyed by the sudden collapse of this house of cards.
There’s nothing here I didn’t know when I was 16. At that age I saw there was little hope for me in the modern world with the community college education I barely qualified for. The cultural ideal for me was to build a career, pay off my student loans, and then, sometime in my thirties, start thinking about starting a marriage...assuming one of the boys (not many actual ‘men’ in my generation) was marraige material and could pull himself away from his X-box and smart phone long enough to speak his wedding vows.
Instead at 17 I determined to be a wife and a stay-at-home mom. After I was 18 I met and married a successful enough older man and now, at almost 23, I’ve got four kids (the first pregnancy was twins) with one more due in late October.
I lost almost all of my friends when I chose this because they treated me like a traitor. Like I was doing something wrong. A very wonderful new friend of mine told me that the real problem was jealousy because I had what the rest of the girls hoped to have but they were all going to wait twenty years to get to where I started at 18.
This is why I say that feminism is a lie. There’s nothing feminine about it and there’s something really sick about a movement that hates on women who choose to be mothers and wives instead of being promiscuous career bitches.
[/rant]
Your entire post is excellent, well said. I like to see kids stand on their own, separate from their parents. However, I like to see them respect and love their families. In the old days (and currently in other countries), it was expected that children would care for their elders as they grew feeble. Entire families of several generations would live together. My point? Regardless of how one lives, it's about family.
What is the Fourth Turning?
I have three very successful children, 26,28 and 32 plus two grandbabies. As I look back at those years of staying home with my children, teaching them, driving them to sports, instilling the work ethic, the only regrets is to have known what I know now, have patience with them, listen to them, really listen and it is good to sometimes repeat back to them what they said, so they know you listened. If you do that with a honest heart, they will listen to you when they grow older and they will come to you for your opinion and advice about life.
Millenials?
Meh - I know Gen Xers with the same loser attitude, living the same way (only now it’s Mom & Dad’s Social Security they’re sucking down, not income, and complaining how little money there is).
PS...they can’t wait to get their single-payer healthcare and send the rest of us to “re-education camps”
http://www.amazon.com/The-Fourth-Turning-American-Rendezvous/dp/0767900464
The book gives examples throughout history concerning generational ‘biorhythms’ of history.
They have a blog, but it’s been mostly taken over by ‘Progressive’ types projecting their ideology upon current events. The ideas of Howe and Strauss may work simply because people believe them. Who knows?
I was discussing this the other day with some friends. I’m 60, but multi-generational housing was the norm in rough times or not, in the past.
My folks lived with my grandmother when they were first married, after a year or two, went out on their own, and then the time came when my grandmother came to live with us. My mom was only 25 at that time and my grandma lived with us till she passed away. After that, a single great aunt lived with us because she had nowhere else to go.
My MIL moved in with us after my FIL passed away, and we are more than prepared to have my dad come live with us, if he wishes, now that my mom has passed (right now he prefers living on his own...but he’s close and we all look after him.)
I know a family who is building a very large, multi level, house to accommodate, a very elderly grandma, married couple nearing retirement, but still with one teenager at home, and a separate floor for one of the daughters, her spouse, and their children. It is the perfect situation for them.
Our son finished his education at 21, moved out and into a rental about that time, married his long time sweetheart at 22, and bought his home at 25. So he’s ahead of where we were at his age.
An interesting perspective if a child goes straight from living at home and into marriage, unless they had their share of chores at home, they don’t appreciate what their spouse is doing for them. In other words, if they live on their own for awhile, (applies especially to guys), and have had to do their own laundry, their own cooking, their own cleaning, then when they get married, they appreciate, not take for granted, the things their wife now does for them around the house.
I do have sympathy for a lot of these kids who are having to live at home because of the jobs situation. I can almost guarantee you that no 25 year old guy wants to be living with his parents...but if there is no money to move out on your own (which requires a “chunk of change” up front for deposits, first/last, etc.) they have no choice.
Thank you! The most important part of all of this was finding a decent, God-fearing, honorable, and trustworthy man. Everything after that was easy.
The Presumption Against Marriage
by Bernard Chapin
No writer that I know, and I am absolutely no exception, has the right to speak as an authority for all men. No matter what I say about honor and pride, some guy somewhere is going to spend his last dime on a dominatrix or propose to a coke whore. There’s no getting around it. It’s a fact. We can quibble and pretend dominated males are exceptions, but there are legions of guys out there who will put up with any abuse that a woman sends their way. That being said, I would like to address this column to those not pining for the submissive’s chair or anxiously awaiting a girl on a white horse who’ll allow them to pay off her car note and college loan without saying thank you.
The fundamental question is, “Should a man nowadays get married at all?”
My take on the issue is that the appropriateness of marriage has to be determined on a case by case basis but that presumption, in this day and age, should always be against marriage. To put it more simply, the tie cannot go to the runner. Men, when in doubt, walk away. If you have serious reservations about a woman and you marry her, a number of things may happen. One of them is good. Your negative intuition could turn out to be wrong and you’ll end up having a wonderful, blissful life with your bride. Unfortunately, lots of bad things could happen as well:
1. Your intuition was right and she divorces you. She thereby acquires half, if not
all, of your assets and possessions. The state is thoroughly biased against men and seems to have no threshold for its love of male suffering. This is a very real and tragic possibility.
2. Your intuition is right and she’s unreliable. You experience strange men calling the house and hanging up should you be the one to reach the phone first.
3. Your intuition is right as your experiment with paying for her college education ends in her befriending evil radical feminists who call the house and scream “rapist” at you as a greeting. They then follow up this pleasantry with asking if their “play kitty” is home.
4. Your intuition is right and she spends money like a gay party boy on Fire Island leading you slowly but gaily into Chapter 7.
5. Your wonderful children get aborted as she decides they’d take up too much time during the day.
6. You spend all your free time with her at the mall or, far worse, with her family and friends.
Well, you see my point. It’s bad scenario a-go-go. So, in the spirit of the boss from the film “Casino”: “Why take a chance?”
That’s easy for me to dismissively say, but then there’s tons of dopes like this writer who are smart enough to know better but then get married anyway. When I got engaged at Christmas time, Eric Ericson emailed me and said something to the effect of, “Have you lost your mind?”
As it turned out, I had not. I sanely and soberly weighed the pros versus the cons and determined that this particular woman was unlike all the others I had met and that she gave me the best chance of fulfilling my dream of fathering a couple of little critters and having a faithful, intelligent person as a partner. Yet, even with such a rational determinations made in advance, the situation changed and in April I found myself in the midst of an ugly soap opera on which I turned out to be only a temporary, non-recurring character. I was written out of the series before summer hit. For the future, I’ve decided, that unless its near-perfect, there is no way I’ll get engaged again.
My decision is not respected by many of the women I know who attempt to use what I call “shame-based” therapy as a means of coercing guys like me into finding a wife. I am at the point where I can vigorously beat back their attempts to manipulate me, but I thought I’d share my responses with the reader in the hopes that my words can be of benefit in case they encounter similar harassment.
First, I say that the situation had changed with men and women. It used to be that when a man got married, he got a deal. A woman would remain faithful to him or, at the very least, cook and clean for him. You’d get something in exchange for what you brought to the table. Today, men get very little in comparison with the past. I have met no end of women who ask in advance if I cook because they themselves do not. When I tell them that I cook every day, they are quite impressed (although I leave out my belief that pre-made salads, brats, and pizza are the height of fine dining).
Promiscuity is another issue. The promiscuity of the modern female makes marriage a very dubious proposition indeed. Who the heck wants to marry a girl that’s had more sleeping partners than a bed at the Motel 6? Not me, that’s for sure. I’d rather die a cold and lonely death than marry a skank; Paul Craig Roberts produced a magnificent column on this phenomenon a few years ago. I’ve never understood the argument that “all their experiences make them good in bed,” either. If they’re attractive, how good do they have to be? If you ask me, no amount of tricks she’s learned can make up for huge “Tyrone” that her ex-boyfriend had tattooed upon her back (and he was smart enough not to marry her).
Another huge factor to me is the obesity epidemic. While I acknowledge that it’s not really an epidemic by most definitions, weight increases seem to heavily affect married women. I’m 34 years old now, and I’ve met countless females who ballooned to MGM proportions after getting hitched. To me, this is deplorable. I knew one who showed me a picture of her when she was 22. She was better looking than most movie stars. Her body was hard and trim and her face was pure allure, but by age 28 she had gained 65 pounds and wore pants that William Perry could have fit into. I’d look at her husband sorrowfully when she talked of having children. The act of conception with her would have required the courage of St. George. No mere oral dose of Viagra would do. It would require hypodermic injections to get old Bumpty into Humpity form.
My last argument is also my most recently derived one. If it’s at work where I’m getting harassed about my lack of romance (read: susceptibility), and it usually is, I tell them: “I have plenty of masters here. Why do I need one at home?” No more accurate words could be spoken. I’m ordered to do things all day long at work. When I get home, I want to relax. I’m not going to waste time doing unnecessary chores or shopping for things I do not need. The homage we domestically have to pay to our wives is outrageous. Why are they my boss? Here’s what I say now, “Let’s take an IQ test and if you win, then you can tell me what to do.” I’ve had no takers yet, as I’m not giving out a big enough point spread.
In summation, with women, unless they’re without flaw, my advice is to ride the train for as long as you can, but let some other sucker pay for its maintenance and servicing, and always make sure you get off of the route before it reaches matrimonial terminal.
The Presumption Against Marriage, Part II
by Bernard Chapin
“Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn’t they’d be married, too.” – H.L. Mencken.
A great sage predicted I’d take some serious abuse for what I wrote about marriage the other day. He was right, but for the benefit of our readers, I’m going to provide public refutation to some of the arguments and whines that were thrown my way en masse–if nothing else, their vaginations actually strengthened my overall position.
Burn the Heretic!
As I have noted in a previous article, Supine or Fall, whenever a man stands up for himself on gender issues, he is immediately accused by women of being unmanly. Why? It’s because we stood up to them, and that’s not right. That’s not manly. We’re supposed to let them walk on us. These women, and those lickspittle male orcs who hobble in their wake, would be wise to remember that the western world now embraces equality between the sexes (at least officially), and that no one should be de facto superior to anyone else. Walking on men, in theory, is not allowed.
Furthermore, it’s a man’s duty to define and defend himself, and I can think of no occasion when this is more true than in making personal life choices. Marriage can be life joy or it can be life sentence, but there’s no room to make allowances for political correctness when thinking deeply about such eventualities. Why would any women be aghast at our pontificating over it? Should we not stop to smell a flower before picking it? I say stop and smell, inspect its structural base, and chemically analyze the ground around it before making a purchase. Perhaps some women became irate at me because they secretly realize that marriage does not offer men the advantages it once did, so their awareness causes them to go after heretics like myself who threaten to make this knowledge public.
I’ll recall the case of Darren Blacksmith here. Darren wrote a “just say no to marriage” piece and got kerosene poured all over him. His offense was such that he quit the business. Luckily, this would never be my response. I’m incorrigible. Harassing me only produces more words. It’ll take more than a few china dolls to deter me from tackling this subject, and if I keep hearing from them, Part III will be even better than Part II!
Nuance Lost:
As much as I hate the word “nuance,” with its outraged tobacco-addicted, post-modernist French professor connotations, I think that the nuance of my argument was lost on some of my critics. Emotions run so scarlet on marriage that many a female reader did not understand the point that I was trying to make. Marriage certainly can be a very good thing and it is, on the aggregate, beneficial for society, but in this day and age, PRESUMPTION must be against it. Our default position should be–“it’s not a good move.” That does not mean it isn’t a good move for everybody in every situation. There are over three billion women on this planet, and many of them could make excellent wives, but you should be vigilant, and nowhere is this more true than in the über-spoiled United States . Men have too much to lose if things don’t work out. Think of my friend Robert and the trauma that he went through. Western independent females, as a rule, do not make the best wives. They’re too “me” oriented for that line of work. One must be very careful indeed. Sit and observe closely before making any decisions.
Who’s Fault Is This Predicament?
Is it the fault of free marketeers like myself clamoring for government to get more of its vile fingers into our private lives? Hell no! Ask the individuals who keep voting for political figures who brag about increasing taxes and adding to the burden with which government sabotages our lives. Many of those who automatically look to the state to provide solutions are the same ones who complain about the decline of marriage today. If they didn’t elect redistributionist judges and politicians, men would not fear marriage the way we do. It shouldn’t be, “if you can’t marry a man, marry the government.” Let’s change it to “solve problems amongst yourselves.” I think that’s an ideal solution. If the divorce courts end their war on men, then we will once again become more friendly regarding matrimonial vows. Until then, it’s best to harken back to the wisdom of Benjamin Disraeli: “Every woman should marry–and no man.”
An Elite Club:
Women of the sistahood view marriage as being an elite club and want nothing more than full-time membership. They, whether they deny it or not, admire their friends who are married, and this admiration can sometimes even be transferred onto their friend’s husbands. Women who are married, even if it’s to users who care nothing about them, are higher on the social plane than women who are single. This is implicit acknowledgment of the sweet deal many women receive through marriage. Personally, I do not begrudge them their social hierarchies and care little about affairs apart from my own, but these same women then try to fit guys like me into their social parameters, which is absurd.
Male Diversity Verboten:
This attempt to coerce men into accepting their worldview is quite disturbing but also rather comical. Ironically, it indirectly benefits fellows like me as the fact that I’ve been married before makes me seem far more legitimate than most of my friends. I am a man who could be amenable to their terms and line of reasoning, or non-reasoning as the case may be. After all, I made the vow once and bought rings twice, so I must be on their wavelength. Am I not? Not.[i] Yet, my friends, like the infamous Dianabol, are knocked out of the box repeatedly because they’ve never been married before. Why should he be part of the caste of untouchables? They’d say because he’s a 40 year old perpetual bachelor. Therefore, he must be a loser. I even heard a girl say this very thing about him the other day. She assumed that since he was never married before that there must be something wrong with him. Why did she not assume that there may be something very right about him? Dianabol is a prince of man. He exercises five days a week and drinks for four on the weekends. He works constantly, makes serious coin, and has an apartment that looks like it came out of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”[ii] Dianabol’s a profoundly educated man with a high thrill-seeking personality who strikes the great majority of girls as being the epitome of fun, but his uncomplicated (legally speaking only) past precludes him from some of their considerations. Guess what? It’s their loss.
What’s In It For Me?
I found out yesterday that I’m not supposed to be asking this question about marriage. It appears that many women believe our default position should be “why ask why” on the topic (rather than “why me”). One girl even called me selfish for putting forth the proposition! Shouldn’t I be selfish about my own interests? Maybe I’m not supposed to have any interests. Perhaps my having interests is really a plot to dehumanize women. It seems that the message sent is, “you will marry a chick the size of Toronto and you’ll like it!” Ah, no. I think I’ll pass. I don’t want her, you can have her, Toronto ’s too big, and socialistic, for me.
Contrary to what many a woman may say, I believe that “What’s in it for me?” is the central question one should ask before signing one’s life away. If you derive no benefit, then run, don’t walk. Again, of course, there’s the nuance thing, as it’s situational. My life certainly is worth signing away in a fight against Hitler or Pol Pot, but I refuse to fall down upon my sword in a scrape for Calphalon pots or Lancome makeup.
Well, you’ve heard what I have to say about the matter, but never forget the triumphant words of Zsa Zsa Gabor before making your own decision, “A man is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.”
[i] Of course, I say that now but got engaged a second time at Christmas. I suppose if the right youthful Laotian national comes along next year, I may have to eat my above words. I’m just letting you know in advance due to a history of snap decisions on my part.
[ii] His ex-girlfriend decorated it!
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