The Future of Marriage: Question 4

Let us start with my version of the ideal setting for MY children if I had my way: I will have finished whatever travelling and education I wanted to do. I will have a decent and reliable source of income, and so will my partnerwife. (Why is it that gay people own the term "partner"? Just as they fight to have huisbands and wives, I think I'd like to have a partner and not have people think that I am gay, not that there's blah blah blah.) We will have relatively fulfilling occupations with a reasonable amount of flexibility. We will have a first house in a real community setting: other families will be close by, but not suburban-hell close. Most of the adults will have respect for each other, and enjoy talking to each other or saying hi in the street. We will all take a part in the raising of the neighbourhood children, and these children will be welcome to play or stay at any of the homes in the neighbourhood. We will have block, neighbourhood and community events several times a year, just things for the small community to do. My partnerwife and I would be able to trust these people if we wanted to go out for a few hours, and maybe even a few days.Special optional pie-in-the-sky dream: we'd power our own homes with solar paneling, generating enough power for a city block and figure out a system for generating and distributing the power and Internet connections. Maybe this sounds hokey and ideal and so unrealistic that it really sounds like an excuse for not doing it because I really don't like kids anyway, but I'm not kidding about any of this.

Deep down I figure that I would love my own child (most of the time) as much as anyone. We would take a neighbourhood and the characters of the people into consideration as much as possible. We would decide what kind of education we want them receiving. We would figure that we need to do so much work to get the right kind of house, not just any house. Same thing for a car. It has to fit our needs and goals, or it may be more trouble than it's worth. And there are so many other things we would consider as well, not least of which is my relationship. It had better be rock-fucking solid. Forget that. Diamond-solid.

Now, back to the question at hand. Here is what I think will happen. There will be a resurgence in the popularity of marriage, however, I fear that this might be because it is a popular thing to do, like watch reality shows. People will try to go back to the 50s with 90s options. Men will continue to be the breadwinners most of the time, and women still start staying at home more. However, with the 90s options, women will say start demanding more from their men than ever, whether it be more intimacy, more help with the kids, more money for them or the family, or more options to get out of the house when the kids are older, or when they feel like it. Women will set the terms for marriage, that is, it will be more and more on their terms, while men who have diminishing roles outside of work, will follow along or get cast aside.

That said, the decision to have children will rest entirely on the woman's shoulders where it has been since the Pill became reliable. The likelihood of both parents remaining with the child is not going to change, though, only the range of options available to women. If a woman decides that the relationship isn't good enough for her, then it will be over regardless of the existence of the child/ren. The vast majority of divorce is initiated by women, remember.

Wait a minute, that's the way it is now. Okay, well I guess that there won't be much changing unless you believe what S.S. Barash says in that women want it easier than their mothers, so they will choose family and husband before careers and therefore more children will have both parents. But I don't believe that women now or in the next ten years are going to stay in marriages or relationships that have children any more than they do now. People will have children, though. Accidents happen all the time, and even when it is planned the positive attitudes towards marriage have been in decline. People do not seem to think about children in any real way anymore. They have them and then somehow "deal with it", like that's the adult thing to do. Personally, the last thing I want is to have to "deal". That's a long time to simply "deal" when you are talking about having children. I see no reason for this trend to change, either. I believe that a hell of a lot of things will change first: attitudes towards your community, whichever that might be. Attitudes towards yourself, your views of personal, governmental, corporate and social responsibility. Your views on what things are actually necessary in life, and more critical thinking with regards to your own actions and how they affect others immediately around you. So many things would have to change.

But things have changed significantly. Children born out of wedlock (what a word, wed=lockdown) are just children, not unsavoury bastards. That's another reason why cohabitating couple with children will remain popular. One one hand, people no longer look down on such children, rather, they are the norm. On the other, people do realize that there are some advantages that children in stable homes have that other children do not. What people don't realize is that the nuclear family, and this is where I think that S.S. Barash and David Moats are spot on, is not an ideal situation if the people involved are not ideal. I cannot stress this enough. Do not get any romantic notions that just because people are married that everything will be great for the child, and that everything will just take care of itself. It won't, as I've seen many times with my own eyes. You probably have, too.

I do believe that children do better with both of their parents as primary caregivers in the same living space, and even better with secondary and even tertiary caregivers. It would be better if parents who had to split up could at least live within a short distance of each other and raise the child equally—weekend visits aren't really enough. All too often they turn into these awkward obligations, even if, or maybe especially if, the child is used to it from a very young age. Almost all the people I know that have had fortunate lives in many ways have both their natural parents in good relationships well into their adult lives. Things just seemed to work out better for them: nice home, nice (true) friends, ease in developing relationships, an ability to avoid bad ones, etc.

This doesn't mean that you need you natural parents in a good relationship to have a good start. All you really need are the right people raising you, really. And I don't see why it should necessarily just be two. Why not a father, stepmother and an uncle? Or a group of aunts, maybe?

To conclude: people will have children out of wedlock at the same rates as now, and children are better off with family-oriented mature adults raising them.