Recently I mentioned a number of reasons why males today may be cynical about marriage and family. With the marriage rate the lowest it's ever been in North America, some wonder if a men's marriage strike has begun, and some explicitly advocate this position. Sociologists have documented the positive effects seen in the lives of married males, but these effects appear to be waning.
In Britain, fathers' rights groups have begun acts of civil disobedience as they'd found other methods of protest ineffective. (Even though their protest methods are non-violent, they note that the women's suffrage movement gained prominence only after resorting to violence).
At the moment, men seem to be "acting" by not acting, while women feel the results. An article from the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled A Tough Time to Be a Girl suggests that the gender balance on campus has women becoming promiscuous in an attempt to attract the relatively few men available. At the same time, this has left them unable to trust those men that they know. With such changes, cheesy pickup lines may be going the way of the dodo bird:
While the male-female imbalance in the church is yet another topic of discussion, the discontent amongst single Christian women who desire to marry was sufficient to inspire an article in the Wall Street Journal under the title A Match Made on Earth: When Christians date outside the fold.. Even where Christian women do find men in the church, they're often left unimpressed:
In recent conversations with a couple of my girlfriends, I expressed an extreme disinterest in Christian guys of my generation.
"I've pretty much had it with Christian guys," I said. "The main problem is that they are 'guys' for too long and never become men."
They are, I theorized, stuck in the youth group culture. The church has encouraged them to never leave that mentality, and so it takes until about age 35 for them to extract themselves into adulthood-land where the women have been waiting for years and have been steadily growing fed up.
While men and women may now individually be feeling the pain of the present turmoil regarding marriage and family, the environment and civilization are also feeling the impact. As the British Sunday Times notes, divorce (and correspondingly singleness) may be seen as a contributor to environmental problems such as global warming. While the article contains more detail, in short, married households have a higher population density, and the economy of scale results also in more efficient use of resources inside the home.
Civilization is threatened by a lack of children being born. As Philip Longman notes in his book entitled The Empty Cradle: How falling birthrates threaten world prosperity and what to do about it, calculations about the sort of social programs to be implemented were based on an expanding population as well as productivity gains that haven't been met in reality. Medical advances have allowed for longer lives, but often have not greatly extended the work that people are able to do prior to retirement. Many western countries now are dependant on an influx of immigrants, but this is only a short-term solution (and a long, complicated argument in and of itself).
Wow! Seems like a rather gloomy picture for all concern. For now, consider the words of the (then unmarried cynic, now married) John Frame from his sermon Marriage as Unjust Unsuffering:
The Bible, of course, has a very positive view of marriage, but it is also realistic. It recognizes that in a sinful world there are a lot of problems in marriage. So while it says many positive things about marriage, it says some negative things as well. Once, indeed, Jesus told his disciples, in effect, “You’re not allowed to get divorced, so some of you shouldn’t get married at all.” In this sinful world there is a downside to marriage, and we ought to ask if we can accept that downside before we presume to make a lifetime commitment.
While meditating, stay tuned. Hopefully next time I'll get around to talking about solutions that some have proposed. Maybe something positive for once.
