Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
One of the real joys of life for me is reading the essays of Joseph Epstein (you can find him in Commentary, The Weekly Standard, New Criterion, and in his own books of essays). His prefatory essay to In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage is entitled “Kid Turns Seventy, Nobody Cheers.” It's wise rumination about turning seventy, with commentary on the great differences between what it meant to grow up in the Fifties and Sixties and to grow up now. Epstein has me by 10-15 years, but I see the world much the same as he does. Two excerpts from this essay are, in particular, worth sharing. The first defines when a person has accepted his "dufferhood":
“At seventy it is natural to begin to view the world from the sidelines, . . . watching younger people do the dances of ambition, competition, lust, and the rest of it.” xvi
I'm just about there.
The second is the more important observation:
“I . . . grew up at a time when the goal was to be adult as soon as possible, while today . . . the goal is to stay young as possible for as long as possible. The consequences of this for the culture are enormous. That people live longer means only that they can remain kids longer: uncommitted to marriage, serious work, life itself. Adolescence has been stretched out, at least into one’s thirties, perhaps one’s early forties.” xxi
His observation is a profound one for our society. I got married before I could "afford" it, and we had kids long before we had the slightest idea how we would pay for college; but it worked out--necessity really is the mother of invention.
Other than the privileges of "dufferhood," I have no right to give anyone else advice. That, of course, does not prevent me giving some to the younger Ricocheteers: Get married and have kids. It will turn you into an adult. You'll like it. And it's one of the best things you can do for a culture that needs some help. [TR gets off soapbox and toddles to couch to catch his breath].
- Comment (59)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (6)
Comments:
May '10
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
Same here. It's like Golden Girls Gone Wild meets HMS Pinafore.
Dec '10
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
Yeah - what's up with that? A new Secret Service service?
Jul '11
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
I hear how great kids are and I am glad other people have them but the ROI does not look good.
Apr '11
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
Western Chauvinist
Yeah - what's up with that? A new Secret Service service? · 45 minutes ago
As I understand the classifications, Ricochet is a hate group likely to breed domestic terrorists; the ad is probably aimed at the agents monitoring us. When we start seeing donut delivery services coming up, we'll know for sure.
Apr '12
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
Mollie Hemingway, Ed.:
(Foxfier Snip)
Garrett, if someone hasn't told you this by now:
If you wait until you can afford children to have them, you will never ever have them. · 6 hours ago
I was planning on mentioning that very same point.
For cautious folks, there is ALWAYS another disaster to be saved for; there is never enough leeway to take on the risk with an eighteen plus year commitment.
One of the nice things about being an observant Catholic is that the question: "are we worried enough about our ability to properly raise kids that we would not have sex?" really puts things in perspective.
Apr '12
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
Diane Ellis, Ed.:
In any case, I'm getting married in 3 months at the age of 26. I feel ready for it now, but I'm glad I had the opportunity to go to college, travel, live in a city for a spell, and have a few years to pursue my interests before entering into a lifelong sacrificial commitment. · 5 hours ago
Good heavens, you barely beat me, let alone my mother!
Now, I'm nearly 30, and I think...two of the sixty+ kids in my graduating are currently married, other than myself? Several have children, some had marriages, but I can only think of two that I'd swear are currently married. One to the guy that she's been with since just after high school, and with whom she has a grade schooler.
Life is sacrifice.
It's also a pack venture. (I was about to write "team" and couldn't bring myself to associate the one-sided CF from high school with it.)
You have to FIND someone that's the right fit, first; if you've got them, don't put it off. If you don't, for heaven's sake don't marry.
Nov '11
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
Back in the good old days, such advice was totally unnecessary because . . . if you wanted to have sex, you had to get married and there wasn't much in the way of reliable birth control.
The Pill changed everything.
After The Pill, young people could have sex without someone getting pregnant, which meant, in effect, that they could have sex without getting married, which removed one of the all-time great motivations for getting married.
Before The Pill, soon after a couple began to enjoy the privileges of marriage, kids began to arrive . . . unplanned.
Pardon me if, by stating the obvious about what used to inspire young people to marry and have kids, I seem crude or unromantic. But the unexpected thing is, before The Pill, when marriage was inspired more by hormonal imperatives than nowadays, young people were more romantic than nowadays. Young people today would claim that they are more romantic because their romantic decisions have been freed from such necessities. How wrong!
An aside: The Flukish types want every last little thing to be natural . . . except human procreation, about which they claim an absolute right to free access to every possible form of unnatural intervention.
Apr '12
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
Western Chauvinist
There's one exception to this rule. Serving in the military is equally effective at maturing people, IMO. · 4 hours ago
Thank you.
As it happens, it's also a route to FIND someone else for the newly matured people-- assuming they're mature enough to not view others as pleasure-objects. I know of more stable marriages that way than anything beyond "we were friends and then went 'wait, why don't we get married?'" (They're not exclusive.)
Feb '12
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
Mollie Hemingway, Ed.:
If you wait until you can afford children to have them, you will never ever have them. · 7 hours ago
I'm waiting until I can afford to have them. As in, literally, waiting until I have health insurance so I'm not debating between taking on thousands more in debt for a hospital delivery or hoping every goes right for a home delivery.
Ideally, I would want my maternity leaves's worth of bills in a savings account and to have no past due balances on any bills, but the important thing is to make sure the littlest Schley doesn't put us in the poor house the moment he's born. :D
I married at 18 a good man for all the wrong reasons, which is my only caution against early marriage. Without a *lot* of self-control, determination, and pressure to stick together through the rough spots (and ho-boy, will there be rough spots!), most couples will not survive finishing their growing up together.
It's hard to believe it'll be 10 years for us in August.
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
So even though I wholeheartedly agree with this advice, I do have a few other thoughts. One is that even though I really do wish I'd married younger, I had a heck of a time enjoying my career and life prior to marriage. I have great friends in all different stages of life. I got to travel extensively. I had sooooooo much time to read and enjoy movies and concerts. And I just really enjoyed life. I knew that I wanted marriage, but I also knew it wasn't happening. So I just enjoyed my station in life a great deal. I think the key is to just enjoy whatever role you have currently. It's good training for marriage and parenthood, but good training for not being married, too.
Dec '11
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
I also got married at 32. I was the last one of my siblings to get married. For some reason being unmarried at thirty made me feel terribly old where being 40 and married didn't. If your unmarried and feeling a little old remember my wise mother's advice:
Better to wish you were married than wish you weren't.
Marriage is not a panacea. It complicates one's life. If you are unhappy when you are single, you will probably be more unhappy when you are married. I think the beauty of marriage is two very different people balance one another out.
I am happy I waited to get married because I cannot imagine how I could of met my wife at an earlier age.
Edited on April 17, 2012 at 8:23amRe: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
Married late, by the old standards. My friends, who are older than me, followed in the next few years. Most of the dads in my social circle are Old Dads - dealing with ten-year-olds at an age when men in the past were walking daughter down the aisle or waving sons off to ships.
And we all feel younger for it. That's the thing. We had our lives upended and redefined at an age when men once were staring down the vacant barrel of early middle age, wondering which role comes next. My friends are high-energy, devoted fathers and husbands, too, which helps.
We sit around on the Fourth and watch our brood gambol, and there's always a smile, a wink, a toast: life's good, my brothers.
Jun '10
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
The epitaph on the tombstone of America circa 2035
Nov '10
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
The key to getting married is the key to staying married...patience. They key to being happy parents is to have a life to recall fondly before becoming parents.
I can think of few things worse than being in a bad marriage. And while we live in a world fraught with cohabitation, we also see, at least among my generation and younger, a rush to marriage by those who are themselves, often times the children of divorce. And so many of these marriages end in divorce because they simply were not ready. And for those on the outside watching them take place, you just hope and pray that they are able to come to their realizations before they have children.
May '10
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
I'm 36. Two kids, aged 8 and 5. Married for 14 years come July. Suddenly I have this urge to go buy Geritol in bulk.
Nov '11
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
A generalization but from what I observe many people who have children at an older age (not starting younger and having some later) are extremely over protective and tend to spoil their children. I am at an age where my friends and acquaintances who started having kids in their 30's, children are now teens and older. Also, some who have college age children who are marrying again to the same age (older) people who have young kids and they tell stories about how worrying and confining the others are- wet socks, they're going to die! I guess the point is to be aware of this possibility. Most of us become much more cautious as we grow older anyway and it is not necessarily a good thing for children. Some may want to sail around the world, alone.
Jul '10
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
I'm 22 and married now to my college sweetheart. At least legally. The big bash is in another month with the family and drinks. We're both in the military, just about to commission as officers. Since even before we were engaged, I felt like my priorities were rapidly shifting from concerns about what I would do on the weekend to how much money I could pile away for this or that years down the road. I can no longer relate to the average collegiate in class.
Mar '12
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
Diane Ellis, Ed.:
In any case, I'm getting married in 3 months at the age of 26. I feel ready for it now, but I'm glad I had the opportunity to go to college, travel, live in a city for a spell, and have a few years to pursue my interests before entering into a lifelong sacrificial commitment. · Apr 16 at 3:56pm
Not to get too personal, but do you feel like you've said a version of Saint Augustine's prayer: "Lord, I'll be sacrificial, but please not yet"?
Mar '12
Re: Unsolicited Advice from a Duffer to Younger Members: Get Married, Have Kids, Be an Adult. Now!!
It seems to me that most of the comments that disagree with the post only prove the point that Epstein makes in his article. I hear a lot of "it is fun to be childless" and "there are so many things I can't do with children around" and "it's hard to have kids," but all of these only address the issue by proving its point.
He says that being "uncommitted to marriage" is a result of a larger problem: perpetual adolescence and the desire to stay in never never land (Peter Pan's, not Michael Jackson's).
Dodging the sacrifice involved in marriage and children to have fun, "fulfill" yourself, etc. is exactly what Epstein is calling out.