I’ve just come back from the gym. Cool bunch of people, who usually roll up as couples. About a third of them are married: many are living together, some with mortgages and kids. But this is Dunedin, where you can get a reasonable house affordably. If you look and you take your time you can find houses at around four time the average salary of 50K. But not in Auckland. The same house there is four or five times as expensive, and the salaries are higher, but not that much higher.

Ratteable value $175K: probable sale price 200K. Ten minutes out from centre town.

This means that many houses locally are selling to people from the North Island, who (as I did) are moving away from high mortgages to get a life. Because this is affecting marriage and birth rates.

Experts believe Auckland’s housing crisis may be lowering the city’s birth rate, as young adults shut out of buying homes are forced to live with their parents.

Census 2013 figures calculated for the Herald’s Home Truths series show that 44 per cent of Aucklanders in their early 20s, 18 per cent in their late 20s and 8 per cent in their early 30s are now living at home with mum and dad.

These figures are about one and a half times as high as in the rest of the country, and have increased since 2001. A separate UMR survey for AUT sociologist Professor Charles Crothers has found that 19 per cent of Aucklanders aged 18 to 34 are postponing parenthood. The figure for the rest of the country is 14 per cent.

…

Auckland’s total fertility rate has dropped from 101.5 per cent of the national rate in 2001 to 98.5 per cent of the national average in the past two Censuses.

Statistics NZ demographer Dr Robert Didham said this partly reflected a growing Asian population, which has the lowest fertility rate of the country’s four main ethnic groups. But he said the cost of housing was also depressing the birth rate

Marriage should not be something you do when you have it all together. When you have lived long enough single to get right royally crotchety, and when you are so old that chasing after kids becomes an effort. Have your kids young: listen to the pukeko, who had his daughter at 24 and sons at 35 and 37/ Chssing after kids when you are pushing forty, particularly when you were an unfit and fat forty, is not fun. Besides, biology is a toad. A woman takes a lot longer to recover from pregnancy in her thirties, and the risk is greater, than in one’s twenties

This author suggests men should marry by 23. Which means women should marry at 20 and 21. Like my mother did, but not like my generation. However, many more of my mother’s generation are still married than mine.

There is no such thing as gift of singleness. That is not a Bible thing. Paul does teach that there is a gift of celibacy. “For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that” (1 Cor. 7:7 [Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)] ).

For someone who is gifted with celibacy, marriage would constitute a distraction (1 Cor. 7:33 [Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)] ). But for someone without that gift, the absence of marriage would be the distraction. Burning with passion does have a way of distracting.

If someone is single (who very much wants to be married), that condition is only a gift in the sense that every affliction is a gift. Those who are single involuntarily must still worship the Lord, must still love Him, must still live productive lives in the church, and so on. The one thing they must not do is try to talk themselves into the view that singleness is a positive ideal like sunshine and upland meadows. It is a trial, and nothing is served by pretending it isn’t a trial.

If someone is unmarried and the other sex is a distraction, then we are not talking about the gift of celibacy. And if we are not talking about celibacy, and there is no pending persecution (1 Cor. 7:26 [Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)] ), then the young men have a duty to initiate marriage, sooner rather than later. Find out what her name is, and ask her.

The trouble with all this is that we have two systems. We assume that women need to be protected, regardless of their choices. This systematic white knighting forgets the contract that was chivalry: if a man is to lay down his life for his lady, who should be his wife, that the wife should be a lady [1]. That we need not nice places to live when we start out.

And that we can live with very little. Women need to read the Captain, who argues that a man should rent a small apartment within walking distance of the city, take jobs that pay more than he spends, have no car or a lousy one, and minimal possessions: spend our money on self-improvement: ride a motorcycle, and take time off every year to do something new and exciting. For him., live is a project, and children will slow him down.

What we need to do is take his minimalism and apply it to the young. THey should marry. THey can sleep well on a hiking pad: when I was in my twenties I did this frequently. They ned but one room apartments when first married. Your kids can share bedrooms.

Do not look for perfection, but instead build memories. ANd if your wife can play defence [2] you can school your children regardless of where you are, avoid the need to be in the high rent school districts, and take time to serve each other and the church.

Build your lives from scratch. And when you are my age, your house and home can be a shelter for the grandkids. Or you can still disappear for a month a year, with the aim of seeing them.

But seek not perfection. In that lies the home for the single mother and the debtors prison for too may men. Seek instead to live well enough. Marriage is too important not to try to do well, but it is better to do badly and imperfectly than burn in singleness and sin.

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1. We will leave aside the troubadours, who argued that courtly love was chaste and for the wife of another. This was, as Lewis noted, adulterous. And it lead, As Wright notes in his most recent novel, to Guinevere loving Lancelot, and letting Camelot fall because her passion burned too strong.

2. Some years ago Butterfly Squash (Alte) said that most of the work women are paid to do is what a smart housewife would do: cook, keep house, be a social secretary, educate the children, nurse the elders, and preserve traditions. She pointed out that most women would better spend time with those they love and growing them than working in one task to pay another woman to clean and raise and teach her children, for that other woman would not care for them. There is a truth in that observation.