As I’m reflecting on this year (between tidying up) I am thinking of a prayer I wrote in the diary this time last year. I prayed that I would find someone who could be a stepmother for the boys.

There is, at this time, no one. And… since I am fully aware that once one is sleeping with a women your ability to discern if the relationship is correct will go.  (It is no sex before marriage for practical reasons).  Now… there may be some reasons for this.

1. I may have not been psychologically ready for a relationship. I certainly did not put much effort into finding someone. Looking after the boys and myself has been the priority this year — I had one boy sit his first set of senior exams, ran a conference, and re established two hobbies (viola and photography).
2. It may be wrong to re-marry. This certainly is Catholic Doctrine. It is not Reformed doctrine.
3. It may have been the wrong time for my boys to realise that I had someone else in my life. I’ve seen this with friends. We all may be middle aged, but it does not stop imitating the most silly of giddy teenagers when we fall in love. And the idea of this is… to our children… simply gross.  It is bad enough for a pre teen or early teen to consider that his parents may still be having sex, but her or his parents dating? Awful.

And my older son gave me the “I don’t want a girlfriend because you have to give them attention and spend money on them” speech again about three weeks ago. It simply may have been the wrong time.

Or it may be never.There is no question that the current rules of our society are based around serial monagamy — and this itself needs defending, which is one reason that I’m linking to Susan Walsh as well as Dalrock.

But the reformers had it right. They argued that families should help their daughters choose an eligible man of good characther who could support her. They could not rely on the crown (for they were generally dissenters) and the expectation was that families provided for one’s own. The woman’s sense of attraction was important, but the young people were encouraged to know each other, and then learn to love each other once married. In their late teens (for the girl) and mid twenties (for the boy). Divorce was shunned — and in a divorce, the woman lost everything.

We can argue about what has changed here, but some of the components that led to the loosening of morals include:

• The development of a social welfare system that supports single mothers (ie. supporting widows extended to divorcees and then to single mothers)
• The move to alimony, female custody of children and child support payments tilted the financial equation for divorce in women’s favour.
• A de-emphasis of the theology of incarnation, and bodily resurrection within the church. This has led to a functional form of gnosticism that tolerates immorality — particularly serial relationships — and does not call out bad behaviour, female or male.
• Birth control. This has led to young woman considering sex as a form of recreation apart from fertility (and, given that a third of NZ women have chlamydia when screened in pregnancy, the women who have many partners [ut their fertility at risk).
• Neo-Gramscian Feminism... as an ideology that has made a "long march through the instutitions" now sees the current situation as normal, inevitable and sustainable. The cost to men, in this view (such as increased suicide, decrased ambtion, and the move to a relationship strike) is acceptable.

There is one problem. Look at this graph

Hat tip to zero hedge and Will S from Patriactionary

We are not living in the times that are increasing wealth and growing a vibrant culture. In the West, we are in decline. The burden of the state is such that what used to be simple is now complex. We have a large bureaucratic class, and the members of this are sheltered from competition or production. In fact their rules make the West less competative.

We may not have killed the golden goose, but we have given it an gastric bypass, and it is starving.

The consequences for this is… that the current social democratic welfare state is doomed. Tax reciepts are down — even in NZ, which technically is in recovery. You cannot grow the size of the welfare state when the size of the economy is shrinking.

And this will break the bedrock assumptions of the current feminist zeitgest. The state will not be around to provide jobs. The family will have to step up.

And families need mothers, yes. Hence the prayer last year. But they also need fathers. One of the reasons I am on this planet is to be a father for my children. I pray regularly that God will give me time to see my chidlren grown, and my grandchildren grown, (See, I’m greedy!). But this means that I am likely to live through the destruction of the social welfare state.

And during that time, many will suffer greatly. I am praying not for that, but that we will, as a society, return to a more sustainable, crunchy, and traditional way of living. By choice, and before we have no alternative.