It is getting close to the end of first semester here. I told my sons to only go to college if they knew what they wanted to do, so son one did not take an offered year out (during which he would have had to get a job) and is doing the hardest course in any Kiwi University. He left home at 7:30: I do not expect him to leave the library til 9.
But Casa Pukeko is a geek home. The kind that idiot teachers think is poorly socialized because the beer is not touched but the caffeine is. Most people would be better off working.
Now for some home truths: Free Northerner referred to a situation where a 16 and 17-year-old were moving into a physical relationship and Christian counsellors told them to split up The first comment is from a commentator who I respect, and yes, she is a mother.
Now, please note that the following should be read with tones of sarcasm dripping from it:
C’mon, now, if they get married right now, just so they can have sex, you’re advocating completely ruining, ruining both of their lives and futures! They want to go to college, for heaven’s sake, and have careers, they have Set Goals themselves and marriage would only get in the way of that. And children, at 16? Good Lord, FN, what sort of misogynist dystopia spawns such ideas?
jack, above, has the right of it. Hedonism rules and marriage is something you do “after” you have life figured out, no? My hairdresser has one daughter and two sons. She doesn’t care if the sons go to college, they have options and inclinations for jobs that don’t require college degrees, and she’s confident that, because they’re boys, they’ll be OK. Her eldest is the girl, who is in her fifth year of college (whoops, $34K on the first year swirled down the drain in a wash of beer and bad grades). She said she felt the girl needed to go to college to have options and get ahead in life so she wouldn’t need to depend on anyone. *Sigh*
So, $170,000 later, her daughter has been at West Virginia U for five years getting a degree in communications so she can become a social media consultant. I wonder what her marriage prospects will be in a few years. Hairdresser doesn’t seem to see the potential damage done to her daughter’s happiness by trying to ensure Daughter never has to depend on anyone.
Funny thing is, the best way to get “kids” to grow up is to give them adult responsibilities. I never saw women get serious about life, etc. so quickly as they do when they have a few children to look after. The sooner, the better, is my new outlook. It used to be sexist to say it, but a husband and children really do settle a woman down.
If this young couple has a strong family around them, who are marriage-minded and committed to making it work for both of them, they’ll be better off for it than being spendthrift with their youth and energy in college.
Will S. expands.
I know of two young boyfriend / girlfriend couples of my own personal acquaintance, from churches I’ve belonged to, who unfortunately did slip, and were subsequently caught (one because the girl’s father found out; the other because of a pregnancy scare, revealed to the elders), and the parents in one case and the church elders in both cases decided it best to drive them apart, and end the relationships, rather than do what used to be done in olden days – encouraging the young couple to get married, especially if she’d become pregnant, but not only. But alas, today, even in traditionalist churches, there is a tendency to not want to let educational and career aspirations, especially of the woman, be harmed by such a sudden change in their life. That is profoundly wrong. If they were willing to mess around, they should be made to do what they likely would have done in time anyway – I know in both cases, both parties had strong feelings for each other – marry, and start their life together; they can then decide as a couple what goals would be worth pursuing, and how they would accomplish them together.
Alas, there were profound impacts from having broken them up instead of pushing them together, uniting them, in each of these cases – in the one, both the former boyfriend and the former girlfriend have had subsequent relationships with complete unbelievers (one is now living in Europe with one); in the other, while the former girlfriend has moved on, and gotten married in her church, the former boyfriend has left the church, and is shacking up with a new woman, occasionally attending a liberal church that doesn’t judge their ‘living without benefit of clergy’ (a.k.a. ‘living in sin’, as we used to say).
Yes, we should strongly encourage traditional sexual morality. But the solution when it isn’t followed is not to come down hard upon those who mess up, and split them apart, but rather to make them see their error, yet nevertheless encourage them to make their relationships right with God, by getting them married to each other.
If we are serious about Christian morality we should marry them, for they burn for each other, and then the older women should teach her how to love her husband and care for her children, while her husband learns how to earn a living. It should then be about shared goals.
But expecting young men and women to just date until their 30s without fornicating? Unlikely. Most fall in love, seriously and hard, in their late teenage years — as it was designed from the beginning. We should work with this, not against it.
“Most fall in love, seriously and hard, in their late teenage years — as it was designed from the beginning. We should work with this, not against it.”
Exactly!
Yes. I might have even deserved white on my wedding day if I thought I was shooting for a wedding at 18 rather than in my early-20s…. (For your reference, DH and I started off-and-on dating at 14, and have been attached at the hip since 16/17, got married at 22 – 23 for him by four days). And I’d not have chosen Women Studies if I wasn’t *looking for* the lowest and easiest hurdle to jump over so I could finally get married.
At 18 I drove over here every morning, got him out of bed so we could go to class, we went to class together, shared an unofficial bank account (meaning he deposited his checks into mine and I took as much money out as he wanted) and worked completely as a team. We *could* have gone to college as a married couple…
And yes, me going off to Santa Cruz to finish my degree work was sucky for our relationship, although we didn’t break up or anything. I put a lot of miles on a wonky car getting home to see him though! (Poor man thought I was dating around on him until he visited me. Not a lot of hetero males at UCSC – those that were had a nice selection).
So yes, thanks for mentioning my “if only we’d done it *that way*” … 😛
Lucky you. I did not meet anyone like that until I was older than you were when you wed. And yes, I married her. According to yesterday’s paper 35% of marriages in the year I wed (1988: I am ancient, Will) were divorced before their silver anniversary — which would have been November last year. And we made it to 20 years.
You give a woman your life, your fortune and your sacred honour and you trust that she will never pull the trigger on you. But that can break at any time in this world.
It is good to know where you belong, yes. And I’m daffy over him.
But as your article said – there are drawbacks. Imagine the … impatience of youth (you have two as an example) who know who they’re supposed to be with but don’t know how to make that happen within the “rules”.
The acceptance in our society that you will fornicate before you go to the altar and the idea that this is some kind of romantic sacrament is…
… a distortion of what should happen, when you go to the altar, lay your live down for each other, and then consummate that joyfully.
This lie is repeated often: consider the Sookie Stackhouse series (True Blood TV — which has more bonking in it than Game of Thrones, but in GoT the temptation is power, which gets me less than romance. Need to avoid TB) where she sleeps with Vampire Bill, gets bitten, and this is portrayed as high gothic romance.
EDIT
In my mother’s day (she was a teenager during the 1940s and 1950s) if you did have sex with that man there was a very high likelihood you would end up pregant and either “go up North” (to the family farm, have the baby in a rural maternity ward, and give the baby up for adoption) — which is what happened to my birth mother — or go down the aisle knowing you were in for labour pains in seven months or so.
Sex had consequences then, and everyone knew it. It still has consequences, but our society denies it. Hence the need for vampires to MAKE it romantic and irreversible — it is part of our psychology. We want this to be more than a pleasant exercise.
And that used to be getting knocked up after the first or second time you “went all the way”.
There are reasons I’m quite blunt about my youth – same as you are. It would be terminally easy for me to shut my mouth and let people think that it was smooth and easy and virtuous. You get a lot of mythos when you marry your high school squeeze. IF you want to marry young – (your original point in your blog is that sometimes we do want to do this) – we have to have systems in place that make it workable. I was just about insane by the time I got out of college, we’d waited so long to be together… I was sleeping 14 hours in a day to make the days go by more quickly. (Eat, write papers, sleep – that was my life).
My husband *does not* have a college degree. If we’d married young, like as not we could have done college together – we took a couple of classes at the local junior college together and enjoyed that. But you’ll note that he’s the one putting the roof over our heads? There hasn’t been a day of our marriage that he hasn’t out earned me. A chunk of that was the dumb degree I took, but still. The “go to college and life will open out before you like a flower” is a lie. I bought that lie and my teachers bought that lie. I remember when I was in junior college, working at a local craft store on my off hours. One of my HS teachers came in – you’d have thought I’d killed her puppy from her face. I was one of the bright ones, I wasn’t supposed to be in town working a cash register… :p
Long reply – but basically I’m agreeing with everything you wrote and cheerfully offering myself up as an object example of what not to do.