[b]The marrying crowd? Seems to me that the marrying crowd catches up with most of us when we enter our thirties. At 33 I am rapidly approaching a time when more of my friends will be married than not. I should probably stress that many of my friends aren’t exactly what you’d call conventional.[/b]
I'm 39, and the only person I know who hit her 30's got married and had kids was so insufferably smug about it that no-one speaks to her any more. The rest of my friends are single women, or gay, or single parents, or coupled-up but unmarried heteros, or trans, or sperm/egg doners to same-sex couples, or a gay guy and a straight woman and her daughter (yes really), or doing anything at all apart from the "heteronormative" (so-called) marriage and family route. I can't conceive of marriage being the norm in my social circle, which is bizarre I know.
[b]The freedom to just loaf about for days on end, or conversely to burying myself in a project, or, I dunno, play a computer game! The thing I miss most, when I’m in a missing mood, is the ability to spend time on my own. Hours and hours and perhaps weeks by myself, on my lonesome. [/b]
Precisely. The freedom and the luxury of being the master of your own time is priceless.
[b]That said, I really love companionship, and I really enjoy the structure that life as a married father of one affords. Then there’s the added bonus that I have two people around who I love and love me in return. Being in love is nice, being with people that you love (assuming they’re not arseholes) is nice. Also - and this is something that I’ve started to feel acutely now that I’ve left the immortality and omnipotence of youth behind me - I don’t want to face the future alone, and the best way I can see of doing that is by creating a strong family and extended family, just like the kind I was brought up in, but one where the Dad sticks around. [/b]
That's an interesting point. It's almost inevitable that people will base their relationships on their own family, and happy families are more likely to beget happy families than unhappy ones. My personal experience of family is that it is utterly toxic and I really don't want to live my life in a family structure because of the damage it does to the individuals within it. Mind you, how many happy families are there? At best, most people seem to put up with family because that's just the way it is, rather than enjoying the "strong family" you mention, or actively seeking alternative ways to structure their personal lives outside of the usual family model.
(obviously, all of this is predicated only on my observations - I'm no sociologist of the family or anything like that!) |
