DR. LAURA IS WRONG
When is it right to marry, and when, after that, is it right to have children?
Those are personal questions, and they have personal answers. Answers that are different for different people.
But there are rules of thumb, generalizations that hold true more often than society thinks. Our grandparents knew that, but modern America has largely forgotten.
Forgotten that the best things in life are actually the purpose of life, and that there is no wisdom in delaying what on our deathbed we will consider the jewels of our existence.
Marry early and have children early.
Be fruitful and multiply, create a home and a family, build a life that matters and has substance. Find purpose in something larger than yourself. Find purpose in love.
We live in an era when men and women are told to delay marriage until after they have gotten their educations, and established their careers, and had a chance to live. To buy a house perhaps, and see Europe and have some fun.
Delay, delay, delay. Thing after thing is held to be more important than marriage, and getting married is seen in a negative light, as something for later, not for now. Maybe a relic from another and less-evolved age, something for simpler people, the poor or naive.
And when people do decide to wed, increasingly they have engagements of a year or two in length. And sometimes they simply become engaged, without setting a date, and they step not closer to, but further from, the altar.
That’s no good.
It’s no good because life is not meant to be lived alone. Humans are not solitary creatures. We form, typically, lifelong pair bonds. We function best when we love and are loved.
So marriage is good. And delaying a good can only be bad. And it can solidify habits and tendencies of selfishness and singleness which will hamper the eventual marriage. During the formative and early years of adulthood, when nature intended us to be adapting to the new family that will be the structure of the balance of our lives, too many people draw within themselves and set out on solo lives.
And when people do marry, the custom of the day urges them to put off childbearing, to spend a year or two or five “getting to know one another” or to delay the arrival of babies until they can “afford them.” These are both treacherous positions, seducing people into inactivity and procrastination, putting the insignificant in front of the significant.
Because two people spend a lifetime getting to know one another, and no one ever truly feels ready to have a child, and nobody can afford kids. And these excuses are a poor substitute for a babe in arms.
In fact, everything is a poor substitute for a babe in arms. Everything is a poor substitute for what is best and most precious about life.
Yet the poor substitute is increasingly society’s choice. And where a generation ago many women were done having their children by 30, many now are just beginning. And they are discovering difficulties of fertility that were once rare, and they, having lost years of opportunity, have fewer children. And the children they do have are raised by people in middle age and beyond.
And the natural vigor of youth, the reproductive strength of the 20s, is spent not on family, but on self. Nature’s plan is overturned, and it is only natural to wonder if that is for the best.
Marry early and have children early.
For many people, that is the right answer.
Certainly, it entails struggle, difficulty and challenge. It means more work and fewer of life’s recreations. But good things come at a price, and the love and richness bought by the hard times linger like a treasure through life.
Life’s seasons offer different rewards, but none are more sweet or precious than the years when children are young and at home. Their parents will call those the best days of their lives and they will similarly linger in the children’s memory. Those times are life’s best times. They are better than anything else this existence has to offer.
And yet there is a spirit abroad in the land that demeans and delays that stage of life, that shoos people away from marriage and curtails the birth of children. It is an evil spirit, and a selfish and miserable one. A custom and culture that cons people into fundamental error, that steals from them what ought to be their greatest joys.
Our lives have a purpose, whether you read Darwin or the Bible. And that purpose is to reproduce, to make more of our kind, to bring into the world little ones like us, not for our sakes, but for theirs. In this era we often lose sight of that. We see children as additions to our lives, new things to own, higher-order pets who must be adapted to our lifestyles and priorities.
But we have the cart before the horse.
They are not there for us, we are there for them. Our health and strength and breath are not for our enjoyment, but for their benefit. We are meant to serve, not to be served.
And marriage and parenthood are the pinnacles of service in this life. They are opportunities to give of ourselves, to love as God has loved.
And we are fools to delay them or pass them by.
Marry early and have children early.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2009
