It’s About Making Babies!

NML at Baggage Reclaim writes about “I’m Successful! Why Am I Still Single?“.

This isn’t a new complaint, or a new topic. Susan Page wrote “If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single? Ten Strategies That Will Change Your Love Life Forever,” back in 1988. A copy has been sitting on my coffee table since 1990. And, yes, it is the same coffee table I bought in Minneapolis, MN, in 1982. Thanks, Dayton’s.

Being successful isn’t the problem

When someone arrives at success, most often that is a personal accomplishment. One overcomes resistance, odds, and perhaps opposition to succeed. Whether success is wealth, or fame, or position, influence or power – the point of success is to satisfy an ambition. A personal drive to accomplish a personal goal.

Love and Marriage

Frank Sinatra sang, a long time ago, a song about “Love and Marriage” – go together like a horse and carriage. (Amazon.com has both the sheet music and an MP3 download). Hold on – the point isn’t the religious-civil marriage ceremony.

Even as long ago as “Our Town” came out in 1955 (the movie in which the song was introduced), America was losing sight of what makes a community, an extended family. Focus on veterans returning from World War II, and then the Korean conflict, focused on individuals. During WWII, women had left the home of their fathers and husbands, and found a niche in industry, commerce, retail – and in the community.

The modern concept of family – a couple of adults raising children to be “the best they can be” – came from an earlier time. The family, even today, is a unit of culture. Culture – an adoption of rituals, traditions, and values that express the lives and living of those in the family. This culture comes about by combining the backgrounds of experience and cultures they had lived in, to arrive at an agreed upon “home”. It is the expectations, the responsibilities and beliefs, the definitions of right and wrong that a couple use to embody a home, whether in a house, an apartment, a barn or garage, or a couple of rooms in someone else’s house.

The family is a unit constructed out of respect and honor of the families of the primary adults. That is, the extended family. The family is the unit of culture that, gathered together with all those living in a community, define that community.

We are all familiar with chance-formed communities. This is what happens when people buy a house, move into a condo or apartment, without knowing who the neighbors are (and likely never meeting them). The community is formed by chance. So we hire police and elect a mayor, and mostly things go on. In family where there is conflict often some of the affected parties rebel and cut contact, or are shunned.

Make a home, not a bed

What can we do, then, to avoid using chance to build a home – or not? We look for a mate to build a home with, to build with us a unit of culture that we can recognize, respect, and adopt. A mate that will help define our own position within the extended family and within the community.

Crowds of single people form one kind of community. Families, though, have a chance to form stable communities and combine in extended families. Changing from single to family is not a pronouncement gifted when two (or more?) adults choose to form a family.

A family forms, and the community recognizes the family, because the culture of a family is formed. The identity and roles and fundamental definition of one’s role in the world is redefined, by becoming part of a family.

Cults and many religions are similar to families, in that your life is transformed. That transformation is plainly visible to self and the cult or religious community. Or self-help group. Or military unit. Or family.

Success or family

If success is a personal achievement, family is a surrender. What we call a “relationship” is too often a chance-formed association. You find someone that you are attracted to, or is available, or is just there and you feel needy. We choose a partner because of our feelings, our needs, our goals.

When the reality is that we need a partner, to form a family culture, to define something that doesn’t exist yet – the people we will be within a family, within an extended family and within a community.

Single or coupled

It is a shame that marriage is considered to be between a man and a woman.

The reality, is that a marriage is the fundamental formation, the birth if you will, of a new unit in the community and extended family. The community and extended family are integral actors, in the formation nurturing, and ultimately accepting this new family.

The Christian Church, for it’s own reasons, long ago determined that only heterosexual couples fit the rite of marriage. That is fine, I won’t comment on that further. The state and nation have an interest in tracking the merging of assets and parentage – identity – of progeny, both adopted and by birth. But handfasting predates the Christian form of marriage, and serves the community well (except, of course, the Christians). As for man and woman – I cannot find anything in scriptures that details how many adults may be involved in a family – none of the man-and-woman scriptures mentions that either were unmarried, and would not take further spouses. But that is neither here nor their, I just explain why I don’t define a family as the result of a Christian (or “civil”) marriage.

Where the successful person is proud of her/his accomplishments, and strives to apply the strategies that were successful for them to other areas of their life – a relationship is a surrender of self and values, within boundaries, with the goal of forming a family that nurtures everyone else.

Success is something one does, is a personal satisfaction. A mate is defined by role within family and community, not by oneself. A relationship is a partial formation of a family.

Make me happy

When we pick someone because we admire or fantasize about their sexual features or provocations, we risk beginning a relationship – whether a quick few minutes or attempt at months or years, or a lifetime together – because we follow the key to success. We strive to satisfy our personal goal.

And we stumble into a chance-formed family.

It used to be that girls worried about dating and their “reputation” about being sexually active. Not just the girls and boys – their families, and entire communities. Sex obscures thinking; the community and extended family have a need to sustain themselves. That is, they need to keep families involved in the community, and to nurture those families. Extended families have the same need. Letting homes form, that fail to thrive, weakens the community.

We have forgotten that.

Few alive in modern America today recall just what an involved, community-type community could be. Some rural villages and towns, some urban neighborhoods still express the old involvement, but most have lost their young people.

Whom to choose

Suppose, for a moment, we respect and honor what our parents taught us. That we think of ourselves in terms of being part of a family, of raising children to believe as we do, as our parents did.

Who would we need to fill the other adult role(s), to make a family? To contribute to raising the children – to embrace and build the community?

We need someone trustworthy, stable, and disciplined.

Should we take on a partner to have fun, or should we look for responsible people to have fun with?

Does it have to be this way?

Up until the Renaissance, mostly matings were formed by arrangement by the parents – worldwide, that was still the most common form of marriage in the world, in 1970. The musical “Fiddler On The Roof” (and Janeane Garafolo in “The Matchmaker”) taught many of us that hadn’t known, about matchmakers. Matchmakers served the community, enriching the community with responsible pairings that also took into account similar backgrounds and likelihood of being good for each other. Many older women today seem willing to give such advice. I would stick with the happily partnered women, for advice.

Alternatively, the successful and powerful bought slaves, or bought wives, or allowed a woman or man to serve as the co-parent of their children. Sometimes as eye candy, sometimes as display spouse or host/hostess for social occasions. Sometimes these mercenary partnerings resulted in real respect and affection. Sometimes.

Dating sites and dating services

Dating sites and dating services don’t take into account the needs of the community, or the extended family. The assumption is made that each individual is unencumbered by family or friends or employer or neighbors, or current or future roles in the community.

Dating services and dating sites enable one to pick someone – to make themselves happy. That is, successful. And we are back to the ego satisfaction of the individual, rather than the “together from now on” goal that has to be shared.

If you don’t think you want to pick your partner based on whether, together, you form a unit of your community – consider where you want to live, with what relationship with your community. And whether you want a partner that makes that better for you and the community.

And consider why, in the marriage ceremony, the phrase often arises, “before G-d, family, and friends”. Picking a partner is just a blind gamble, if you are trying to be successful.

An old post on CindyGees blog caught my eye, What Godliness Does NOT Look Like. Dated 2007, the post refers to a an article by Karen at True Womanhood in the New Millenium, What does Godly womanhood look like in the 21st Century?. vision of godly women, Christian, that is, in the 21st Century. Written by Scott Brown of the National Center for Family-Integrated Churches, the list looks a bit like an honored Amish woman – plain dress, withdrawn from worldly (non-worshipful) influences, protected from undue influence by loving father and family, and desiring most of all a godly husband.

Karen’s post on True Womanhood copies the Scott Brown list, pointing to ScottBrownOnline.com. That site no longer exists, and apparently neither does Scott Brown’s article. The domain redirects to ncfic.org/blog, which begins August 2008 – more than a year after Karen’s blog. Karen concludes her inclusion of the list with a question – an uninflected, “what do you think?”

CindyGee objects to an assumption of affluence.

Godly womanhood is a fine thing, but godliness which is dependent upon privilege and wealth is merely hypocrisy, all gussied up in a modest, tasteful, expensive Edwardian gown.

Scott’s thoughts are quite Biblically oriented, as he sees the Bible.

Here are some of their distinctives:

1. They saw the bitter fruit of feminism and began to understand it’s bankruptcy and destructiveness.

2. They “kissed dating goodbye” and decided in their youth that they would abstain from the modern dating debacle.

3. They trusted their fathers encouragement toward them to fulfill the biblical and normative pattern of scripture regarding the roles of women and began to prepare themselves to be wives, helpers and home makers as a life strategy – in contrast to the feminist vision of independent workers outside the home.

4. They rejected the immodest, worldly but common clothing options of their culture and the Lord put it in their hearts to be faithful to God’s commands regarding feminine dress and modesty.

5. They are striving to preserve themselves sexually for their future husbands, instead of test driving numerous partners before marriage.

6. They are spending their time serving the enterprise of the home as assistants in their fathers businesses and assisting their mothers in the teaching and raising of the children in the home.

7. They were told by their parents that if they were faithful and obeyed, they would be blessed.

8. One of the blessings they are anticipating is godly husbands.

I will not speak to the relationship of Christianity to women, to families, or churches. My take isn’t about faith.

The Home as Culture

I think that there is merit in some of what Scott lauds, quite aside from faith.

• Don’t confuse fertility rites with other social and family virtues. Sex is everywhere, from advertising to common dress. The assumption that hints of breast and leg and sexual availability are related to “pretty” or beauty is decadent. The assumption that sex is another name for love is derogatory. And looking for a sex partner instead of a mate and co-parent is distracting from self-respect and responsibility.
• The home as culture. A house is a building. A home is an assemblage of traditions, rituals, and values that define a culture. The home is defined by those that dwell there, and how the home and those that live there interact with extended family, with community and nation.
• There is a reason to make babies. Most of us were raised in a community and family heritage that sees children as the continuation of their parent cultures. The intent is to teach the child the values, the traditions and rituals that enrich and empower the lives of parents and community. By raising the child, the culture of parents and community are preserved into the future.
• We each choose to honor the culture that formed who we are, or to amend or abandon it. Much of the turmoil and the un-familied people and children is because decadent forces in the United States sought to diminish the effect of home on children, to form a society of uniformly un-familied (lost and rebellious) souls.
• There is a difference between sex and making babies. Those that intend to make babies must choose a partner and co-parent to be, that will fill domestic, economic, and genetic role expectation. Matters of discipline (will to complete a task), honor, respect, and competence are much more important than physical condition. Socially, I contend that the better partner will not be particularly skilled at winning bed partners. Making a baby is an act of cultural continuity. Making a baby affirms belief and acceptance of parent and community culture, and defines the role of the family within extended family, community, and nation. Sex is a hormone event, part recreation, part exploration of emotional bonding, part affirmation of partnership in the home.
• Looking for a sex partner is an act of disrespect to self, family, and community. If you don’t depend on someone to help raise your child – how can you afford to spend intimate time with them? Conscious intentions aside, the body is a hormone-driven mechanism. Train it to respond to sexual signals, and it will. Choose to define those signals with respect to home and partner(s) helping to form that home, and you get the hormones, the emotional involvement, and physical adaption of the body all centered on enriching ties. Choose to train the body to attract available prospects, and you encumber the body’s ability to later live a chaste life. Experience many partners, and you train the body to react to . . . many partners. Sex is a life skill, and developing that skill to share with one or many is a life choice, difficult to change once acted on. Besides, like riding a bicycle, anyone interested can learn to be a better intimate partner.

Roles of women within the home, or men, or in whatever combination, are quite rigidly defined for most Christians. My own feeling is that roles within the home and community are matters of the home. I think communities are enriched that admit and support whatever homes may form, that nurture and respect themselves and others.

And I don’t think I much care whether this is the 21st century or the 20th. Culture of home, community, and extended family and nation, and honor and respect, are just what they have been, and still worthy goals.