Listen / Read
People aren’t getting married, getting a mortgage and having kids young enough for Catherlic Pepinster’s liking. In other news, the number of young boys being molested by Catholic priests has gone down. As it were. I imagine she thinks that’s a bit of a bummer too.
The interesting thing about these new statistics is that you might think the cost of houses and living in general would encourage people to combine their finances and move in together (if not marry and have kids) so they don’t have to live with their parents any more. But obviously not. Obviously, plenty of people would rather stay single, not commit to living with someone they probably don’t like that much anyway, and live with their parents despite how cool that’s not.
Perhaps they’re just doing their bit for population control. Or perhaps it’s finally occurred to people that, in the words of Alain de Botton:
We’re coming to the end of an age of extreme romanticism, based on the belief that you could somehow magically fuse love and marriage together. Once you abandon that idea, then you’re into a much more flexible system. We may be getting back to a more pragmatic sense of what the family is about — things like property and children — rather than an absolute soul mate. After all, that’s a tremendously demanding idea, an idea that probably only worked for 2% of the population, who, strangely, managed to persuade the other 98% to buy into it.
And when Pepinster says “that kind of love needs space and independence to grow”, exactly how much space and independence is found when people move out of their parent’s home and into a house with a co-dependent spouse to immediately commence having children? What growth has taken place when couples do this in their early 20s? How much wisdom will they be able to bring to the responsibility of parenting?
The wisdom of such arrangements wore thin a long time ago. They only ostensibly worked when women were considered the property of men and weren’t allowed to own any of their own; when people had half a dozen kids because they knew only a couple might survive. As soon as women began to fight for some semblance of equality, the charade was exposed (“romantic love was invented to manipulate women“) and people who married in their 20s and had kids started divorcing as soon as the kids had flown the coop. Now the entire prospect seems less appealing to many, and some kids never fly the coop, so people certainly aren’t going to be in a rush to move in together and have their own. They’ll never be rid of them as long as banks and estate agents conspire to inflate the market and then sell houses to people who can’t afford them.
The housing market has actually done what people in Pepinster’s camp have been asking the government to do for years – incentivize marriage (or cohabitation, at least) and the nuclear family. House prices and living costs have made home owning difficult for people solely dependent on their own income. When couples do move in together, the trauma of dividing assets, downsizing or returning sheepishly to a parental household might seem like a further incentive for them to stay together. But even if they buck current trends and decide to marry or cohabit, couples are separating more than ever. Better that than spend their rest of their mutually resentful lives together.
I don’t mean to be so very down on the idea of romantic love and commitment; it still works for some, but not so much for others. The one thing that people should be discouraged from doing is having kids before they know what they themselves really want from life. Given that we’re overpopulated as it is, the Catholic message that condoms give you AIDS certainly isn’t going to curb the social trend of kids who live with their parents into adulthood.