Society Is a Terrible Lover

I have a theory. Bear with me for a moment, because it's a doozy.

Today you hear all this hullabaloo about "don't get married yet! Figure out who you are first!"

Yes, I call it hullabaloo. It's total horsescrap. Know how I know? Just look at history.

For the larger part of history, relationships went something like this:

     - child spends most of young life learning the trades/duties of his/her parents
     - child hits puberty
     - young adult meets a girl, or as was more often the case, is arranged with a girl
     - young adult gets married at the ripe age of 16


Now, there are some people probably muttering to themselves, "but they also lived shorter lives, too! That's why they did it!"

No, to those dimwits. There was never a point in time where someone said to themselves "gee, we're dying at age 35, maybe we should try marrying the kids at a younger age!"

Nor has the increase in life span dictated a later marrying age, vague correlation does not make causation.

The reason why people wait longer to marry is for two very explicit reasons:

1. Education has forcibly lengthened the "childhood" years beyond the puberty stage.
2. Many of the basic social skills by which people meet and attract each other has failed to pass from one generation to the next, owing to such factors as the breakdown of communities and the nuclear family, the war of the sexes, and the internet. Yes, I did just say the internet. Yes, I understand the irony.

Casting the second reason aside for the moment, I'd like to make a very obvious point that, despite being obvious, many people seem to miss. We like to laugh at the idiotic rebelliousness of children that seems to magically appear during puberty. We think to ourselves, "oh they think they know everything, don't they? I used to think that too, until I got older and realized how stupid I was."

Here's the obvious point: maybe kids hitting puberty are supposed to know everything about adulthood by that age - and society has completely failed to prepare them for it. The fact that this fierce inclination towards independence that occurs during puberty is no mistake on nature's part, that's meant to happen: what's not meant to happen is for kids to hit puberty, try to be an adult, and get rebuked by society and forced to remain a child for the next 4-8 years.

And of course, you shouldn't be married if you're a child, now should you. And since neither society nor the family ever helped you form your identity (radical notion: your identity is NOT something you magically conjure from the abyss of self-consciousness), you get told that you need to set out on a vague, meaningless journey to "find yourself."

Meanwhile, time passes by, and you spend years in a state of being nature never intended you for. It's no wonder our current state of humanity is fucked up.

The brain doesn't hit maturity until somewhere around age 25, and yet for the vast majority of humanity's existence, marriage has been somewhere around the age of 16. This sounds silly, until you ditch the "find out who you are first" line.

Maybe, just maybe, we're meant to figure out who we are with another person. We're supposed to marry while our identity isn't solidified. Perhaps our identity is supposed to intermingle directly with another person. After all, why do you think people use the phrase "my other half" to refer to their spouse?

And why do you think it is that the longer someone waits to get married, the harder it is for that person to form a romantic relationship, or create a stable marriage?

Maybe it's because when they finally "found" themselves...

They were utterly alone - and that's their identity.