Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Readings for New Year's Day

Here is an absolutely fascinating essay in the New York Times that stands a lot of our most basic ideas about love and marriage on their heads. Plus, it is both touching and funny.

And here's another one, also from the Times, not about love but just as fascinating. Worth thinking about and learning from, especially on a New Year's Day.

3 comments:

Dad said...

That Modern Love story is one of the most astonishing things I ever read. What bravery and daring! What a contrast to the "thougthful" modern young people who seem to be rejecting marriage in droves.

Caleb said...

Who are those modern young people, exactly? Certainly none of the people I know, whether they're thoughtful or not. Maybe it's the young women who can support themselves these days and don't need to marry someone they don't love in order to be financially secure. Maybe it's the young couples who were raised in a world with a 50% divorce rate, where every other friend of theirs had divorced parents, who choose to cohabitate for a few years before settling down and spitting out some babies so that they can be sure their kids aren't gonna be seeing their dad only every other weekend.

I'm sure somewhere there are people who fit those groups, but everyone I've met in high school, college, and vet school are becoming engaged, wed, and pregnant left and right. If those groups do exist, I'd argue they're actually showing greater respect for the institution of marriage by not entering into it in haste. If there's some other tendency among modern young people that I'm not aware of, it's a response to a broken system, not a symptom of a broken generation.

I thought the people in the article were definitely astonishing, brave, and daring. It is a really great story. But it's an example of something moderately crazy someone did when they were in their mid-50s and had otherwise completely abandoned both love and marriage, not something that would be generally advisable for, well, anyone else.

Dad said...

Well, I'm glad to hear it. Happy to be wrong. Bless their hearts.