Reclaiming the Family – Part 5 – Reinvent the Matchmaker – First Thoughts

Two things are true about this particular item.  The first thing is I’m sure this is one of the most important aspects of trying to bring back family life.  The second thing I’m sure of is that I know almost nothing about how this would work.  I know almost nothing about women or dating or anything else having to do with human mating rituals.  I met Camera Girl by complete accident when we were both seventeen-year-old kids each separately skipping out on our separate schools and meeting at one of the most anonymous places in a city as large as New York.  It was at least a billion to one shot so no one should ever take relationship advice from me.

But I do know that kids these days and especially kids from whom their parents hope someday to receive grandchildren need a better way to find mates.  Sure, there are places like match.com and the like but this doesn’t seem to be getting the job done.  What is needed is some kind of sponsorship of social activities where the participants are vouched for by their families.  In other words, you want to keep the freaks out but still have a place for young people to meet.  Now this used to be taken care of by high schools and other teen age membership institutions.  But because college is the place where normalcy goes to die and because women now postpone marriage and childbearing until their mid-thirties, we’re in the place we’re in.  So, to my mind a new arrangement has to be formulated.  And the only ones who have the talent, the inclination and the opportunity are the mothers.  This brings to mind the scenes in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye’s wife is trying to arrange a marriage for her oldest daughter through the village matchmaker and picks a terrible husband that luckily is sidetracked by a subterfuge by Tevye.  And of course, living in these liberated times no one is going to allow his parents to pick a wife for him and vice versa but setting up opportunities for young people to meet likely partners makes perfect sense.  I will have to consult with my daughters to see if this is an at all reasonable idea.  They both have children who one day (and in some cases soon) will be marriageable.  I am interested to know if they’ve thought of helping along the process by some discrete manipulations.

But one thing that would increase the chances for more women to find husbands is for them to look outside of the college pool.  A young woman right out of high school could do much worse than finding a young man in one of the trades, an electrician or a welder and setting up a home instead of wasting four or more of her most valuable years sitting around a college quadrangle watching the soy boys playing frisbee.

I really have to do more practical research on this and this is just an introductory post.  I am especially interested in getting the mother’s point of view on the practicality of trying to influence the courtship decisions of today’s youth.  But I’m convinced that this topic is of extreme importance in trying to somehow revive the traditional family from inside the modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah that we find ourselves trapped in.  Stay tuned for more on this.