Tag: matchmaker

Talking Family with Some Friends

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Today I went to visit some very good friends.  It was a pretty long trip but it was so good to spend time with people who speak my language.  We talked about many things.  We even talked about the political situation and I got some different points of view about the outlook for the mid-terms.  Apparently not everyone is as pessimistic as I am.  But the opinions on what’s wrong with the country were still very close to my viewpoint.

One thing that was brought up was the awareness by women in their thirties and forties that they’ve been tricked.  They’ve traded their most precious resource, their fertility, for ten or twenty years as corporate poster children.  The paradox is the women in their twenties will deny to the death that this is what is happening.  It’s only after the deal has been paid for that they understand what has happened.

But at the same time, it has to be acknowledged that our society has made the one salary middle class family a virtual impossibility.  And both millennial men and women have absorbed this as an unavoidable reality.  I countered that Hungary has begun the process of trying to provide a way out of this trap with tax incentives for couples that allows the wife and mother to stay at home with her kids in exchange for benefits that acknowledge the advantage to Hungarian society of providing new Hungarian citizens for the state.  I got some agreement that this would be highly desirable but there was also a lot of skepticism about any chance of it happening here.

And that’s true.  There’s no consensus among Americans that the stay-at-home mom is a necessity.  In fact, among young women, it’s exactly the opposite.  They’ve been proselytized to believe that only after they’ve achieved corporate success should they even think about getting married and starting a family.  The problem is no one wants to marry a thirty-five-year-old middle manager who makes more money than you and wants her husband to facilitate her remaining at the office to further her career after she has the one child, she thinks she has time (maybe) to produce.  So, we’re in a Catch-22 that neatly resists any fix.

So, I shrugged my shoulders and thought I should open a matrimonial agency and entice twenty something women to marry any men who are brave enough to try and raise families on one salary.  I’ll pitch it to these young women as a quixotic adventure that dooms them to poverty but provides the most enriched personal space in the known universe, the nuclear family.  And it’s true.  There is nothing more dynamic than a man and a woman struggling to provide a home and an upbringing for their own children.  What it requires is a man to spend his twenties saving up a stake to own a house and develop a career that he can use to sustain a family.

And it can be done.  I’ve seen it done.  Some military men have done exactly this.  And there are other career paths that can accommodate this goal.  And then he has to find a girl who’s interested.  But the real question is how many men of this type are left?  It may be a small number.

But this is what I was doing today.  And it was a stimulating discussion.  It’s good to get out and about when there are smart people to talk to.  I only wish there were ten thousand people like those I was talking to today.  If only those kinds of numbers existed.  I could see things getting done.  But when it’s handfuls it seems impossible to cause change.  Well, it was a good day.

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

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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.