(Why super-involved conservative young people may actually be working for the liberals!)

I was once on the board of an alumni association. One of the older members said everyone on the board was either right out of school and new to the area, or retired. He wasn’t upset about it in the least. He said it was simply that everyone else was busy raising their families, which he thought was a good thing.

Nowadays the conservatives really want to get more young people involved. They seem over-excited about getting attendance at events and meetings. You know, it’s just some guy talking too long about something only a little interesting, but the Facebook event page says “come be part of this exciting event!” Uh huh. A local conservative nonpartisan organization just gushes over its 30-year-old single guy who is ready to volunteer for everything. They love how much time he gives to the group. But 30 isn’t actually young. And at that age, he ought to be contributing by raising a family. But it looks like he has invested so much of his energy in political volunteering, sending e-mails, organizing rallies, maintaining a superficial internet presence, that he has missed the boat on major life investments.

If conservatives really intend to try to live like super-involved liberals, they will be abandoning the very worldview they are fighting for. Consider:

Liberals get a lot of young adults involved, but if my friends and associates are any indication, those people are living out a worldview in which individuals interact with civil society directly, without being invested in a family first. At its worst, it’s me and the government. That is, those friends tend not to be married. They tend not to have families. They have huge presence on facebook, and they hold and attend lots of “events,” but if you ask me, the whole thing looks a lot like college. In college, we were all separate individuals participating in student organizations and attending events. Accumulating experiences. Stuffing our schedules with “involvement” for its own sake. Living in organizations rather than families.

And that is the liberal worldview, isn’t it? Everyone unmarried, everyone dependent on society at large, the State, for emotional and economic support. Pure democracy is both radically individualistic and totalitarian. But it has no legacy. It is impermanent.

My married friends don’t live like that. Certainly many of them still care about politics, but their investments look much less like they’re just desperately trying to fill their time and be “involved.”

Conservative young people seem to be more likely to get married and start families. They spend less time on Facebook, and their political volunteering comes after their commitment to their families. In fact, to the extent that they are involved in politics, they are doing it FOR their families, because they have something, someone, important to take care of beyond themselves. They aren’t individuals interacting directly with the State. The first interaction they have is their spouse, and everything they do flows out of that basic relationship. If you ask me, that is a far better way to generate policy.

And I have been convinced that cultural change comes about by example. Getting young adults to give all their time to politics keeps them from focusing on building families. But families are the most important units of society. So if conservatives want to stay unmarried and over-involved in politics, they will actually be working for the liberals. Even if they are fighting for conservative policy! Because they are living out the liberal model of society.

So, I’m not saying young people shouldn’t be involved in politics. I’m saying they should have families first.

It’s not about you.

Love, that is. Love isn’t about you. This is possibly the most important truth that Christianity has to offer our culture’s idolatry of romantic love. So, internet world, listen up.

Someone said to me recently “we have different interests.” He said it as though it meant something. Of course we have different interests: even in a marriage, spouses have different interests. Love is the decision, the choice, to put someone else’s interests above your own. Simple! Hard to do. But simple.

Nobody deserves our love. Nobody! If this man is waiting to love someone until that love suits his own interests, he will never love anyone. He will feel physical attraction, infatuation. But that is a selfish love and nothing to do with Christian ethics.

I’ve been told it is very hard for men to understand the significance of marriage before they’re in it. Married men insist it is about companionship and friendship. Unmarried men have no idea why that matters. Having separate interests is always going to be part of the game. I’d argue that marriage is the best way humanity has to accommodate those separate interests. But “looking out for number one” is the poisonous morality of our age, and it does not lead to love.

Love isn’t about you. Love is all about others. My heart breaks to watch a friend labor over whether he should be with someone: he can’t find the confidence he needs to marry a girl, because he can’t know that it is objectively, absolutely, what he wants. But it never will be. No person can be! His love for her can’t be about him. As long as it is, he won’t find peace.

I have been there, and I wish I could tell this guy about it. I remember being paralyzed by my fear of committing to someone who is imperfect. One day, though, I realized that all my thinking was about me and my own fears and desires.

As long as we go looking for a love that fulfills us, we will find nothing but doubt and we will end up hurting the very people we should be loving. I learned it the hard way. Hopefully, dear reader, you won’t have to.

A blogger for Rachel Maddow discovered an admittedly strange Fox panel discussing a recent Pew study that found women are the primary breadwinners in 40% of American households. The blogger makes a good point that everyone on the panel was male, and for my part, I thought it was pretty unfortunate that they seemed so emotional and threatened when they expressed that men are supposed to be “dominant.”

I agree that this statistic probably indicates a problem in our society. But as a woman, I might talk about it differently.

Someone told me a story recently: When she was younger she was part of a Christian young adult group of some kind, and all these single young women were distressed that none of the men in the group would marry them. She met her husband in that group, and he later told her that the young men noted among themselves that all those young women seemed too independent: the men didn’t feel they were needed, and it was a turn-off. She was surprised, because all of those women really wanted caretakers! But if nobody offers himself, what are they supposed to do? They have to hold themselves up, pretend things are fine. They have to work to support themselves. They have to smile.

Another story: Once, a young-adult group I was in welcomed a registered sex offender into its midst. I was pretty uncomfortable with it. And of course it was just my luck that he set his creepy sights on me (he was a lot younger, creepy in an emotionally clingy way, not in a physically threatening way). The sex offender went to my best friend–and the only man in my life who could serve as my defender–and asked if I was available. My friend said yes! He said yes! He gave a sex offender permission to pursue me! When I later expressed dismay, he said, “Well, I wondered whether I should try to stop him, but I figured you were able to take care of yourself.” That is one of the most sickening things I’ve ever heard.

It’s true; I can tell a guy to leave me alone. But that’s because I have to. What are women supposed to do when the men whom God has given responsibility for taking care of them just abdicate?

A young man I know talks a big talk about men being leaders, initiators, protectors, providers. But he absolutely refuses to apply his theory to his own life. While all his friends have paired off with the young women in their lives, he remains alone, wagging his finger at everyone else. (He seems to think masculinity means he should date a new girl every month so he can feel like a ladies’ man, and as long as he opens doors for women he’s done all that has been asked of him.) Right next to him is a girl, his best friend, who suits him like a glove and gives him a lot of care and companionship and help. She lives alone. She is looking for work, because the things she wants to do with her life don’t pay much. She’d like more than anything to be a wife and mother for her best friend. When she expresses concern about her future, he blithely suggests she get a job selling things door-to-door. When she feels alone, companionless, he suggests she hang out with her younger sister’s college-age friends. That is, when God has given him a straightforward opportunity to be a leader to a woman who really needs it, from him specifically, he says to her: you’re on your own! Fend for yourself. Even your best friend won’t take care of you. Nobody wants to be responsible for your wellbeing. Sell things door-to-door. Act like a college student forever.

It is a huge betrayal. It is easy to correct, if he finds the bravery to step up to the plate. But if even the women who clearly want men to be their leaders are turned away like this, I see little hope for us to re-build a healthy society based on strong marriages and families.

So, maybe it is a problem that 40% of households are supported by women. But I bet it isn’t just that women are trying to compete with men (as the panel suggests). We’ve been abandoned, even by those who more than most should know better.

The topic of online dating is huge. It is sprawling and linked to other important subjects, like marriage, prolonged adolescence, the fragmentation of society, the effect of the internet on our brains and lives, consumerism, and so much else. I don’t know how to write about it.

I’ve been thinking about online dating for a few years. I’ve been reading about it, testing it, watching those close to me use it, thinking, testing theories (only against already available information), feeling surprised at how accurately the things I read describe my own beloved friends, watching other dating strategies succeed gloriously, discussing it with anyone around me who is willing, and worrying about how to communicate any of this to the people I love, who don’t want to hear it in the first place.

I don’t know how to write about it. But I know what my conclusion is. Bad. It’s bad. Not always, not for everyone. But for so many people that I would counsel nearly anyone against even starting to use a dating website. For a while, I thought I had found one good use for online dating (and, no, it isn’t the intended use at all!), but even that has succumbed to further research showing that pretty much all exposure to online dating is bad for us, and bad for society around us.

I’ll start with the good: Online dating hardly ever ends in marriage. Among the people I’ve known, those who end up in successful relationships are very emotionally self-aware, and they are using the dating website because they are part of an easily defined, geographically dispersed, tiny minority group that must marry within itself, and they know exactly what sort of person within these boundaries they are looking for. That is not most people. But that is where online dating can be useful.

Now to what I wish were a good: The valid reasons to use an online dating site keep shrinking, but one that I felt pretty good about for a while was the use of these websites as a way to gain clarity about who you are and what you are a suitable mate for, and who is a suitable mate for you (or at least who is not). That is, it has been argued that dating is mostly only good for helping you learn about yourself, and online dating is just a more private, creeper-friendly way to do that. Unfortunately, the data suggest that online dating may be making people worse at discerning good matches while simultaneously insulating them from reality in a way that encourages their own imaginations about themselves and others, thus lessening even their knowledge of themselves.

On to the bad?

How do we know we are living a tragedy? How do we tell whether we are sinning? How do we know what God is trying to tell us? This is not an exhaustive answer, but it is a true one.

An example

A friend of mine with great powers of rationalization once took a personality test that told him he was a type that thought of himself as logical, but that he actually sometimes acts on strong, non-rational senses of obligation to certain conclusions or ideas, even when they are wrong, using logic as a tool to justify himself. (I was not surprised!) He came to me, concerned that this explained away his Christian faith.

“What if,” he said, “I’m only Christian because when I was younger (before I was Christian) I had a strong sense that promiscuity was bad, and I felt a duty to follow that moral sense into Christianity, or Christianity validated what I already thought?”

This is the answer I gave him: His reasons for believing are affirmed by his many discussion partners. That is, he talks about it freely, and he responds to good arguments when he hears them. His faith is not unexamined, and reasonable people agree with his reasons.

The place in your life where you can be almost certain there’s trouble is the place where everyone around you, among your respected Christian advisors and especially the people who know you really well and love you, think that you are doing something problematic. If you are committed to an attitude or a course of action that nearly everyone thinks is wrong, or harmful, it may be worth a second look. You might be rationalizing.

My poor friend does have something like that in his life, but he scoffs as soon as a conversation moves in that direction. I think he may have rationalized away the test itself in this instance, which is fitting, ironic, funny, and tragic.

A helpful list

Now, I know that it is hard to see out from our sin. Here is a short list of red flags to help you explore. Where in your life do these touch you?

You might be rationalizing or allowing sin if…

…if a lot of the people around you agree that your actions aren’t good. If you hear the same observation over and over. (Hearing something over and over may also be a good sign God is asking something of you in a positive sense.)

…if you’re drifting away from your good friends and seeking out others who affirm your choices, even if they are less suited to you as friends or peers.

…if there’s a part of your life where you won’t take your own advice.

…if you become defensive or try to end the conversation when people want to talk about it.

…if you are hurting others but you think your own happiness justifies it.

…if you think you are the exception to the rule (e.g., you aren’t like other gamblers, other drinkers, all those other people using dating websites)

Again, the list isn’t exhaustive. But we ought to know that we can shield ourselves from unpleasant truths and that we can become very practiced at it.

Why it matters

Stepping out of sin requires consciously identifying it. It requires an intentional re-direction of the will, which will not be achieved simply by praying, “God keep me from sin” or “God grant that I stop being sinful.” Nope. You’ve got to know you were sinning and turn from it. Nobody said it was easy. God will help us and work with us; after all, he wants us to succeed, but see my last entry for how imperative it is that we actually get in the boat God sends us.

This is part of why Catholics think it is a good idea for people to confess to a priest and do penance. It requires you to examine yourself and to articulate what is wrong. You have to face it. Then, the priest assigns you some task to set things aright, not in the world, but in yourself. Responding with action is a tool, a way of helping a sinner achieve that intentional re-direction of the will.

I know someone who offers a lot of short prayers that God keep him from sin, and give him guidance, but the poor guy is one of the most adrift folks I know these days. God has given him guidance, but God’s guidance requires things of him. Bleh, who wants that? Instead, this guy prays, and assumes that if God doesn’t come down and physically re-direct him or change his emotions for him, he’s free to wander in any direction he chooses.

But that doesn’t work, apparently. The stuff above does! It’s how I figure out my own sins. And addressing them requires work for me just like it does for everyone else.

A joke we’ve all heard:

There’s a flood. A man is watching the water rise on his street and a truck pulls up to offer him a ride away from the rising water. He refuses the help, insisting, “God will save me!” The driver pleads with him but eventually drives off without him. The water rises higher and the man has taken refuge in his home. A motorboat comes up along the now flooded street and offers to rescue him. The man refuses, insisting again that God will save him instead. The rescuers in the boat plead with him but eventually speed off to help others. The water rises higher and the man now stands on his roof! A helicopter approaches and tells him he needs to climb in or he’ll drown. The man refuses to be rescued, insisting still that God will save him. The helicopter leaves him on the roof, the water continues to rise, and the man drowns. He goes to heaven and meets God. He says, “God! Why didn’t you save me? I had faith that you would save me!” God sighs and replies, “I sent you a truck, I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter…”

This joke is a tragedy. (Or, better said, a tragicomedy, as we are meant to laugh at the tragic outcome.) In jokes, everyone goes to heaven to talk with God, so the end isn’t that bad. In real life, although the calculus of salvation is complicated, this man’s failure to see and respond to the hand of God is nothing more or less than sin, refusal of God’s will, the opposite of having a relationship with God, and therefore real tragedy. (Remember, within the tiny closed universe of the joke, God’s will was that he escape the flood and live.) In the end, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, God says to the man, “Thy will be done.”

I am told that Dante wanted to call his Divine Comedy only the Comedy, without the modifier, because there is only one Comedy: God’s story of salvation. And we are all either part of that Comedy, or we are nothing. That “nothing” is tragedy: we destroy ourselves by stepping outside of God’s Comedy, by refusing God’s truth and help. They say the doors to Hell are locked from the inside. Every one of the characters in C. S. Lewis’s Great Divorce who refuses Heaven is a tragic character.

I think this means we should pay close attention to the genre of tragedy and learn to recognize it in our real lives. Where we see tragedy, we see perdition itself.

What is Tragedy? Sometimes the tragic character is aware of the tragedy in some way and may not be morally culpable, as in Oedipus. But more often, maybe, the tragic character has found a way to ignore all the instructive information he has been given. The audience can see that he is going to regret his decision, but the tragic character has some strange, blind dedication to some misguided principle: his own power, his own happiness. Creon is undone by his unbending allegiance to his former decision, an edict which mandates the death of the princess Antigone as punishment for burying the body of her brother (who died while leading a rebellion). Creon refuses to re-evaluate his decision because he doesn’t want to compromise the legitimacy of an already pronounced edict. He trusts his own wisdom, rationalizing away all the many arguments he hears from his advisers, who press the issue from three different directions. Antigone explains that her actions were the will of the gods, objectively good and honorable, and a higher law than Creon’s edict. His son tells him it would be a pragmatic administrative decision to pardon her and keep peace in his city. His seer tries to show him how his decision will bring him personal harm. But Creon seems impervious to each line of reasoning. In the end, he has arranged his own undoing, and he has worked evil in the lives of others.

The joke is about recognizing what we’ve been given and responding correctly.

The principle applies to nearly every aspect of the Christian life. Grace is precisely that: a gift from God that we have to accept. A boat or helicopter that we have to recognize and climb into. God offers us good things! When we realize that and accept them, we are part of the Comedy! When we don’t, we are our own little tragedy.

Consider what God sent to Creon: He sent Antigone, He sent Creon’s son, He sent the seer. God did all He could short of bypassing free will. Then it was Creon’s job to get into the helicopter.

The Bible tells us that God gives us second chances, and even third chances, to do what is right. But He does not give infinite chances. I think this is expressed beautifully and painfully in the story Jeremiah tells about a potter. This potter fashions his clay into jars and other beautiful shapes, but the clay is flawed and breaks as he shapes it. The potter smashes it down and starts over. (The clay is a tragic character. The potter is God. The clay is Israel, and all of us, intended by God for some beautiful purpose that we frustrate by our sin.) The next scene is God telling Jeremiah to buy a finished, fired pot and take it to the gate and smash it in front of the city leadership. It is God’s way of saying, “No more chances.” The pot has been fired. If it breaks now, the potter cannot just re-work it. Endgame. It’s over.

I want to celebrate an internet meme that I saw recently! I keep saying that married people need to do more of this. Pretty much every happily married couple I am friends with has spoken about the importance of friendship in selecting a spouse. (They know the secret! There is a reason they’ve won the game.) Many of them seem concerned that their unmarried friends don’t seem to understand, and are ending up in problematic situations (whether with people they date or as differently-aged adolescents who find it increasingly hard to justify their choices).

I think it is really interesting that we have to have the conversation at all! We shifted away from old cultural norms, and now, if we want to return to them, we have to make them explicit for the first time and argue them. In the past, everyone was expected to marry, and they made their decisions much more efficiently. My grandparents talk about friendship like it’s obvious, about finding someone headed in the same direction, about common sense next steps to take with someone who is a natural companion. A now-famous marriage psychologist has demonstrated scientifically (with a level of statistical precision that is almost unsettling) that good friendship is the seed and sustainer of romance. That is, if you are willing to intend to love your friend. But doesn’t it seem funny that we had to prove it?

Will our new explicit instructions make a difference? I have my doubts. I’m not sure it is as persuasive as those social expectations used to be. It’s one thing to fall into the pattern that surrounds you. It is another to be intellectually persuaded of an argument, and further to admit that it applies to you, and then to translate that into a habit of thought and action. This meme is a step in the right direction. It has been shared more than 80,000 times on Facebook. I don’t have to be persuaded by psychologists, because the truth of the claim about friendship is evident in the lives of people all around me. And the ugly counterexamples among my acquaintances further demonstrate the truth! Even on Facebook, I am always seeing people post status updates about how their spouses are their best friends. May my single friends read those status updates! May they notice them and find the healthy pattern!

Are you married to your best friend? Tell Facebook! Better yet, tell your friends, so they know what the foundation of your marriage really is. They may not know! They may think you are trading sex for cooking. They may think you married for infatuation! For the past few decades we have all but forgotten what makes a good marriage, and it is hurting us. But now, we need to get serious.

It is important to choose a spouse who can be your partner, and too many people miss that fact these days (that’s why they aren’t finding spouses, and why divorce rates are so high). But it is also important to choose someone who will be the parent you want for your children.

As to the first criterion: I recently heard a young man say to his best and closest friend (a young woman), on the way home from an event at a church: “If I marry someone else, will you still do things like this with me and be my partner in trying to change the culture?”

Her answer, obviously, is “no”—of course she won’t. He only gets one partner. Just one. We all only get one.

It’s a self-deconstructing question. If he can even ask it like that, he ought to know that he has found the person he should marry. Without doubt. Especially because, as far as I can tell by watching the people around me, the best and perhaps only way to change the culture is for people like those two to marry each other and then tell everyone why they did and what it is like.

As to the second criterion: Several months ago, I was chatting with my priest, and he recounted a thought he had upon first seeing his wife holding their newborn son. He looked at her, thought of his son, and realized that his son’s well-being and upbringing were almost entirely in her hands. He was very glad to have chosen a wife who would be the sort of mother he wanted for his children, because the responsibility was hers. Apart from her genetic contributions (such as intelligence and personality), she would have an enormous role to play in the formation of their children.

Men, your wife will raise your children: They will learn their grammar from her. She will be the one answering their questions about life, the world, and God. What will she answer? How will she answer? Schools and churches can’t compete with mothers. A hundred years ago the argument was made that women should be educated, especially in civics, so that they could raise well-informed critical thinkers who would be good citizens. I’m not sure that everyone benefits from education the same way, but for a certain segment of the population, I expect this could be pretty important.

Working mothers will hand their children to someone else for large parts of their lives, so that’s a bit different. On the other hand, it may be worth asking whether mothers should work. I have a sister in research science, which is obviously not an easy discipline to dovetail with child-rearing. My mother supposes that women in those situations often put off having children until after they get their degree, or else they may have just one until later, etc. (Not every family wants lots of kids, and that’s fine.) My mother worked, and we spent the day with a nanny, a widow in her sixties.

But my mother remarks often that she felt incredibly lucky to have found for us a nanny like the one we had: it wasn’t a daycare—it was one person acting as a parent to us, as a family, in our own home. And she was intelligent. My mother said that they talked about how my parents wanted us raised, disciplined, educated, and our nanny did her best to raise us according to our parents wishes. She wasn’t babysitting, she was parenting. I can tell you that a lot of my development must be credited to her. She encouraged creativity and discussion. She taught us history and respect for family in the stories she told us about her own family. She took us out to learn about our city and about nature (She taught us to collect clay from creek beds).

It is because I can see so clearly her influence that I know my priest is right about the impact a mother has. Even in households with stay-at-home fathers, women report spending more hours per week parenting than men. My own working mother thought of herself as a housewife (as much as or more than she thought of herself as a physician), and tells us that being our mother was a second full-time job for her.

Your children are in the hands of your wife. In a sense, this is nothing more than one aspect of the partnership of marriage: a unified vision—a life built together. As someone put it to me last week: “I think feminism has made it so that people think finding someone to marry is supposed to be, like, really mysterious or something. But it isn’t!” The standards should be high. But they also should be the right standards. As with that fellow up above, it isn’t actually hard to recognize the person you should marry, if you know what you ought to be looking for.

The all-you-can-eat buffet is quintessentially American. We are a cafeteria society. You’ve heard the term “cafeteria Catholic.” It refers to someone who picks and chooses whatever he considers the more appealing parts of Catholic doctrine and leaves the rest. Think Joe Biden at the Vice-Presidential debate: he really goes for that “social teaching”, but he thinks of the pro-life stuff as totally optional and not really his thing.

We’re cafeteria everything! And not a Latin-American cafeteria, where you go through the line, pick your choice of meat, choice of starch, choice of vegetable, choice of dessert, and then pay for whatever you picked. We’re like my college dining hall. A hundred distinct food items sit up at the front of the room along with an endless supply of plates, and kids make three or four trips. You can put one slice of mushroom on a plate, and one piece of ravioli to try. Or why not take a full plate of the ravioli? If you don’t like it, you can throw it all away and go back for a hamburger instead. Actually, you can throw away the hamburger, too, when you realize that you’d rather just fill up on peach cobbler and ice cream. And when the dining hall management says they can meet the students’ demands for costly cage-free eggs only if they get rid of something else, there’s a huge uproar! We want the cage-free eggs AND the natural peanut butter AND the waffle bar AND the feta cheese AND the make-you-own-stir-fry with the array of twelve or so eastern spices!

(And we all complained about the crummy cafeteria food even though I really don’t know of any other college cafeterias that put out the likes of natural peanut butter and cage-free eggs and feta. Even the Commons at Yale University had fewer lunch meat and bread options in the sandwich line than my little college.)

But isn’t this our approach to everything? (Not to over-simplify. Ahem.) “I’m just attending this church until I find someplace I really like.” Or our involvement eyes are bigger than our involvement stomachs and we end up throwing away commitments left and right. Or we keep them and realize too late that we’ve made a whole meal out of fried things and dessert and we forgot to go get the entrée of a job or a marriage or a set of friends who are likely to be around for a few years. Friends come and go. Incredible relationships are almost assumed to be temporary. All the choice makes it hard to commit to a job, to a spouse, to a church. Instead we commit to para-church groups, we go on dates and dabble in mismatched relationships because it seems like there’s no downside to that, we do internships because we don’t want to get stuck someplace. We say to ourselves, “Oh, no, I’m not going to be in Cincinnati two years from now.” And we complain that we can’t find the perfect job, perfect church, perfect spouse.

What if we just don’t realize that the guy or gal we’re such great pals with is actually not available in those other cafeterias we are imagining, and we’ve got it pretty good as marriage set ups go? My friend’s job may not speak to his soul, but if he’s getting $40,000 a year when a lot of others are playing employment Frogger, maybe he shouldn’t be too anxious to empty that plate and start over. Maybe the kid who has collected five different campus ministries thinks it’s cool to have one group for the games, another for the discussions, another for the music. You don’t owe much to the sampler of cafeteria food. No one thing is responsible for sustaining you and there’s always more out there. But I saw a sign recently in a restaurant insisting that customers clean their plates. Maybe something is owed to the food after all? What if the others in each of those five Christian groups are trying to form communities and build strong relationships? Isn’t that kid’s dabbling actually taking something from the experience of the others in the groups?

Alright. All analogies are flawed. I like this one. Feel free to point out flaws, and maybe it can be refined! (Or, you know, dumped in the trash. Surely there’s a whole buffet full of analogies!)

“Love endures only when the lovers love many things together and not merely each other.” So says Walter Lippmann. “Love is not just looking at each other; it is looking in the same direction.” So says Antoine de Saint-Excupéry. In Eden, Adam is given Eve as a fitting helper. The first function of the relationship is partnership. Maybe God tells humanity generally to reproduce and manage the earth. But everything we’re told about individual relationships points to partnership. “It is not good for Man to be alone.” (Brigham Young agreed, saying that every unmarried man over the age of 26 is a menace to society.) Adam is delighted to see someone like himself.

With whom do you love “many things together”? Who seems to be “looking in the same direction” as you? It seems as though some of my unattached peers, especially those prone to over-thinking and intellectualizing and abstraction (I seem to know a lot of those!) don’t realize—or feel rather grudging—that those questions really articulate the whole project.

One friend of mine told me that her young man (at that time “just friends”) said to her, “We seem to think about things the same way.” Now, she’s a woman, so she knows what that means. There’s an “ought” attached to it. But he’s a man, so he knew her for years before they became a couple. They’re together now, and if you ask me, they probably already know almost as much as they need to. There are some really consistent indicators of couple potential. That line is one of them. Someone asked them about it—How long have you two known each other? And you’ve just started dating recently? “Yeah,” he said. “Actually, it turns out this is way better.”

I understand that there is a cloudy barrier preventing people (mostly men?) from seeing what things are like on the other side of committing to someone like that, even someone who “thinks about things the same way.” I am sympathetic. I have a friend who keeps saying he thinks he’s really bad at envisioning what a job will be like before he takes it, whether he will like it, etc. That is exactly why society needs patterns, norms, and social pressures. People need to be pushed through that cloudy barrier, but these days there is nothing to push them. So they just sortof stand there, saying, “Well, I just don’t wanna; I just don’t know. What if there’s someone better?” When I was younger, and involved with someone who “thought about things the same way I did,” I stalled the same way, and there was nothing to give me a push beyond that cloud. Couldn’t I spend a little more time looking for younger or prettier? But young and pretty (for example) isn’t the point, of course. And it isn’t common to be “looking in the same direction.” And people waste a lot of time.