I have had a lot of time alone recently, as my companion is absent for a while. It’s Labor Day weekend. But I am blessed to be surrounded by people who are married and have families of their own, which means I am by myself; the only person whose job it is to be with me is temporarily elsewhere.

This is what I’m thinking about today:

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” … And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.” Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.

Women are made to be companions. Men need companions whether they know it or not. God knows it. This is saying that when you find a fitting partner, you get married. And leave your father and mother and siblings. And lead one life together with your spouse. To the extent that men these days can get away with not committing, they are harming women by denying them what they most need: the chance to be what they were made to be. Companions. Feminism, ironically, has just enabled men to harm us in this new way. They still hold the power. They can dawdle, and refuse to grow up, and act like they don’t owe anybody anything, and pretend they have years before they need to settle down. And while they refuse to marry, they keep women from being women.

We weren’t made to be alone. And meeting friends for coffee once a week doesn’t cut it. We were made to live one life together with one other person, one God made to suit us primarily as a committed friend. COMPANIONSHIP IS THE PURPOSE OF MARRIAGE, as far as the Bible is concerned. A partnership! That is very important. Children, notice, are NOT the reason for marriage. They are one thing marriage can give you, among many things. But the reason God gives is that is it NOT GOOD FOR THE MAN TO BE ALONE.

It is apparent that God’s observation is true. Joseph Smith [Correction: Brigham Young] is credited with saying every unmarried man over the age of 26 is a menace to society, and it is true. Thankfully, in my circle of friends, there is only one single guy left. But he is an incredibly destabilizing force in our lives! My sister, the other day, was talking about how hard it is for her circle of friends to deal with single people (she and her circle are also mostly married). She says they change they dynamic of parties. They are increasingly hard to interact with. And the older they get, the more their immaturity shows. Marriage is the only way I know of to civilize men and get them to be positive forces in the lives of those around them. It forces them to live cooperatively. It forces them to live for something other than themselves and their own hobbies.

It is a little different for girls. I think we are less destabilizing than men. But we actually notice the lack. Companionless on a holiday, a lot of people would be quick to say, “I’m sure there must be someplace you could go be a third wheel!” And that’s probably true. But it isn’t what we’re made for, which means it is likely to hurt even more than being alone for the holiday. All for the selfishness of childish men who won’t leave their mother and father and cling to the wife God has given them.

The other day I heard a story. My friend said that at a recent family gathering with his several siblings, one of his aunts said “You know, your grandfather is a really great man and he deserves to see some great-grandchildren before he dies!” The room of course is scandalized by her forwardness. Observing the shocked and uncomfortable looks on the faces of the grandchildren, the grandmother adds, “Well, she’s just saying what we’re all thinking!” That’s the punch line of the story: first, it was outrageous for the aunt to make her remark, but just when we thought it couldn’t get more awkward or inappropriate, the grandmother agrees! Surprise!

Now, I feel bad for my friend in that it must not be easy to have put off adulthood so long that people’s remarks about it have become impatient. I even understand that that can make is harder—make it feel more uncomfortable—to do the right thing. But I really think it is a great portrait of how lost our culture is that a 29-year-old can be so nonplussed when his family remarks that he ought to get on with having a family of his own.

As it happens, I heard this story right before church. The sermons at my church have sortof been all about growing up. The theme has been not limping between two opinions (God and Baal in the story) because dawdling is the same as making the wrong choice. They’ve been encouraging us to find the places in our own lives where we are just limping along, refusing to step out in faith into what we’ve been asked to do.

We were charged this past Sunday with taking our roles seriously: our roles as fathers, mothers, teachers, bosses, husbands, wives. It occurred to me as our priest listed all the roles he could think of that my friend in the seat next to me was none of them. Not a husband. Not a father. In short, not committed to anyone outside of himself. Of course he’d say he is committed to God (and that’s true and important), and that he is committed to a loving attitude toward people generally, and that he is dedicated to certain socio-political philosophies and their implementation. Maybe he would say he is committed to paying off his student loans. But none of those things are very concrete, and none of them are people. I, like my friend, am not living one of those roles. Unfortunately, being a wife and mother isn’t the sort of job we can apply for. It takes a mature man who recognizes the value he gets from committing to a woman. He has to grow up and act before we are able to do the job God has made us for.

When you are 22, you can look at a close female friend and say, “oh, we’re just friends.” If you are “just friends” with the same girl seven years later, you’ve gotten it wrong. That’s the girl you should have married. (And you can still get it right!) Because in mature adulthood, there is no such thing as “that girl you’re good friends with.” That isn’t one of the roles. That’s the girl you should marry, and you are limping, uncommitted, living for yourself instead of taking your life seriously. Friends was a t.v. show that totally ignored the normal course of life. They married off the friends in the end, but in real life, you aren’t supposed to wait until the series ends. At 29, it should not scandalize you that your grandmother thinks you should get on with things.

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.

This article in the Los Angeles Times suggests that a certain “style” of being a guy (being the lazy bum who likes his beer more than his girl) may be a reaction against feminism. It reclaims a definitive masculinity, but an altered, childish one. 

Someone once suggested to me that men and women may be prone to different corruptions. Women may become controlling. Men may become lazy. Just a suggestion. But if feminism encourages the former, it makes sense that the latter would follow. If we accept the premise.

Apparently, women in the Netherlands “work less, have lesser titles and a big gender pay gap, and they love it”! Check out this piece on Slate.com.

It’s a touchy topic sometimes, so in good postmodern academic form, before I talk about it, I will tell you about myself. If you don’t care about me, skip at least the next two paragraphs. 

My mother worked. She is a physician. I could never figure out what the stay-at-home moms were doing to contribute to society, or why it took them all day to raise their children while my mother managed to fit in a full time-job and still cook dinner and do laundry and clean the house every week and take us to piano lessons and gymnastics and soccer, and play that game where we pretended we were puppies in a shelter and she had to come look at us in our cage under the dining-room table and remark about how cute we were and adopt us and take us home to the living room where we sat on her lap for a while. And every day at five or so, we’d hear her car drive up and run out the back door–all two, three, or four of us depending on the year, yelling “Mommy!” like the sun had risen after some polar winter. That joy deflated as soon as she asked us how our homework was going, but still. Life with a working mom was pretty swell and I assumed that’s just what everyone ought to to.

So when I met someone I wanted to marry, I gave him a hard time about all this because I didn’t know why I thought I needed a career. American feminism hurt me, hurt my relationship with this fellow, and hurt him. He didn’t marry me, and when I feel like pointing fingers I point first to myself, but also to feminism. Here’s why:

These days, I think of careers and feminism as separate issues. Any woman who wants a career should have one.  And I’m still pretty sure I could work full time and raise four, five, six children.  As with a lot of life, it’s more about our attitudes than anything. Neither of my parents ever put their careers above their children, and my mother even saw her career as a sort of encouragement to her daughters to reach as high as they wanted in life.

But a few years ago, I thought of them as the same issue; and for many women, they are the same issue. I wasn’t just figuring out whether I wanted to work full-time. I was figuring out what it meant to be a woman. Any man’s equal? Girls in America are told that equality means there are no differences between men and women, and where we see them, they are accidents left over from the old social engineering. The Bible tells women to submit to their husbands. Society says that makes us inferior, and historically women have been given far fewer opportunities. Feminism, in remedying certain actual abuses of this Biblical principle, managed to set up an opposing paradigm that exerts just as much pressure on young women, forcibly driving them just as far from health and happiness as previous decades’ repression had done. I was reluctant to turn over any autonomy to this guy I mentioned above.  I owed my allegiance to women, all women throughout all history, to myself, to feminism. Not to him. I should be any man’s equal. Any man’s copy-cat.

In the American feminist narrative, that means working. The difficulty lies in creating opportunity without also implying an obligation. But maybe the Netherlands has done it somehow. That makes the Netherlands a perfect test case for examining differences between the sexes. What do women do when they have opportunity, but no sense of obligation to behave one way or another?

It turns out they fall back into gender stereotypes, but they’re happy about it. There really are differences between the sexes, and observing the Netherlands may help us see them. Then, we should take them into account and create a new narrative for our children. A narrative based on reality rather than either abuse of power or reactionary over-correcting. Both patriarchy and feminism are selfish rather than cooperative.

Reality: Women are as capable as men. Fewer of them are scientists and engineers, but presumably those few who are talented engineers are not less talented than their male colleagues. If women want to be engineers, they should be.

Reality: Women, as a group, tend to have different skills and preferences than men. More of them are caregivers of some kind (and those men who are caregivers are likely as skilled as their female colleagues). Society ought not value these gifts differently, although the market might give them different monetary values.

Reality: Women bear children. We rational human beings do not hover so far above the animal kingdom that we can change our anatomy. The investment of the female in child-bearing and child-rearing is naturally greater than that of the male. As such, it makes perfect sense that nature would give females a disposition toward child-rearing that they need not share with males (who are conveniently given both the strength and desire to protect vulnerable mothers with infants). Six-month paternity leave doesn’t change the facts of nine-month pregnancies and the benefits of breast-feeding.

The decisions these Dutch women have made are perfectly understandable if we take traditional notions of femininity and masculinity as our starting point. They don’t make any sense if men and women are the same.

We need a new narrative. We need to talk about men and women differently. This article appears on Slate.com, and that itself speaks volumes. This isn’t a conservative Christian publication. Jessica Olien is speaking from within a segment of society that champions feminism, gender equality, and women with careers. I am in the second generation of women raised according to those ideals, and women my age have the benefit of looking at the lives of the first daughters of feminists: women in their thirties and forties. More and more, they ask whether putting everything “on hold” for their careers has made them happy. More and more, they suggest it hasn’t.

So, case closed?