Necessity

Modern Marriage: Trying Not To Drown

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The pattern was quickly set: life would be good for two months, and then she would blow up and throw a laundry list of complaints at me. There would be so many complaints over such an extended period of time that it was an automatic ticket to the doghouse where I’d languish for a couple of days. We’d patch things up (I’m sorry. Yeah, you better be.) and things would settle. I’d  then think things were good and that we had finally got past the cycle and then it would blow up again and it was back to the doghouse.

It was when she started suggesting that we should go splitsies that the metaphor changed. Doghouses, you come back from those. Now it was like treading water in the ocean and you could actually drown. Every fight became a dunking from which I’d struggle to get back to the surface gasping for breath. Continue reading →

Modern Romance: On Relationships and Necessity

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The 18th Century: The Transformation of Family is Nigh

The ideologues of past centuries taught that with the  proper adjustment of material-political circumstances mankind could escape the world of necessity and enter into an era of peace, prosperity, and personal happiness–the problem of evil all but eliminated. As a matter of faith, ideologues believed that the solution to mankind’s trials and tribulations lay without, not within. Tinker and be saved.

While our country certainly has its issues, it would be foolish to deny that we live in an era of unprecedented wealth and opportunity. Our politicians may squabble over the distribution of wealth while eschewing the bombastic proclamations of old world ideologues, but they all agree that wealth and more of it is good. And yet they rarely note that wealth itself has not solved misery. More importantly, and paradoxically, the individual and civilization both labor under the burden of gold and liberty. Nowhere is the suffering and confusion more apparent than in Americans’ romantic and family relations. Continue reading →