Spring Cleaning: All Your Eggs In One Basket

This is a piece from early 2004 that I found while cleaning out my old drafts. I'm finishing and running a few of these. Call it lazy, call it recycling, call it Gladys, but it seemed like a thought I wanted to finish.

I've been chewing on this one for a while. Since last February, I think.

Last spring, I caught about half an hour of Dennis Prager. I don't get to listen to Prager much, smack dab in the middle of my work day as he is. He's become something of an esoteric character on talk radio - an old-school intellectual in a field of button-pushers. Which is fine - when he delves in the same depth into a topic that fascinates me, it's great.

But the other day, he started me thinking. Usually, that process ends with me agreeing with him. This time, not so much.

He was talking about the left's howling with glee over an article that showed that abstinence-only sex education had "failed".

Prager noted - correctly - that it was a "failure" only if you looked at the numbers exactly one way; expressed in terms of teenage pregnancy rates (which don't differ much) and overall sexual activity. Prager noted that kids who took abstinence-only sex ed did, in fact, tend to wait longer before becoming sexually active - on the average, as I recall, 18 months. This, Prager noted - again, correctly - is a good thing; that 18 months is a whole extra world in terms of maturity. Not enough, but every bit helps. Prager also noted that kids whose school-based sex ed focused on abstinence had statistically fewer sex partners before marriage - which is good for physical as well as emotional health.

So far, so good.

Then, Prager noted that abstinence-only graduates tend to marry, on average, much earlier than graduates of other programs. This, Prager said, is a good thing.

I had to think about that one.

Did Prager mean that early marriage, in and of itself, is a good goal? I'd have to disagree.

Prager's implication: Marriage, and damn the torpedoes!

It seems shortsighted to me.

There've been studies of kids and their attitudes toward marriage and sexuality. Now, children and teenagers who grow up with some level of religious faith are more likely to put off the onset of sexual activity - but it doesn't slow the onset of adolescent horniness one iota. I didn't need a study to tell me that - I remember it all too well.

And these kids are the ones that will abstain until marriage - but, the studies say, will marry much earlier than other people; making sex "legal" is a large part of the motivation for those early marriages.

But early marriage has its problems, too.

Sex makes babies. Babies make families. And families freeze your life exactly where it was when the child was born; for the most part, once you have kids, your path is pretty well set for the foreseeable future. You may have dreamed of being a film director - but once you have that family to pay for, if you're working as a restaurant manager, the chances are pretty good you'll be in the restaurant business 18 years later. Which is not to knock the hospitality business, not at all. But if your heart and soul lie somewhere other than where you're working when you got married at 18 (as did quite a few of my high school classmates, and as do a lot of small town kids) or 20 or 22, you stand a very good chance of being a very unhappy, unfulfilled-feeling 30-year-old.

I know the feeling, of course; I didn't get married young, thank God (I was 27), but it was at a lousy time of my life, the middle of a debilitating four-year long depression. Kids didn't just follow fast (my daughter, now 13, was a honeymoon baby), but I married a prefab family; my stepson was 9 when I married his mother.

Once I got along with the matter of working through the depression, there was the little matter of earning a living. I'd always hated the high tech industry - but with kids to feed (my son was born 18 months later), it was a better option than what I was doing. And 12 years later, I'm still in high tech; enjoying it, but it's not what I would have wished for.

That being said, I was older, had a degree, and had lived a fair chunk of life before my life entered its' child-rearing freeze-frame. I've often wondered; what becomes of the kids who get married at 18, partly because they just don't want to wait anymore?

Well, I've seen it happen; friends from high school, from small towns around my hometown, and from college who got married right away, most of them either virgins when they walked up the aisle or (much more common, given the number of shotgun weddings) at least having been when they met their spouses. They had little education, little time to really find where they belonged in the world, and little idea of themselves as people.

And I've met a number of them in the years since. Happy as they were to be with the one they loved, to be starting families, and to be finally getting some!!!!! at 18 or 20 or 22, many were equally...not miserable, mostly, but unhappy, pondering the roads not taken, without the education and life experience to really know how to fill in that big, yawning blank. Some seemed wistful; some seemed to drink a lot; some had a divorce or two under their belts by age 28 or 31 or 37; a joyous minority seemed as happy as the day they walked down the aisle.

Am I advocating sex before marriage? Certainly not; I doubt you find many fathers of teenagers who do. But early marriage as a goal in and of itself is, it seems, as big a mistake for almost everyone as too-early sex; it leads to a lot of the same problems for everyone involved, except of course the children that result.

I need to have a word with this Prager fellow.

Posted by Mitch at January 7, 2005 05:06 AM | TrackBack