![\"Semi-happy\"](\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/7\/71\/Grant_DeVolson_Wood_-_American_Gothic.jpg\/250px-\")
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The Pew Research Center reports that<\/strong><\/a> millennials \u2014 adults aged 18 to 29 \u2014 think parenthood is more important than marriage. According to a poll taken last year, 52% of respondents said that being a good parent is \u201cvery important\u201d; only 30% say the same about a good marriage.<\/p>\n For years now, I\u2019ve watched Baby Boomers glancing over their shoulders at millennials as they shuffle off toward their reward, wondering, \u201cWhat is up with these kids?\u201d Some call them \u201cyoung fogeys\u201d; others say they\u2019re so depraved, they\u2019ll soon be wearing Baal brand jeans. This study shows each side grasps a corner of the truth, but nobody\u2019s got hs arms around the whole thing.<\/p>\n On the good side, millennials like kids \u2014 they really, really like them! The results of this poll correspond to the data that show increasing support for abortion bans. On the other \u2014 well, they don\u2019t have any grand notions regarding marriage. But you know, in a way, that\u2019s good, too. The Church may talk very prettily about cleaving and love is patient and whatnot, but her bottom line is, don\u2019t divorce. Marriage and reproduction are callings, not hobbies. If you can\u2019t approach them joyfully, approach them grimly \u2014 just as long as you don\u2019t quit. If millennials, with their hard-headed realism about matrimony, can be talked into marrying despite it, then by gum, we may be headed back to the nifty 50s after all.<\/p>\n To hasten things along, someone had better slip hemlock into Ayelet Waldman\u2019s oolong, or whatever brownstone Brooklynites drink. In her essay \u201cTruly, Madly, Guilty,<\/strong><\/a> she wrote that, of all the mothers in her \u201cLook at me, I had a kid \u2014 high five!\u201d group, she\u2019s the only one who\u2019s \u201cgetting some.\u201d The hussy then goes on to reveal that it\u2019s her love for her husband, not her love for her children, that\u2019s holding her marriage together:<\/p>\n WHEN my first daughter was born, my husband held her in his hands and said, \u201cMy God, she\u2019s so beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n I unwrapped the baby from her blankets. She was average size, with long thin fingers and a random assortment of toes. Her eyes were close set, and she had her father\u2019s hooked nose. It looked better on him.<\/p>\n She looked like a newborn baby, red and scrawny, blotchy faced and mewling. I don\u2019t remember what I said to my husband. Actually I remember very little of my Percocet- and Vicodin-fogged first few days of motherhood except for someone calling and squealing, \u201cAren\u2019t you just completely in love?\u201d And of course I was. Just not with my baby.<\/p>\n I do love her. But I\u2019m not in love with her. Nor with her two brothers or sister. Yes, I have four children. Four children with whom I spend a good part of every day: bathing them, combing their hair, sitting with them while they do their homework, holding them while they weep their tragic tears. But I\u2019m not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n When Waldman first published this piece, readers came close to stoning her in the streets \u2014 and rightfully so, I think. Not that there\u2019s anything wrong with loving your spouse, but common sense tells me that the Waldman model is simply out of most people\u2019s reach. Not everyone is as loving, or as lovable, as she and her husband seem to be. If you, the reader, happen to number among the Elect, well, count yourself lucky.<\/p>\n No, anyone who wants to plug marriage as a vocation is going to have to sell what Yahoo! News calls the semi-happy marriage<\/strong><\/a> \u2014 the union without devastating conflict or animating passion; that is, the union that is bearable, as long as you don\u2019t mind being bored. In Marriage Confidential: Workhouse Wives, Undersexed Spouses, and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules,<\/i><\/strong><\/a> historian Pamela Haag tackles that very subject:<\/p>\n Her own 13-year-long marriage almost fit the bill. \u201cOften, in my own case, I really can\u2019t tell if my marriage is woeful or sublime,\u201d she writes in her book. \u201cMaybe I\u2019m just so profoundly content that it feels like unhappiness, because nirvana is dull in this way, it lacks frisson.\u201d (She adds that she thinks her husband is \u201can amazing sport, and brave, to let me write about this topic of mixed feelings at all, even though a good number of husbands and wives have mixed feelings.\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n My mother, who grew up in the actual 1950s \u2014 a golden age, according to social conservatives, to rival that of Pericles \u2014 recalls a neighborhood positively awash in semi-happy marriages. Nobody cohabited; everybody was hitched, good and proper. They all managed \u2014 nobody shotgunned her husband of a Saturday night, although my mother does recall an awful lot of people around in a kind of low-grade depression. Each couple had a passel of kids, which was fortunate, because there was always a weird one who ended up hanging himself from the shower rod. Were these couples cushioning themselves, with their fecundity, against just such a loss? Maybe so. This modern age of ours has sent a lot of folk wisdom down the pipes.<\/p>\n The art of the semi-happy marriage hasn\u2019t been lost, I don\u2019t think, but it doesn\u2019t seem to have been codified \u2014 at least not in the Catholic press. I see no end of ink spilled over how to have a happy marriage, or why people should stay in unhappy ones. Ever once in a while, some secular publication will run a first-person account of a blah marriage \u2014 something along the lines of, \u201cWhy I Won\u2019t Kill My Husband Till The Kids Are out of College.\u201d But these pieces tend to have a \u2018true confessions\u201d tone; it\u2019s as if the author is expecting her readers to gasp. <\/p>\n What\u2019s needed are matter-of-fact survival guides written by married people who can stand their lives, but only just, and have isolated the techniques that make the standing possible. \u201cI sew doll clothes \u2014 lots and lots of doll clothes! My husband re-enacts Lord Nelson\u2019s great victories on a pool table in the basement, using our son\u2019s old Matchbox cars. And we both drink.\u201d Rub millennials\u2019 noses in that reality hard enough, and you might just start to see the two-parent household emerge from its slumber.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Pew Research Center reports that millennials \u2014 adults aged 18 to 29 \u2014 think parenthood is more important than marriage. According to a poll taken last year, 52% of respondents said that being a good parent is \u201cvery important\u201d; only 30% say the same about a good marriage. For years now, I\u2019ve watched Baby […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[49,150],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-catholicism","tag-marriage"],"yoast_head":"\n