On Women Marrying Young
Did any of you catch the recent “Princeton mom” flap? Princeton alumna Susan Patton, in an open letter to women attending Princeton, advised that they should find a husband in college–otherwise they’d wind up divorced from a not-very-smart man they’d meet later in life. (Ouch!) Then Kathleen Gerson fired back, countering that it’s objectively better for young women to marry later in life.
Let’s face it: at the root of all this chatter about what women ought or ought not do is secular society’s conflicted and uneasy relationship with the institution of marriage itself.
People are no longer comfortable with the idea of one man and one woman pledging forever to one another in order to love and raise a family, and they don’t understand what it ultimately means to be a husband or a wife, or a man or a woman.
And thanks to the wholesale acceptance of artificial contraception several decades ago, the very purpose of marriage has been reduced to Something That Makes You Happy. Until it doesn’t. And then you bow out, because what reason is left to stay together if children don’t really need both a mom and a dad, or if man and wife are not really one flesh before God?
