I recently started a new job, and was surprised to find a majority of the people I work with are single parents, mostly with a child under five. They are wonderful parents, but I can’t help feeling sad that their children will never know the security of having both their mother and father living with them. They have never known the family unit that God meant us to have. Their parents have to live with the bitterness of a failed relationship, and the increased hardship of bringing up a child on their own.
Why is it that so many relationships end like this?
What is it about us?
There is definitely a trend towards getting married later in life. In 1999 the median age of first-time grooms in New Zealand was 28.9 years, and the median age of first time brides was 27. This was on average six years older than in 1971.
Maybe because we get married when we’re older, we spend a lot of time ‘shopping around’, and sleeping with a lot of different people. Kind of like when you see one dress and love it, or you try on 15 dresses then just become indecisive about the whole thing.
There are also more and more people not planning on getting married at all, or just living with their partners and planning on getting married some time in the future. Then when they get married nothing really changes, and it doesn’t feel like a real commitment. Maybe (sorry I’m going to blame guys mainly here…) actually getting married, after living with someone for so long, suddenly feels like some sort of claustrophobic trap which you can no longer get out of.
Maybe we’re just not prepared to make commitments? Moreover, very few of us take making a commitment to God seriously in our relationships at all. Maybe because we are willing to have so many casual sexual relationships we are left emotionally scarred, and can no longer trust anyone completely.
The most awful thing is the causalities of this casual attitude to relationships and sex is children. Unplanned children often get aborted in New Zealand. Or solo parents may do their absolute best for them, but they still don’t have the family base God wanted for us.
We should be able to feel loved absolutely and completely trust our partners. When we know the other person has made a commitment to God that’s a whole lot easier. It seems a lot of people give themselves completely to another person in a relationship, yet that person is not willing to make a commitment to them. This seems to leave a trail of messed up emotions, children without families, and broken people.
Coming from a broken family myself, it really does distress me to see that this sort of “casual love/sex” lifestyle is becoming the norm.
It really is a problem when people divorce the concepts of ‘love’ and ‘responsibility’ (which is the same as ‘commitment’). The two go hand in hand, or it is not true love. Love seeks the good of the beloved, as Benedict XVI says in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est.
A man who does not care about his lover’s future, or about the child’s, is a man who is not in love; he is a self-seeking individual experiencing infatuation. So no true love can exist in an uncommitted sexual relationship; the man would be afraid of being led into a committed relationship, and the woman afraid that she’s being used as a simple object of gratification. It’s simply against their true desire and nature, which is to love and be loved unconditionally.
I feel for the solo parents out there. It’s a difficult task, raising children alone. I feel for the children too. I know what it can be like, and nobody should have to go through it.
I just hope the society realizes the damage it creates – the suffering and sorrow it creates – not only by accepting broken families as the norm, but by promoting promiscuity, “safe-sex” (so-called), contraceptive mentality (which erodes away true self-giving love) and generally saturating the culture with sex. I think our popular culture is sometimes incapable of linking the problems with their cause – or is unwilling to do so. It’s time our society had a hard look at itself and repent of its hedonistic and ruinous lifestyle.