Genesis 2

ne of the interesting phenomena to afflict the United States is an increasing number of young adults failing to marry, and failing to even leave their parents' homes in many cases. The increasingly scarce jobs market and the tendency for young adults to get themselves hopelessly mired in huge sums of debt has an unfortunately chilling effect on people's ability to get married and have children.

It's a paradigm shift then when at the end of Genesis 2, after the creation of the woman--not out of man's feet to be his drudge, or out of his head to be his goddess, but out of his side, to be his equal partner in life--the Genesis story says that a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, almost seeming to suggest that at no point should a man not be living with family members.

Certainly in Jewish culture, the family was always a huge factor in the marriage, with the husband building a room for himself and his bride typically on the back of the groom's family's larger home. But how much of this image, anathema to single young modern urban professionals living on their own in the U.S.A., is culturally bound, and how much speaks to a more universal truth? I believe there is universal truth to be appreciated here: Man is not just a political animal. Man is a familial animal. It is not good for the man to live alone, today as ever.

Perhaps in the economic downturn there is a hidden upside, namely that monetary necessity forces many moderns to reassimilate to the older pattern of close-knit families--extended families even, living under the same roof.

So far, the economic downturn has suppressed childbirth and family creation, but perhaps there will be a turn-around as the stigma of being more dependent upon one's family lifts, and marriages and childbirths happen more frequently under the economic protection of the older generation. Only time will tell. One thing seems certain though. The current order of society cannot last, simply because the birthrates are too low to sustain the current culture:

"Preliminary 2012 data show that non-Hispanic U.S. whites have a total fertility rate of 1.76 children per woman, compared to 1.90 for non-Hispanic blacks, 2.19 for Hispanics, and 1.77 for Asians."