(no subject)

I am more and more finding the lengthening age of singleness in this country to be truly problematic and disturbing. One has only to look to Europe and their swiftly decreasing population to see the problems that extended (sometimes permanently) bachelorhood creates in the long run. Both men and women decrease in fertility with each passing year, and women are much worse than men. By putting off marriage and children until (often) the thirties means that each of these couples is much less likely to produce children. The only reason that the US doesn't have a below replacement rate birth rate is due to the constant influx of immigrants and their subsequent large families. For the most part, anyway. Add to that the notion that so many people my age seem to have about needing to "find themselves" first, and you have a recipe for...bum bum bum! disaster! The problem with so many people remaining in their youth faze for so long is that they accrue baggage and become more set in their ways. If two young adults marry before they fully "find themselves", there is a much greater chance that they will grow together. The idea is one of growing two trees intertwined; it will be much easier to do so when the trees are saplings and still flexible. Try twining two older, fully grown trees together and see the inevitable failure this produces. Not to say that this is impossible, but the growing rate of divorce over the past few decades seems to have some correlation with this extending of adolescence and bachelorhood. Correlation does not mean causation, but there seems to be some form of connection there.