When we lived in a third-floor apartment with our two boys, it was miserable. If we let the boys be themselves, they would run and jump and irritate our downstairs neighbor. But if we tried to stop them, we were constantly scolding them for simply being young boys. There was just no good solution to a situation with such incompatible goals. So we rented a house and all became well.
Culturally, I fear we’ve put our older children in a similarly impossible situation. On the one hand, we tell them that it is responsible to wait until they are older to get married. And on the other hand, we tell them to be abstinent until they are married. Although it is logically possible to do both of these, in practice it’s extraordinarily difficult. But the solution is fairly simple.
If we encourage our children to date toward marriage and then to marry early, they can live a life that happily expresses their biology rather than a life which must constantly stifle it. In short, the main reason it takes such massive effort to wait until marriage these days is because waiting that long is unnatural.
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