Author: ethan

This chapter documents how people’s love lives and tribe lives can come into grave conflict. Not many links to point you to here because I relied on the personal stories of people who struggled to make the transition from tribes to families. There is good news. The divorce rates appear to be going down. Experts have pointed to stronger, later marriages as one factor. Even though we’ve delayed marriage longer than any generation in American history, we might also be the generation that saves the institution from irrelevance.

Over the last ten years women have often been blamed for the marriage delay. “Women are not behaving correctly” was the subtext of books like The Rules^*. Conservative commentators similarly believed that women had been the cause of the death of courtship. Chief among these doomsayers were Patrick Buchanan (who still has his site up for his 2000 presidential campaign).

There was also Leon Kass’ essay “The End of Courtship,” in which he said ridiculous things like, “In the present climate, those increasingly rare men who are still inclined to be gentlemen must dissemble their generosity as submissiveness.”

My case was that courtship hadn’t died but changed. As a generation we were not cynical about marriage, we were just very cautious. It was true that, if we were going to spend a decade of our young adulthood outside of marriage, we were going to have a good amount of out-of-wedlock sex. But that didn’t mean we had abandoned the idea of marriage. There was evidence, in fact, that we were holding marriage to a higher standard—taking it more seriously—than previous generations.

^*My Top Five Stupidest Lines from the Rules can be found here.

In this chapter I go looking for my personal reason (excuse) for reaching my mid-thirties and still being single. I travel to the American Psychological Association’s national convention and criticize the work of William Pollack and David Lisak who were arguing at the conference that all male commitment issues came from bad socialization. I was sure socialization wasn’t the whole story. This led to my brief affair with the work of evolutionary psychologist David Buss. He argued that many of the differences between men and women in romantic relationships came from our pre-wired evolutionary desires. I thought he was right but eventually realized that evolutionary psychology was not helpful in finding (or understanding the meaning of) love.

The fifth chapter marks a major shift in the book. I turn my attention to why my generation is experiencing the marriage delay. I visit the American Association of Single People. I chide them a little for using the word “single” in the name of their organization. I get the executive director Tom Coleman to admit that he has had trouble with the word because so few people seem to want to label themselves as open-endedly “single.” Perhaps he took our conversation to heart because the organization is now called “Unmarried America: An Equal Rights Organization.”

Here I try to make the case that my generation is actually good at building community. Mainly I take aim at Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, where he argues that this generation of young adults has not done its part in creating “social capital.” It’s true that we’ve not joined the community groups our grandparents belonged to but we’ve done something more interesting and harder to document. We’ve created community among networks of friends. This has led to what I call “social dark matter.” The community building that goes on among these networks of friends is difficult to document but it creates a force that binds together whole cities. I cited Critical Mass as an example of how this social dark matter can suddenly become visible. Since the book came out there have been more examples, like flash mobs, Friendster and Tribe.net We seem to be coming to understand how these loose networks of friends can have an impact in the world.