Time Immortal

Oh, goody.

The traditional family still rules in Alberta.

This province has Canada’s lowest rate of single-parent homes, according to 2006 census statistics released Wednesday — but there are signs of change.

Newcomers from other provinces and countries are contributing to a shakeup in how mothers, fathers and children live together in Alberta, say some analysts.

According to Statistics Canada, only 14.4 per cent of Alberta families were headed by single parents, although their numbers are on the rise both here and in the rest of the country. And married couples headed 73 per cent of the province’s households, compared with a national average of 69 per cent.

However, Statistics Canada reported that for the first time in history married people are in the minority, with the number of “unmarrieds” edging up to 51.5 of the population aged 15 and over, compared to 38.6 per cent two decades ago.

This is the part where I say something controversial that will — more than anything else I say — inspire people to comment on the article. So why disappoint?

Anyone who is willing to have sex with his or her partner, but has reservations about marrying that person, is a coward.

There…see how easy that was? Controversial.

In Alberta, the number of common-law couples had soared more than 23 per cent since the last census, taken in 2001. Single-parent families were up 11.8 per cent.

“This tells us that families are a key part of our lives, and there’s that consistency over time,” said Deanna Williamson, a professor of human ecology at the University of Alberta.”Family configurations are important, but there’s more variation in how we live in our families than in the past.”

Williamson acknowledged that Alberta’s “more socially conservative ways” could make for a nuclear family tradition stronger than in other parts of Canada. But with the influx from other parts of Canada, “that’s probably going to mix things up a bit,” she said.

Former Montrealers Isabelle Turcotte and Ryan Rosewell are among the wave of new Albertans and the growing segment of common-law couples.

“A lot of people are married younger here,” said Rosewell, 26. “It’s strange to me, because I’ve always thought you should get your life straight first.”

The couple, who have lived together for three years, aren’t opposed to getting married, but don’t have any plans to do so. Both said their parents are relaxed about wherever their relationship might go.

Our world has become progressively more selfish as the years roll on, and this sort of attitude crops up a lot more nowadays than it did even a decade or two ago. The argument that a person should get his or her life “straight” first before embarking on the journey of marital life would seem to be compelling, but in the end it’s really just an excuse to avoid permanent commitment…or, at least, to defer it. What constitutes getting one’s life “straight,” exactly? At what point is one ready — having the right mix of financial security, independence, and whatever other metrics one might care to use — to marry? I’m a month and a week away from my own wedding, and I’m not sure that I can answer that question*.

Selfishness…it’s the point of coming up with such a silly excuse, I suppose. When one can have all the fiscal benefits of marriage under Canada’s current tax regime, plus all the sex from a theoretically exclusive partner, what reason is there for a person not to keep his or her options open by avoiding marriage, using the excuse of readiness to defer the occasion time and again? I can’t think of any.

More to the point, why should one wait for complete stability in one’s life before getting married, when the whole point of marriage is to create stability not as two individuals, but as one couple? It strikes me that doing so would be harder for two people who had achieved stability independent of the other than it would be for two people who are at reasonable points in their lives but still have a way to go before they’re completely “straight”…who can thus help each other toward that goal through the marital bond.

Especially in friggin’ Canada! It’s different in the States, where marriage carries a financial incentive with it above and beyond common-law “shacking up.” Obviously, most people probably don’t get married just for the tax incentives, but it’s worth pointing the statistic out all the same. In Canada, absent that same financial benefit, the primary reason that Canadian couples get married is the one reason why people should get married:

Jim Chalmers, a registered psychologist and executive director of Edmonton’s Cornerstone Counselling, said he finds Canadian couples tend to get married for psychological or romantic reasons, rather than practical ones.

“There’s something about the emotional safety, if you will, or emotional comfort of knowing that you’ve made this commitment to somebody openly and positively … in a very structured way that is obvious not only to you and your partner but to your culture, your family, your friends,” he said.

“(Marriage) doesn’t seem to be for practical reasons. It does seem to be more psychological, emotional reasons.”

That more and more Canadians seem to prefere merely living with their partners, rather than taking the formal step of making a commitment to them, would seem to suggest then that more and more Canadians don’t want to bestow on their partners the added degree of emotional safety and comfort that comes with making a deep commitment to them. And in our increasingly secular society, why should they? I remember overhearing a conversation a young lady was having with her friend, in which she explained that she and her boyfriend saw no reason to get married since, after all, it was just a silly religious thing that “meant that he owned her.” Yes, historically, marriage has been abused by many people and used as little more than a vehicle by which property changed hands. But the fact that people don’t always add correctly doesn’t mean that math is a dated tradition which we ought not to take seriously anymore.

In a sense, this young lady was right…but in a much more important sense she was wrong. Technically, marriage does sort of mean that the wife is now “owned” by her husband…but only in the sense that the husband is “owned” by the wife. More importantly, however, the commitment of marriage means that husband and wife are both pledging themselves exclusively to the other, in all things. They pledge to live together, suffer together, rejoice together, share their finances, share their food, comfort each other in times of sorrow and minister to each other in times of sickness…and, of course, remain sexually faithful to each other.

In our selfish society, that sort of commitment — especially the parts where we might suffer some discomfort ourselves — is a scary thought indeed, and one that more and more people want to avoid. And in a society that is unfortunately puttng more and more value on the notion of a “selfish gene”, permanent commitments of sexual exclusivity get in the way of both having a good time and fulfilling the human biological mandate which, absent God, is the highest calling to which any human being can aspire (except for the fact that we all use condoms and birth control now, which kind of get in the way of that whole genetic propagation thing). Remaining in a common-law relationship is kind of the “holy grail” of that sort of lifestyle, because there has been no formal commitment made and therefore there’s not really all that many obstacles to walking out the door if something better comes along.

Which all distills down to what I said before about cowardice…selfishness and cowardice. But what more can we expect from a secular society like Canada’s? Marriage, as an institution, has served humanity remarkably well for several thousand years now, but within the last century or so it seems that society has been attempting to assert that it knows better than all those thousands of years of human tradition and experience. Exactly what makes us think that this social experiment will yield success eludes me….and in the end, what really gets lost in the whole discussion is that thing which is the whole point of marriage (and, if one is honest about biology, the whole point of sex as well): children.

More than anything else, our society will endure or collapse based on just how many children we produce with each generation. And as the focus on the point of marriage shifts from being about the bearing and raising of children to being about the adult participants in the marriage; as the focus of shared lives and acceptable contexts for sexuality shifts away from permanent commitment to more opportunistic shacking up; and as the focus on the purpose of sex shifts away from unitivity and reproduction to just base pleasure, what is constantly forgotten is that all of this stuff about marriage, eros love, and sex is not just about the two people having sex, but about the fruit of that union: children.

Children we — as a society — are not having.