Many of us find it less inconvenient to be on our own, without the responsibility of commitment.
The other day, I was walking across London’s Southbank at night with a friend – let’s call her Charlotte – when a chap sporting a scraggy beard, an eclectic long-johns-and-shorts combo and carrying a complicated configuration of bags across his back appeared at my elbow. He thrust a paper cup half-full of wine in my direction and asked, “Can you hold this for a sec?”
“Sure,” I said. He walked on a bit as he rolled a cigarette. I half-thought he might wander off without his vessel, but he did eventually come back for it, before thanking me and toddling off. Interaction over, I forgot all about the episode until the following day when a thought occurred to me: what if it hadn’t been a cup?
Say he’d pulled a knife and the old “Your money or your life?” What should I have done? A shining-armour type might say the chivalrous thing: take him on, physically if necessary – protect the lady at all costs. Emissaries of the nanny state, insurance advisers or psychologists might say hand over the goods double quick, don’t look him in the eyes, then seek help.
But there is a third option that may not have come to mind: let Charlotte handle it. As it happens, Charlotte has a triple-black belt in karate, and could have beaten seven shades out of beardie if it came to it. This unique circumstance aside, it doesn’t take much searching to find that woman “not needing men for physical protection” is a widely supported view.
Peruse the panel shows and street interviews of YouTube and you’ll find many a woman happy to say so. They may not be the most representative group: 15 minutes of viral fame ever an appeal, they happily declare that women don’t need men to protect them, that they feel condescended to when they are treated like “children” when they are adults just like men.
So, is there anything that we do need each other for? With the workplace a more even playing field than ever before, neither sex is dependent on the other for financial security, so we don’t need that. Both sexes are quite capable of surviving independently of one another. To have families or relationships? No chance.
Women can IVF a baby with the help of a sperm bank, or even bone marrow now. As has long been known, men can satisfy their lust with help from the uglier side of the internet. While nature still takes its course and bids us into couples, it is in fewer and fewer numbers and for less and less time as censuses and studies continue to show.
It seems the only thing left to us is the power to intrigue one another: the power to appeal to a whim, for as long or as short a time as we can bear. The old couples who spent 50 years together and spoke of choosing to love one another in the best and worst of times, where have they gone?
It is true, not everyone scrolls through the infinite rolodex of perfectly curated faces on dating apps, flicking from one fling to the next (exceptions there will always be), but it speaks to the marketisation of our lives and our time. It is the threats to our time that we take more seriously than any other.
We buy into those relationships and to those circumstances which will least inconvenience us because there’s always another opportunity out there, a better offer. There will always be someone that bit better looking, cleverer or wittier than one’s partner, a spontaneous opportunity more appealing than that dinner you committed to two months ago.
We prefer the limitless but unfulfilled potential of freedom to the difficult certainty of commitment. It is hardly surprising. The impermanence of modern life is evident from the most mundane to the most explosive parts of it: what was perfectly normative yesterday is considered dangerously unacceptable today.
The abundance and hyper-individualisation of our time allows most of us to live, by any historical standard, extremely comfortable lives without our ever having to do something we do not wish to. And, with no real incentive to face the challenges of doing something for a cause that extends beyond the self, having children is low on the priorities list.
Some declare not having kids the responsible thing to do vis-à-vis the climate while others don’t want to interrupt their careers; more say they daren’t bring a child into society given its general state. A dozen reasons are given but the implication is the same: we risk abdicating from the future better to enjoy the present.
But it remains a choice, not a certainty: to believe that we do not need each other; to believe that our personal success is more important than sharing our lives with those around us; and to avoid our responsibility to the future. It is a choice we have not yet made, not fully, and there is still time to choose another path.
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