Love, Sex, and Marriage Are Good.

Setting ourselves free from what has been done to our societies.

I have been busy this December.

Every so often, I think to myself, If only I did Christmas shopping in July… It never happens, of course. I am lucky if I start in November. And then there’s the wrapping and decorating and cleaning and family events…

Plus, for some reason, I frequently pick December as the time to start some random huge project somewhere in the house. People talk about “spring cleaning,” but winter, it seems to me, is a better time to accomplish big indoor projects. This year, it ended up being the basement…and I ended up doing a pretty massive cleaning and reorganization of it.

It started out innocently enough. I just wanted to help my wife get her office organized…

My wife, you see, struggles with organization. Putting on my Jordan Peterson hat for a moment…she is highly industrious, but low in orderliness. I am rather high in orderliness, so we have a bit of the quintessential Odd Couple thing going on.

It works out just fine for us, though. Making sure the house stays organized is my domain, and her disorderliness stays largely contained to her office. I occasionally offer my help in getting her office organized, but she usually politely declines.

This year, however, even she got sick of her office looking like the aftermath of a tsunami, and she decided to accept my assistance.

But these things get complicated…

In order to really help her, I needed to create a massive increase in available storage space. This meant taking a lot of the office and art supplies we had been keeping in her office and moving them elsewhere. And the basement was the only real candidate.

But you know what that means. I had to change the way the basement was set up, and a change in one part of the basement impacted another, and so on and so on.

We’re done now, and even my wife—who has an extremely high tolerance for disorderliness—is delighted with her new office. (And with our new-ish basement, which is even more pleasant and spider-free than before.) This fresh start is a great way to go into the new year (and the new job she is starting in January). We even burned a little sage yesterday, as a symbolic cherry on top of our cake of cleansing.

I started telling you all that simply to explain why I have not posted as many installments of The Distributed Nation over the last couple of weeks. Writing them takes a long time, and between Christmas and the basement/office project, time was in short supply.

That said, a story about our domestic life is, I suppose, a good lead-in to today’s topic.

Without a new Distributed Nation installment written, I had two choices for today: do a #FreedomMusicFriday or #FreedomShorts post, or post the next installment of my other book, The Freedom Scale. And I was leaning toward #FreedomMusicFriday. (It is Friday, after all.)

First, I contemplated doing a song on the subject of loneliness…

I hate loneliness. I don’t feel it much myself anymore, but the thought of other people feeling lonely bothers me a lot. I am not an effusively emotional person, but the thought of people being alone really hits me hard for some reason. Loneliness is a privation from which I would like to see people set free.

I thought about doing the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” or maybe the Filter song “Take a Picture,” just for its line, “Could everyone agree that no one should be left alone.” Or maybe both.

I had almost decided to do so when I clicked another song in my saved list: “Little Boxes,” by Malvina Reynolds. I listened, and while I will do that one someday, I wasn’t feeling it this morning. But then I noticed a song in YouTube’s list of recommendations and decided to give it a listen.

There was no reason other than that I saw the name “Hrdza,” and I happen to like listening to the folk music of Eastern Europe from time to time. (Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares introduced a lot of us in the West to the cool close harmonies of Eastern Europe, and I have loved them ever since.) So I listened, and knew right away what today’s topic should be.

The song is a traditional, and here are the (translated) words in full:

I fell in love with Stephen
I fell in love just with him
Let me, mummy, marry him!

Heya, hoya, heya, heya, hoya
Let me marry, my mum!
When he looks at me I faint
How long I‘ve been waiting for him
I can’t say!

Heya, hoya, heya, heya, hoya
Let me marry, my mum!

Because I have, dear mummy
Chosen just him
Because I couldn’t fall in love
With any other boys

Heya, hoya, heya, heya, hoya
Let me marry, my mum!

Get married, girls, when boys propose to you
Let not evil tongues
Slander you in the village!

If you listen close, you can almost hear it—the sound of modern feminists’ heads exploding…

She wants to get married? Ick.

The song has her literally swooning over him? How backward.

She’s waiting……for a man? Gross. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Blah blah blah. They’ll probably extrapolate, too…

I’m sure she wants to make babies with him, too. Think of all the carbon those extra people will emit!

Seriously. Shut the &#$% up.

I am truly happy that we live in an era in which women are free to choose what they want, to the same degree that a man is. Marry or not. This career or that. And so on. (I am not, at this moment, having the debate about whether or not any gap remains in that degree. Here in America, and throughout the West, things are pretty good on that front. Good enough for the purposes of this discussion.)

All of that is great. But all of that has also come at a terrible cost: Declining rates of marriage. Declines in birth rates—declines that will soon become precipitous. Those who do marry do so later and have fewer children. And many—possibly more than at any time in history—never marry or have any children at all.

Feminism is not the only culprit, of course. Industrialization, science, and a host of other changes that have accompanied our journey through modernity have all conspired to forge major changes in normal human patterns.

If you think any of this is making people better off, think again. Even if we set aside concerns for the future of the species and just focus on selfish considerations, none of this is making people happier. Quite the opposite, as many studies (and the evidence of our own eyes) have clearly revealed.

I know this is a rough topic. I know many of you are alone now, or childless now, and my words might sting. I am really sorry. But the truth is, we’ve all been victims of the dark side of modernity. I myself barely escaped being alone and childless…

I lived in Los Angeles when I met my wife. You’d think that LA would be a great place to date. What was that line from the movie Swingers about the top one percent of gorgeous women from every country in the world having relocated to LA? Well, it’s pretty much true. I saw women in clubs and restaurants and laundromats who made my heart ache just through their sheer beauty. Maybe not to the point of suicide, like James Blunt, but you get the idea.

But that doesn’t make things easier. Nor does the pervasive attitude that there is always something better right around the corner. Or the weird delusion that youth will last forever. Or the fact that left-wing politics suffuses every corner of that city. (Or the fact that plenty of Angelinos think of abortion as a form of birth control.)

And that city is just a more extreme version of what has happened throughout the West. It was only through dogged effort that I finally met a woman who was ready to be serious about life. And it happened so late that we only managed one child before the biological window closed.

In “Stephen,” a woman expresses normal, natural things. She loves him. She wants him. She even needs him. She wants to marry him. It’s refreshing!

And the song, and its accompanying video, implies one of the most beautiful things in the universe—sex and children—without ever having to come out and say it. That is refreshing too. That is normal.

My wife really loves watching K-dramas on Netflix. She is not especially soft-hearted or sentimental—her favorite movies aren’t romances; they are Terminator and Fight Club. She can watch even darker stuff than I can. But even she has fallen in love with the refreshingly innocent, refreshingly normal romance stories of South Korean TV.

The stories are sweet. There is none of the moral grayness, irritating 27th-wave feminism, or raunch that pervade entertainment in America and the rest of the Anglosphere.

Boy meets girl. Girl loves boy first, or boy loves girl first. Or it’s love at first sight for both of them. Forces conspire to keep them apart, but they get together in the end.

They don’t have wall-banging sex in the first ten minutes of the first episode. It takes forever for them to even kiss for the first time. And when they do, as the snow falls all around them, it’s just…nice. These shows are not apologizing for love and marriage, and sex and children and everything else that comes along with it. They are celebrating it. They are celebrating normal human things.

(Sadly, Korean birth rates are disastrously low, though that is a topic for another time. Maybe these shows will help!)

Those who know me know that I have an Italian grandmother living inside me, whose primary question in life is, “When-a you gonna make-a da bambinos?” (That, by the way, is an excellent impression of my great grandmother.)

It’s a thing for me. I want people to get together, get married, and make babies. (I nagged one couple for so long that when they finally did spawn, the mom told me that I was “eight percent responsible” for the existence of their child. Glad I could help.)

I know that not everyone wants to be with someone. I know that marriage is not for everyone. I know that not everyone wants children. You are free to do what you wish.

I also know that many middle-aged-and-older folks have made peace with whatever their situation may be. It is not my goal to stir up any tough feelings.

But love, marriage, sex, and children are wonderful and normal. So to younger people, I want to send that very message. This song is not backward or regressive. It is normal. It is celebrating something good. Something that will make you happy.

So fall in love.

Boys, do dumb stuff,¹ or manly stuff, to show off.

Girls, you can even swoon a little if you want. Or not.

Just don’t listen to the shrieking voice of modernity and left-wing propaganda that keep telling you that love, marriage, and children are bad. Or that there are 97 genders, or that you should chop of your breasts or take life-altering hormones.

Set yourself free from the artificial madness all around us.

Be normal. Be happy. Make-a da bambinos.

And for us older folks who still are not with someone, but who want to be…never give up. Maybe the childbirth ship has sailed, but the love and marriage ship could pull into port anytime.

1. Not TOO dumb, though. Don’t injure yourselves.