(Continued from Part 2.)
Give Up the Fantasy
A daughter may need to move, bend, compromise, and pivot. Those are all signs of maturity and embracing reality. A successful farmer looks at changing conditions across soil health, larger economic forces, and continues to refine their decisions onwhat crops are planted, and when.
Young women and their families need to give up on fantasies and embrace reality. Fantasies are very dangerous delusions that often leading to negative long term consequences. When preppers think their food supply is adequate, but it would not feed a 19th Century waif for a fortnight, it is just as dangerous as families thinking that appropriate spouses will just appear exactly as they are envisioned. Many times God sends people what they need, not what they want.
Young women and their fathers would likely be much better off if they started thinking like any army brat. Army brats are often able to move between a variety of situations and learn from a young age how to “embrace the suck.” Too many people are raising fragile children instead of resilient individuals. The world is not getting better. Systems are only deteriorating and conditions are worsening especially when you compare it to previous generations.
Catering to every whim of a daughter is a dangerous thing because it sets her up for failure in future relationships with men. A young girl and a young woman needs to learn the principles and concepts of waiting, maybe, and no from a caring, but involved father. Batting pretty eyes may melt their daddy’s heart, but successful men have so many obligations to balance that they cannot cater to every whim. Most men are not rich and probably never will be. You may be successful, but the likelihood of the average man ever obtaining the true inflation wage adjusted success his father or previous generations have achieved is very low.
Fathers need to understand the ground conditions as to what is likely for a daughter unless you put in the work now. The current path a young woman is many times offered is to date a man. For those who do not understand what this means because words may be the same, but the meaning is very different from your understanding, dating has changed. This is not the dating of years ago where a man would arrive at your home to pick your daughter up, meet the family, and go out to dinner and a movie and get a little peck on the cheek as a reward under the porchlight when she is returned home promptly.
The Dating Trap
Dates are expensive and morality has collapsed in our country. A young woman is likely to be asked for “favors” on the first date with about half during some first dates in so-called “home run” territory. This is a family-friendly blog, so I am keeping it as clean as can be, but this discussion is for the adults. I am an observer of trends and have many times heard of young women who are not receptive to the exchange of any physical contact not getting an offer of a second date. Whenever people talk about equality between men and women it is actually more injurious to young women. If these “dates” go well, she might be asked to live together without benefit of marriage. During this time, your daughter is essentially performing all of the functions of marriage without any long-term benefits or security. Men normally can leave the situation at any time or take up another affair with another woman. Our country has long ago removed laws on fornication (back in the 1960s, 40 states had laws against fornication and adultery), but the 1960s ushered in the age of no shame where “anything goes” and “do your own thing.” All of the previous societal guardrails were broken.
So many people are out there living together without benefit of a marriage that it can be argued that we live in the “Golden Age of Immorality.” Some people may say what about the 1960s and “free love” of the “Haight-Ashbury” generation. I posit that today an immoral man has many more options than his father or grandfather. Back then, many young women were giving away “love,” but if a baby resulted from this fornication then the young man would often grow up and get married. Now, it is a maybe, not an almost guarantee.
I have had people contact me over the years and one case is particularly instructive to this trend of the collapse of morality in our country. The lady told me about a young woman who matched everything and I was very happy when I first read about her and then later on in the message after a long description about her I found the one serious problem: she was currently carrying on an affair with a married man. A life lesson for young women in this situation that few will take: Don’t have affairs with married men. Even if they leave their spouse, you could end up like Anne Boleyn.
The current path being offered to many young women is to date, live together, and then if she becomes pregnant to maybe marry. Marriage then baby became baby then maybe marriage. During this time of cohabitation, she will be expected to pay half of the expenses. This, unfortunately, is the likely path many young women are being offered if they have not prepared themselves for marriage and are not meeting traditionally minded men seeking a future homemaker.
A young woman with the wrong attitude, who does not take care of her health, or who has moral issues may likely not be able to find a quality man. For all of those people who are raising “independent young women,” you might be because I have seen many times of women working to support “their” man: I have found many who are not married and their “man” does not work even though he is able. I have met parents and grandparents who are distraught as to how it happened. Lack of planning and lack of guidance at early ages is often the way this situation occurs.
Planning is necessary. Spouses rarely fall out of the sky parachuting into your life such as Isaac and Rebekah. You are not likely to “find” a sign such as a man needing water at a well. If you want a sign, here it is. If you have a very young daughter, start thinking about the future. If you have an older daughter such as past college age, then she will have fewer options. I know many people will say 25, 30, or even older is young for a woman, but it is not. It is never too early to think about her future. Health problems occur. It is unfortunate of how many families I have met either with single daughters or married daughters who were waiting and then something changed with her health and then they could not have children.
Mental Preparation
A daughter or granddaughter needs to be mentally armored to prepare herself from the onslaught of people who have bought into the lie that success is only through college, careers outside of the home, or working to support themselves. A woman of average looks and abilities who sincerely wants to get married can have a very successful life and fulfill her God-given potential by being married and having a family. There is no need to go to college, work outside the home, and homemaking is a valid acceptable career.
I am not insulting young women who have gone to college, but often all they have for their effort is a mountain of student loan debt, stress, and they have missed out on opportunities to get married and have children. Women hold over two thirds of the student loan debt in the country or about a trillion dollars of debt. The average woman has between $30,000 to $40,000 of student loan debt with some having hundreds of thousands of dollars of college debt. The cost to service the average debt is around 10 percent of their net income. Women on average are making less than men because of the type of jobs they train for and start after graduation. Many of these jobs that women work do not need a college degree.
Dating is Practicing For Divorce
I have graduated from college. I found that most colleges and universities are now non-stop parties. I have had to refuse so many gatherings because the company was not going to be productive to my goals. Getting wasted is not an accomplishment and being physical with someone who is not your wife is not either, so I refused both. College is one large petri dish and communicable diseases such as meningitis and mononucleosis are common because of the close contact especially in dormitories with many of these diseases usually treatable, if caught early. But there is a more insidious threat facing young women. For those women who are thinking about getting married someday for every increase in partners, there is an increase in likelihood of divorce with 10 partners (an easy number for a promiscuous woman to rack up at most colleges) with it being roughly seven times higher than a young woman who has only been with her husband. Even with just one other physical relationship other than her husband, the increase is still over four times higher. For a strong man, college is not very difficult for a man to escape with his morals intact, but for a woman, it is a minefield.
Society looks down upon 18- and 19-year old young women and even young women in their 20s getting married and having children instead of going to college and having a career. Both college and careers are a waste of time and resources for the majority of young women when compared to a successful marriage. From an early age, it is important to inculcate children with moral values and guide them on the right path, so they do not imitate unsuccessful paths of others. I know of an interesting case of a then-young woman who people tried to find her a husband. People in her circle found her a very acceptable young man who had a good job, but he was not exciting enough for her as she was looking for a “bad boy.” She was looking for someone more exciting than a man with a job, house, and safe car who wanted a family. It turns out she is still not married, over 40, and still looking for the “right” guy!
Education for Young Women
If I had a daughter, I would concentrate on her learning the skills to be able to become an effective homemaker. Such women are in high demand. If I knew several young women matching some very basic qualifications, I could probably place all of them in marriages very soon!
A young woman trained in the domestic arts is a valuable partner in life. A young woman with a lot of nonsense poured in her mind from liberal college professors is often a liability and many times relatively useless in making a house into a home. A young woman being able to write about the history of “feminism” is much less use in the future than a woman who can prepare a luncheon and serve as hostess for a husband’s work colleagues. It takes so long to remove weeds and destructive bugs from crops and even longer to deprogram a person who has bought into various liberal lies such as: men and women are equal in terms of what they can do, gender is fluid, boys should play in girl’s sports, women can raise children and work outside of the home as effectively and efficiently as a homemaker, and homemaking is oppression. Remember: If they still have to keep trying to knock their propaganda into people’s brains, then they are not winning.
Families can concentrate their daughters on learning how to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. Young women do not need to learn advanced mathematics such as solving differential equations using calculus, how to solve an anesthesiology titration equation, or solving complex angles in non-Euclidean geometry. This is not saying they can’t, but the idea is should they if the focus will eventually be married and having children? Young women have a very limited amount of time in which to get married and have children. Men cannot have babies.
If a young woman’s goal is to be a homemaker, traditional in-person college is almost always a complete waste of time and can set her up for failure on multiple levels. Traditionally, college is an extremely competitive environment of vigorous debating. Often, the skills developed in verbal combat are very rough compared to the pleasant conversation men appreciate in young women.
I perused my shelf of homemaking texts and the skills required are basic, but foundational to our civilization. Looking through these books had me think of a poem. Back in 1865, the poet William Ross Wallace published “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle” a tribute to motherhood. The poet has been forgotten by many, but the rest of the verse has become a commonly cited proverb “is the hand that rules the world.” In the second stanza, we learn:
“Mother’s first to guide the streamlets,
From them souls unresting grow—
Grow on for the good or evil,
Sunshine streamed or evil hurled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.”
I cannot see a reason for a married woman wanting to leave her kids and go into the trenches at workplaces slogging it out trying to earn daily bread when she can have a strong husband providing for her needs and many wants. Some may say they need the money, but it is interesting how many times I have seen a better life when people follow God’s ways of women embracing homemaking instead of careers.
There are many skills that a young woman should know which she should have learned as a child. Because of the direction of the world, it is a good idea for boys to also to learn these same skills including how to balance a checkbook, increase or decrease a recipe using simple fractions, value shop, bake bread, perform basic cleaning and laundry. Farm families could of course add various homesteading and gardening tasks to what they usually teach their children. For previous generations, all of this was just simple chores that everyone knew about. However, in this modern age these simple tasks which practically everyone previously knew have become mystical. I have had people shocked that we bake “artisan quality” bread or know how to do other more complicated things.
Financial Preparation
Financial preparation for a young woman is fairly simple. Don’t be in debt. Debt makes a young woman’s future more difficult. There are a lot of men who could not afford to hire a young woman as a homemaker if he also had to pay off a large amount of student loan or other debt. Even if she has a career, it still has to be paid back. The time earning money and working is time away from her husband and limits her fertility (many couples will delay having children if there is debt and unfortunately the fertility clock only counts down to zero fertility). Because of the amount of young women with debt, it is a good idea for men to have money set aside if necessary to pay off the debt of a spouse. I have an amount set aside and if I meet a young woman with debt then I would use that money. If she does not have debt, I would use it for our future together.
Some may say it is impossible to go to college and not have debt. I did not have any debt from college. I worked while in college. I received no financial aid.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 4.)
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