I’m still reading Lidia Falcón’s autobiography, and she’s telling about the very typical collapse of her first marriage at the age of twenty. This part of the book really speaks to me because I experienced the same thing.
And here’s the problem. It’s enormously easier to give birth at 20 than at 35 or 40. But you can’t be good at marriage at 20. You definitely can’t be anything as good at it as you can be at 35 or 40. The things that look insurmountable at twenty become child’s play later in life.
Falcón says that it’s best to have kids at 18-20 because you don’t have to interrupt your career for them. There’s nothing to interrupt at that age. And it’s true but then her marriage fell apart over some silly stuff three years in. So the kids were screwed from the get-go.
The biology of childbearing and childcare are related to living in tribes, where it’s not all on the shoulders of a young mom and dad, marriages aren’t necessarily forever, and people don’t live past 40. The timescales of civilization are too short to put a dent in biology. Modern marriage is, as you say, best when people entering are mature adults in their thirties or forties, but this type of union is not what evolution had in mind, and neither is the atomic family. Seriously, if modern marriage were aligned with evolution, women wouldn’t start ovulating until their late twenties or early thirties, and would be able to produce new eggs throughout life, similar to what happens with sperm, instead of being born with all the eggs. Alas, that is not the case.
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For some reason, I find this comment very comforting. If it’s a conflict between evolution and society, then I can accept it because there’s no arguing with the evolution.
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