Celibacy, marriage, kids, and getting people to do the hard things
Soen Joon Sunim, back in her earlier blog incarnation, once said that Koreans had very different ideas about the hardships of celibacy than Americans; while Americans saw the big hardship as not having sex, Koreans tended to assume that people should most regret not having children.
I thought of that post yesterday, when I realized that I was in some sense arguing opposite sides of the fence. Just as I was posting on this blog that I could see how people could live a satisfactory celibate life that they see as tied to something larger, I was arguing in this thread at Feministe that it’s dubious to expect that people who really want children, on any very large scale, are going to opt out of becoming parents out of a concern for the environment.
It’s not, of course, that I think that never having children is an intrinsically harder thing than never having sex. If Soen Joon Sunim is right about the difference in American and Korean attitudes about celibacy (and who should know better, I suppose, than an American who has now gone to Korea to become a Buddhist nun), I’m American here. Choosing never to have sex and choosing never to have children both seem like difficult things to me, but I think the pool of people who can be happy as non-parents is a bit larger than the pool of people who can be happy for life without any sort of sexual intimacy.
Part of it is that it’s one thing to say that something can be a fulfilling life for an exceptional person, and another to say that just anyone can readily choose it. I don’t think the comments equating childlessness with suicide on comment threads on Pandagon were about parenthood being sold as a bulwark against an existential crisis. I think that they were about people taking the mention of environmental reasons for not having kids (which one commenter gave as prominent in his own decision not to have kids), as a general admonition that they, too, should be altruistic enough not to have kids out of concern for the environment. Suicide isn’t that overwrought an analogy for making a decision that would have a huge negative impact on your own life in hopes that it would be a tiny benefit for the world at large.
The other part is that I think that people on both sides of the childfree/parent fence sometimes have the weird idea that their choice is much easier than it really is, for people firmly on the other side of that fence. This comes through in the Ask Prudence column to which Jill is responding, where Prudence tries to argue that a couple who are in firm agreement that they never want to have children really should reconsider. It comes through in the Dear Abby column that someone else cites in the comment thread, where one couple has married while in deep disagreement about having children, and each is still hoping to change the other’s mind (Abby advises the couple to go ahead and divorce now, rather than each staying married in the hope that the other will change). I see it over and over, both in people who advise having kids in the serene hope that once the kid is there, people who have always been convinced they hadn’t the least interest in parenthood will find it twenty times easier than they thought, and in people who talk as if choosing not to have kids (perhaps because you’re married to someone who doesn’t want them) should be as agreeing to live in a different town. But the desire for children and the desire not to have children both go deep, and to me flipping your choice if you’re firmly on one side or the other actually seems like a comparable sacrifice to celibacy.
Which brings me to the matter of getting people to do the hard things in life – to make a commitment to marriage, to kids, or even to celibacy and stick it out, to get through all those sleepless nights with sick kids. It seems to me that part of getting people to do the hard things is allowing people to pick the hard choice that they’re actually suited for.
Say you need some people to keep having kids, so there will be people around to care for all of us when we’re old, but it’s also useful (and I think it actually is) for some people to take a different, childless path. Maybe it’s useful because the population would grow too fast if everyone has as many kids as possible. Or maybe it’s useful because there are things that people who aren’t in regular marriage-and-kids mode can do, roles they can take, that parents just can’t. For the moment I’ll ignore whether the people in the childless roles are there because they’re celibate monks and nuns, or because they’re doing really well with their contraception. Just assume that, however they got there, they’re being involved as part of the larger “village” that cares for other people’s children, and, in their own way that’s different from the married-with-kids way, filling a role that’s actually of value.
Doesn’t it make most sense if people’s vocation, up front, is assumed to have something to do with what they actually want to do? If you get to marry someone you have a reasonable shot of liking, years down the road, and if the person who gets up at night for the sick kid is the one who is drawn to that role to begin with? If the celibates, if there are any, are people who have some sense of being called to the particular difficulties of a celibate life?
The other side, of course, is that once you’ve made that commitment, you need some understanding that there’s value in doing the hard things even when you don’t much want to do them. And in the case of kids, that may mean sticking it out and being father to a kid you didn’t plan, but have simply because you liked sex so much. Your actions made the commitment for you, whether you intended it or not.
June 5th, 2006 at 12:13 am
This is a great post, in part because I’m pleased to find a non-defensive defense of both celibacy and married life; usually, even bringing up celibacy as part of religious vocation touches off enough nerves in Westerners I’ve talked to (and particularly Buddhists) that one or the other of us ends up on the defense before anyone went on the offensive.
The most important thing you bring up, from my point of view, is committment. Nothing’s a perfect match, not children, not not having children, not having sex, not not having sex. Whether we recognize before we get into something, either marriage, children, or, say, monastic vows, that at some point and likely more than once we’ll wonder why we ever made such a ridiculous, difficult, and life-changing decision, those times will come. As you said, “Your actions made the commitment for you, whether you intended it or not.”
But sticking it out is what matters, not in a blind way, such as staying in a clearly failing marriage or a clearly failing vocation.
You also raise a lot of good points about celibacy in and of itself, not just as a parallel for the demands and sacrifices of marriage and children. I’m currently reading May Sarton’s “Journal of a Solitude,” and she remarks at one point that despite her desire for the kind of marriage and companionship she sees in many of her friends’ lives, she knows that she herself could not have flourished, much less been satisfied, in such a life. Although she had lovers, she was childless and unmarried and it brought her a certain sorrow. She also suffered in her solitude, but understood that the sufferings and difficulties of her life-long solitude allowed her to fulfill her creative life, to be creative. This exchange of sacrifices is a fitting way to understand celibacy (although Sarton didn’t forgo her sexuality, a big difference). It’s not that there’s one way that’s perfect, and it may indeed be possible for someone on either side to have lived on the other quite well. Sacrifices are made by everyone who committ to something in order to achieve what they believe to be the work that will fulfill them.