Maturity and Marital Status

Believe it or not I think about how these two subjects and how they relate to one another quite often.

One of my prejudices is that marriage and building a family stunts a lot of people's intellectual growth. People get married and all of the sudden, it seems, they think less about the big questions, and more about getting work done, putting food on the table, and surviving day to day. I am not completely sure how I developed this prejudice, because most of the people I learn the most from are married people. Somehow, this was just something I observed in my friends and the people in churches I worked with. It was like intellectual seeking and growth was a nice phase in their life, but something they left behind for greener pastures. It wasn't like people stopped thinking after they got married. More to the point, it was like their intellectual abilities seemed to enter a static period after they started a family. And, to a lot of these people that I know, the world of ideas seemed to matter less and less. At least until middle age, where a lot of these people started to dig into things a little deeper again. As I looked at marriage, the possibility of having less time for reading, for thinking, for writing began to worry me.

Recently, I have discovered singleness has its own struggles with maturity. Spiritual theologian Henri Nouwen was single his whole life. From what I have read, there were several of Nouwens friends and critics that were dismayed by his inability to not move past certain life issues. He seemed to be stuck in this quest to understand his lonliness and his brokenness, and to understand his significance. And, to a certain extent, he was still on this search as he died.

And I look back at certain posts I have written recently, in response to other single people about what is "sexy" it seems like it is easy to get stuck in a similar rut. Instead of getting static with the intellectual things, it seems I am still trying to understand what I was trying to understand in my twenties. I am still thinking about dating and relationships, about what I find attractive and what I do not, and about issues of who I am in relationship to others that others my age seem to have put behind them long ago. And it disappoints me that although I am still growing in this area...in many areas I have become stuck on the issue in my personal growth somehow.

I am not sure what all that means....but that is where I am at.