Why do we create families? It’s a ‘matter of the heart,’ not head

By David McElroy · August 14, 2012

I ran into a friend Monday afternoon who I hadn’t seen for awhile. I knew he had gotten married about 18 months or so ago, but I hadn’t heard any news of him since. He had some news for me. He and his wife had a baby boy a few months back, so he’s a father now.

I was happy for my friend, but I was also envious — because having my own family is something I’m really eager for. I’ve always known that I wanted children, and I want them even more as the years pass.

I’m glad I didn’t have kids when I was much younger, because I’m not sure I’d adequately dealt with my own childhood baggage to be a good parent. I fear that I might have left them just as damaged as I’d felt if I’d taken on the responsibility years ago. I feel ready now, but I’m under the impression that convincing the right woman to be the mother is a key prerequisite.

As I thought about all this again, I wondered — not for the first time — why human beings seem so driven to have families. Having children isn’t logical. They cost us money. There’s rarely a “return on investment” in the pragmatic sense. So why do most of us feel so driven to create families?

Some people would explain it as a simple genetic imperative to reproduce in order to send our genes into the future. That’s a compelling theory in some respects, but it has holes in it when we see that there are plenty of times in life when people are willing to make decisions which will sacrifice themselves in order to save others — and those sacrifices frequently mean that the person making the sacrifice is dead and won’t be able to reproduce and send his genes forward. (As a side point, I’m generally in agreement with the ideas proposed by Howard Bloom in his book, “The Lucifer Principle,” insofar as group evolution being far more important than the individual variety.)

But any theory that explains human longings in terms of genetic desires is simply an intellectual theory. There’s no way to prove it, even if an awful lot of people accept it as true just because it makes sense to them. To me, though, that’s intellectualizing emotions. If I feel the need for something, the feeling is real. It’s not just some preprogrammed genetic signal that’s expressing itself through body chemistry. The feeling is reality, as far as I’m concerned.

Even though scientists try to explain emotions — such as love, desire, longing — in reductionist ways, their explanations leave me cold. What’s more, I’m not sure they matter. I don’t object to people looking for the gene or neurotransmitter or whatever that’s associated with certain feelings. I do object to the idea that my consciousness is a puppet performing for my DNA.

We want families because we are driven to experience love. We need love. I want the right woman as my wife and I want children with her, not because it would do any pragmatic good or that it would please anybody else. I want those things because I long to experience the love that only come in a healthy family relationship. The need for the feelings that come with that trump almost everything else in this world.

Not everyone has the same needs of the heart. Some people have no desire to have children. Some people have no desire for a mate who understands and cherishes them. Some people are more driven by other things, whether it’s a drive for money or power or fame. I don’t understand those people, but they’re perfectly free to pursue what they want.

I simply want something else — and I’ll spend the rest of my life pursuing it, even though it might not make sense to anybody else.

Share on Social Networks

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

Related Posts