The other day, a good friend of mine told me he was planning to get divorced. The news sounded somewhat astonishing to me, since he’d gotten married just a year ago. The reason he gave me was his wife didn’t understand him and she didn’t support him. He was going through a very tough process trying to strengthen his small (and ill) Internet Company. So he would wake up by eight in the morning, take a quick breakfast, drive to the office, and remain there until eleven or so, at night. I’m pretty sure the problem wasn’t that easy. If I had talked with my friend’s wife, she’d probably have shared with me her own point of view: my friend’s lack of interest in her and, his almost non-existent communication with their ten months- old child, and so on.
Their situation is indeed difficult. I hope they’ll manage to understand each other. I really wish that if their small company collapses, their marriage will not. Unfortunately, the case I just described is only one among many similar situations we come across every day. On the one hand, we find couples who just got married and are having a terrible time trying to get through; I'm not talking about the first or second decade of marriage, but the first six months after their Honey Moon! On the other hand, we also find "maturely young" people (I mean guys in their thirties) who can’t make their minds up to commit themselves in a stable union with anyone for the rest of their lives. A third group (there are no hands left…) would be formed by those who got married as far as twenty or even thirty years ago, and who suddenly find themselves alone: their children have grown up and left home. With terror, one day, wife and husband discover themselves as a pair of complete strangers one from the other. And they break up. Finally -and according to our innovating times- there’s a fourth group of those who prefer, like in an immense mall, an incredible set of nontraditional- relationship options. In all cases the relationship receives the name "family": "single-mother family", "single-father-family"; "male-homosexual family", "female- homosexual (or simply "lesbian") family"… Summing up what we’ve said up to now, we find the "traditional" family living a very hard time. We find as well "new" concepts of family trying their chance through the "relationship market". We find people who simply do not believe in any form of family anymore. For these people, products in the market can be acquired everywhere at any time. You buy them; if you don’t like them, you throw them away and buy alternative products. Couldn’t family be considered as a product in such a fashion?
Starting and raising a "traditional" family today has ceased to be a normal endeavor -an expected part of life (as it surely was fifty years ago). It has become a very tough, challenging enterprise. Young people who think about it, risk appearing as real fools to the eyes of the mentality that nourishes our pores through many of the movies and TV programs. Future "traditional family pioneers" may, indeed, feel a bit lonely in their ideals. It’s impossible to fully treat and develop each of the topics I’ve put on the table for the reader. For the time being, may I only stress one idea: like many other things in the universe, human beings possess their own nature. And, when I say "nature", I refer to a very strong and well-founded concept. Above all, that the human being is as much something to be discovered as is something to be made according to moods, fashions and culture. I mean there’s something transcendent to it, something beyond each one’s mere opinion.
I am not suggesting we move coerced by blind and hidden forces that hinder our freedom. I am only saying that a human being is to be conceived according to some natural principles, in a similar way like we deal with stones and gravity, with planes and aerodynamics or with apple-trees and fruit cycles. There is a difference, of course: trees and stones are not free to stay away from their nature: a human being is. Yet there’s a common element: trees, stones and human beings have –all three- a certain nature. Out of the apple tree’s nature is to deliver pears on its branches. Out of the stone’s nature is to sing or recite poems. There are some things, too, that are outside the human being’s nature such as flying with arms open from the eighteenth floor of a building or submerging in a swimming pool without breathing for three hours.
I am not suggesting we move coerced by blind and hidden forces that hinder our freedom. I am only saying that a human being is to be conceived according to some natural principles, in a similar way like we deal with stones and gravity, with planes and aerodynamics or with apple-trees and fruit cycles. There is a difference, of course: trees and stones are not free to stay away from their nature: a human being is. Yet there’s a common element: trees, stones and human beings have –all three- a certain nature. Out of the apple tree’s nature is to deliver pears on its branches. Out of the stone’s nature is to sing or recite poems. There are some things, too, that are outside the human being’s nature such as flying with arms open from the eighteenth floor of a building or submerging in a swimming pool without breathing for three hours.
Why is the nature topic so important to this discussion? Well, because family is a relationship composed by human beings. And, since it is so, we can speak -even if for certain aspects in an analogical way- of a nature in the family. And if it does have a nature, an objective ground that everyone may discover with the aid of reason, then there will be a true concept of family and some concepts that will not be true. My point is this: there is hope for those who believe in this kind of family: a community of a man and a woman, united in a stable, exclusive and lasting relationship; dedicated to seek one another’s betterment; gathered by love; open to the fruitfulness of rationally wanted children; inserted in a larger community of relatives as a "part of their history"; constituted as a reservoir and a channel of values and meaning of life for its members, and established as the basic cell of society.
And there is hope, not because it is easy to carry out the enterprise -for what has been stated in the lines before, this is clearly not the case- but because it is the natural way to do family for us as human beings. Important to say, these ideas intend no discrimination at all, for anyone -saying stones can’t recite poems isn’t either discrimination towards them-: it only looks to realizing what is and what is not in human beings’ (or stone’s) nature. So if you are thinking about the challenge called "family", either as one who starts or as one who tries to hold on to it, take courage! You’re going through a hard path: true. You’re swimming against the river’s fall: true. You may appear as a bizarre, odd animal of past times: true. But, equally true: you’re acting according to your own rational nature as a human being. And, true as well: you, your spouse and the children of both, will surely (objectively) find happiness, which consists of fully developing your own human nature.