What is a family?

and are we now "too much married" for these times?

Many of us are robustly questioning gender relations, here and out in the world. Most societies tend to do so in times of economic and social madness.

A good gender examination, however, logically necessitates an adjacent wrangle with the fundamentals of what a family is, and what the actual point might be of partnering exclusively with someone of the opposite sex (to procreate or otherwise), per our society’s standard definition of a family. Do we have to? Is there an evolutionary basis to our current notion of “family”?

And, perhaps less commonly, but more critically, is “the family” the best societal unit for our civilisation right now?

In 1959, a few years after the Korean War had ended, America was asking the same kinds of questions. The family was deemed in crisis, divorce was on the up, feminism was being blamed 🙄, and there were active debates about “new kinds of marriages” that might better serve the times. On his program The Search for America, the philosopher Huston Smith set out to find some answers and in this super fascinating video clip he interrogates the anthropologist Margaret Mead for her insights.

I’m so glad I found it (my friend

A C Grayling

, who is now on Substack!) sent it to me) and I really recommend watching it. Even just to enjoy the spectacle of humans being so terribly earnest (and scientists having free rein to ruffle feathers as their expertise sees fit).

The nuclear family experiment…

We should never kid ourselves. What a family is or is not is not has always been a confection and has been determined by what best serves the economic and/or security interests of the dominant class at the time.

After the Korean War (indeed after the two World Wars), the West became a marriage-focused culture, with people marrying earlier and having more kids. Economies needed neat, easy-to-sell-to consumer households to buy all the white goods that were being pushed onto the market; governments needed stability and everyone in their place (preferably inside homes). The family turned “nuclear”, an inwards focused entity, that, as Mead and Smith explain, became “an end in itself”, eclipsing each person’s “sense of responsibility for the larger world”¹.

Which put the family in the perfect position to operate in full servitude to capitalism.

We are still largely ensconced - uncomfortably - in this model. At least in the neo-liberal West. In less individualistic western democracies, such as Greece, Italy, and even here in France, there isn’t the same myopic, insular focus. Families are often extended and not caged by the white-picket-fence mentality; they interact on the street, in piazzas; parents chat as adults while kids from several families play together.

Mead, back in the late 1950s, makes a bunch of observations about, and predictions for, this set-up:

• When the family is the prime focus in a culture, parents invariably project their unmet needs onto their kids. I could wax on this for chapters…

• This new era was the first time in history that kids were being parented by their father (or at least more men were physically in the home than before). Previously, when the mother was the only caregiver, boys would grow up “differentiating themselves”, while girls “identified”.

  “No one yet knows how this new experiment will pan out,” Mead says. Many of us here do. My verdict: Very Mixed and Contradictory Results!²

• Mead even speculates that this kind of family unit emerged in preparation for a “very exacting” new era of space colonisation. (To colonise the moon or Mars, the powers-that-be will need nice tidy couples, like so many pairs of animals on Noah’s arc.)

• When asked if “we’re too much married”, Mead says yes, and adds that the isolated nuclear family model has left “no honorable room” for celibacy, nor for choosing to share a home with people you might find more interesting than a spouse of the opposite sex (including your parents).

These were radical points to raise at the time. And they’re eerily prescient.

But my favourite point of Mead’s is this…

The modern family comes at the expense of friendship

In the interview, Mead says this myopic focus on the family in the post-war era saw culture “give up on friendship”. This, she says, was particularly pronounced for men who were no longer bonding with mates after work, but heading home to wives and kids.

Significantly, I read the other day that pre-the World Wars (ie, pre-nuclear family lift-off) male friendships were a large part of public life, while women’s friendships were seen as frivolous and less important.

Which is something I’d not thought about before.

As we all know, men in neoliberal cultures are in a well-publicised “friend recession” with 15 per cent saying they have no close friends (like, none at all). In Australia, a Movember survey showed that 22 per cent of Australian men hadn’t caught up with a friend in over six months (like, not a single one).

Feminism has been blamed. (🙄 again). As well as technology, porn, and other external forces. But rarely do we hear about the male loneliness epidemic discussed in terms of the (largely unquestioned, capitalism-tethered) stranglehold that the nuclear family has over us. I think it needs to be. As do other highly gendered issues, like women’s exhaustion and disappointment, which we discussed here:

The collapse of men and women

I’ve long been pissed off with the nuclear family

It has always struck me as an awkward, limiting artifice. At 7 years old I told my mother I was going to be a nun or the first female prime minister of Australia when I grew up so that I didn’t have to get married. In my early thirties I saw a shaman in Bali (for a story I was writing; he was the cousin of the one Elizabeth Gilbert sees in Eat Pray Love). He told me that I would not “go for relationships because they get in the way of relating”.

As it turns out, I’ve been largely single since my mid-thirties, have no kids. and have had a life filled with deep, nourishing, vibrant relating. I have loved, formed meaningful bonds and shared intimacy with a wide range of humans around the world. And, honestly, my life has been the richer for it. In recent years a bunch of studies have shown that friends make us happier than family and that having strong and varied friendships will extend your life more than quitting a pack-a-day ciggie habit³ (while, for a woman, being married will often shorten it).

This “choice” to favour relating and friendships, however, has not been an easy one to make in a culture in which most people I know exist in set-ups with strict barriers to entry at barbecues, dinner parties and summer holidays (ie. you must be a corresponding family unit). Such is the need to preserve the capitalism-propping model of the family, outliers like me are often pitied and deemed problematic. Being “independent”⁴ is discouraged by everything from sit-coms to hotel rates to the tax system. American inspirational speaker (remember when that was a thing?) Simon Sinek speaks to this in this interview (he and I matched on a dating app once…another story!).

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Esther Perel has also been talking on this subject recently. She makes this great point:

“Everything that we wanted from a traditional marriage—companionship, family, children, economic support, a best friend, a passionate lover, a trusted confidante, an intellectual equal—we are asking from one person what an entire village once provided.”

But back to the men

The nuclear family unit has had a massive impact on male relating. Mead also says in the interview, that male bonds outside of the family are needed for societies to flourish. When men go straight from the office in their hermetically sealed cars, to home every day it limits the amount of adventure, exploration and curiosity that they engage in. They can silo and atrophy. And go down online rabbit holes…etcetera, etcetera.

As all the systems around us start to wobble and crumble, the role of the family is going to increasingly come under scrutiny. For many everyday people around me, the current model is absolutely not working. (See last week’s heterofatalism conversation for some extra context here.) I am having regular conversations with people about different possibilities that might take the place of our current conception of a family going forward. Two single mums I know here in Paris are looking to save money and resources by renting an apartment together, with their two lots of kids sharing a bedroom. Other girlfriends and I are constantly revisiting the idea of buying a home to retire together in.

As with many of the topics I raise here, I am feeling an urgent need to get on top of where the family unit needs to sit in our lives while we still have a say in the matter. We know the dominant class is already manipulating the family to its own ends, as it always does, tweaking it to fit the new collapsing world order. The clamp down on fertility laws and women’s rights is only the beginning. I marvel how fast it can happen. I think the “trad wife” movement and MAGA’s embrace of it, took hold within months of the anti-trans tirade kicking off and Trump coming into power the first time around.

My sense is that no matter the material structure of the family, it will need to become untethered from the capitalist imperative. Not least of all because that system is already in collapse. Families will need to be less nuclear and allow for more of “a responsibility for the larger world” and they will have to allow for a hell of a lot more relating, as opposed to exclusive - and excluding - partnering. This doesn’t require a massive revolution. The adjustments can be made now, without the fascists noticing. You know, with barbeques where you invite all your single friends…

Sarah xx

PS In case you haven’t seen it, my TEDx talk is now featured on the global TED site as an “editor’s pick”. It’s been getting some great traction and the comments thread is epic. If you’re having a bad day, go read what everyday people are sharing on the topic. I’d love it to reach as far as it can, so please do share the link below with everyone you know (press the copy link button in the top right corner).

1. What a wonderful reminder that such a consideration was a “thing” not so long ago…

2. It led (directly or otherwise) to the highest number of kids being raised in a “family” where the father was completely absent.

3. People with strong friendships have a 50% increased likelihood of survival over an average 7.5 years. (Source: Holt-Lunstad et al., PLoS Medicine, 2010.)

4. A bloke in the comments the other week used this term in place of “single woman” and I liked it.