So there’s news flitting about that women are increasingly the leading or sole breadwinners in the American family. In most cases, this means more and more families are being raised by a single mom with an absent father, or the reason mom is the breadwinner is because dad can’t find work.
It isn’t because a couple sat down together and reviewed their financial and family plan to assess what the best scenario might look like for their family. That is what we did back in 2007; we looked at my job prospects and our growing family, our move to a new city, and we said, let’s see if this can work. It did, with bumps and bruises, just like every new adjustment. We know other couples who have made similar decisions and have made it work, and made it work well.
If a woman can earn a degree, work hard, carry a child, mow the lawn, take out the trash, prepare meals, and change a diaper all on her own, why bother with a man, who simply complicates life with his dirty clothes, smells up the place with his burping and farting, and adds another person to worry over and provide for? Obviously all men are good for is sperm. After impregnation, we can take it from there.
We need good men for the great pleasure of building a family and a life with another person. We need good men because men are at their core different from women, and women are at their core different from men, and these differences (whether traditional or non-traditional in their manifestations) provide balance, beauty, and character refinement.
Society is shouting, “We need good men!”
How do you make good men? You raise good men. And if there isn’t a good man in your life to help you do that, you find other good men to stand in that role as best as they can. Good men must help other men to make men out of their men so that they can raise up good men, too. We cannot complain about there being no good men out there if good men don’t step in to make men good.
Stop asking “Why do we need men?” – that is not the question. It should never be the question. Substitute in any demographic and the question sounds preposterous, derogatory, and dangerous. That question, when extended to its scariest places, devalues an entire population of our society.
We need each and every kind of person to strive to be the best versions of themselves. Let’s stop asking dumb questions and start making good answers.
Sarah Marie Wells 