Have you seen March of the Penguins?
The film chronicles Antarctica’s Emperor penguins on their multiple annual 70-mile treks from feeding to breeding grounds. They suffer astonishing privations in order to mate, incubate their eggs and nurture their young. It’s a riveting saga of raw endurance. The penguins’ stoically pursued travails illuminate perhaps the world’s most extreme example of nature’s totalitarian imperative: Thou shalt perpetuate thy species.
The penguins’ brutal lot throws into relief the ease and relative comfort in which we modern humans mate and perpetuate our own species. And yet the easier and safer and more accessible human mating becomes, the less appeal it seems to have to North Americans.
The latest U.S. census figures indicate that the number of “single adult” domiciles has for the first time edged out categories of couples with children and childless couples in Americans’ domestic arrangements. Of the nation’s approximately 105 million households, 27 million are “sole occupants,” many because they claim to like it that way. According to a StatsCan representative, Canada is trending the same way.
A two-page spread in the National Post earlier this month surveyed this phenomenon with a collage of “quirkyalone” profiles. (In Web parlance, quirkyalones are those who consider singleness a natural and desirable state). The sample group was divided between young, enthusiastic quirkyalones who may never mate, and older, disaffected quirkyalones who attempt to spin the straw of their relationship failures into philosophical gold.
The never-mateds’ reasons for preferring singleness underscored their ignorance of committed coupledom.
“Quirkyalones believe that maintaining friendship is very important,” a 31-year-old offered. But who—single or married—doesn’t?
A 50-year-old bachelor was described as wanting his independence because he is “in love with his wine, his music, his friends”—as though committed partners drink nothing but Diet Pepsi, in silence, with no one but each other on their speed-dials.
The older, disillusioned post-mateds, on the other hand, spouted literally meaningless fatuities, such as “I found out later that the best partner for me is myself.” Huh?
The spread also featured an article by award-winning writer and confirmed quirkyalone Gina Mallet. Her piece at least offered the benefit of articulate reflection on the subject. But her conclusions were depressing, not to mention misrepresentative. Her view of the family is “the Judeo-Christian ideal of life through pain … wherein your reward always comes too late.” She admitted that marriage entails responsibilities but added: “A sense of responsibility – held as a sign of maturity – strikes me as a waste of time in a world where a responsible person looks more and more like a chump.”
I’m a chump? It is fascinating to observe, through a certain Orwellian chutzpah in the use of language, all these attempts to alchemize failure into virtue through sophistry: In the quirkyalone vernacular, “partner” and “myself” are deemed synonyms, wine is equal to a human being as a love object, and a “sense of responsibility” is redefined, against all empirical and historical evidence, as “a waste of time”.
But as any old “chump” can see, all these quirkyalone celebrations of singlehood as a natural state are simply a farrago of distortions. Mature relationships will always require a sense of responsibility; the family is the cornerstone of civilization; and any reward worth having entails some degree of sacrifice in the earning. Railing against verities doesn’t make them any less true.
It is sad, though, to see impressionable young people throwing the unexamined pearl of responsible commitment and children before the swine of a specious ideology woven from the personal relationship failures of bitter old quirkyalones. Nature wants us mated in our reproductive years, and we snub her at our peril. Fulfilling one’s biological destiny—certainly pain, also gain—produces a reward beyond material price, and comes not “too late,” as Mallet insists, but right on time, exactly when the lustre of worldly prizes grows dull.
Mallet ended her article with a prophecy that read more like an invitation: “I believe the way I’m living (“vive l’adolescence”) is the way most people will be living in the future.” Let’s hope she is wrong. Otherwise, the quirkyalones will be archived as bellwethers in the suicidal cliffward March of the No-Painguins through lands where the air was temperate, but the maturity level was well below zero.
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