The Kids These Days

“The people we consider to be ‘adults’ are married with kids, sharing houses, sharing finances,” says [sex educator and therapist Liz] Powell. “Whereas ‘wayward adults’, like myself, who live alone, unmarried, are examples of everything wrong with society.”
Does ‘solo polyamory’ mean having it all?

As someone who lives alone, and is unmarried, I have never heard the term “wayward adult” before. No-one has ever described me, to me, that way, certainly. “Failed human being” in the context of being “childless by choice,” yes, but never “wayward adult.” But I wonder: Who is the “we” that Ms. Powell refers to? Part of the reason why I decided to stop using the word “we” when referring to large groups of people that I might be a part of is specifically because it fails to actually point the finger at anyone. And while I understand that there are still noticeable numbers of relatively conservative (or Conservative) people out there for whom nothing less than a monogamous marriage to one’s first and only sex partner resulting in multiple Christian children is acceptable, attributing that attitude to society at large is overstating things.

There is, I think, a certain narcissism that goes into some persecution complexes, stemming from the supposition that whatever it is that one is doing is so threatening to others that they’re motivated to pull out all the stops to put an end to it. This is not to say that there aren’t people who understand that putting a stop to all “non-biblical” forms of human relationships wouldn’t magically fix everything that ails humanity, but their chances of that wish coming true anytime soon are pretty much zero.

There are always going to be people for whom their chosen way of living is seen as the one true way that everyone should follow. That’s not going away. Being aggrieved about it isn’t useful. Change takes time, and while that time is often frustrating, it’s simply part of the process. It doesn’t need to be a matter of us versus them.