“Surely a country that claims compassion and democracy as core values should reject as inadequate and misleading the marriage and fatherhood formula as a response to poverty,” said a report published in 2008 by the liberal groups Political Research Associates and the Women of Color Resource Center. “True compassion and democracy would respect the right of low-income women to make their own decisions and provide proven pathways out of poverty as the first line of assistance.”

Starkly opposed positions may be good for think-tank fund-raising, but they do not a good society make. Is there a middle ground between doing too much and doing nothing? Between family conformity and family dissolution? Between nostalgia for a perfect family that’s never coming back (and may never have existed) and a refusal of the idea that life is easier when you’re not alone?

That middle ground may be found by thinking of the family as, in effect, a huddle: a way of sharing risk and joy, having others to lean on when life makes it hard to stand. It will be hard for the extremists to swallow, but it may be possible to argue, in the very same breath, that the huddles people form are inevitably growing ever more diverse; and that huddling makes life easier than not.

“Is ‘the family’ a barbaric, premodern holdover institution, perpetuating irrational relations and inherited forms of inequality?” Philip N. Cohen, a University of Maryland sociologist who studies the institution, writes on his blog. “Or is it a ‘haven in a heartless world,”’ he asks, “one of the few places where people still have any loyalty to anyone but themselves? I think it’s both.”

If that is so, it is worth continuing to argue, as we have been, about the appropriate forms, legally and otherwise, of huddle. But the more urgent discussion may be about the unhuddled.

Gay or straight, old or young, a staggering number of Americans live isolated today. They struggle to make reliable commitments and to have reliable commitments made to them. They create children they cannot raise. They grow up with too few hours of devoted parenting. They live alone, one doctor’s bill from ruin.

Everyone has their preferred culprit: welfare, bad schools, tax policy, drug laws, hip-hop, the vaporization of manufacturing jobs.