I was texting with a college professor friend last night about various things. We got to talking about social trends. He said he is ticked off about young men who won’t marry their girlfriends, and the young women who rationalize and defend their unmanly behavior. The professor said that he has seen lots of women delude themselves with the belief that they have all the time in the world to get their lives sorted, to start families, and the like. It’s a lie, but it’s a lie that brings comfort to women who find themselves surrounded by men-children who won’t grow up.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, in part because my oldest, a boy, turned 18 recently. How well did he absorb the moral framework within which he was raised? We’ll find out soon enough, I suppose. My college prof friend, a late Boomer, said that he’s unnerved by how cold and transactional young people have become about sex today. It’s almost entirely separated from love and tenderness. We talked briefly about the effect of pornography on the imagination of young adults today. Is it even possible for them to conceive of a world in which sex is reserved for committed love and that alone? Or are they as fatalistic as the French philosopher who told me that belief in God is not possible for the French, who decided some time ago that materialism is true?

I was having a conversation not long ago with a young woman — the daughter of a friend — who is in a relationship with a guy who is jobless, without a college degree, and still living at home with his parents. She’s educated, smart, healthy, beautiful … and going nowhere with this guy, or so it appears by her telling. She’s still young, but I warned her that this won’t last. This is not something that is at all easy for people in their twenties to conceptualize. But it’s true: time passes much faster than you think it will, and before you know it, you’re in your thirties, and things get real serious.

But it’s easy to pretend that you’re still young, and you have time yet to become an “adult,” in the sense of making commitments to marriage, to career, and even to family. One year slips into another, though, and somehow you’re not married, and you’re looking at the prospect of starting a family in your mid to late 30s. If, that is, you can find a man willing to commit to you, and worth committing to. By then, though, the unmarried men in your age cohort may well be dating women in their twenties. The choices you thought would be all but infinite, forever, are suddenly — even shockingly — constricted.

And you can’t get that time back.

Like I said, my wife and I won’t know if the way we’re raising our kids will make a difference in helping them to escape this trap. I do know that I hear with disquieting frequency of friends whose kids are older, and who are disappointed that their adult children have stepped onto the cohabitation treadmill.

I don’t know enough about female psychology to say, but for guys who have no religious faith telling them that they should marry, unless you give them a firm reason to bind themselves to one woman, forever, they’re going to resist marriage. It’s in their nature not to want to be tied down. Of course a mature young man is going to have his passions formed towards desiring the permanence of a wife and family — but we have gotten very good in this culture of raising self-centered failsons, or if not quite failures, then men who make money but who want to keep their options permanently open.

Agreed, marriage isn’t everybody’s calling. I’ve known men and women who wanted to get married, and really tried, but things just haven’t worked out. I’m not talking about people like that. I’m talking about the young people — especially the young men — who don’t see marriage and family as serious life goals, or if they do, who believe that pursuing them is something they can put off indefinitely.

I’m curious to hear from readers of all generations about their own experiences on this front, and their experiences with their adult children. What advice would you give to your 23-year-old self? What advice would you give to parents in the middle of raising kids, who want to raise them to be desire marriage and family?

UPDATE: A great comment by reader C.L.H. Daniels: