THAT'S MEN:Nobody knows what's going to happen next, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
FOR DECADES, I have had Alvin Toffler's 1970s bestseller Future Shockon my shelf. The book, with its predictions of how we would live in the future (ie now), made a huge impact in its day.
I took it up the other night to see how well he predicted our 21st-century relationships.
Oh dear, not terribly well, really. Had he been right, we wouldn’t have had to rear our own children, we guys could have had lots of wives and when we got old we could marry a whole group of other old people who would help look after us.
According to Toffler, many of us would marry in our mid-teens, with the understanding that when our paths diverged, so to speak, we would move on to our next marriage. We would all be terribly mature about this.
What would be particularly helpful is that we would not necessarily have children around to complicate matters – we might have handed junior over to a professional family for rearing.
This would be a bit like a super foster family which, for a fee, would raise our kids in accordance with best practice as good and balanced citizens and hand them back to us as finished products.
Of course, you might not have a junior to send off to a professional family in the first place. Toffler speculates that many of us are, by now, putting off child-rearing until after we retire. Thanks to the wonders of science, this is entirely possible.
He even suggests that having a child after you retire might help to keep your marriage together as you struggle with the challenge of actually having to spend time with each other for a whole day. It will all be a matter of buying an embryo, sticking it in the oven and waiting for junior to pop out.
In all of this, there is no expectation that a marriage might be permanent. Toffler quotes a young, black civil rights woman explaining that “I can’t imagine myself promising my whole lifetime away. I might want to get married now, but how about next year?”
I wonder did she ever get left holding the baby and if so whether she still clung to her former views?
By the way, you might not be confined to the same partner even within the same marriage. Toffler speculated that cultural and legal barriers against polygamy might be relaxed.
Because men would be moving from place to place for work they would have wives in various cities rather like a sailor who has a woman in every port.
The wives left behind as men move from city to city “will demand extramarital sexual rights”, he says. Sounds like fun for feckless chaps eager to please other men’s wives.
It gets worse or more interesting, depending on your point of view. Toffler suggested that older people might form what he called a “geriatric commune” and that they would marry the group for the sake of companionship and of mutual assistance.
That mightn’t be a bad idea in some ways when you consider the alternative of the nursing home, but I haven’t noticed it happening in my neighbourhood despite Toffler saying that this development is “likely”.
At least he got it right when he predicted that single-parent families would become more common. Remember that this was published in the early 1970s and that what seems obvious to us now might not have seemed so obvious then.
Toffler also quotes a London photographer, Michael Cooper, who, after winning custody of his baby son in a court battle, didn’t really want to marry again but liked children. “I wish you could just ask beautiful women to have babies for you,” he said.
Toffler writes that “attitudes like these will be widely held by men in the future”. Okay, beautiful ladies, form a queue.
The lesson in all of this? Don’t believe people who claim to know what’s going to happen next. Wait and see.
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His mindfulness newsletter is free by e-mail.