I find this fascinating!

I'm (slowly) working through a women's Bible study called "Five Aspects of Woman," by Barbara K. Mouser. The section I'm in now talks about how women were made to be helper-completers for men. Check out this quotation, given in the study, from a secular book. I don't mean it to be down on men or anything, I just think it's astounding and definitely reflective of Genesis 2 and the male and female qualities she's talking about.

(It's a bit long, but worth the read!)

"One might imagine that the single life, vaunted in many books and magazines, works. It doesn't. For most men, to remain persistently single is to court trouble. Men need durable ties to women to discipline them for civilized life, or they become a menace to society and to themselves. In his second book on the dilemmas of love and marriage in our time, George Gilder focuses on the single and divorced man. Through research statistics, hormonal studies, slice of life portraits, and an acute eye for the current scene, Mr. Gilder contrasts the free, swinging virile image of the single man with the reality--naked nomads, rootless and vulnerable. Single men commit some 90% of the crimes of violence, from robbery to rape. Single men earn only a little more than half as much as their married peers with equivalent qualifications. Single men are 21 times as likely to be in prison or in mental hospitals as married men. Divorced men between 25 and 65 are over 3 times as likely to die of various causes as married men. Losers from the start? To some extent yes, says Mr. Gilder. But marriage itself has a dramatic effect in transforming bachelors with antisocial and self-destructive tendencies into stable citizens. Further, a sexually permissive society creates a competitive sexual arena where the powerful, the rich, and the sexually desirable win. As in Arab societies, the powerful men monopolize a series of young women. The less successful, marginal men are left on the periphery to drift toward homosexuality, to be driven to impotence, rape, theft, suicide. Women are better able to manage alone. It is the men who need marriage for psycho-biological stability.

Crazy stuff, eh? What do you think?



(From the jacket cover of George Gilder's book, Naked Nomads: Unmarried Men in America, 1974. Emphasis mine.)