Youth is Wasted

16 Marcheshvan 5773

Sometimes I wonder why I bother going to college.
It's such a waste of fertility.
Truly it is. I'll only be able to bear children for so long. By the time I graduate from college I'll have wasted a full decade of prime child-bearing potential. By the time I have my first child I'll be halfway through my fertile years. However many children I have I'll know I could have had twice as many, or at least increased the chances of the same number of children being healthier by birthing them in my youth. School, on the other hand is something I can do at any time. I could always just marry and have children now and go to school later. Rabbi Akiva didn't start until he was forty, so what if I do the same? I have a serious and real time limit on the fertility of my womb, but the fertility of my mind knows no such bounds.

But every time I think of this I realize why it's foolish. That's just my biological clock thinking for me. How would I now be feeding the children I should have had when I was fourteen? Could I have provided a means of support without an education? And suppose my husband would support us: who would this husband of mine be who would be capable of supporting a fourteen year old wife and her children? How would I have selected such a man? Who would I even be without the expansion of my mind which education and experience has brought? Certainly noone capable of participating in a healthy sexual relationship, or of fitting my children with the skills and values they would need when they grow up.

Yet, my great-grandmother married when she was fourteen! Am I any better than my great-grandmother, or hers? They just lived in a different world. Marriage and child-rearing was a different game back then. Then it was about living, and continuing. In some cases it was about not getting kidnapped lest you become too old a virgin for someone not to notice and steal you from your father's house before he loses the chance to monopolize your otherwise wasted youth and reproductivity. In a way he would be doing you a great favor, that man. He would be preventing your fertility from being lost. Besides, he would feed and clothe you after your father died.
So the girls married young then so that they, or at least their fathers, could choose their husbands.
That's a model in which women are property.
In many places it is a model that persists.

Today, though, marriage is supposed to be all about love. You have to love a man before marrying him, you can't marry him otherwise. If you do, your life will be miserable and unfulfilled because you've missed the chance to spend eternity with your one true love who will now forever be pining away in sorrow.

What folly! To imagine love as the sole foundation of any relationship.

Love is the product of a relationship not a catalyst for it.
That is why in describing the marriage between Yizchak and Rivka the Torah says "He wed her and he loved her." A marriage is not built upon love. Love is the product of the marriage. Love comes after commitment because commitment is an act of love.

So still we seek a healthy model for relationships, and try to figure out what this thing is we call love.
I don't know that we can figure out. It's different every time.
I'll just have to keep living with my eyes open and trust that Gd will put the right one in front of me.
And that I see him when He does.