Great article, Amanda. As a recent university grad, I find that most people around me are a little more ambivalent when it comes to marriage than the peers you describe, but I suspect that this is more a result of another five years being thrashed around by the world and relationships than it is a sign of a genuine lack of desire for a committed, sincere and intimate relationship.

It is true that people of our generation want careers and children, but I wonder if the desire for these things alone is enough to guarantee we'll actually get them. Women ten or fifteen years older than us are finding it very difficult to do both, and there seems to be a greater acknowledgement that, for now, we DO have to make a choice. To be able to choose both, I'd wager, would require some shift in public policy approach to the matter.

As someone looking forward to my own wedding in the coming months, and as someone from a family of what would no doubt be classified as "intellectuals", I always read these kinds of articles with a certain fascination for just where all this talk of "disintegrating nuclear families" is coming from. Perhaps I'm not drinking enough lattes or hanging out at the right cafes, but in neither my family, nor my circle of friends have I found any resistance to the idea of marriage and family.

Indeed, my personal following of the media would seem to suggest that the number of panic-stricken, 'sky is falling' articles such as this one far outweighs the number of articles which actually promote an end (or serious alternative) to the nuclear family.

The painfully obvious irony is that the people bemoaning the imminent death of the nuclear family are the same ones lobbying to prevent gay couples from forming their own families in the full, legal sense of the word. It is this sort of prejudice which is the true threat to families. That the children in families based around a gay couple should be disadvantaged is an injustice that no social conservative can ever adequately defend.

Amanda, you are doing exactly what you seem to be criticising "the baby boomers" for doing. That is, speaking for a broad group of people based on your own relatively narrow experience.

I'm 24 and don't wish in any way whatsoever for marriage. I do hope one day to become a father, but I think that our society will have evolved by the time I'm ready for that to make it possible to be a good father without marriage. Infact, I think it may well be more possible to be good parents never having married than to be good parents who are divirced.

The point here is not any problems or contradictions within my own ideas of family, but that there is no reason to assert our own perception of what we want as somehow generalised.

Ofcourse, if you want everyone to live acording to your principles, then you should be open about it. Otherwise be content to state that there are people who agree with you and that their opinion should not be overlooked. Please don't try and represent your entire generation because I suspect I'm part of that group and I don't think you represent me or many of my friends.

Thanks.

I find the above discussion rather strange because before marriage became a rite of the church it was the sexual act that constituted marriage. Weddings came much later as a way of ordering society. So to say that someone is not married when they are living together places too much emphasis on the wedding,in the biblical mentality they are already married and the husband has responsibility for his wife and any children that may arise from the union. The only thing that has changed for us is the availability of reliable contraception that masks what is really the case, men and women who live togther as husband and wife are in fact husband and wife.

Something else has changed, and that is technology. A big part of the historical cause of marriage was that men wanted to be sure that they were in fact the father of their children. This was important for inheritance aswell as whatever phsycological factors might be involved. Now, if your in doubt, there are ways of being sure that you are the father of a child (I'm assuming that it's always been obvious who the mother is).

Historically marriage enforced monigomy on women for men's benifet. Obviously I'm not claiming there were no other benifits of marriage because I think there have been many, but I think it helps to conceptualise social structures as historical rather than natural.

I think its great that there is so much public discussion about family structures. The idea that only one model of family is acceptable clearly leaves alot of people unsatisfied. Making alternative models socially acceptable would be a big step forward.

Kalpa, I agree with the dangers of generalising about generations, but there are some interesting straws in the wind in terms of how the younger generation views the world. A story www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11801883%255E2702,00.html in today's Australian shows younger people being more conservative than baby-boomers on the abortion issue; and then there is the phenomenon of the younger people called "Howard's fogies".

While generalisation is invidious, it is also invidious not to generalise, because then you forgo the opportunity to make out underlying principles. We know that moral attitudes are not a constant between generations but that they are rather cyclical.

I think Amanda may be on to something.