Once upon a time, getting married early, raising children, and building a family was considered the ultimate expression of adulthood. It wasn’t glamorous, but it required something most people today would find exhausting — maturity. The kind that wakes up at 3 AM to a crying baby without complaining. The kind that works two jobs to pay school fees. The kind that stays faithful not because there isn’t temptation, but because love was once measured by sacrifice, not dopamine.
But we’ve evolved, haven’t we?
Today, we’ve replaced maturity with something more fashionable: intelligence.
You see, it doesn’t take much to build a family. Any village idiot can do that. But managing a body count of 20, hiding it artfully, gaslighting your spouse for decades, and carrying that performance all the way to your deathbed — now that’s intelligence. That’s emotional calculus. That’s the kind of genius that modern culture applauds.
We’ve built a world where honesty is optional, but optics are everything. Where truth is boring, but manipulation is an art. Where youth is for “exploration,” and marriage is where you drop the curtain and perform your greatest illusion — the illusion of purity, commitment, and a spotless past.
Let’s be clear. This isn’t a moral lecture. This is a cultural x-ray.
We live in times where virginity is mocked, loyalty is old-fashioned, and cheating is a lifestyle — as long as you’re “smart” enough not to get caught. We no longer measure character by responsibility but by how well you can curate your image and keep skeletons locked behind clever locks.
So yes, marriage and family still require maturity. But lies, manipulation, and maintaining a façade till your last breath? That requires a different kind of genius —
the kind that wins applause, not respect.