Mom, Apple Pie and the Girl They Can't Find

I was watching an interesting piece on the news on Wednesday, and it got me thinking about some things that had occurred to me, only in a lot more depth than I had ever considered them.

Apparently, for the first time, the most common residence situation for people aged 18 to 34 is living with their parents.  As in "home", like, "never left" or "came right back."  Second place was "living with a romantic partner", which had always been first.

I know a lot of people probably watched the show and were thinking that it had everything to do with the part about the parents, the parents' home, the lack of the job needed to make money, or the actual "living with the parents" aspect.

That was not my reaction, though it is not wrong. It's pretty obvious why, given their specific situation, the 18-34 crowd ends up in their parents' home rather than living independently elsewhere.

What needed the thought was why they were not living with a romantic partner.  And that's where my mind went.

The vast majority of people would like to be living with a romantic partner.  They just can't find one, or haven't found one, or found one and lost one.  But there's a basic essential to finding someone, and that, to me, is the ability to communicate with a member of the opposite sex.

Granted, that shouldn't be hard, but let's think about what makes millennials different from previous generations.  I think we'll find a thread here.

First, they are enslaved by technology -- their iPhones, their tablets, their video games.  Lots of texting, lots of playing, lots of Internet searching dominates their lives.  It is an artificially sheltered environment in many senses of the word.  But the tools of technology are distractions from humanity.

Second, they don't read.  Ever try to sell a bunch of used books?  There is zero market for books anymore, and one wonders how Barnes & Noble, and the other big book retailer whose name escapes me, even survive, unless it's mainly by selling Kindle versions.  No reading for pleasure means losing the mind-expanding world that books provide -- and it means losing the vocabulary-expanding value that reading a lot offers.

Third, it's too freaking loud when they assemble in social situations, to have a conversation.  I realize that this is not necessarily a new phenomenon; I graduated college in 1973 and the parties were too loud even then.  But I have a lot of memories of the kind of interaction where you want to talk to (in my case) a girl and have to figure out where to go to have a conversation BECAUSE IT WAS TOO LOUD.  I went to a cousin's daughter's wedding not that long ago (she was in her twenties) and spent most of the reception out in the lobby to keep my head from hurting from the loud "music."

By now you may have gotten what that thread is.  Millennials never put themselves in the kind of situations that facilitate communications with the opposite sex, and even when they were in such situations, they never honed the communication skills needed, because they were simply not trained and practiced to have a conversation.  Too distracted.  Too loud.  Too little mastery of the spoken word.

That was my supposition regarding the study.  Sure, millennials all over are moving back with their parents, or not leaving, because they don't have jobs and can't afford to live on their own, and this excuse and that excuse.  And because the parents don't do their jobs and kick them out, or set a deadline for them when they will be evicted.  I get that.

But it's the relative lack of relationships that lead to marriage (or cohabitation) that I find more troubling -- but equally explicable.  Millennials are less -- in some cases, far less -- able to conduct a civilized discussion with each other than previous generations, that were obliged to learn the skill.  No communication, no relationships.  No relationships, no process that ends up sharing a home.

We look at TV family sitcoms and think that maybe I'm completely wrong.  But those sitcoms have two things real millennials don't have -- a script by a professional writer, and a low maximum background volume.  I think the trend reflected in the study is here for the long haul, because neither technology nor ambient volumes in bars and clubs will change any time soon.

If you're a parent, you had better concentrate on your 15-year-old learning to communicate with the opposite sex and getting them in environments where they can.  Or you can expect your home's consumables budget to be pretty high in another ten years.

You heard it here first.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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