Want a village? Learn to pivot

Copy the people whose lives have produced a supportive community

Credit: Francisco Delgado and Unsplash

Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. If you want a village, this blog is for you.

One of the things I have struggled with over the years is learning to make hard pivots. In other words, recognizing that something I’m doing isn’t working and then abandoning that thing in favor of a course correction.

An example of this is religion, which I recently wrote about; I spent many years not participating in religion while hoping to have a church-like community. Eventually, after too long, I realized my efforts had failed. And so I pivoted to a new strategy, though that pivot was made with great reluctance and after years of resisting. In my experience, pivoting is hard¹.

But hard as it may be, I suspect pivoting is one of the key things that is making or breaking village-building efforts. Take, for example, this recent New York Times piece from Jessica Grose. The headline promises tips for marriage, but the first third of the story is actually about Grose’s extended family. Though her own clan is small, her husband comes from a big extended family. Through marriage, Grose has gained access to “a warm crowd of people who supported one another over generations and across geography.”

What Grose is describing — “the easy camaraderie of having so many close kin” — is a family village. In fact, it is rare that I’ve seen a more explicit or positive description of a village in a mainstream news outlet. It’s fantastic stuff.

Grose goes on to describe the foundations of this village, which included a powerful matriarch who had five kids, the first when she was 19, and who remained married to her husband for 50 years. Grose’s husband is one of that founding generation’s 12 grandkids.

Now, if I had been writing this piece, my next move would’ve been to say something like, “hey look, I love being a part of this big family, I’m describing what created it, and therefore I now have a proven village-building recipe.” In other words, “do you want a village? Then pattern your life after this awesome lady.”

The piece’s headline promises tips about marriage, specifically, and Grose goes on to mention that a “crucial part of” her bond with her husband “has always been about building and maintaining the relationships” with her husband’s extended family. So, what are the “ingredients of a lasting marriage”? Well, it sounds like they include marrying into a big family and then working hard to maintain strong relationships with that family. That seems like the obvious thesis that comes from Grose’s lived experience.

But that’s not actually where this story goes.

After describing her family village with great fondness, Grose then goes on to explore a book about a British couple who were stranded on a raft in the 1970s. The couple were eventually rescued and became famous. They “knew they did not want kids from the start” and Grose celebrates the book about them for being “a kind of rebuke to the current extreme cultural narratives about heterosexual romance.”

This couple, the Baileys, sound pretty cool and seem to have had an adventurous life. As a person who likes adventure, I get the appeal. There’s nothing wrong with idolizing them and their adventures, fame, or the modern values that seem to have made them so appealing to Grose. If what you want is the life the Baileys lived, by all means hold them up as role models.

The catch is that that doesn’t appear to be the life Grose wants, as she spent much of her piece lauding a woman — her grandmother-in-law — who chose an entirely different path. And so there is a disconnect here. Grose admires the Baileys’ values, but she admires the outcomes that spring from her grandmother-in-law’s life. She

A) wants, and has obtained, a big family village;

B) idolizes people whose life choices — primarily related to having kids — are the opposite of what village builders do.

I don’t mean to come down hard on Grose because I think she’s an engaging and thoughtful writer, even if I find myself often disagreeing with her.

But I highlight this disconnect because it’s quite common. Like Grose, I think many people today — including and especially me — want a village. In fact, that lack of a village (or something similar) is one of the most common laments of people, millennials, in my age cohort. But also like Grose, I think many of us take as role models people whose values and lifestyle seem appealing, but who have prioritized a variety of non-village things.

In other words, there is a tendency to choose role models for things other than the long-term outcomes of their lives. We all want to have our cake (a cool life based on cool role models), and eat it too (enjoy the benefits of a more traditional lifestyle).

And so I would suggest that a pivot is in order. Perhaps, if you want a village, it is time to abandon role models whose lives have not produced villages. If that’s not what you want, fine. Do something else. But it makes very little sense to say that your life is great because of a woman who had a 50-year marriage, gave birth to five kids, and eventually had 12 grandchildren, and then in the next sentence to suggest that the recipe for a good life or marriage is to “rebuke” “heterosexual romance” and avoid having kids at all. These are entirely different value systems that are going to produce entirely different outcomes.

(This also isn’t to say that you have to become a tradwife or something. Grose’s grandmother-in-law appears to have been a firey and politically left-leaning woman. The argument here is not necessarily “live a traditional life.” It’s “look at the outcomes.” Based on the article, I think Grose’s grandmother-in-law actually offers an example of someone who blended tradition and progressivism and ended up with pretty pro-village outcomes.)

In any case, the point I’m trying to make is not about Grose specifically. It’s that I see in her piece much of myself, and of my generation’s tendency to not focus on outcomes that might realistically lead to a village — and then to throw up our hands and assume the entire enterprise of community-building is doomed. But in practice, there are people who have villages, and I think it’s worth looking at them and simply trying to copy their lives. And at least for me, I hope I can pivot when I find that I’m heading toward a village-less outcome.

Thanks for reading Nuclear Meltdown. If you enjoy this blog, consider sharing it with a friend.

1. I reiterate here that the point of talking about church is not to convince you to embrace religion, but rather to chronicle my own thinking on village building — and to highlight a moment in which I did pivot, but should have done so earlier.