When I was younger, I remember people, for the most part anyway, keeping their big fat noses out of other people's business, especially when that business had to do with the bedroom. In those days I probably heard the phrase "I don't care what people do in the privacy of their own homes" uttered at least five times a day, but usually even more than that. Now that I have matured, I realize that all those people were just lying. The truth is that privacy does not exist. Whilst people pretend that privacy is sacred, that sacred ground is violated with prying eyes whenever it is advantageous to those with something to prove. It is, for some reason that I have not yet figured out (I will eventually), very important to some people, many of them wealthy people, to prove that having a family is a burden. These people loathe what they have termed "traditional" relationships. They blame people who choose to stay with one person and, god forbid, to have children with that person, for every ill in the world from depression to global warming. They sit in their one room studio apartments and write essays on the perils of parenthood, and the misery of marriage. They are the enlightened ones, the people who have been blessed with eyes to see the supposed sham of love. This idea that family is the bad guy does not fit any particular ideology. There is no mass movement to destroy the family. Instead there are many wealthy people in the world with too much time on their hands, and idle hands often lead to irrational acts of jealously. Contrary to popular opinion, money does not insulate you from heartbreak. Relationships do not magically improve once Sally can buy the dress she has always wanted or once Mike can finally afford to buy his favorite video game or once you finally buy the kids all of they toys in the goddamn world. Objects do not make people all that happy. If they did there would be at least some difference between the divorce rate of poor people and that of rich people. But wealthy people and poor people get divorced at similar rates. But while it may be true that money cannot buy happiness, it can certainly buy publicity. When the average citizen goes through a divorce or has an affair only a few people ever find out about it; thus, the bitter party in this situation only has a few shoulders to cry on. The wealthy, on the other hand, can devote entire movies, novels and even political campaigns to whining about their negative experiences with relationships. This negative publicity about the supposed evils of love has been pumped into the minds of the populous so that now it has gone mainstream. It is now perfectly acceptable for single people to state that they are happier than married people, that they are contributing more to society, that they care more about the planet, but the evidence for these claims is, as usual, nonexistent. And while the internet may be full of bullshit articles about how miserable families are and how happy single people are, a whole lot of bullshit does not amount to verifiable proof. Many of the studies on happiness in relationships are not peer reviewed. Many more were based on compromised data. How does one even begin to measure happiness in a person? The whole notion of figuring out who is the happiest is insane. To be frank, I am sick and tired of people telling me whether or not I am happy. I am sick and tired of people reducing my relationship to a "social construct". I am sick and tired of people acting like my child is "a burden on the environment". I do not care if anyone has children or not, but I do care about impressionable young people being sold the lie that children make you unhappy, that choosing to have sex with only one person is some kind of crime against humanity. You have the right to do as you like, but so do I. I choose to recognize that no one is happy all of the time, and that completely uprooting your life to fit into some cult of love haters is a waste of time.