"Why don't they get married?" anguished parents wonder of their aging unmarried children.
The various explanations boil down to two: "I don't want to" and "I can't" — can't for economic, social or psychological reasons; don't want to because, for example: "For meals there's the convenience store, for laundry there's the dry cleaner's. And I've discovered I don't have an overwhelming need for sex." Or, from a woman's point of view, "If I were to come home late from work some evening and my husband asked me, 'Where's my dinner?' I'd kill him."
Those snippets come from Spa magazine — not the current issue but that of Nov. 11, 1998. So if the Japanese family is in crisis, as a glance through the table of contents of Ushio magazine's "overview of the family" this month suggests it is, it's not a cataclysmic crisis but a slowly unfolding one — maybe, therefore, reversible, if there's any point to reversing it.
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