It is not easy to get a true picture of the relationship and opinions that young people currently hold about the family. There are many people interested in making young people think one thing or another. The media and commercial advertising are continuously shaping the public image of young people and want to orient it according to their interests.
There is a great distance between the family of opinion -that which is maintained in speeches, in conversations or in the media- and the family of experience -that which people truly live, that which they have in their hearts and longings. This is something we have studied extensively in the family report (www.informefamilia.org).
The main note that characterizes the relationship of young people with the family is very positive. The family is the most important and deepest personal and social dimension of young people. All surveys and research show that it is the main source of trust and is an indispensable aspect of their lives.
The young people express immeasurable gratitude to their families and want to build a family of their own in their future.
The family is the most original, universal and profound component of the human condition, so it should come as no surprise that young people express such a powerful appreciation.
And yet it is surprising because the family is a counter-cultural community in today's society. As much as the dominant culture is invaded by individualism and utilitarianism, the family's logics of solidarity and giving constitute its strongest resistance.
Family ties are the most persistent and some of them are irreversibly forever. This is also contradictory to what Pope Francis calls the "family bond. throwaway cultureThe apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia.
However, young people yearn not for a little bit of life but for the whole of life. Youth does not want a little bit of life but the whole of life. Their hearts beat with yearnings for wholeness and greatness, ready to give everything and even more. That is why they are reluctant to do without the source of their deepest experiences and bonds, the family.
For this very reason, they also aspire for the family and conjugality to be expressed with the greatest possible transparency, depth and authenticity. The crisis of the conventional institutionalization of conjugality in favor of new formulas -such as unmarried couples- expresses this search.
Other interests are also at work, such as those that weaken community bonds - our society has suffered from what Bauman has termed "the Great Unbinding"- and the very dimensions of law and institutionality. Perhaps excessively identified with the power of the State and of the great potentates of capital, culture and religions, they are considered to be coercive and not sufficiently genuine dimensions.
However, young people continue to place conjugal love - a life partner - as the greatest aspiration they can feel. They continually sing it, write it, show it by all the means at their disposal. In any case, conjugality always finds a way to become institutionalized, albeit in informal ways.
The greatest threat to the family is the weakening of ties, even the most crucial ones, such as the paternal-maternal-filial and conjugal ones. To resist the wave of disengagement, young people will need not only their desires, but also to rebuild institutions - which are not primarily a phenomenon of power but a phenomenon of universality and intergenerational communication - including the conjugal community, which is the greatest possible friendship between human beings. It is time to rebuild positive conjugality.
Director of the University Institute of the Family, Comillas Pontifical University.
