My first serious girlfriend’s dad was an asshole. He was an investment banker, so just by that metric alone he deserves to be bullied and cast away from society. I had never seriously entertained the possibility of his being my father-in-law and that despite the fact the his daughter and I were quite serious about one another at the time. 

My current in-laws, or in-laws to be, are not assholes even a little bit. They impress more all the time, the more I know them. 

I wouldn’t say it was a surprise that we are now inexorably and even possibly spiritually linked, my in-laws and I, but it does feel pretty astonishing. One day we were just people who had been hanging out at various functions for the best part of a decade, and now we’re connected in a way that can’t ever go away. 

The protection and emphasis of how important even the possibility of that connection is, appears to be the wellspring from which all family law emerges. Which is to say, the real physical reality of what can happen dictates how we ought to think about

Our laws and systems and rituals, within family life, and beyond it, are not arbitrary and abusive things designed to cloy power from the weak: they are emergent approaches to make the best of an unfathomably complex system on which we have only a fleeting ethical pinkie-grip, to say nothing of actual understanding. 

GK Chesterton said a lot of beautiful things, but chief amongst them, at least to me, was his thought that he no longer wanted to believe that his ancestors were idiots. That does seem to be a central conceit of most athiests and technologists. Those who came before us, those who birthed us, are barbarian fools casting bones and selling their daughters.

C.S. Lewis has a similar perspective to Chesterton. He does not accept that his ancestors were wrong about the things they were most serious about: family and faith. As the complexities and beauties of family life are slowly revealed to me, I’m increasingly siding with them.