Institutions of the Heart and Mind

I recently read an article about my generation's anxiety with marriage.

We don't feel economically stable. We don't know how we are going to make our way in the world. Thus we don't feel comfortable thinking about marriage or children. How are we to think of these things unless we feel stable in our livelihoods? How are we to get married and live out this narrative unless we can buy a house and 2 cars?

I'm worried here about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I'm worried that we are forgetting about love because the institutional structures no longer support it. For marriage is but an institution meant to corral our experience of love, sex, and procreation.

The university system, like marriage, is an institution that structures the activity of thinking. Similarly, the universities are experiencing a bit of a crisis. They no longer have the means to fulfill the narrative that they have built themselves upon. They don't provide an appropriate or accessible outlet for thinking, just as marriage does not provide a strong framework for love.

My hope, my conviction (which I very much need to be correct), is that the experiences of love and thinking can exist in spite of the institutions that fail to facilitate them.

Love and thinking are self sustaining activities. The heart and the mind do not need institutional structure. Though it'd be awfully nice to have it.