Ah, gotcha. My mental concept of "nuclear family" stretches to include "two people who might have kids someday" and "a couple and their thirty-year-old never-moved-out child" but by the stricter definition where the kids have to a. exist and b. be young, you're right. Though there could be nuclear families constantly breeding, so that for them it's most of their lives, but large swathes of the population *not* doing that.
I've seen way too many stories where people supposedly live thousands of years, and the population is fairly stable, and yet the majority of adults are still raising young kids.
PLAGUE! FAMINE! VIOLENCE!
...or maybe just breeding season that comes around once every five hundred years, so everyone has kids all at the same time. But also PLAGUE, FAMINE and VIOLENCE, because how else do you come up with a plot, right?
(Or an unstable, frantically-growing population, preparing its armies for the return of the Dark Lord while an ever-shrinking fraction of the population actually has firsthand experience of the First War, and... no, do not need more plotbunnies and I'm sure it's been done before.)
...Personally, though I have no principled reason for this, when I write long-term immortal committed relationships, I have in mind a model that's less about togetherness and more about... possibility. Like, you may live together this year, but you may spend a year *not* together, and where for humans "sweetie, I don't want to see you for a decade, I'll be off having adventures, call me iff it's an emergency otherwise I'll see you later" would be pretty much tantamount to breaking up or at least a sign of a relationship on the rocks, if you have eternity... why not take a break, even from someone you love? I know that's far afield of the topic, but since it's sort of about family structures: family as something you return to, rather than something that's always there, is an idea I like for immortal characters.
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I've seen way too many stories where people supposedly live thousands of years, and the population is fairly stable, and yet the majority of adults are still raising young kids.
PLAGUE! FAMINE! VIOLENCE!
...or maybe just breeding season that comes around once every five hundred years, so everyone has kids all at the same time. But also PLAGUE, FAMINE and VIOLENCE, because how else do you come up with a plot, right?
(Or an unstable, frantically-growing population, preparing its armies for the return of the Dark Lord while an ever-shrinking fraction of the population actually has firsthand experience of the First War, and... no, do not need more plotbunnies and I'm sure it's been done before.)
...Personally, though I have no principled reason for this, when I write long-term immortal committed relationships, I have in mind a model that's less about togetherness and more about... possibility. Like, you may live together this year, but you may spend a year *not* together, and where for humans "sweetie, I don't want to see you for a decade, I'll be off having adventures, call me iff it's an emergency otherwise I'll see you later" would be pretty much tantamount to breaking up or at least a sign of a relationship on the rocks, if you have eternity... why not take a break, even from someone you love? I know that's far afield of the topic, but since it's sort of about family structures: family as something you return to, rather than something that's always there, is an idea I like for immortal characters.