Love & Marriage
A strange case of synchronicity has happened to me lately. Over the past few days (since my post about marriage), it seems that marriage has been coming up in every one of my classes. In Anthropology we discussed the marriage practices of Bands and Tribes. In another class, we discussed the Victorian pre-occupation with Love in an age of pre-arranged marriages. Other blogs I read have posts about them. CNN is constantly talking about Gay marriage. On and on I am bombarded with people shouting about marriage. So in an effort to add to the din, here's what I think.
A lot of people complain about the rising rate of divorce. Some blame it on immaturity, some on the baby-boomers, some on the destruction of the nuclear family, some on voodoo. I think I'd like to disagree with all of them. It's all because of unreal expectations & love. You see, in the course of human history, divorce is actually very common. Most Band societies practice divorce commonly (their marriages are not in practice life-long unions). However, upon our vertical movement into tribal societies and chiefdoms, suddenly divorce becomes a problem. Suddenly divorce is a negative thing (this is due to conceptions of property, women's rights, the agricultural revolution, and several other factors I won't get into). But then we moved into state socities. And the divorce rate dropped (it did however remain negative). It dropped because of the function of marriage.
Traditionally, marriage is not about love. It's about reproduction. You partner up with the person who is going to up your chances for survival and shooting out kiddies. For a woman, this means find the biggest, meanest sohnbitch you can find because he can protect you. For a man, this meant the woman with wide hips, a well padded figure with the necessary fat and physical structure to pump out 12 or 14 kids before crawling into an early grave. That's the way it worked years and years ago. After survival, we started using marriage as an insitution for social security. Tribe A can make peace with Tribe B if they marry their daughters into the other tribe. People are also less likely to go to war when they know they would have to kill their own daughters and grandkids. It also helped out the gene pool (always a good thing). Today though, we've taken marriage and placed it on a much less secure foundation: Love.
Republicans always complain about the destruction of the nuclear family. Sure, go ahead and complain, but the nuclear family is a dying stereotype from the Victorian era. It has its basis in a marriage of convienance. Back then, due to societal pressure, there was no such thing as divorce. It wasn't so bad though because you never expected love. You expected a business partnership with your spouse. The Victorians wrote books and books about love because that's what they saw as the ideal, not the reality. They romanticized and pined for "true love" and never got it. Fast forward 100 years and all of a sudden, marriage is no longer about physical needs or societal needs, but about the individual. It's about what I need. What I want. That's why marriages fail today. That's why we don't have nuclear families anymore. It's because we've come to expect more pleasure from life. We've come to expect true love. Just as we instill in every little girl out there the false hope that her knight in shining armor will come along on a white horse and sweep her away, we've deluded ourselves into thinking that marriage has always been about love.
Well it hasn't. The divorce rate climbs and no one thinks to look at the selfishness of our society. I'm not saying this is a bad thing (I'll reserve that for another rant), it is a causing factor though. When the only reason you got married was because of emotions, and those emotions fade, it becomes pretty damn hard to stay together.
That's why I'm in favor of Gay marriage. Hell, let them adopt kids. It won't be any worse than straight couples. Let's give them a shot to get it right. We obviously can't.
-----
Music: The Refreshments
A lot of people complain about the rising rate of divorce. Some blame it on immaturity, some on the baby-boomers, some on the destruction of the nuclear family, some on voodoo. I think I'd like to disagree with all of them. It's all because of unreal expectations & love. You see, in the course of human history, divorce is actually very common. Most Band societies practice divorce commonly (their marriages are not in practice life-long unions). However, upon our vertical movement into tribal societies and chiefdoms, suddenly divorce becomes a problem. Suddenly divorce is a negative thing (this is due to conceptions of property, women's rights, the agricultural revolution, and several other factors I won't get into). But then we moved into state socities. And the divorce rate dropped (it did however remain negative). It dropped because of the function of marriage.
Traditionally, marriage is not about love. It's about reproduction. You partner up with the person who is going to up your chances for survival and shooting out kiddies. For a woman, this means find the biggest, meanest sohnbitch you can find because he can protect you. For a man, this meant the woman with wide hips, a well padded figure with the necessary fat and physical structure to pump out 12 or 14 kids before crawling into an early grave. That's the way it worked years and years ago. After survival, we started using marriage as an insitution for social security. Tribe A can make peace with Tribe B if they marry their daughters into the other tribe. People are also less likely to go to war when they know they would have to kill their own daughters and grandkids. It also helped out the gene pool (always a good thing). Today though, we've taken marriage and placed it on a much less secure foundation: Love.
Republicans always complain about the destruction of the nuclear family. Sure, go ahead and complain, but the nuclear family is a dying stereotype from the Victorian era. It has its basis in a marriage of convienance. Back then, due to societal pressure, there was no such thing as divorce. It wasn't so bad though because you never expected love. You expected a business partnership with your spouse. The Victorians wrote books and books about love because that's what they saw as the ideal, not the reality. They romanticized and pined for "true love" and never got it. Fast forward 100 years and all of a sudden, marriage is no longer about physical needs or societal needs, but about the individual. It's about what I need. What I want. That's why marriages fail today. That's why we don't have nuclear families anymore. It's because we've come to expect more pleasure from life. We've come to expect true love. Just as we instill in every little girl out there the false hope that her knight in shining armor will come along on a white horse and sweep her away, we've deluded ourselves into thinking that marriage has always been about love.
Well it hasn't. The divorce rate climbs and no one thinks to look at the selfishness of our society. I'm not saying this is a bad thing (I'll reserve that for another rant), it is a causing factor though. When the only reason you got married was because of emotions, and those emotions fade, it becomes pretty damn hard to stay together.
That's why I'm in favor of Gay marriage. Hell, let them adopt kids. It won't be any worse than straight couples. Let's give them a shot to get it right. We obviously can't.
-----
Music: The Refreshments
