Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to A question about fidelity.

The Truth? You can't handle the truth!
ER — (archived)

The Jack Nicholson line has nothing to do with this post, but I figured it would get your attention.

Historically, who gets married, anyway? Most people married at puberty, mid- to late teens at the latest. The women by this time were thoroughly indoctrinted in their roles as homemakers, the men in some agricultural activity or craft. Sometimes, the men were expected to already have some wealth they could bring to the union, a trade or some arable land. What men got out of it was a helper, sex, and an heir. What women got out of it was security and protection, some limited guarantee of her rights, for herself and her children.

In order to make this work, the institution of marriage was conceived to intimidate these kids into taking VERY seriously the utmost gravity of the situation; interesting, since very often it was an arranged family affair and the participants often had little say about it. The whole proceedings were imbued with pomp and ceremony, tradition and ritual. All the major institutions were involved, the church, the state, both families, the community, all playing major and highly visible roles. Gifts were involved, dowries and bride-prices, numerous functionaries and officials, as well as friends and aquaintances to witness the ceremonies. There were many traditions and superstitions to be precisely observed, and surrounding the entire show was a veritable haze of old ladies, eager to see their own historical legacies perpetuated, and a lot of young women fantasizing about when it would be their turn to be grown-up too. The women all cried, the men went out back and got stoned on fermented mare's milk, or whatever. They had a good idea of what it was really all about but they couldn't really talk about it without offending someone.

By the time it was all over, the poor kids were scared to death, and desperate to get out of the limelight. Ironically, the marriage was probably the first crisis they weathered together as a family, and if they were lucky, they had a kindly old aunt who slipped them a dead chicken they could use to sprinkle a little blood on the bedsheets for public display the next morning, just in case.

I'm not being flippant or deliberately cruel about all this. I have a reason for my uncouth analysis. Marriage works, and it is highly ritualized in all human societies past the hunter-gatherer stage (prior to that it is usually a very informal affair, there is no property involved), because it is how culture manages the powerful biological attraction of the reproductive drive in the context of a complex human community based on property, be it land or livestock. Culture evolves, and those systems survive, as in the natural world, selecting for stability and repeatability. The happiness or rights of the participants is not an issue, any more than the happiness of a single organism is an issue when one studies evolution in animal populations.

But as I mentioned before, cultural evolution is much faster than biological, because the reproductive arrangements made possible by culture can adapt faster than we can adapt biologically to meet the conditions of village life and settled agriculture. But today, our social and technological evolution far outstrips the ability of our culture to keep up, so we are saddled with anachronisms and contradictions, and many of our new rituals and institutions are clearly inadequate. Which is what this entire thread on "fidelity" is really all about.

It is a testament to the flexibility of the human spirit that it is possible to understand all this and still love your wife. I've had the same one for 27 years.

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