For thousands of years, marriage had reciprocal material benefits for both partners. It often made the difference between survival and early death. The reciprocity worked because of a mutually agreed upon and traditional division of labor, which goes all the way back to the first hominids who learned to scavenge or hunt for food. In those families, the women stayed close to home. Home was a circle of straw huts around a common hearth, kept always burning, with the little community surrounded by a fence of thorn bushes interwoven to keep out predators. Every day the men went looking for meat. There is no sharp division between scavanging and hunting. If they scavenged, they would have to throw rocks or sticks to chase off the hyenas, which is also the way to kill a live animal. Some days they would come home empty-handed. However, the women had not been idle. They were busy gathering anything edible near the home village. Grubs, roots, tubers, fruit, mushrooms, leaves…anything they knew from long experience was edible or could be made edible by cooking. So even if the men came back empty handed, they wouldn’t starve. Gathering was a more reliable way of producing food; it just didn’t have the high content of protein and fat of the occasional feasts brought home by the men.
Jump ahead thousands of generations, to pioneer families on the frontier between 1760 and 1840. The men would kill and cut down trees, using the logs to build houses, and opening up land to be planted to corn. When the men had harvested the corn, they converted it to corn whiskey and built simple flatboats to raft it down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans where they could sell it. They then took a steamer back home, or if they couldn’t afford it, they walked up the Natchez trace. If it was a good crop and everything went well, the men would arrive home with money in their pockets, and the women could buy cloth, kitchen utensils, plows, needles and thread and treats for the kids from traveling peddlers. But what if the Indians burned their crop? Or there was a drought and the corn didn’t grow? Or they shipwrecked taking the corn liquour down to New Orleans? Or were held up by highwaymen and had to hand over their money? They wouldn’t starve. The women in the family would always have a kitchen garden and a cow, and they would have a root cellar for durable foods, like apples, pears, pumpkins, squash, and potatoes, all of which will keep over the winter. Long lasting cheeses could also be made from some of the milk. Once again, the women would keep the men from starving. The family would just have to do without new clothes or a new horse. They would survive.
All of this was still true in the Great Generation of the 20th Century, who came of age in the Great Depression. It was still true until perhaps 1960. After that, it disappeared. Today, women don’t know how to cook, and men don’t know how to fix cars. Neither have a clue about child care. What both men and women are now best at, is going out and getting a job and building a career. So, the food is take-out or delivery pizza. Child-care is left to pre-school. I don’t know who cleans the house. Whichever one is best at it, or most interested in having it clean. Or maybe they just don’t bother since they have no social life anyway, and never have the neighbors over for a game of cards.
My own parents were of the Great Generation, as were all of our Aunts and Uncles, and all the adults of the community. I never knew anyone from that generation who ever got a divorce, even if the woman had a sharp tongue, laid regularly on her poor husband like a whip. Nor did it matter if the husband was a no-good, lazy, ignorant, shifty sort of person who spent all his time drinking beer and playing cards in the smokey saloons of my childhood, with their brass spittoons and pungent smell of spilled beer. My own parents had a long and happy marriage, terminated only by death, and my mother always considered herself fortunate to have found a husband, especially a man she admired so much. She felt sorry for the few old maids who taught in the local junior college, as indeed, they felt sorry for themselves.
All that is gone and cannot be brought back. If a man wants a clean house, he had better not get married, because that will lead to children, who must have pets, and chaos ensues. My father was a much better cook than my mother, and much better at house-keeping too. We kids only learned that when Mom was gone for a few days visiting her mother or some farm women’s convention. Part of the compact was that no one ever criticized their mate. I mean NEVER!. No matter the short-comings of one or the other. At least, that was the rule in our family.
I am amazed that people spend thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands on weddings, when marriage has become so precarious, and so unlikely to be “until death do us part.” After all, what is there to bind them together? A set of romantic and entirely unrealistic expectations. A woman will be sadly disappointed if she expects to be made love to every night. Every man considers that a chore and a duty, and would really much prefer to have at it with his pretty secretary at work, who didn’t always smell like baby drool. Love-making really works best if there is a schedule. My former in-laws made love on Saturday nights, whether they felt like it or not, and I don’t believe my mother-in-law ever felt like it. A man will be sadly disappointed if he expects to come home every night to supper on the table. My once-and-long-ago then-wife only knew how to cook one thing. She could fix the curried dish of India called Keema. But I and the kids never knew whether to expect supper or not. If it was getting late, and we were starving, someone would suggest, “Why don’t we go to McDonalds?” That’s how America got fat.
Since both spouses are equally good at making money, and equally bad at cooking or house-cleaning, there is no reciprocity. I don’t suppose men would ever get married if they didn’t eventually want children. From a sexual point of view, it is much more fun for both men and women if they have many lovers in a lifetime.
The Na ethnic minority in China have an interesting form of marriage that might work for us. A woman’s brothers took care of her children and provided for them. So a household is a woman and one or more brothers. Incest is strictly prohibited. Women get impregnated by the casual sex practiced by everyone. Sounds like paradise to me. I don’t think either men or women are intrinsically and instinctively monogamous. Our near relatives, the Chimps are not strictly monogamous. They may be mostly monogamous, but they sneak around when they can get away with it.
One more entirely unrealistic expectation of today’s blissfully ignorant brides and grooms is that each will always find the other sexually attractive. Or at least more attractive than others in the neighborhood, or at work, or in ones circle of friends. Impossible. It will not happen.
The cost of broken marriages is broken kids. They may not be broken in any obvious way. They won’t necessarily become criminals. But their hearts are colder; their emotional attachments more fragile; their sense of extended family almost non-existent.
So what is the solution? Some very famous and highly successful couples solve the problem by just not ever getting married. They live together; they form a family with children; they do things together. But I imagine they are not joined at the hip, and engage in lots of activities apart from their partner. Including perhaps sexual activities.
I could dream up alternatives, or propose the Na solution. But all I can really say is that like Humpty Dumpty, marriage has taken a great fall, and cannot be put together again. We shall have to invent something new, some kind of hand-fast ceremony without the unrealistic expectations. — Dr.H