Anonymous wrote:The topic of why we enter relationships is a fascinating one.
In the 1800s in France it was common for bourgeois men to separately maintain 3 "types" of women:
- A wife, who was selected based on reason, i.e. raw intellectual and physical criteria, ability to run a household, capacity to raise good children, political and financial considerations. Divorce was not an option. This was a pragmatic relationship where both parties first and foremost benefited from the union in the material sense, love and sex were only a bonus. Marriage was principally expected to fulfill material needs for the husband, his wife and their children.
- A mistress for love and passion. The most passionate stage of love lasts for the first 2-3 years, so a man could very well have several mistresses over his life. It was common for the man to pay for the mistress's accommodation, buy regular gifts, and generally provide and care for her. Relationships between such lovers were principally expected to fulfill their emotional needs
- Prostitutes for sex. It was fine to have favorites, but these were not relationships of love. These relationships were principally expected to fulfill the man's sexual needs and the woman's financial ones.
I think this was not such a bad model in the end. Before you kill me on the altar of gender equality, please hear me out. Yes, it was relatively male-centric and that is why for ease of understanding, I presented it from the man's perspective. But don't oversimplify this, as women at the time also navigated between these roles, which gave them freedom to fulfill their material, emotional and sexual needs. It was common for example for mistresses to have purely sexual affairs with other men, and to attempt to marry well. It was also possible for married women to discreetly have emotional/ sexual affairs, as long as the household's integrity remained intact.
My point is not to promote a model or another, but to propose that we have recently (last 50 years) been asking way too much of marriage. It is now widely believed that our spouses should fulfill all our material, emotional and sexual needs, constantly and forever. In reality, these different relationship aspects ebb and flow, and when they do, people naturally often conclude that the person is "not right for them". Which is why you see such an incidence of divorce these days.
I do not believe in the absolute "freedom" widely promoted these days, because more "freedom" is not what is needed to ensure our happiness at this stage. What we need is a better societal structure that allows people to fulfill their needs in a healthy way. I don't believe that our current western culture is a healthy one in that regard.
When we are young, we throw ourselves into short-term relationships, changing partners from one day to the next. Many of us have liberal sex with random strangers, and "cheating" is commonplace. Why do we do this? We do this in anticipation for marriage. We are really front-loading our sex and emotional lives, in anticipation for a later marriage to "the one" which we know will necessarily entail sexual and emotional exclusivity - a situation we instinctively understand is untenable. This liberal drive during youth therefore comes not from a place of respect and attraction for others, but from a place of anticipated frustration, of stress, and thus ultimately of pure selfishness. It comes from a mindset of taking, and not of giving. By contrast, the 1800s model described above in my view leads to a healthier more relaxed society where people are not industrially using each other in their youth, as the society was open to people fulfilling their emotional and sexual needs at any stage in their lives (i.e. even when married).
After our wild youth, we then enter progressively more stable relationships, until eventually we are too old to simply be dating. Once we start making money, living in our own place, and generally being materially stable, we start thinking about having kids. Usually, the current long-term girlfriend/ boyfriend sometime in our late 20s/ early 30s thus gets the ring. Note how the timing of our achievement of material security is the most important determinant of who we marry. Note how we symbolize marriage with a piece of jewelry. We see here how a marriage is simply the introduction a materialistic link between the partners, to finalise the "required" trifecta of love, sex and material security. Interestingly, surveys show that most people currently married state that they could have been just as happy with one or more of their previous partners. In other words, although we organise our marriages on this premise, most of us understand there is no such person as "the one" who can fulfill all our needs.
Once married, as anticipated in our youth, we actually start getting deeply frustrated. In the best cases, love and sexual attraction ebb and flow in circa 3-year-long cycles, but often simply disappear forever. Depending on where we are in the initial attraction cycle when we marry, the first year or two of marriage meet our expectations, but eventually we realise -oh the horror!- that we do not passionately love our partners all the time. We realise -say it ain't so!- that we do not find them sexually attractive all the time. Although this is perfectly -biologically- normal, we do not see it as so, because that is not what we have been taught. We start wondering whether or not we made the right choice. Now with kids and the commitment to forever, we start to feel imprisoned as our emotional and sexual needs are no longer met all the time, while our material needs are. We are not only frustrated, but we also start feeling guilt. We start lusting after others and many start "cheating" again. We expect so much from our marriages that they inevitably let us down, but even worse than to frustration, they lead to betrayal, to guilt, to self-doubt, to depression, to cynicism. Because once married, there is a stigma associated with trying to fulfill our biological and psychological needs. It leads to several divorces over our lifetimes, getting more and more frequent. Marriage is progressively viewed as temporary agreement as we get older, and so they no longer even provide us with the material security they should. We start to focus on ourselves, first and foremost. We take more and more, rather than give. We enter in an implicit conflict with the entire opposite sex where situation is win-lose. Some of us even go back to the frenetic ego-feeding serial relationships of our youth to compensate for the impossibility of finding someone "perfect". In other words, we resign ourselves to never finding material security and throw ourselves into our other needs.
Again, I would invite you to compare this to the 1800s French model, where a marriage was only expected to be materially rewarding (hence its permanence). Emotional and sexual needs could be fulfilled by other people, as long as the marriage was respected for the pragmatic arrangement it was. It was fine to have lovers on the side to meet these needs.
Perhaps most importantly, notice how children were also major beneficiaries of the old model. As the security of marriage was not subjected to the unreliable, short-term whims of emotions and sexual needs, children were raised in much more stable familial environments. The sole underlying purpose of the families they grew up in was to nurture them, and develop them into the best possible adults. They were raised simply by one mom, and one dad, without any of the confusion introduced by divorces and remarriages nowadays. Divorces lead to children feeling chronically guilty, abandoned, and lonely. They too as a result eventually become cynical, selfish and unhappy adults.
Though again I do not promote any model over another, I do believe that we should recognize that while our need for security is permanent and constant, our emotional and sexual needs are not, and are in fact subject to frequent and uncontrollable fluctuations. By integrating love and sex into what was originally a permanent material arrangement, we have hurt our ability to fulfill our own (and our children's) need for security, and as a result have become withdrawn, selfish and unhappy.
And on that rejoicing note, I wish you good night!
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He's still the love of my life.
