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Posted on 07/19/2011 7:42:21 AM PDT by flowerplough
Edited on 07/19/2011 7:51:11 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Men have been cheating for thousands of years. I would chalk this up to our instincts for self-preservation being more finely honed than women’s.
The bad economy has many couples staying “together” because they can’t afford a divorce or living separately. I know of several such couples.
Those that needed or wanted the government to define marriage for them didn't understand marriage in the first place.
But who are these men cheating with? i bet they all aint single
The successful reproductive strategies of men and women are different. Men want to spread their genes by impregnating as many women as possible. Women want to have a man around to help protect and raise children, and they want the best possible man to impregnate them (for healthier children).
Mating for extended periods of child rearing is what enabled human beings to rise to the next level of advancement. Marriage was developed as the formal means for enforcing that mating constraint on men, who otherwise would be still trying to impregnate as many women as possible.
Marriage is a relatively recent invention. "Cheating" is a recent interpretation of otherwise natural instinct, layered over the biology which has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Biology does not change quickly.
So, the reason men run around is obvious. As to why women run around.... they're usually looking to get themselves pregnant by a better man than the one they have (assuming they have one). Again, this is biology, and does not change quickly.
Here's the REAL kicker: Our modern welfare system has completely screwed up the natural instincts, by taking away the loyal male mate and replacing him with the government handout. It is a travesty.
What? Can you expound on that statement a bit? Relative to what, the age of the universe?
> Mating for extended periods of child rearing is what enabled human beings to rise to the next level of advancement.
One may view this (marriage, and the accompanying advancement as a species) as a gift from God. I do. It's the basis for the Seventh Commandment as well.
Well, no, not the entire universe. I meant "recent" relative to our biological development as human beings -- hundreds of thousands of years perhaps. Human biology hasn't changed significantly in the last say ten thousand years, but that was the rise of civilization.
It was only when humans started putting together the traditional family that we advanced towards civilization as a species. And marriage was developed as a protection of that traditional family structure. The Seventh Commandment was God's directive to make that official, in my opinion.
The above is of course just my own belief of how things went. YMMV. :)
Those trends are VERY worrisome. They cut away at the traditional family structure which has been critical to human beings advancing as a species. I hope that these are merely fads of a few decades' duration, not fundamental changes to how we as civilized people run our society. Otherwise we are doomed to revert to a lower level we haven't seen in thousands of years.
What failed were two things. First of all, for marriage to work as a better system of biology, it must be socially enforced. Those who violate the marriage, from the inside, or the outside, must be punished by society as a whole. If society stops enforcing marriage, it has to be self-policed, which is much less likely to work.
The other problem was that marriage was corrupted with the dowry, in an effort to turn a biological system into a business. Essentially prostituting women in biologically undesirable couplings so that her family will profit from selling her.
This was doubly bad, not only for the motive, but the means. This is because there is considerable speculation that prostitution, as such, fills a biological purpose as well.
For a given large group of men and women, there are a considerable number that for several reasons either should not, or cannot reproduce. Yet only some of them are “diverted” away from sexuality by being homosexual. The rest of the non-breeders thus interfere with those couples who should breed.
Prostitutes, often sterile or infertile, function well as such a diversion. It’s noteworthy that this may be such an important function, that even some postmenopausal women become hypersexual, to fulfill the role of prostitutes when there are not enough prostitutes.
And ironically, morality, in this case the opposition to prostitution, is also useful to keep males that should be breeding *away* from prostitutes.
So when a dowry is paid, a breeding female is sold to what usually is what should be a non-breeding male, often far older than the age of optimal fatherhood. As often as not this results both in poor quality offspring, and because the father dies soon after, insufficient, single parent upbringing of the child.
It is ironic that the rejection of this corruption overdid it, assuming that the perversion of dowry was a problem inherent in marriage itself. Which is why in modern times marriage has been so despised.
Wow, what a fascinating post! I will respond, but unfortunately I have to run to work and don’t have the time to respond in suitable detail right now. I will get back to you tonight for sure. I hadn’t thought about the dowry aspect, and that’s really interesting. Also, your comment about homosexuality as a way of taking those who should not reproduce out of the breeding pool makes a lot of sense; I wonder why I hadn’t thought of that “diversion” before. Back in 8-10 hours....
A divorce would cost me over a million dollars. You think I’m crazy? A mistress and a love nest get-away is much more fun and less expensive.
Not that I have one, or two, or anything...ahem.
I believe the dowry was intended as a tool to prevent divorce. It may have been a good business deal for the husband to marry, but it would have been terrible to have to return it, ensuring a hopefully better future for the daughter than if he were allowed to use her at will and get rid of her when he wanted, no?
Around 10% of children are not from the person the mom said is the dad.
This is reflected in our biology.
If humans were more like the completely monogamous Gibbon - then we would have much smaller testicles.
If humans were like the much more promiscuous chimpanzee - we would have HUGE testicles.
Dowry was always evil. In China and India, for example, girls were seen as an expensive liability for a family, so much so that infanticide was popular.
Even though it is illegal today, it is still widespread, and leads to such customs as “bride burning.” When a couple are married, the groom’s family gets the dowry, but gets greedy, so pours gasoline on the new bride, sometimes still wearing her wedding dress, and burn her alive.
There is no problem with men who have been married getting remarried, so a single man could become a widower repeatedly, as his family got wealthy.
With ultrasound commonly available, as soon as couples find out they are having a girl, they abort her.
Last but not least was the practice of Suttee, or widow burning. When her husband dies, the widow is thrown on his funeral pyre.
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.” General Charles Napier
Open marriages aren’t people cheating, cheating is done without permission of the other spouse. Which as a concept has been going on a long time, it didn’t used to be that being caught cheating was the end of the marriage, that’s a fairly recent development.
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