The thousands of years old principle defined most concretely by the English Common Law concept of coverture, which the legendary jurist William Blackstone defined thusly:

"By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-French a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. Upon this principle, of a union of person in husband and wife, depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities, that either of them acquire by the marriage. I speak not at present of the rights of property, but of such as are merely personal. For this reason, a man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself: and therefore it is also generally true, that all compacts made between husband and wife, when single, are voided by the intermarriage."

Source: Wikipedia and myriad others.

Yikes! The rest of this post is a rumination of the consequences of that.

Fun story: Almost 25 years ago now one friend in a long-term committed relationship broke up with her absolutely marvelous-in-almost-all-ways partner.

Why says we, he's almost perfect? True says she, but I just have a feeling this isn't it. But he's devilishly handsome says we. True, says she. He has that sailboat and that vintage Triumph motorcycle says we. True again, says she, but he's still not it. But he's smart, funny, extraordinarily considerate! He's finishing his engineering degree and firms are falling all over themselves to hire him. You've been together for years and still seem incredibly compatible. And he's still crazy about you! I know, I know, and I love him too but none the less, said she, I just don't feel like this is "it."

And so on she moved. And the only reason he wasn't immediately in one, or two, or a dozen new relationships with any of the 31,000 presentable but unpartnered women in Seattle is that he was completely devastated and preferred to quietly mourn rather than move on.

Though move on of course he eventually did. And met a marvelous woman for whom he was "it," and the two have been fast, faithful friends, lovers, partners, and parents together ever since.

Meanwhile our friend who left him actively rattled around the date-o-sphere, plunged into her advanced degree program, ran through a succession of not all that fulfilling relationships (including one rising star who turned out to be a closet domestic abuser) and maybe five years later met a marvelous man who was "it" for her and the two have been fast, faithful friends, lovers, partners, and parents together ever since.

From the outside, anyway, I really couldn't tell you why one wasn't "it" but the other was. Why she would have felt she was "settling" for one but not the other.

I mention this for a couple of reasons. First, because of my friend's seemingly daft feeling that her partner wasn't "it" because she thought there should be "something more." Second, because of my other friend's equally daft feeling that having lost true love he could never love, or be loved, again.

---

Two of the most dangerous stereotypes in relationships are

• true love waits and I shall never love again. They both really distract from and otherwise interfere with our actual relationships.

"Is this it?" Where "it" is something like that one truest, most fulfilling, most completing love thing. Asking yourself "is this it" also disrupts actual relationships.

"I shall never love again" is extraordinarily common for both men and women -- so common, in fact, that both the radio stations and book stores would seem like empty stadiums if all the songs and stories about true love lost were to disappear.

Then again, while both men and women experience "this isn't it" moments there's been a traditional gender imbalance to it that still needs to be uncovered and explored. So I'm going to explore it here.

Back when a) women were expected to be utterly financially and socially dependent on men and b) the only way out of a marriage was "till death do you part" women were basically in a position where accepting an offer of marriage was by far the biggest gamble anyone, male or female, commonly made in their life. Because if your husband developed consumption, or turned out not to be able to make a living, or drank, or beat you, the die was cast and that became your lot in life.

Under English Common Law, which formed the foundation of both English and American... um... common law, from a legal perspective a woman literally disappeared! The legal doctrine was called Coverture, and under coverture women could literally not own property, she obviously couldn't vote, she couldn't enter into contracts, she couldn't seek education (without her husband's permission), any and all money she earned, won, or inherited became legally and irrevocably her husbands, any children she gave birth to became his sole legal property, and so on.

In the late 19th Century the pressure became such that a lot of women (many of them early or proto-feminists) declined to risk marriage at all!

Because back then, if for any reason "this" turned out not to be "it" for women that was it!

That anxiety over such an uncertain but irrevocable decision, I think, is the source of the "hypergamy" meme that so haunts MRAs and Evolutionary Psychologists. And so baffles and occasionally outrages the rest of us.

I'm also going to propose that this might be the origin of the idea of women as judges, gatekeepers, and the whole male anxiety about "worthiness." Because if your odds of marriage depend entirely on someone else's assessment not so much of gold-diggery success but simply not having enough income or stability to safely support a wife and children, that's going to stress the shit out of you as well. And really generate huge loads of resentment as well as anxiety. Even as you possibly benefit from having to compete with only half the potential workforce for any given job.

Anyway, you can see how the whole "this is it" and "true love waits" business, plus "I shall never be loved," plus all those songs about murdering one's true love ("Banks of the Ohio") and suicide ("Irene Good Night") aren't just dangerous bullshit but dangerously gendered bullshit.

But also, if I'm right (I think I am) and if we can just wrap our heads around it, about it's somewhere between 99% and 100% obsolete bullshit. Because these days we don't have to make those kinds of perilous decisions, or risk just perilous judgments. Because half the population no longer needs to rely 100% on the other half for social and financial well-being.

And so questions of lifelong worthiness, like (I'm guessing) similar questions about lifelong beauty no longer have to distract and interfere with a) the formation of, b) the end of, and most important, c) current appreciation of our relationships.

Anyway, my intuition says that you pretty much can't understand "hypergamy" without first understanding coverture. And this is why I think it's foolish to claim to understand biological "truths" about relationships without first understanding sociology, history, and law.

Hmm... I've still gotta think more about this.

Emily Nagoski says it's not her story to tell, but responding to something that sounds pretty serious she says

No one asked your permission to put toxic thoughts about your body in your head. No one waited until you could give informed consent and then said, “I’d like to tell you what’s wrong with your body; would that be okay with you?” No one said, “Would it be all right if I say how broken and ugly and inadequate you are?” No one stopped to find out if it was okay before they told you all the made-up, fictional reasons you should feel bad about yourself. They just knew they could make a profit if you hated yourself.

No one asked your permission to put those thoughts and beliefs in your head, but there they are. And each of us has the job of finding the beliefs we’re not interested in carrying with us anymore, uprooting them, and finding something new and healthier to take their place. This process is neither easy nor painless. But it is a path to the confidence and joy I advocate everyone bring to bed with them every night.

Source: Sex Nerd

In context the thing she's talking about might have befallen a woman, and so that's the language she uses

Negative body image is among the most common causes of sexual dysfunction. But more than that, it’s manufactured misery that generates profits for corporations at the expense of women’s power in the world. It cripples us and keeps us in chains.

But myths and toxic thoughts are whispered, shouted, and most-insidiously shepherded into our heads.

Dumb question: without the traps of the beauty myth for women or the worthiness trap for men would there wouldn't be anything left to construct gender with?  Because it seems to me that that's what roughly 99% of it boils down to.

See also Holly's Face beyond beauty and Ozymandia's I am a bad person. Those all showed up pretty much next to each other in my news reader with Emily's post and in different ways they all address the disconnect between things like truth and beauty vs. what we come to believe is should be be things like truth and beauty.

In comments to Emily's post I said "It’s totally ok since it sounds as though the unmentioned context includes a woman’s experience. But if I were to expand it I’d add two more things. One, that men get the same whisperings about their inadequacies in the dimension of worthiness and accomplishment. Two, that sometimes the one doing the whispering is us as when we decide, on our own, that thing in dimension X didn’t work because we must not have correctly performed or avoided something in dimension Y."

In comments to Holly's post I said "I don't have the mental horsepower to put them all three of [their] posts together into one of my own. And it says right there on my superego that I should be able to do it."

Photo by Flickr user victoriapeckham. Used under a Creative Commons license.“

Amanda Hess The Daily Beast says

The Daily Beast has produced a slideshow on “Baseball’s Sexiest Teammates,” ranking baseball platers’ “wives and girlfriends” on their physical attractiveness and other conspicuously gendered categories (“Number of Scheduled Breast Implants: 1; Number of Breast Implants Carried Out: 0”). But the Beast knocks this one out of the park with the apparently unironic juxtoposition of the slideshow with this “Baseball’s 10 Richest Players” feature. Men succeed by hording resources like currency and attractive women! Women succeed by being horded by successful men!

Source: Amanda Hess

She suggests that for balance the Daily Beast should produce a slideshow of her male colleagues hair plugs and beer bellies and rankings of her female colleagues salaries and partner’s looks. Naahh. Ranking women by income and men by their attractiveness would be both inconceivable and intolerable!

Speaking of old blogger friends I’d lost track of, I just rediscovered Z of The Naked Truth — another old blogger friend I’d lost track of. It’s true she’s not as prolific as she once was but she’s still thoughtful, still active socially, professionally and sexually (perhaps more now that her daughter has begun a new life a partner in a home of her own), and still very much worth reading.

And speaking of women “needing” to be taught to be “natural” women (as men must be taught to be men), a few months ago Z nicely broadsided the perpetual “you’ll never get it right but try this anyway” features in women’s magazines and newspaper sections.

The fluffiness just perpetuates a self-fulfilling prophesy of hopelessness that does no one any favours. See? It’s not my fault I can’t get a man, or keep one, or that I feel a bit harassed by work and motherhood: this article canvassed a load of people who also don’t get out much, and it says here that no one else can do it either. It says here that men are scared of smart, funny women, that they only want to have sex with women who look like Playboy bunnies, that you’re heading over the hill at a rate of knots by the age of 29, that you could just be happier if you went on a diet/wore the right shoes/managed to get your pants on in the morning one leg at a time and here’s a video to show you how. The women’s magazines have dragged themselves shouting and screaming into the age of technology by adding saucy texts to their same arsenal of lingerie, candles and massage oil that they were touting when I first came across them in the 70s. And still nobody seems willing to write that the surest path to getting laid/having a decent relationship/dealing with the vagaries of life is a sense of self and some self-respect.

...

In the group of women I work with – spanning the decades from late twenties to early sixties – it is noticeable that youth and beauty don’t dictate the happiest relationship, the kinkiest sex or the most wildly romantic love affair. In real life, so it is reflected on the internet (just with added loopiness). The facts are these: the vast majority of women have lives. They have careers, and marriages, and kids, and relationships, sometimes separately, and sometimes all at the same time, and sometimes with barren periods in-between. Most of them got the message that you can have it all, but you can’t have it all without negotiation and compromise because, you know, you can’t actually have anything without those provisos. Look around you; read a few blogs. Men, those devils, watch porn and, weirdly, still lust after women without pneumatic tits, fake tans and plastic sandals. They fall in love and lust with less than perfect female bodies, and are thrilled to bits to get their hands on all the bits women love to hate about themselves. Go out into the street and look at the people holding hands, feeling each other up and gazing passionately down each others cleavages: most of them aren’t world class beauties with gym-toned bodies, they are perfectly ordinary people hiding what someone else finds exceptional and arousing under not-next-season’s clothes and quite possibly a roll of flab. Here’s what women, and men, want: someone to turn them on and make them happy. Funnily enough, all this mainly goes on in the brain, which is why you don’t need botox and silicone to get laid, or loved.

She said it here.

That seems about right. In fact it seems perfect.

I ought to add that the same, of course, is true of the happiest men when you look around. Contrary to PUA and MRA fantasy they’re not “alpha” males. They’re not rocking the most exclusive nightclubs. They’re not apologizing to dazzled “babes” that their other Porsche is being detailed. And they’re definitely neither perfectly attired nor perfectly coifed save for the perfect degree of artful dishevelment.