Dear Coke Talk says

[Q] If I am unhappy in my relationship, why do I feel more miserable over the prospect of ending it?

[A] Because you mistakenly think that ending it is failure.

Source: Dear Coke Talk

First of all no, this isn't about my personal life. :-)

Second of all, though, I think this is a really, really important point about relationships.

First (didn't I already start counting once?) there are better ways than duration to measure the quality of a relationship. In the trivial sense a "fling" can be a complete relationship. For that matter so can a one-night stand. Or even a brief flirtation across a reservation desk. In the more enduring sense a relationship can be complete when you've both achieved the goals you hoped to meet together and there's nothing else you need to do with each other that couldn't better be done either alone or with someone else.

There are better ways to measure relationship failure than by when it ends. "Till death do you part" can be either "it seemed like only yesterday that we first met" or it can be spent looking at actuarial tables with the same longing intensity that high-school students look at the classroom clock.

And not to put too fine a point on it, what is for many people one of the most domestic relationships, the ones we have with our children, nevertheless effectively end after 18-20 years. This doesn't mean love fades. It does mean, though, that it changes dramatically from the complete melding when they first move in to bittersweet happiness that comes when they move away.

That we generally continue speaking to our children, continue to love them, continue to share feelings for them... unless of course they linger on or we try to hold them back. This ought to be the best indicator that romantic love needn't end either in death or anger nor feeling of failure.

Nor does it mean that a relationship fought for or clung to is a relationship that's succeeding.

Second, just as we are not our work, neither are we our relationships. Karl Marx and Carrie Bradshaw notwithstanding this is a terrible error of categories. We are people, as are out children and partners. Relationships and work are things.

Though I'm not sure she'd have thought of the child perspective I remain envious of the way Coke Talk can say the same thing in a single sentence.

Sigh.

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.

Sooo....

If I was a pop evolutionary psychologist or sociobiologist I might spend all my time pondering how it's just seed-spreadingly natural for men to want to be polygamous.

Oh, silly, me.  Actually if I was a pop evolutionary psychologist or sociobiologist I wouldn't ponder any such thing.  I'd take it as axiomatic -- requiring no proof beyond "makes sense to me" -- and cheerfully use that axiom to prove anything else that popped into my little brain. When pressed by people with a modicum of gender-studies in their background I'd blithly breeze by way of explanation that hogamous-higamous, men are polygamous.

The other axiom I'd posit would be that women just don't like sex in the first place, and that therefore they're grudgingly going to aim to have it as infrequently as possible, preferably with as few men as possible.  And explain that with higamous-hogamous, women are monogamous.  Oh, and bitches too.  Oh, or if they didn't match my axiom, whores.

In evolutionary biology, on the other hand, it's more common to actually ponder whether there might be a reproductive benefit or cost underlying any inclination towards something like monogamy.

Something like this tidbit, via from Holly of Self-Portrait as, who says --

...low fertility rates among Mormon polygamists. My favorite bit:

the more women partnered with a man, the fewer children each of those women had. Exactly why is not clear. Like the Soay rams, men may simply not have had the stamina.... The failure of the Utah polygamy experiment should therefore not be seen as that surprising.

Source: Self-Portrait as

Reading the article it sounds like, in fact, on average, women in polygamous marriages tend to have approximately one fewer child for every fellow "sister wife."  And no, that's not a stretch.  Stories of sultans or Mormon patriarchs notwithstanding, most polygamists have somewhere closer to two to four wives, meaning a one-child per fellow wife isn't going to put anyone in negative numbers.

Anyway, EPs and sociobiologists tend to go on, and on, and on, about how men can fertilize bazillions of women in a lifetime while women's "investment" of pregnancy, lactation, and staying home in the cave-kitchen limits their reproductive potential to a relative handful.  And they brass on about how that means men are "naturally" likely to collect wives and partners willy-nilly whereas women are going to just as "naturally" be all gate-keeper-y and discriminating.

Which never made much sense to me -- in the real, non-Flintstones version of "the state of nature" related groups of women with satellite groups of men seems pretty common, and those groups of related women are usually able to collectively gather and trap enough to feed themselves and most of the men.  So while women might tend to care about fathers, and be interested in having men in their lives, and definitely interested in the meat and other foodstuffs men tend to hunt and forage for.  So in pure reproductive survival terms that's never seemed like a good enough reason to "evolve" a preference for monogamy.

If I were to going to assume that women are "naturally" monogamous, though, and if I were further inclined to go looking for facile sociobiological explanations for why that might be, then the likelihood that getting rooked into polygamy creates a material reduction in women's reproductive potential ought to be just about all I'd need to start making that case.

---

Getting back to the original article, the reference to Soay rams is about a variety of sheep that do the whole alpha male head-butting fights over harems thing... but basically run out of sperm.  In comments someone pointed out the tendency for women to ovulate in sync.  That would tend to put a pretty heavy limit on men's ability to productively "spread his seed" in his own "harem."

Which in turn leads me back to the suspicion that "collecting" wives is probably a relatively recent function of property accumulation rather than some sort of "on the savannah" biological adaptation.

---

Note that whereas women (and females of other species) are evidently reproductively harmed by polygamy, there wouldn't necessarily be the same issues with polyamory, either overt or covert.  So whereas men might be concerned about "cuckoldry," women (in polygamous marriages anyway) would positively benefit from it.  But in monogamy?  Not so much -- which at the very least ought to be a monogamy selectivity-stabilizer for men. (Don't hold your breath waiting for a pop sociobiologist to bring that one up.)

Photo by Flickr user slgckgc. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Kaili Joy Gray of Daily Kos, who's husband died this year, says

It’s mind-numbing how often a widow is forced to prove her husband is dead.

Source: Daily Kos

The rest of her post sadly and sweetly make real and personal for me the history and significance of Chanukah, which was familiar to my family's tradition only as another story in the Old Testament.