The church seems to be mainly obsessed with managing sex–we are creatures biologically evolved to be pregnant by the time we have reached puberty, but any social structure above the Paleolithic demands additional embellishments to ensure social continuity, community cohesion, separation and specialization of labor and orderly inheritance. As for the importance of sex and reproduction, remember, that most cultures allow for remarriage because death was so common among the young during most of our history. Today, among the aged, its mostly about companionship and friendship; in the past, it was survival of the young. Someone had to take care of the youngsters if a parent died, and fertile adults could not be wasted if their mate passed.

I live in a retirement community where there are a large number of widows and widowers, but there is also quite a bit of remarriage (and even some good old=fashioned shacking up!). People not only get lonely, they need partners just to survive. We can’t move in with our kids any more when we get too old to hunt, or farm, and pay for our keep by babysitting and teaching the grandchildren while their parents go into the bush to forage.

Marriage systems are not created by god, they are cultural institutions that evolve to meet different conditions. Those that don’t serve their communities are selected against, and either change, or their cultures fail. Marriage custom takes on many forms today, but they all have one thing in common, they served their cultures well enough to have survived to this day, not by how how well they served the bride and groom, but by how well they served the community as a whole.

When technology or social change alters conditions, marriage has to change too or society is doomed. We have different marriage institutions than did our hunter-gatherer ancestors, our slash-and-burn forebears, our earliest farming civilizations, and now going into our industrial and post-industrial age. Insisting on cultural norms that worked well in the past is a recipe for disaster.

Even the extended family, which was still relatively common among my friends and relatives when I was growing up, has becoming increasingly rare. Today, even the traditional nuclear family is rapidly becoming obsolete in a world dominated by geographic separation and economic mobility and change. We don’t have more divorce now because of a decline in morality, we have it because there is little cultural pressure to maintain families intact, and because there is more economic opportunity to allow changing mates. We have developed economic and legal arrangements that make divorce, remarriage and single-parent families possible. If your marriage is bad, because, say, your husband is a murderous brute, you can dump the sonofabitch.

The church’s role in codifying and preserving these cultural arrangements may have been essential in the past, but nowadays, it just doesn’t cut it anymore.

What?! …That is so sad…

Anyway, yes, marriages have always been paths of convenience, and new setup expands that path to a highway. A lot of people will be a lot happier.

The old problem remains, however. The term everyone has been clamoring about was “marriage.” This remains a religious word, still defined by church as the bonding of a man and a woman.

The past 100 years have brought romance, drama, confusion and chaos to the very idea of matrimony. The mice continue to find ways around the trap, until the trap designers finally just join the mice.

Maybe the issue is finally resolved, an we can concentrate on this new outbreak of “devil weed.”

Cheers.

Somewhere mid-entrée, she informed me that she was looking for a husband so she could stay in the country.

*gulp* Suddenly, the room seemed a lot warmer.

“But it wouldn’t be a real marriage,” she said.

“Meaning…what…?”, I asked, feeling the room getting cold.

“No sex.”

I swear I stared at her blankly for at least a few moments longer than was really needed. I was polite as hell in informing her that I was not the guy she was looking for in that regard. But in my mind I was laughing and crying at the absurdity of her proposition.

I wonder what happened to her and her quest. did she find a hetero guy stupid enough to do that? Did she find a gay man looking for a cover like she was?

Now, she could find a woman for the same purpose.

Fine for her.

Me, I married the most amazing woman in the world whose mind and body compliment and enhance my own. Love her so. Our contract is that there is no other human I’d rather spend my time with.

Happy Valentines Day.

He could do so because a good friend of his was a male flight attendant for some major airline. The visitor, a middle-aged man with wife and children, was listed as the male flight attendant’s significant other and had the spousal privilege of free stand-by flights.

He left when he did because there was a seat available, a fairly rare occurrence on the airline he could use which served the island.

Not at all gay, not at all a significant other, it still seemed to work. The guy had traveled all over.

If it were truly a gratis deal it was a good one. If it wasn’t, he paid a very high price.

Do it anyway. Keep trying. Grace is worth it.