By Alan
Caruba
A great
marriage is a marvelous and mysterious thing. My parents celebrated 64 years of
marriage together until my Father passed away. Even into his 90s, he could not
leave the dinner table without pausing to give her a kiss. They enjoyed each
other’s company and gave each other the space to pursue their interests.
Valentine’s
Day arrives preceded by two weeks of commercials in which men are reminded to
purchase flowers, chocolates, pajamas, or teddy bears for the women they love.
In my parent’s era—they were born in 1901 and 1903—and in the era in which I
spent my childhood and became a young man, the 1940s and 1950s, courtship was
expected to result in marriage. Getting divorced or having a child out of
wedlock was a disgrace. Compare that to the present era.
In the
1950s, having returned from the great drama of World War Two, men wanted to
settle down and start families, and as William Tucker notes in his new book,
“Marriage and Civilization: How Monogamy Made Us Human”, “More than 75 percent
of households were occupied by married couples. Illegitimacy was a miniscule 5
percent…The phenomenon of “single motherhood” was virtually unknown.”
My Father,
a Certified Public Accountant, was the breadwinner, but my Mother also
contributed because, for three decades she taught gourmet cooking in adult
schools where we lived. She was an expert on wine and wrote two cookbooks,
gaining awards from France and elsewhere. I grew up in a town that was the
quintessential suburb filled with tree-lined streets and broad lawns. The men
went off to work. The women tended to the children and the home.
Their
generation and mine could never have imagined the society in which we live
today. Tucker asks, “Should we attempt to strengthen the traditional two-parent
family or do we accept broken homes and single motherhood as a ‘new type of
family’—one that seem to require the everlasting support of the government?”
If we do
not strengthen the traditional family, our society, our values, and our nation
will be in deep trouble, if it isn’t already. A nation in which abortion was
legalized in 1973 has witnessed the destruction of the lives of 55,772,000
unborn children and counting.
One of my
friends was Betty Friedan, the author of “The Feminine Mystique”, published originally
in 1963. A formidable intellect, Betty was also a socialist to the core. The
book spoke about the pent-up wishes of women to be something more than wives
and mothers. It unleashed a revolution and in 1981 she followed it up with “The
Second Stage” which she called “a problem that has no name.” How were women
supposed to live with their new freedoms? She inscribed the book to me, “For
Alan—who surely is a second stage man.”
“Since
antiquity, monogamy has been the general rule of Western civilizations,” notes
Tucker. “It is often easy to overlook how unique the organization of human
society is in nature. Of all the species ever identified, approximately 95
percent are polygamous.” We share a unique commonality with chimpanzees.
“Chimps and humans are the only two
species in nature where the band of male brothers forms the core of the
group…The result is that human beings are the only species in nature where males work together in the context of
social monogamy. That is what makes us unique. It makes us human.”
There’s
more. “Within the anthropological record, there is a statistical linkage
between democratic institutions and normative monogamy.” Dating back to ancient
Greece, “the peculiar institutions of monogamous marriage may explain why
democratic ideals and notions of equality and human rights first emerged in the
West.”
“Monogamous
families,” writes Tucker, “create socially conscious human beings ready to live
in peaceful societies.” There are a billion Muslims in the world and Islam
permits polygamous marriage. The nations where it is the dominant religion have
a long history of warfare with each other and with nations in which monogamy is
the standard.
“Monogamous
marriage is the most thrilling adventure anyone ever undertakes—that perilous encounter
with an individual who is so much like you yet so different, the other half of
your humanity, without whom you are never a complete human being, It relies not
on sex, which is easy, but on romance, falling in love and staying in love,
which is the work of a lifetime.”
Happy
St. Valentine’s Day!
©
Alan Caruba, 2014
Fine wines of Wal-Mart and a bag of peanut M&M's... The key to a woman's heart... And breakfast at IHOP if she's really lucky... :)
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