Marriage a most unnatural state of affairs?

[MiniTheMinx]

The monogamous family seems to me to uphold patriarchy better than any other institution. Men have for thousands of years sought to control women's reproduction as a means of controlling wealth. The most obvious way in which they have done this is through marriage.

Having read quite a lot and of course experiencing first hand the joys and the lows of monogamy, with all the emotional fall out, the sense of ownership but also support, the security but also the boredom! (at times) I question just how natural monogamy is.

Women are brought up to believe in fairy tale endings, white weddings and happy retirements, men, meanwhile we are told are naturally less inclined towards faithfulness. Their behaviour proof of biology, our faithfulness and commitment is likewise biologically driven.

I don't believe biology drives our desire for monogamous relationships and think this a materialist social construct which can be accounted for by the study of our material and economic history.

www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2011/04/feminism_and_re_1

www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch02d.htm

jezebel.com/5339211/is-non+monogamy-a-feminist-relationship-choice

I am interested in hearing what others of you think, is marriage and monogamy an unnatural state of affairs?

i think that monogamous sexual-pair-bonding is pretty natural. sex releases hormones including oxytocin that encourage bonding feelings. i think this is pretty necessary to live with somebody and raise a child - people find it easier to live with people they "love" than with people they don't.. i certainly do.

i also think that in 21st century britain there isn't the same issues around marriage. my marriage protects me as the person taking maternity leave more than it empowers my husband.

The chemical high doesn't last more than 2 years, apparently.

oxytocin is released with every orgasm (although that does assume you are orgasming with your monogamous partner!)

Yeah, right, love is in the air.

sorry, i'm not trying to derail, i know this is the feminist theory bit.. i just struggle with having a husband i love very much and parents with a very strong marriage which really enabled my mother to make her own choices - i can't really 'de-personalise' and agree with the theory about marriage being repressive to women 'in general'.

sorry, i'll leave now...

*I know of precisely NO men to whom this applies. Control of women's reproductn as a means of controlling wealth ? In Britain today ? Are you serious?
*

Seems mad to me too. It didn't even apply to my grandparents. I don't find marriage repressive in general and I can't understand why you would enter into it in the first place, if you feel like that.
It is a choice!

Have you been on the relationships board recently?

Most people don't enter marriage thinking it's a repressive institution. Most people (well, in the western world, anyway), do so because they're madly in love and either want to make a legal commitment or a religious one. Nowt wrong with that at all.

Doesn't mean a significant proportion of those loved-up newlyweds don't find marriage repressive once they've been in it a while though. Sadly, plenty of men seem to think that marriage gives them rights over a woman's body and behaviour. It can work the other way round as well of course, though less often. Count yourself lucky you don't know anyone in that situation (though you may and just not realise it).

This is NOT an attack on marriage. No one is calling for the abolition of marriage; just the ending of holding it up as the ideal when clearly for many it is far from it.

minnietheminx could you explain more about the misinterpreting of Bowlby; I can't think of criticisms you might be referring to? Thanks.

You have to bear in mind that people post on relationships when things go wrong. If I went on and said I have a lovely one-people would call me smug or worse!! It is like MILs-read MN and you get the impression they are all 'difficult' and yet in RL I find that people actually like their MIL!

Of course, I was being facetious. The divorce stats aren't though.

From my understanding, the government appointed Bowlby to write several reports after the war. His theory of attachment was seized upon as proof that women were best to spend their time at home engaged in childcare, within the nuclear family. No doubt this had the added benefit that women in post war Britian/USA became consumers. Rebuilding houses and reshaping the built environment further isolated women from work. Much building concentrated in suburban areas, where women and children lived, far from where men worked. Women became the driving force for all sorts of capitalist expansion.

Actually talking of people raising children, here's a question:

What does it take to love a child?

If you go on the step-parenting board there are plenty of people who live and often care for children but don't love them.

Likewise children in foster care and especially in local authority care are not usually cared for by adults who love them.

This lack of love is often hugely detrimental to children.

However there are people who come into a child's life and love them very much. Why does this happen in some cases and not others?

im monogomous by choice. im unmarried by choice
i think your op is gallingly clichéd and full of assumptions.
Whilst im not married i dont think every bride is driven a frothy hazy of tulle and romance. evidently you do

Mini - I think post-war reconstruction is far more complex then you're making it out to be. Cities were dirty, slum filled places. People, especially women were very glad to move into spacious suburbs with better bathrooms, hot water etc.

Scottish, I don't think every bride is driven along in a romantic whirl of frothy dresses. Historically few women in the western world married for romantic love. Class played a huge part in this, with women in higher social classes even less likely to marry for love and their husbands even less likely to be faithful. In other parts of the world now, women are being married off at 13 or 14 to older men. We are told this is cultural but culture is shaped by economics and patriarchy. For much of world even now, marrying buys a women as domestic servant and child bearer.

The ideal issue is worth discussing. I have been both - married 19 years and single (since divorce). I don't find my state of personal happiness or that of our children relates to whether I am in a relationship or not. Obviously people in relationships often like to think those who are single are not as happy but that simply is not so. You can be pretty lonely and miserable in an unhappy marriage and there is a lot of freedom in being single which I am currently and as I'm happy I would have no problem if I always were single. I'm not sure for example I would have found it so easy to buy my island near the equator had I had a husband or partner and that is just one illustration of issues. Although I accept that some husbands may encourage wives to buy islands of whatever the issue might be or business decision the wife or husband wants to take. It is certainly a lot easier and simpler on your own particularly if you are a woman who earns quite a bit of money so you are not reliant on men for money as so many women even on mumsnet are. Their man is their cash cow in a sense.

It can also be simpler to take decisions about children with only one of you to decide them. There are pros and cons and I have had boyfriends and that is good too when it works.

The Origins of Sex by an Oxford academic which was published in the last 6? months is quite interesting. It looks at male/female relations, marriage, affairs from about the year 1000 AD up to around 1800s and how we had various forms of relationships, common law wivse, church marriages and when adultery and came in and out of fashion and punishment for cheating, church and state control and then various periods in English history when things were more liberal. The author seemed to find that once we had both Catholics and Protestants in the UK so not just one unified single religion everyone had, then people had to accept there were different ways to live and then they had to allow people to have different rules whether that be free love or fidelity (n terms of state law anyway).

Goth, I agree, cities were slum filled and I am not in anyway saying that slums are good but when you see now whole areas on the outskirts of cities around the world being cleared to make way for capital investment, you wonder what will become of the poor.

In some places around the world, (off the top of my head Mombia) they clearing the slums of the poor, they don't compensate them for the loss of their home. The cities are becoming gentrified and sterile. The poor are kept out with rising land and property prices. This is because capital has to be reinvested, I think there was something like £50 trillion surplus in 2011 by 2020 it is likely to be in the region of £100 trillion. The average debt in the 80's was $40,000 now it is $130,000 for every household in the USA. See a correlation here! on the one hand we have huge personal debt and on the other a huge capital surplus. This is why I say material aspects shape our lives.

Mini - you are conflating very different circumstances, which makes it difficult to pin down what you are arguing for.

First you spoke about post war reconstruction and how it affected women, now you mention gentrification and clearances for land profits which does indeed impact women but in a completely different way and one not at all related to the original O.P.

I think you are under-estimated a lot of married women.

Personally, even searching deep into my 'biological sex drive' I have no desire whats so ever to have sex with anyone else, male or female. Neither does it make sense in terms of procreation and carrying on my genes. Why would I go out of the marriage/family and risk the support of DD's father to have a baby with someone else? Makes no sense to me as I am madly in love and deeply happy with who i am with and having sex with.

it was on finding this out that we decided to get married.

If this ceases to be I will stop being married.

And what on earth are you deeming natural and unnatural anyway?

Good question, what is the definition of natural and unnatural in this thread?

I haven't decided for you what is natural or not for me natural would imply biological. In the case of desire to do anything or to behave in any way considered natural could also be said to be biologically determined. Anything outside of that would be socially determined. That would be my definition.

GothAnn, the built environment is very important in shaping social relations, upholding traditional ways of living, upholding class privilege, so yes I think it's pertinent. Both in terms of answering why people don't live communally but also in why people don't want to.

Mumble, I supplied a link in the OP, many people do not live in monogamous relationships, some question whether one form of relationship should be held up to be the norm by which all other types of relationship are judged. I also linked in Engles The origin which questions whether pair bonding is natural and sets out to explain historically how women have been owned in marriage, how men have greater access to wealth and women have been made powerless through marriage. I am not suggesting for one moment that women shouldn't marry

So is your point just that marriage is unatural?

"It takes work, not about "the one"..."

I don't find that. OH and I have the same values and love and respect each other. After nearly 31 years of marriage I still don't find that either of us needs to "work" at our marriage, but then neither of us finds it difficult to show love, respect and consideration towards each other.

I agree with Dahlen's points as well.

Marriage involves the formation of laws and rituals, so no it can't be natural!
Monogamy is that natural? Well, I don't think so because pair bonding came about at the same time as the domestication of animals, the formation of the nuclear family, private property and patriarchy, before then monogamy wasn't widely practised and people lived communally. The op asks for opinions.

Thats great for you bunbaker but everyone is different and I don't think it's helpful to dismiss that monogamous relations need effort to work out for some couples.