Mainstream Marriages Are As Oudated as the Triassic
Thousands of years of evolutionary and social development and couplehood is your only choice of living a life?
I’m not even a little bit surprised that Adam Levine turned out to be a cheater, wrecker, a troublemaker. What else would a 43-year-old, cis, white man with extreme power derived from celebrity culture aspire to be if not a sex predator?
He’s basically the character arc of every Wattpad male lead since 2017.
What I’m most shocked about is the timeline. His history of sexual objectification of women — no less cringy than a middle-grader with a C in English — goes all the way back to 2007, when he sexted his yoga teacher to “spend a day naked” with him.
Ha. Said no man with a billion tattoos ever!
I’m sure there are more than four women who have received creepy messages from “Blue Tick Adam” and reciprocated replies even though his marital status is one-click away from googling.
But I’m not here to take sides. Not when women are constantly villified for being imperfect and targeted for public shaming while men run these misogynistic incel forums. Nope. These social paradigms are beyond the simplicity of a science experiment that concludes which genital-possessing homo sapien is more likely to deserve punishment.
I’m here concerned about something far more nastier, the cause-r of all causes — mainstream couplehood.
Most people in the world just didn’t know they were allowed to not be married.
Growing up, I often noticed the way adults acted: as if their organising principle in life was to make money and have kids.
My cousin, Tasha, got engaged when I was in middle grade. She was cited as the most misbehaved kid amongst all our cousins. So her marriage and later her pregnancy, was met with a kind of celebratory relief by everyone in our families, as if that brought an end to some kind of agonizing period of worry.
But the baby, to put it in simple terms, — -was “difficult”. Nobody acted like the suffering of Tasha or the baby, which was clear to anyone who spent even five minutes with them, had invalidated their celebratory view of her married life.
Nobody ever admitted it out loud, but adults acted as though trying to live a life not involving marriage and kids was a frivolous dream, a phase of delusional thoughts.
If you ever dared to ask any particular person why they had had a kid or got married — be prepared to be treated like a piece of belly button lint instead of a family member for the rest of your adulthood.
But ask questions, I did.
Because I knew that I could not escape adulthood. But what I do not know is , how could one be an adult without submitting to couplehood? Why is it the only appropriate option (but then, a sole option isn’t an option at all.)
My grandma told me that the reason I should marry was because I could have children (wow), so they would love me and take care of me when I grew old. I thought that could be solved. I’d rather pay a pre-existing person to take care of me — -something I’m sure some modern educated people would go for — -instead of creating a whole new person and making them do it for free.
My parents, on the other hand, told me that the real reason for getting married was love: but I thought that my parents were doomed; I didn’t see why I should try a do-over of whatever “love” they shared with each other.
Some people, usually men, talked that we are genetically hard-wired to be social creatures, and we couldn’t deny our nature to marry and have kids. I didn’t know that obeying our natural tendencies to be scientific since it was also our nature to die from small pox and to never be able to fly.
The closest logical reasoning was made by religious people, who openly admit that having kids was something you did because God told you to, and because you had to outnumber people of other religions. This made a little bit of sense, though it did seem sort of antisocial.
In the end, the most likely explanation was that most people in the world just didn’t know they were allowed to not be married. Either that, or they were too unimaginative to think of anything else to do, or too beaten-down to do whatever they thought of.
That had been the main reason why I left my country for college: I’d been sure it would be full of resourceful, courageous people who had some better-conceived plan for life that I could learn about.
But to my great disappointment, most people’s plans were to submit to couplehood and amass money for kids. You would be talking to someone who seemed like they viewed the world the same way as you, with free movement and the exchange of ideas, and then it would turn out they were in a huge rush to get the interesting bit over with while young.
But thousands of years of evolutionary and social development and couplehood is your only choice of living a life?
If there’s anything my three years of STEM biology has taught me, it’s that, evolution has answers to every question. You just have to dig a little deeper.
When proto-homind evolution decided to switch poses — from four-legged creatures to upright, two-legged postures — all it wanted was to do a little bit of makeover and rebrand us sexy.
But there was a problem: if a mammalian quadraped stands erect, the baby coming out of the rear is left with very little space. And if the feet are too far apart, it would be harder to balance upright.
To cut the long story short, evolution came up with a plan to give birth to smaller babies that are physiologically immature and need years of care.
The mothers who took care of babies survived much better if they had someone to protect them — a guardian. It turns out, men were less likely (my bad, not likely at all) to have a baby of their own. So they conveniently fit into the position of safeguarding women.
And just like an over-zealous teenager dying to change their relationship status to “in a relationship” on Facebook, our leafy-dressed ancestors couldn’t miss the opportunity of brandishing their new partners — -and came up with the concept of marriage.
One thousand years ago, with such high stakes of being killed in the forest? It all made sense.
But what are we even doing, two decades into the twenty-first century, and still constructing entire lives based on an institution that’s as outdated as the Triassic?
I bet even those ancestors are ashamed of our reluctance to adapt.
In today’s world, a co-dependent alliance of people should cater to a diverse spectrum of human emotions.
A union should involve alliance that is not just bound by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but it should also be acceptant of mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. But marriages are just not doing that anymore.
It’s unrealistic how many people walk into marriages accepting it as the normal human state. I can’t think of anything else people do in such huge numbers with such a terrible success rate.
My best friend’s mom used to say that we should take the pleasure of friendships when young. It won’t be acceptable to be codependent on friends as we grow older. You’ll have kids to look after and a partner to depend on. I felt doomed.
Why was friendship admirable when you were twenty-five and creepy and codependent at thirty-five? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why was it even better?
It’s quite obvious that humans should get over the primitive concept of marriage and design a much more flexible civil union. Because we’ve done enough damage to people who didn’t fit into this box of couplehood. We all deserve the freedom to live the way we want.
A union should form with contracts that have terms laid out quite clearly in advance. A civil union where men will no longer have to worry about their wives divorcing them and taking them for all they’re worth. And women don’t have to consider staying in shitty, abusive marriages to maintain basic societal acceptance. The dissolution of a union shouldn’‘t be considered shameful or a “failure.”
Marriage should evolve into something that isn’t a sport of endurance; it should stem out of a privilege to be present for another person’s life, by choice.
I mean, I sure don’t know what love is. But it’s not buying a split-level with a two-car garage you can ill afford.
Love isn’t Adam Levine pretending to be the loyal wife-guy until the day a third woman shares his creepy sexting history or all the times he couldn’t even come up with his own baby names.
Love isn’t his wife sticking to our man-baby husband, who can’t “dial down” his sexual needs every time he feels “neglected” or when she’s pregnant.
None of this is love, but narratives that society has made up and imposed historically. They’re fairy tale endings with a running tab. And I have a feeling, if it weren’t for the community property provisions written into every statue, marriage would be a dead institution anyway.
There’s just one life, and I wouldn’t want to half-ass it for anything. Relationships should exist, not because they have to, but because they want to.
