The Trouble With Marriage

In the 40,000 years of the existence of Homo Sapiens, this is the first time that we have had no sexual specialization, beyond those imposed by biology. As a result, there is no particularly good reason to get married. It brings no economic or material benefits to either man or woman. So there is no particularly good reason to stay married, especially not "in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, til death do us part." Are you kidding? If one partner gets fat and ugly, the other is gone. If one partner becomes permanently disabled, the other is gone. The children are the ones who suffer.

Some of the people who read this chapter will react emotionally, as if they just learned that Santa Claus is a myth. They accuse me of missing out on enough hugs growing up. That is not true. I grew up in a very loving and traditional family. I only report what I see. The problem is not with me. It is with the institution of marriage as it now exists in Western societies.

If a man thinks he will get home cooked meals, child care, and housekeeping, he will have a rude awakening. He will only have home cooked meals if he cooks them himself. He will only have child care if he does it himself. The house will be cleaned only if he does it himself. He would be much better off hiring a housekeeper. And it would cost a lot less too.

If a woman thinks she will get to stay home after marriage, she too is in for a rude awakening. Her husband will insist that she go to school, get a job and have a career, so they can afford paid childcare, housekeeping and takeout food. Bon appetite!

No one is very happy with the result. Parents miss out on the formative years of the childhood of their children, when everything they do seems miraculous and wonderful. One good thing that has come out of this disappearance of gender roles is that at least a few men have chosen the stay-at-home role, and enjoy it. And are good at it. We men have been missing out on a lot.

Still, the root problem with this new unspecialized marriage is that there is no glue to bind man and woman together. If they are interchangeable, then it doesn't make much difference if one or the other decides to leave. Reciprocity is the glue, and it seems difficult to make that work in this unisex view of marriage. So marriage has become as fragile as glass. Children worry that their parents will break up, since this happens to all their classmates. And sooner or later, it does. One reads that half of all marriages end in divorce. I suspect that if we confine ourselves to the baby-boom generation and later, the fraction that will stay married "til death us do part" is much less than half, maybe only a fourth, or a fifth.

The ancient religious and legal institution of marriage is not geared to this new situation. The trouble is, everything is either black or white. Nothing in between. Either two people are joined at the hip, and must do everything together, or they divorce, which always ends up in bitterness and alienation between the former lovers. And, of course, untold psychological damage to the children.

Assuming we cannot go back to traditional marriage, I propose a different sort of joining. We won't even call it marriage. If there is a ceremony, we will have to invent it anew. The bond will not be so tight, nor separation so absolute, as in marriage. Let us imagine all degrees of closeness and separation between men and women. At the very least, men and women should retain their pre-joining circle of friends, and there will be a boys night out and a girls night out, every week. From the beginning. And many activities involving both man and woman and the children. That was certainly the best part of marriage for me. We should not insist that men and women sleep in the same bed, the same room, the same house, or the same city. Let us assume that both man and woman will change, and that this in turn may cause a change in living arrangements. This should not be regarded as failure. Nor should we insist on "fidelity." Both men and women will be attracted to other people. It could be a casual fling, or it could lead to another joining. This does not supersede the old joining. All joinings are forever, so that children know that neither of their parents are ever going to go away and never come back.

The key to joining is flexibility. Let the children in on decisions. Maybe they would prefer to live more with one parent than another. When they go through the changes of adolescence, maybe they would prefer to go live with the other parent. And at all costs maintain the framework of the extended family, of cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, grandparents. In my case, this is mostly done by family Email or Long Distance phone calls, with only occasional visits. Modern economic trends have a way of flinging the members of a family all over the map. Still, connection can be maintained over the Web. It should not be considered unusual if children go live with cousins or grandparents for a period of time. The one iron rule is that if two people (really two families) are joined, nothing can ever sever that tie. Family consists in all those people who will help you when you are down, help you no matter what, give you a place to stay, and help.

So instead of the black and white of marriage and divorce, we have the infinite variations of closeness or separation without regret or bitterness that is the joined family. This is really the joining of two extended families, with grandparents and siblings and cousins. The trouble with our society is that no one stays in the same place, so it is impossible to have those big family Thanksgivings of my youth. If you are lucky, you will stay in touch with an extended family via the World Wide Web.

Consider this. There will be cycles in the relationship. Once attracted, always attracted, at least through the child-bearing years. So there may be cycles in the intensity of relationships between members of the family, and this should not be considered a failure. Yes, it is a radical solution, but the only way to preserve the family is to get rid of marriage.

At the very least we must think about family and joining. So much of what we do as parents or as spouses is what we have seen other people do. The minutiae of everyday life are impossible for each person to invent anew for themselves in every generation. There are countless strains between intellectual dogmas and cultural tradition. Just to take one example of that, no man is good at cooking or housework unless he has grown up in a household where the dominant male did all the cooking and housework. And was good at it. So men, at least unconsciously, expect the woman to take that role. And if she doesn't, it just doesn't get done. They live on takeout food, and the house is a pigsty. Men who live alone learn how to clean their houses and prepare nutritious food. Their houses are clean and tidy, their diet simple and reasonable. One more reason why a 35 year old man should marry a 18 year old woman as Aristotle suggested!

When it comes to dealing with conflict, we all resort automatically to the mechanisms employed by our parents. For men, this usually means silence, which women interpret as withdrawal, coldness, or a lack of emotional expression. However, for countless generations, men have reacted to an angry wife by getting out of the house. Not permanently. Perhaps just for the day. Go off and have a few beers and play cards with the guys. They won't get mad at you for leaving the toilet seat up.

People expect too much from marriage. In particular, they expect happiness. Women even expect entertainment. But that was not the original function of marriage. Originally, it was for survival, of the individuals, of the extended family, and of the genetic stock. Pioneer families would have starved if they depended only on the hunting or farming prowess of the man. So women had a kitchen garden, and worked hard at drying and storing food for the winter. Further back in time, the men went out to hunt or scavenge meat. The women stayed closer to the hearth and gathered roots, nuts, berries, grubs and similar reliable but low fat foods. They needed each other to survive. Happiness and entertainment probably depended more on the stories told, sung and danced by the old men and old women of the clan. And that is why our species, almost alone among birds and mammals, allows for the survival of the grandmother generation. Some of them anyway. That is why we have menopause, unique among mammals.

Does this chapter offend your sense of the meaning of love? What is love? Do you think love is forever? Love conquers all? Romantic nonsense. There was no romantic love in the traditional families of the past. Some of the married women of my father's generation had tongues like knives, and never missed a chance to slash their hapless mate to ribbons. Yet, this did not result in divorce. The men of my childhood always had an escape. They could go out and putter around in the shop, or go to town and have a few beers and play cards in the smoky, beer smelling saloons of the 1950s. Modern men don't seem to have any such escape. And maybe women don't either.

Romantic love does not exist. Or if it does, it exists only in the minds of virginal adolescents. Nonetheless, it is the basis of Western culture, especially movies. Consider movies to be fairy tales. There is nothing wrong with fairy tales, so long as children are told at some point that Santa Clause and Prince Charming do not really exist. Remove all romance from relationship movies and what do you have left? Woody Allen, Bergman, and Kurosawa.

I am reminded of a line from a Lisa Loeb song: "The time between meeting and finally leaving is sometimes called "falling in love."" Some people can "fall in love" with someone different every day.

Who will take care of the scutwork of home cooking, housework, and changing the baby's diapers in my utopia? Whoever chooses that role. And if no one in the extended family wants that role, hire quality childcare and good housekeepers. Maybe we need to revive the bracero program. These are people from other countries who would be willing to work for a dollar an hour, with housing, food, transportation, clothing, medical care, everything provided by the host family. The unions are wrong to oppose this. The bracero program does not take away jobs from American worker, because no American is willing to work this hard for so little. Yet, compared to what they have back home, it is riches for the bracero. And the children will be raised bilingual.

In the long run, the solution to homecooking and housekeeping may be robotics. The robotic kitchen and the robotic cleanup station would take up some floor space, but less than a room for a bracero housekeeper. True robots look nothing like those of science-fiction. They do not require any Artificial Intelligence, even if AI were a possibility. The necessary robots could be built now, at the beginning of the 21st Century, and manufactured and sold at a reasonable price for a kitchen appliance.

The kitchen robot would resemble a large cabinet. All the user needs to do is keep the bins full and use software on the home computer to select a menu and a serving time. The user also schedules the pickup robot and the cleanup robot from the computer menu. The computer would communicate with the robots via radio commands. Chef-programmers would create the code to run on the home computer for fixing meals. The kitchen appliance would have no smarts. It would respond to wireless network commands for each step, such as "pull out a 3 quart pan, put 2 quarts of water into it, bring it to a boil, drop 6 ounces of pasta into it, bring it to a boil, cook for 10 minutes, and dump into a strainer over a sink. It would then clean and dry the pan and return it to the bin, while announcing "The spaghetti is ready." Each family member would take a plate, dish up some spaghetti out of the strainer with a pair of tongs, and hold it under a nozzle which instantly heats the sauce for one serving. Push the button for the sauce, sprinkle on some parmesan cheese and take the plate to the table.

The kitchen robot does not serve the table. It is not much trouble for the customers to clear the table and put the dishes in the dishwasher, which itself adds detergent and runs when ordered to do so by the main computer. The human customers would have to put the dishes away. The kitchen robot does not have to do everything. Just enough so that fixing supper is not a chore.

As for the pickup and cleanup robots, they would have to be guided on their appointed rounds by a human the first time, or whenever there is a major re-arrangement of furniture. This would be like steering a radio controlled toy car. This would program the linear part of the robot's code, which could be contained on a cassette tape on the robot.

This robot is no more than an appliance, able to respond to simple commands from its linear program or from the home computer via wireless networking. The first task is to pickup and drop objects into a pull behind cart. When the cart is full, it unhooks and reverses course to the pickup station, where the objects picked up are sorted and put in the appropriate bin. Simple sensors could measure things like the heat conductivity of something to distinguish books/magazines, plastic objects, metal objects, and ceramic objects, each being deposited in its appropriate bin. The pickup robot waits patiently. The cart retraces its route and hooks on again and the pickup robot continues. It would have wheels, of course, but the wheels could be extended vertically perhaps two feet, so the pickup robot could climb or descend stairs. Doors would have to be left open. If the door to a room was shut, the robot would skip ahead to the point in its linear program when it goes to the next room.

Naturally, the robot would stop if it encounters an obstacle. If the obstacle emits heat, it might be a cat or a human leg. Wait a minute and try again. If the obstacle does not emit heat, it might be a chair out of place, or toys, clothes, books or magazines which need to be picked up. So the robot will try to pick it up. If successful, the object will be deposited in the cart behind. If not successful, the robot calls for help from the main computer, which will invoke a program for avoiding the object and getting back on its linear track at a later point on the tape.

The cleanup robot would be just like the pickup robot, except that when programmed, it would be told whether to use the carpet vacuum module, the carpet "rug doctor," the tile mopping module, the tile waxing module, or the vacuum module. When the cleanup robot passes over into a new space, it would retrace its path, deposit one module at the cleanup station (which would empty dust chambers or dirty wash water) and latch on to the module required next. Human customers would still have to dust, vacuum drapes or blinds, cleanup the cobwebs in corners, and clean the bathroom. But these are jobs that do not have to be done every day.

Science fiction raises false expectations. If it were not for science fiction, we would probably already have robotic kitchens and robotic housekeeping, since they only require simple engineering. As long as everyone is waiting on AI to develop, nothing will happen. We will be waiting forever. Would I hire a Bracero or buy the robotic maid? No. My children are grown; my pets all died, and I have not replaced them. Once clean, it is easy to keep my house clean. I live on a simple yet nutritious diet which does not require elaborate preparation.

To summarize, nothing is more important than family. A person without family can hardly be considered human, alone in an urban jungle. Family is forever, or it is nothing. The closeness or distance between one member or another will naturally go through cycles and changes. The eternal stability of family must be preserved. And the only way to do it is to avoid the legal and religious strictures of marriage. If there is no marriage, there can be no divorce. No marriage means no expectations. We don't fall into the unconcious trap of being our parents. The only place the law need intervene is to insist that all full citizens have equal right to the care of their biological offspring. Of course, a person can be declared an unfit parent and lose that right. When a child is in your custody, you pay the tab. When not, you don't. No child support payments or alimony. That is where the law needs to be changed. Eventually, if this experiment works, we can just abolish marriage.

Copyright © Dr.H 2003

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