Just Raven

I came across this article at FOX news, that helps answer some of my questions about this whole “marriage is best” rhetoric.

This week’s raid on a West Texas polygamist retreat was shocking. At last count, authorities had taken 139 women and 416 children from the Yearning for Zion Ranch.

Watching them get herded onto buses, it was easy to ask: “Who are these people, and how could this happen?”

Yet in the eyes of world history, we, the gawkers, are matrimony’s social deviants. After all, polygamy is the original “traditional marriage.”

O’RLLY?

But a marriage in which a spouse of either sex has more than one partner at the same time has been accepted globally for centuries.

Polygyny, where a man has multiple wives or female mates, has been found in more places and at more times in history than any other form of marriage. This is in large part because marriage historically has been for economic and political purposes.

It is an institute originally intended to help people acquire wealth, power and property — not love. The expectation of love and loyalty for a one-and-only actually is a relatively recent social invention.

I didn’t know all this.

In fact, cultures typically have regarded love as irrational and absurd. Seen as a threat to social order, love has been viewed as incompatible with marriage.

SO what about women’s natural need for love and affection? Is that inherent or cultural?

When it has come to one’s sexual needs, cultures simply have gotten “creative,” both in and out of the marriage framework. In ancient China, a woman was allowed to bring one or more of her sisters to her husband’s house as a back-up wife. In parts of India, Kashmir and Nepal, as well as Tibet, women may be married to two or more brothers. All of them have sexual access to her.

While numerous cultures have allowed husbands to go outside of their marriage for sexual gratification (polygyny), some societies have given women the same leeway (polyandry). The Dogon of West Africa, for example, have allowed young married women to carry on their affairs publicly. The Rukuba of Nigeria permit a woman to acquire a lover when she gets married for the first time.

Very interesting. Women were actually allowed to have lovers in the past?

So how did we in the West evolve into honoring the bliss-filled, two-person marriage?

Early Christianity was the first to condemn having more than one spouse at a time (polygamy), and is considered unique as a world religion for insisting on monogamy. The other major religions have allowed men to have a number of wives.

Thanks to the Christian movement, as early as the 12th century, polygamy was prohibited in Western Europe. Quite by accident, this support for monogamy became a step toward gender equality. Men no longer were allowed to see wives as possessions. (They could — and many did — keep mistresses, which a wife was expected to ignore.) Still, many of the same rules applied as far as who made for the most practical mate.

Ah well now they just pay exuberant amounts of money for sex…

While hard for us to swallow, history’s most “successful” marriages have not been the modern, happily ever-after sort. They have not been about our society’s ideas of a “perfect union,” such as:

— Having deep love and loyalty for your partner;

— Making your partner your highest obligation and priority;

— Putting your partner before your parents and family members;

— Being best friends with your partner;

— Expressing affection to your partner;

— Being sexually faithful.

It has only been in the last couple of centuries that Western Europe and North America have developed a new values set around organizing marriage and sexuality.

Well I’ll be darned. I honestly didn’t know all this. A quick call to my brother, Mr. Preacher, augmented this article’s basic premises as being truthful. I learn new things everyday and each little tidbit adds up to my global thinking on sexual matters. It’s all starting to come together. It is only in our recent history that sex has become associated with love, emotions and marriage. I love the phrase about organizing marriage and sex around values though. It’s very true, I think.