44-The Planet's First Peace-Treaty

How and why did marriage get started; where is it going?

Part 1: It Takes Two to Tango

One might see the defining difference between men and women as physical: men are bigger and harder, built for war; women are smaller and softer, built for home. Although this stereotype does not help us understand where marriage came from, it speaks to the death of this sacred institution and rebirth as a social arraignment. Supple, stay-at-home dads and fierce, breadwinner moms bust the mold and redefine the terms.

The sexes frame reality differently. Take the concept of time. Ancient Greeks call the two types chronos [male] and kairos [female]. Chronos is synchronous or sequential while kairos is asynchronous or event-driven. Chronos is the hands of a clock; kairos, the right moment to speak-up. Men are driven by immediate goals and long-term priorities. Women are concerned about relationship status and living conditions. Men think linear, moving from one point to the next. Women think parallel, balancing endless points into a narrative of meaning. But when it comes to the individual, each mind is a mixture, a unique proportion, of both.

By the middle of the twentieth century, male dominance lost its footing. The ideal of a male head-of-house was seen for the failure it is. A unified head-of-house with each parent reinforcing the same values promotes health. It is both irrational and illogical to say that one mindset is better than the other unless one is comparing that mindset to specifics states or tasks. Life is complicated. The concept of 'better' is based on the idea that ideals exist. Only those with agendas have ideals. The concept that sex determines effective leadership is no more true than age determines wisdom. Wisdom does not come from experience alone; wisdom is the pruning and molding of behavior based upon learning from experience. As a species, we continue to seek that wisdom.

Nature provides sexual difference because it is genetically and evolutionarily advantageous. Two perspectives work together to create effective leadership the way two hands hold a baby. They do not hold the baby in the exact same spot and often come from opposing sides; but they have the same goal: don't drop the baby. Just as holding the infant with a single hand is riskier than two, the potential for family discord increases when a single voice reigns. The ability to adapt comes from diversity and flexibility. Consider the role of smell in physical attraction. What makes a person smell good or bad? The immune system. People with similar immune systems do not smell as good to us as people with divergent immune systems. Nature has written into our very sense of preference the predisposition of diversity.

Marriage is much more complicated than how we differ from each other, physically, mentally, or whether either or both of us has a 'Y' chromosome. Marriage is a contract among members of a group to define the atomic or indivisible unit of society. It resolves the world into parent/children pixels. Considering the span of human existence, the nuclear family is a recent innovation. Even the idea that children belong to the pair of genetic donors only came into being once tribes coalesced into larger populations. Prehistoric children belonged to the tribe and the elders raised them. Mothers and fathers were typically post-adolescent, children by today's standards. The very concept of a father was dubious as persistent monogamy was the aberration, not the rule. We are, after all, animals. In the age of caves and saber-tooths, marriage served no purpose. It is when tribes became cities that the institution became valuable.