And God Said...

Marriage, ah the final enpoint to feminine completeness! Oh what woman does not dream of her wedding day, to glide down the aisle toward her prince charming, smiling back at her awaiting her to become his wife. This, the very pinnacle of many dreams both for ladies and the commercial wedding machine alike, is an ancient safeguard bastardized into its current romantic incarnation. Any species primary goal is to survive, to eat, sleep and procreate to ensure its progeny survives to procreate yet another generation thus securing the species as a whole. Well that was supposed to be the whole goal of the game of life in its original design. Enter stage right birth control and the sexual revolution and that got all cocked up didn't it? But marriage, through it all has more or less survived such assaults on human evolution. But why?

Eons ago, when men finally realized the link between copulation and human regeneration, they got it - 'if I am to live on in a diluted form I must procreate with a female'. But hold the phone there padre, how do you ensure that it is infact your seed that has created the next generation to succeed yourself and carry your good name forth? Hmm, that's a pickle of a dilemma! 'Well,' man said, 'I simply must stake my claim on this vessel and make her swear fealty to me and me alone and protect (control) her so that I may be sure that the child is mine!' What a plan! Thus, dear ladies marriage was born.

I'm severely oversimplifying here but I'm sure my point is not lost. Once this dynamic was identified a fear crept into mankind as to the penultimate power of women as deceptive, manipulative creatures who held the very continuance of individual male geneaology in their panties or loin cloths - whatever. In order to control someone, as any successful dictator will tell you, you must make the object of your control feel inferior and weak. You must create a dependence in said person. Failing that, create abject fear, shit-your-pants, horrific fear! Enter Genesis 3:16 "...Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." Shit! They thought of everything in that granddaddy of a toilet reader didn't they?

Since men had the backing of the creator of heaven and earth women had very little choice but to obey. Would you step up to a being who created the earth just by thinking about it? Yeah I wouldn't either.



So here we are. Throughout the centuries, marriage has been a negotiation tool in business, a salve for loneliness and and means to ensure the continuance of the human race. But hang on a minute - if it takes nine months to bake a child, and one man did that with one woman only that means she can only give a man one child per year! Not great odds pre-modern medicine when infant death rates were any where from 30-50% (guesstimates given poor documentation of the age) that's a fairly crummy average for one couple. While a man had viable sperm from puberty until death, a woman has a finite number of viable eggs. That seems like a whole lotta wasted sperm! So while a man had his wife at home pregnant with what could only be his child, he was still trying to sow his wild oats around ust in case -whether society and the church considered the child a bastard was really immaterial. It was and is a very involved and complex way of a man writing 'I was here' on the world.



Ladies, we are cunning aren't we? I mean if we weren't Victoria's Secrect wouldn't have the business they do right? We hook 'em and cook 'em! For the first little while in the courtship process they never encounter an unshaved leg, a messy bikini line or a make-upless morning. We push our breasts up to gravity defying heights and make them pant for what may lurk for them beneath our carefully crafted outfits. Glamour and Cosmo magazine fill in the rest of the blanks. I'm not ashamed to admit that, while I don't hide my true inner self, my outer self is dramatically transformed from the puffy, hairy, almost androgenous train wreck it can be on a Saturday morning to near goddess perfection (well, I'd like to think so after all that work!) by Saturday night. Yes, we are temptresses. It's all about the game people!



And so to my point. Marriage, once an arena for business ventures and basic human propagation has been tranformed into romantic love worthy of every crappy Hallmark card on offer for a mere $6.95. It's a total bait and switch tactic, start with the flowers and candles and end up with an extra 30 pounds and baby vomit down your now saggy boobs. Then, the man that sat rapt with attention for every word that spilled from your perfectly glossed pout, can barely muster enough attention when you bellow at him to take out the trash (and secretly hopes he saddles up on the curb with it). To my mind, centuries have transformed a straight forward business contract into an impossible romantic coupling. Can you imagine transforming your boss into your life partner? Eww! These days divorce is at an all time high. Why? In my not-so-humble opinion, it's because we now have this Cinderella bullshit romance to measure up to and we end up feeling like utter failures when we can't get it up for the man who we just finished scrubbing shit stains out of his underwear for! Did Cinderella do THAT!? Doubt it.



When a relationship is forced into a mold that it was never supposed to fit into in the first place, that's when fractures occur. Try it with a piece of pottery next time. You'll see.