Gabor Szendi:
Why has marriage gone out of fashion?

The desire to marry is declining worldwide. Understanding the causes is more important than worrying about the deterioration of the world. What is understandable is perhaps more acceptable.

 

 

Ever since Darwin, all human phenomena have had to be understood through the lens of evolution. Such is the case with marriage. In the course of two and a half million years of human development, men and women have developed the most diverse forms of relationship that can be well studied through the indigenous peoples of today, and through evolutionary psychological experiments.

The "engine" of evolution is breeding success, which basically means that each individual man instinctively seeks to spread his genes. From this principle the many differences between a man and a woman in terms of sexuality, mating and parental care can be understood. While reproduction involves as little as five minutes for a man, it is at least fifteen years for a woman, with pregnancy and parental care taken into account. So it is understandable why a woman is choosier, and why she is "for marriage". The value of the offspring is also different: how much someone invests in them, and what risks there are with the child's failure. The man is a "small investor", and it is no coincidence that the paternal role we expect today has almost no evolutionary precedent: men were hardly concerned with their children in most ancient societies (Szendi, 2015). Even if they provided the woman with food and protection, they did it mostly in the form of courtship for sex (Miller, 2006).

In ancient societies, the relationship between men and women was characterized by shorter or longer periods of cohabitation and then separation, and "polygamy" and "polyandry" fit smoothly into this in many tribes. Couples are together or divorced because of their propensity and interests (Szendi, 2015).

A turning point in the history of human relationships

While in tribal societies consumption of food gathered commonly is typical, with the advent of shepherding and farming, property became increasingly important. Although in principle polygamy is accepted today in more than 80% of societies, monogamy has become prevalent (Bereczkei, 2008). The reason for this is explained by the compromise between men - "If a man has ten wives, nine men have none" - (Barash and Lipton, 2001), but it is even more reasonable to argue that a man's reproduction is more secure if he persists with one woman than if he is constantly seeking a new partner (Coxworth et al., 2015). However monogamy necessarily led to the possession of the woman, because every man's nightmare is to take care of the child of another man, instead of his own offspring, to whom he will leave his wealth. Therefore women have been kept locked up for thousands of years, and could even be killed if suspected of unfaithfulness. Marriages were organized on property and political grounds, and families inter-married with families.

The individual is born

The ideas of citizenship and enlightenment included development, equality, and individual freedom. The American Declaration of Independence called the pursuit of happiness an unalienable right. According to the philosophy of utilitarianism, everything has to be evaluated in terms of individual well-being. The concept grew out of all these ideas, which had developed by the 20th century, of the right of the individual to have control over their own destiny. From the outset, these thoughts began to stretch the boundaries of the authoritarian traditional family, and marriages became increasingly emotionally-based. Shakespeare had captured this historic fermentation in Romeo and Juliet, many centuries before.

The modern nuclear family was initiated: with the couple living separately from their relatives, and raising their children separately. However, even in progressive society, women were still locked up in their homes for a long time; Ibsen's play "A Doll's House" demonstrated this well, and was based on a true story. In the original, the husband had his wife locked up in a mental hospital because she had left home. The idea that a woman could rebel against her husband was scandalous, and in Germany the play was billed as, "Nora and her husband are happy to reconcile" (Shapiro, 2003).

The liberation of women

"The individual is free, but woman is secondary." The suffragette movement beginning in the 19th century demanded the right to vote for women. The idea of development and moral principles have played a major role in our history (Thornton, 2001), however, the real revolutionary change was brought about by the growing hunger of the workforce in capitalist industry where women, and even children, worked. Contraception also became an urgent issue, as the constant pregnancy of women led to the permanent loss of labor, and families wanted to limit the number of children. Among the workers, a woman's pregnancy was equal to misery. However, even the idea of contraception was considered an indictable offense by the conservative male world. In the United States, from 1873, the law prohibited the distribution of any contraceptive device. As a result many women died through the use of dangerous drugs to terminate pregnancy, or in illegal fetal abortions. However, there was more to come from the legalization of contraception: the liberation of love and sexuality. Well, that was exactly why male society was so opposed to it. However women in all developed countries slowly gained voting rights, and it was inevitable that their views would be increasingly taken into account (Szendi, 2012).

The liberation of the body

Enovid was introduced in 1961 as the first female hormonal contraceptive, but it wasn't until 1965 that most married women had access to it. However for a long time it was forbidden to prescribe it to unmarried women, but the avalanche could not be stopped and access to contraceptives was slowly liberalized in all developed countries. Not only was it a health or birth control issue, but civilization had entered a new stage in the process of liberating the individual over a two hundred year period, proved by the fact that it became easier to divorce, step by step, through more and more legislative changes. Even in the 19th century, the process had begun with the separation of church and state, and later, the need to prove unfaithfulness or other reasons for divorce was abolished. Now we have reached the point where anyone can apply for divorce without any particular reason.

In the Western world, the sexual revolution broke out. Until then well-educated girls had saved their virginity for marriage because of the fear of getting pregnant, and well-educated men, unless they visited prostitutes, followed the order of courtship, then marriage, then sex. The wide availability of contraception fundamentally rewrote the relationship between man and woman. If you have sex before marriage, why hurry up with marriage? And why not have multiple relationships before or during marriage? Sex became freed from fear, and from monotony. Sex was no longer an activity for the sake of procreation, but became about enjoyment. The time for marriage shifted to later for both sexes, and sexual freedom undermined marital loyalty. Women could finally break out of the life imprisonment of a monogamous marriage (Szendi, 2012).

The liberation of the spirit

Contraception also had other unexpected effects, or actually, it only had unexpected effects. Among them was the fact that women no longer wanted to marry young, but instead attended college and university. Previously, a highly educated woman or a female scientist was rare. Qualified women became employed and women entered the world of male-dominated work, so that for the first time in history, women were able to develop their sense of spirit. Even today, we still honor women who were first to graduate from medical school, become a scientist, or who won the first Nobel Prize as women. Today, women are everywhere as (almost) equal workers.

Economic independence

As women left the stove, wooden spoon, and cradle, they became self-supporting. The financial dependency of millennia ceased, and this made women even freer to choose partners, have children, and divorce.

Humans have tampered with their own evolution

It therefore seems that all good things came from the idea of development and modernization. However, there is another side to the coin. In a sense, a woman's sexual liberation and the ease of divorce have devalued her. In the indigenous peoples, a man can only have sex with a woman if he supports her. Monogamy was partly intended to ensure this, and partly intended to provide guaranteed paternity. However, if a woman is available for sex without financial and social support because she is self-sufficient, the man will become exempt from all other forms of engagement, and the original nature of polygamy emerges in him. Emotional attachment is no longer enough for marriage, and increasingly prevalent individualism and consumerism play a significant role in this. Human relationships have also become like a consumer market, and a "hasty" marriage is like a hasty purchase. Why "buy" something, if it can be "used" in the meantime, and who knows if there will be a better "buy" later? At the individual level, this can be experienced in the form of "fear of attachment".

Now the woman is fighting for the man, accepting all sorts of compromises in the hope of an eventual marriage sometime later. However, the number of marriages is declining rapidly, and cohabitation is becoming the dominant form. The future of cohabiting people is uncertain, therefore, less wealth is accumulated, fewer children are born, and most children in need, or growing up in a truncated family come from such relationships. We know that children raised in dysfunctional families go on to reproduce their parents' lifestyle (Belsky et al., 2012).

This is not a moral issue. Our brains were formed in Stone Age conditions, while evolution has created new rules of a game to which humans are instinctively adapted. The result: a disintegrating, alienating, aging society. Creating a more livable world for everyone depends entirely on the ability of decision-makers to create new rules of the game.

 

References

Barash, DP; Lipton, JE: The myth of monogamy. Henry Holt, New York. 2001

Belsky, J.; Steinberg, L.; Draper, P.: Childhood experience, interpersonal development, and reproductive strategy: and evolutionary theory of socialization. Child Dev, 1991, 62(4):647-70.

Bereczkei T: Evolutionary psychology. Osiris, 2008.

Coxworth JE, Kim PS, McQueen JS, Hawkes K. Grandmothering life histories and human pair bonding. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015 Sep 22;112(38):11806-11.

Miller, G: The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Natur. Anchor, 2001

Shapiro, AR: The Slammed Door that Still Reverberates: Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879). in: Fisher, J; Silber, ES: Women in literature: reading through the lens of gender. Greenwood Press, 2003. pp:99-101.

Szendi G: The Decline and Fall of Men. Jaffa, 2015.

Szendi G: The rise and glory of the woman. Jaffa, 2015. revised 2nd edition

Szendi G: The woman's life. Jaffa, 2012.

Thornton A. The developmental paradigm, reading history sideways, and family change. Demography. 2001 Nov;38(4):449-65.