Commitment?

harmonic- I am very happy that your marriage turned out so well. Unfortunately, many people are not as lucky as you. I too, believe in committment, (I have been married for 36 years) but with a caveat.

Over the years I have seen many couples who have grown apart over the years so much, that they are entirely different people than when they were married. It would be a waste of both their lives to stay together. I have seen this a lot, especially when the people were as young as you were when you married. Believe me, you are extremely fortunate to have met a soul mate, where the two of you can grow together.

On the one hand, I believe that marriage is an ongoing process, that requires a lot of work on the parts of the two people. It is important that couples work on their marriage together, thereby forging and ever tighter bond of love and caring.

On the other hand, when the couple realizes, after seriously attempting to create a permanent, stable bond, that it is NOT working, that they cut their losses, and move on!



Your words pique my curiosity. Why do you think that committment is "playing on your mind" at this point in time?

I have two younger brothers in "serious" relationships, both speaking of marriage as if it were the NFL draft. I just can not comprehend the logic.

Maybe I truely am lucky to have found a "soul mate". It doesn't feel that way, though. My marriage has not been easy- not by the furtherest stretch of the imagination. But I knew without a doubt that I would do or give anything to spend my life with her- even if I had to trade years for weeks.

Commitment
I think a distinction should be made between a male committing time and caring to a woman and their offspring, and a male committing to not have sex with other females. I can't see that a wife is hurt by her husband having sex with another female who truly loves him so long as he won't care for the latter (or their offspring) and he hasn't spent much effort and time trying to lure her into sex. The benefit to the man of being able to accept essentially free sex from such easily gotten, clean mistresses is quite enormous in comparison to what if anything that the wife might lose. So it is cruel and pointless of a wife to not allow her mate to have such a mistress or mistresses. Not only is it cruel to her husband, but cruel to the females who might (sexually) be in love with him. Marriage for a male should involve commitment of resources rather than a commitment to sexual exclusivity.

Of course, it follows that a female should be able to allow a male to have sex with her without his being required to take care of any child that may be produced. Since commitment ceremonies (marriages) are preferable to non-commitment ceremonies (ugh!), male caring should not be the default state. Before DNA tests, etc., allowed testing for paternity, this is how laws effectively worked, especially I believe in France. (Probably why France is known as for lovers.) Marriage meant commitment from the male, absence of marriage meant absence of commitment (or absence of legal evidence of paternity, which practically speaking amounted to the same thing).

It is bad that in present-day society, marriage is part commitment ceremony, part "look at me this relationship is clean and something I'm proud of" ceremony. It should definitely be one or the other, and in fact should just be the former. As it stands, marriage insults those born outside marriage and those having sex outside marriage by encouraging the confusion of absence of male commitment with sordidness.

I don't think perfect symmetry between the sexes is natural. It is not very proper for a woman to willingly have a child without trying to care for the child. And I don't think a woman should commit adultery against her husband unless she loves someone else very much more than him (and unlike a husband committing adultery, a wife should be secret when she commits adultery).

You lost me, step. I'm not quite sure what it is you're saying here but it doesn't sound too woman-friendly. Perhaps I'm reading you wrong?

I couldn't agree with you less, Step. I think that your view that men are allowed to sleep around because they have more to gain then women have to loose is disgusting.

I think step's point is that the point of marriage for men is offspring. For men, the primary goal is to make sure his mate's offspring is indeed his and to provide food, money and shelter for them. It is a female's job to make sure the family unit remains intact for the sake of her children and choose her mates according to their ability to provide for her offspring. This is primarily the way males and females of the animal kingdom function. Some - not all.

So, by step's logic, humans are really not anymore socially or psychologically developed than wild animals, nor should they be expected to be.

No, actually I am saying quite the opposite. A good female tends to care about the genetic qualities of her mate more than his ability to provide for her, since she wants children with personality and character (and even abilities--though bad females somewhat want children with natural abilities as well) who are more worthy of the love she will give them. She is more likely to base her reproductive decisions on love as opposed to money. If a female has a choice between marrying someone she loves less well and merely reproducing with someone she loves more well, the better female will more tend to take the second option and opt to be a single mother, putting love over considerations of resources. Disallowing females from having sex with married men makes it more difficult for females to choose love over resources--not a good thing. And given that females should be allowed to be single mothers by choice, a husband is being too sacrificial by being sexually exclusive.

No one seems to have expressed clearly the disadvantage to a wife (or society for that matter) of allowing a husband to have extra-marital sex as I proposed. The only obvious disadvantage I can think of is that it might increase the wife's chances of getting venereal disease. Is that the main objection of you who disagree with me about the appropriateness of such extra-marital sex? What if before a husband being allowed to have sex with a mistress, his wife has the option of requiring her husband's would-be mistress to pass a venereal-disease test? Would you feel comfortable then? What if such tests were infallible?

I'm curious, then, you women who feel husbands should be sexually exclusive, What is it that would bother you about your husband having sex with other freely obtained women, provided not much time is spent by him in caring for them or in chasing them down?

One poorly appreciated factor I think is relevant is that the emotion of the male about sex is more relevant than commonly appreciated. I think when the male loves a woman very well he is more likely to view her with holiness and the emotional desire to be at one with her. These emotions I believe effect spermatogenesis and genetic crossover in a way as to make sex more rewarding for the female. However, I believe the stage of spermatogenesis which the first emotion affects occurs about two moons prior to ejaculation of the sperm affected (and I'm not sure about how much prior to ejaculation the second emotion has its affects). So if a male has unholy, unloving sexual emotions toward a female (as he often might toward would-be mistresses), those emotions are going to make sex with his wife less loving for a while, which probably is not good inasmuch as a man especially tends to love his wife. However, there is another counteracting phenomenon. For all the parties involved, sex is probably much more pleasant when there is one or more extra females having sex simultaneously. That would explain much female bisexual emotions. And it makes sense, since sperm that can survive going back-and-forth between females are more likely to have had ancestral sperm that survived similar back-and-forth sex, i.e., ancestral sperm that were very well loved by females and thus unusually likely to have passed on desirable qualities. So basically, the latter phenomenon probably more-or-less cancels out the former phenomenon, with the result that, as mentioned, a husband having extra-marital sex doesn't hurt his wife by this sex. Maybe the confusion between evil male homosexuality and female homosexuality has wrongly led females to be excessively fearful of the erotic pleasures females can take in members of their own sex, and such paranoia explain wives' strange desire for their husbands' sexual exclusivity?

Of course, there are several other explanations for women so often claiming they want sexual exclusivity from their husbands. I shall list three in order of descending cynicism. One. Wives are often addicted to depravities the addictive pleasures of which are more-or-less proportional to the amount of semen entering their digestive systems (accordingly, they want it all!). Two. Women before being married, in order to justify their tendencies to only have sex if resources are given in return, often claim that sex without marriage is wrong; after getting married they must maintain their position to appear consistent, which on account of their selfishness (or stupidity given the number of men who abandon their wives because they just can't take it) is more important to them than pleasing their husbands. (Personally, I think a whore is a whore to the extent she is expensive and not to the extent she is cheap.) Three. Women often feel that a woman who doesn't reproduce in a manner that is usually in her own selfish best interest is disgusting, inasmuch as disgusting females do in fact wrongly sexually love (bad) males unselfishly on account of their addiction-induced stupidity; thus they think that only disgusting stupid women unselfishly love via sex.

There are people who believe that all sex and reproduction is wrong outside marriage. Of course, if you believe that then you will believe that husbands having extra-marital sex is wrong. But the stigma against husbands having extra-marital sex seems much greater than the stigma against bachelors having sex with unmarried females, so there would seem to be more to it than that. At any rate, it strikes me that the question of whether in fact all sex or reproduction outside marriage (or without the male being required to commit to caring) be bad would be a different question that were better left to be analyzed in a separate thread.

I'm not sure you've defined why you feel men should have more than one partner, or maybe you have and I missed it in my reading. You allude to it here:



But I'm not sure the 'benefit' has been expressed. I'm not saying that I am for or against your theory as I feel as individuals, people lead their lives as they see fit. Is the benefit purely sexual gratification or is there more?

I believed that you felt a female should look for resources in her marriage mate due to this - as it suggest that a man should commit his resource to any children born during the marriage, even if he is not the biological father:



I don't think you are suggesting a world full of single mothers with support from nowhere, as single mothers have a hard time finding a marriage partner and men do not tend to stay married to women who have children by another man within the marriage.


Here, you make a leap of an assumption that even though:



:there must be something else out there that will prevent this man from leaving his wife, who he committing to providing for, according to your previous analysis, because he married her:



If this were actually true, men would not leave their wives for other women. Men do become emotionally attached to the other women in their lives. If they did not, a man would have sex with various women for sexual gratification - and not just one other woman besides his wife. Do you see this as limiting himself? The vast majority of men that are with other women only have one, maybe 2. Would you attribute this to the amount of sex partners a man really wants to have, or a social construct?


And lastly, by categorizing women to have the following issues, you include all women - including the women that the married men are having sex with. So, by this explanation, there would be broken commitments everywhere, as a woman's primary list of complaints would be EVERY women's primary list of complaints - whether married, looking for a provider or looking for a mate and remaining single - the last 2 points refer to women in general. If women are like this, in general, how would anyone stay in a marriage or a sex relationship for any period of time at all?





Maybe I'm just trying to make your point clearer to myself and I've missed it entirely. I'm not trying to defend the way I feel about my own marriage, because I've never been married

Marriage and commitment


Neither. I would attribute it to it being no easy thing for a man to find multiple sex partners who really want to have children by him without requiring caring of him. (And of course, if a man has serial marriages, after a while women realize a marriage proposal from him really likely isn't a commitment, and so that no longer is fetching.) In fact, I daresay that many of the males who say they don't commit adultery because they won't in fact don't commit adultery because they can't. (True, it wouldn't be too hard for a typical husband to find a female who would have sex with him with various strings attached or a female who would have sex because she is dissipated and sleeps around, but I'm not talking about such (immoral and unrewarding) sex or adultery, which men aren't very much pleased by anyway, if at all.) I seriously doubt that men commonly leave wives because of having developed emotional attachments with other women stronger than those between himself and his wife. I mean, after all, the man has been with the wife--she would seem to have so much of an advantage along those lines as to more-or-less preclude other "emotional attachments" with other females.

If a man loves his wife, of course he likely will be emotionally attached to her just because he has loved her and become accustomed to living with her. IMO, men who leave their wives usually do so because they want sex from other females. It is the sex they want.



Yep, the benefit is purely sexual gratification. Of course, sex being real (i.e., likely to lead to reproduction) is what tends to be gratifying, though men are often too confused in their emotions to see that. Of course, men can learn things from the sexual gratification experience (not that they can't also be misled by it if the mistress is manipulative) and this knowledge has usefulness, but that is secondary--the same is true of most experiences.



What I am suggesting is a world with some single mothers and some married mothers (and fathers). I do think that the male caring for a female should tend to be all-or-nothing, though, and the caring should be preceded by commitment. Basically, my reasoning is that it is a good thing if bad women mate for money, because that would tend to only cause good women to be mistresses, and good women tend only to be mistresses to good men--thus good men would reproduce more, as desirable. And good men marrying when wanting to care for a woman makes it easier for bad women to without stigma marry for money and resources.Thus the tradition of marriage allows good men to get more mistresses than bad men, a good thing. Also, if marriage didn't imply a more-or-less complete commitment of resources, bad males would have an unfortunate advantage in bad-mistress chasing, since bad mistresses would more tend to get males they could screw some money out of, who would be the bad males. Also, I think marriage being expected to have strong male caring responsibilities more encourages bad males to squander their youth chasing mistresses rather than in throwing out caring to whatever likely bad females might be attracted to them. The exact reasons are complicated and hard to come by, but basically, I don't like the idea of it being considered acceptable by society for men to spread caring on so many females like it's just so much Halloween candy. (An exception is the phenomenon I call quasimarriage, when a female's girlfriends or female relatives have behaved toward the husband as to make it quite unlikely the quasiwife wants him just for money.)

Ideally, the economy should be set up (e.g., with less inequality in incomes) so that it is somewhat easier economically for non-rich females to become single mothers if not rich. Particularly in more respecting the economic rights of females, society has come a long way in that regard since (say) 1800, but it is true it still has much farther to go--I don't mean to imply otherwise. But even with today's excess inequalities there are often females that can sufficiently afford single motherhood that this single motherhood should be an option open to her if she finds a man she loves very well who for whatever reason doesn't or can't care for her.



I'm not exactly clear what you are saying here, but perhaps I can clarify by pointing out that some women are selfish and some are not (and of course there are gradations in between, but it is usually too unwieldy to speak of those gradations otherwise than tacitly). However, unselfish females more tend to look for a mate while selfish females more tend to look for a provider. Different considerations do apply differently to different females. How has anything I said implied that a good female couldn't stay in a marriage to her (likely good) husband? He will if loved sufficiently by other females have carefree sex with them, but Why should that cause him to love his wife less or to leave her? Perhaps you are thinking that I'm saying good females won't or shouldn't get married. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that good females are and should be less willing to get married than bad females and more willing to merely mate. Since good husbands will care more than bad husbands (because the latter will tend to have squandered their youth in mistress chasing), it may in fact be that if marriage is as I suggest, good women as a whole will get more caring and resources in marriage than bad women will. Certainly, if marriage is as I suggest, then, compared with bad women, good women will more tend to have children with (genetic) fathers who have better abilities (and character) that have been passed down to their children than bad women. Accordingly, if marriage is considered by society as I suggest, good women and their descendants should prosper more than bad women, a good phenomenon.

Ya know, this argument doesn't make sense, no matter how many threads you toss it into.