marriage
gregladen | August 4, 2012It seems like everybody in the Old Testament is either married, about to get married, or was recently married but something went terribly wrong. This may be becasue the bible is about marriage. The Old Testament is a history, it is a set of laws, and it is an enthnography, and the themes themes that hold the whole thing together are warfare, resorces, marriage, and a heavy dose of odd cultish rule-making about food and blood. Marriage is a central theme of cultural life, so of course it plays an important role in a culture's own history and ethnography. But is the bible, as one example of…
gregladen | July 17, 2012We've been talking about marriage (here, here, and here). We've established that marriage has a history, it has variability, and that it is hard to pin down a narrowly defined set of functions for it. However, I also suggested that when we strip away a lot of variants that have special explanations (even if those variants are MOST of the variants of marriage) there is a thing we can call marriage that has a limited and understandable set of functions, or at least, there is a thing we can understand in a very basic evolutionary and social way. And we'll get to that. But first, I want to take…
gregladen | July 4, 2012Most people in a position to read this blog post probably think of marriage as a contract between two people that serves a few different purposes. Initially it may be an extension of the a tacit contract governing sexual access or fidelity that likely preceded marriage. Later on it may be an arrangement that facilitates the decision a couple makes to have one or more children. Along with this a marriage may be a framework for any subset of a longish list of social relations people tend to engage in such as friendship and mutual aid, financial cooperation and joint ownership of things, or…
gregladen | June 25, 2012I am going to write a bunch of blog posts about marriage.
You should regard my opinion about marriage to be valuable; I've had several of them. And in this way, I may be more like a hunter-gatherer than a "modern" Westerner, as the practice among the former is to treat marriage as very important and each partner in the marriage as a critical and similarly empowered member of the contract, while the practice among the latter has been to see women as the man's property and to form economic, social, and sexual alliances as needed outside the marriage. Who is in on the deal and how they work…
sastyk | April 25, 2011Ed Brayton has a post showing a series of polls that indicate that a majority of Americans now approve a gay marriage.This is good news for a whole host of reasons, among them that gay marriage is good for straight folk too - particularly in a society struggling with economic and environmental issues. I've written about this before, and about why I think gay marriage may be a gift to all marriages:
As long as we view the establishment of a marital household as the creation of something discrete and apart from the families from which they emerged, in both economic and social senses, we find…
sastyk | April 17, 2011I wrote this post years ago, and have republished it occasionally since - it has been a while, though, and it does go with the other one ;-)
Reasons to Stay Together in Tough Times
1. Gives you something sustainable to do during those rolling blackouts (sex and fighting would probably both fit the bill, actually.)
2. You can't afford dinner and a movie, much less romantic gifts for your mistress or new sweetie anyway. You might as well stay with someone whose expectations have already been lowered by exposure to the real you.
3. Lowered economic expectations mean that even if you are no…
sastyk | April 17, 2011I'll be offline much of the next few days for the Passover holiday. This is a subject we're talking about in the Adapting-in-Place class, and one that comes up a lot - how do you make environmental changes with a spouse who isn't on board? What happens when this strains your marriage?
I get emails more or less constantly on this subject: "I want to prepare for peak oil/live more sustainably/change my life to deal with climate change and my spouse (and/or the rest of my family) don't want to, or don't think it is important enough."
This is something I've heard over and over - marriages…
sastyk | February 14, 2011I'm a bit short on time today, given that I told my boys that today is "smooch day" and Moms have to kiss their kids as much as possible. Since my boys are all deep in the "ewwww....kissing" phase this means that they are spending every spare minute following me around and daring me to try and kiss them. This is awesome because while they may be starting to outrun me, but I'm still wilier and trickier. So I didn't write a luuuuuvvv post - I'm busy being vewy vewy quiet, and hunting boys.... I have, however, written a few over the years, and I thought I'd put them up here:
You'll note,…
sastyk | June 29, 2010This weekend in the Washington Post, there's an article about a couple who first met while serving in various capacities during WWII, who just celebrated their marriage in DC this weekend after a "62 year engagement." This would be a romantic story in any context - but it isn't a story of parted lovers who finally found each other again after decades apart. Instead, it is of two men who have lived a life almost wholly together, sharing work, family and community, but who lacked legal and social recognition.
What's interesting about this story to me is not simply that it is a charming love…