The Tale of Oogie and Boogie, Part 2

In 1930, for the first time in history, the population of the world reached 2 billion. It was a very, very long, and very, very slow climb since we first came down from the trees on the African savanna. But… by 2030, a mere one hundred years later, the United Nations estimates the world population will be approaching 8.5 billion. In the short space of one hundred years, the world population will more than quadruple. This quadrupling of the population… plus the changes in our daily lives brought about by rapidly developing technology… plus the unprecedented demands on our natural resources… plus the changes in the world’s climate patterns, means we are entering new and uncharted demographic waters.

Despite all these highly visible changes, we are still using the same old marriage pattern that Oogie and Boogie came up with. What’s wrong with this picture? (Remember Oogie and Boogie, the teenage neolithic couple who created the first monogamous, lifetime-commitment marriage?)

Yes, despite these huge demographic shifts, the vast majority of those eight billion-plus people in 2030 will continue to marry and have children just like Oogie and Boogie.  Countless generations later, we are still following them down their neolithic marriage path, promising endless love, companionship, fidelity, and mutual support until death do us part. That last clause never bothered Oogie and Boogie and their fellow tribesmen much because they had a short life expectancy. Our two young neolithic social innovators got married, blithely promising all those things for the rest of their lives together. The idea that they might be sharing breakfast with a stranger - perhaps a hostile stranger - decades after the wedding day was not an issue for people who lived short and dangerous hunter/gatherer lives.  

Because of the drive to mate and reproduce that is buried deep in our DNA  - call it the Oogie/Boogie Imperative - you can safely ignore the momentarily popular declarations by young people of “no marriage for me” or “no children for me”. Values change as we age. Values change also as the economic and demographic conditions around us change. Likewise, government mandates and incentives are altered as conditions change. 

What seems a reasonable and logical “permanent” decision when we are 13 or 23 will be subject to endless review as we approach the Dirty Thirty birthday. Those earnest, self-determining young people, by the time they are 28 cannot hear, “The old biological clock is ticking” without flinching. You can expect those momentarily popular “no marriage” and “no kids” social mantras to change, to evolve into new momentarily popular social mantras… because the spirit of Oogie and Boogie isn’t going away.

In large groups, the most common substitute for actual thinking is to simply do what the people around you are doing. Call it tribe-think; it goes all the way back to Oogie and Boogie. If it seemed like everyone was getting married and everyone was having a baby, most people would decide getting married and having a baby must be a pretty good idea. Modern descendants of Oogie and Boogie operate on the same basis, i.e., tribe-think.

Frankly, despite any fact-based, logical decisions, it’s hard to resist our parents, our DNA, and our societal mores pushing us to mate and reproduce. Finally, in addition to the outside forces of family and social expectations, our own personal values that we unconsciously learned as toddlers will be pushing us toward mating. Sorry but, despite any attempts at social engineering and exercising free will, it seems unlikely that we will change our basic urge to find a mate and have children. (Maybe not you; you might be the exception. But most of the people around you will follow the patterns going all the way back to Oogie and Boogie.)

Temporary perturbations aside, our behaviors aren’t going to change anytime soon. The DNA that allowed our ancestors and their tribes to survive evolves with glacier-like slowness. One hundred years is a flicker of a fraction of a moment for DNA. I repeat, the vast majority of Oogie and Boogie’s descendants in 2030 will continue to marry and have children.

But, those two neolithic romantic teenagers couldn’t know what a demon they were unleashing on their remote, longer-living descendants.  

In the preceding article, I wrote about how our conventional marriage patterns have become untenable, even counterproductive. Why? Because, despite the best of intentions on their wedding day, the longer life expectancy and the rapid changes in our daily lives make it highly unlikely – I used the term “mathematical absurdity” – that our modern-day Oogie and Boogie couple will live together happily ever after. This is especially true when that clause happily ever after means having breakfast with the same partner for decades… and with no relief in sight. 

Well, what kind of relief might we consider to assuage this unhappy breakfast conversation leading to mutual indigestion?

First, there is the obvious and traditional solution euphemistically called the “afternoon girlfriend or boyfriend”. In our era, when modern transportation makes it possible for both men and women to travel longer distances, through hordes of strangers, to get to work, it is also quite easy for those same men and women to drop out of sight for a couple of hours to seek some temporary comfort with another comfort-seeker. The French had a term for the places such couples might patronize; they call them “five-to-seven” hotels because of the most popular hours for such comfort-seeking meetings. In America, we just call them “No-Tell Motels”.

In practice however, this romantic notion of “two ships passing in the night” is not a very successful long-term solution. In addition to the inherent risks involved, the night might indeed be quite brief. Did you hear the story of the furious woman who told her friend, “I’m never going to get involved with a married man again! You just can’t trust them!”? (Sorry, dear, but you knew what you were getting when you picked up that rattlesnake.) Such liaisons tend to be short rather than long. No pun intended.

A second common solution – one that allows the children of attorneys to attend expensive universities – is divorce. In our modern era, opening the doors of higher education for women has meant they can have their own career and their own income. It also encourages an independent spirit made possible by that education and income.

With that education and income, the female part of the population no longer depends on a husband to survive. With that independence, they are increasingly asking why they should stay married to a man whom they no longer love. Similarly, some men may choose to jettison a partner who follows traditional gender roles of passive dependency combined with adversarial contrarianism. (Can you hear the Beatles singing, “You say yes. I say no.”?)

In the US currently, the divorce rate for people marrying in their early twenties is almost one out of three. (And that is not counting the ones who stay together reluctantly. They may be bitter, disillusioned, and sarcastic, but they are still together.) It is almost like the first marriage is a training exercise. This initial voyage into marital waters is a shakedown cruise to learn what not to do in subsequent marriages.

Of course, the obvious factor of children being hurt if their parents get divorced looms large in any consideration of breaking up. A most important unresolved question arises: Is it better to raise a child in a toxic atmosphere with two parents who hate each other? Or should the child grow up in a more peaceful but relatively impoverished single-parent household?

Good question. We know that the single-parent is continually exhausted and confused by the daily crush of work to support a single-parent household, plus the unrelenting responsibility of filling several roles, plus endless decision-making. These are all done now with no mate to share the burden. But growing up in a marital war zone isn’t healthy for kids either. Still, “for the sake of the children” is probably the Number One reason for unhappy but unbroken marriages.

A third solution proposed for more peaceful marriages is looser gun control laws. Here, the reasoning is that a society (or a marriage) where all adults are armed is going to be a more polite society (or marriage). The underlying precept behind such a proposal is, “That person may be irritating and crazy but he/she is Glocked and loaded. One wrong word from me and he/she may open fire. Maybe I should avoid an angry confrontation.” Honestly, though, the unvoiced wish for such looser laws is, “If I come home and find my mate in a homicidal rage and shooting at me, I want the legal freedom to draw my own piece and return fire.” I submit that, in practice, this has not been a viable solution for society or for marriages.

Fourth, as a dark horse candidate, we can look at what is sometimes called an open marriage, where you still have the legal marriage contract but it is now a marriage without the promise or expectation of “faithfulness” to one’s partner. This perennial solution pops up – usually in the more educated, more affluent elements of societies – as a proposed alternative but it has never caught on with the masses.

Why not? It certainly seems like a viable solution. It would satisfy the wanderlust in those married individuals whose present partner fails to satisfy Prince or Princess Charming. Yet this alternative would also seem to meet the responsibilities to the other mate and children and long-term debt.

This seemingly ideal solution has never been accepted, however. The objections of the mother-in-law – AKA as the Wicked Witch of the West – are loud and immediate. Remember the traditional wedding advice given by traditional mothers to traditional daughters on their traditional wedding day, “Traditionally, after you have a baby, your husband cannot abandon you.” The bride’s beaming mother is certain to vigorously resist any alteration of the marriage contract which would weaken the ability of MIL’s child to inflict financial and emotional pain.

Another significant obstacle to acceptance of such open marriages is the automatic disapproval by the tribe of anything unconventional – although part of that disapproval undoubtedly comes from, “They look like they’re having more fun than me.” Finally, don’t forget the various religious and ethnic groups whose collective mores prohibit such open marriages, i.e., having too much fun without an accompanying painful consequence.

Added to the M-I-L group, and various social and legal misgivings, may be a spouse who, over time, has become an adversarial contrarian – “If you want it, I oppose it.”  Sorry, but this solution to the lack of marital bliss is unlikely to ever become widely accepted by large numbers of people.

Okay, if divorce is an unpleasant, expensive, and ineffective solution but staying together, albeit unhappily, also doesn’t work well, what can be done that will bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people?

Is there a viable, practical, and mutually satisfactory solution that could be adopted by large numbers of people across all ethnic, religious, economic, and political lines? I believe that there is… but you will have to wait for Part 3 to see what I am proposing.