MEN

  
The corporate world dares to say to young men, knowing how much young men want to be men, that the only requirement for manhood is to become an alcoholic. That's disgusting. It's a tiny indication of the ammunition aimed at men who try to learn to talk or to feel.

-- Robert Bly, The Paris Review
                                 
                                Brent from Long Beach visiting Don in NYC
Let's say that there is only one thing we know about men: that they feel a tension between monogamy and promiscuity. Let's further say that the balance of that tension is different in different men, and that possibly the balance is inherited, and that it changes as the men age, sometimes from monogamy toward promiscuity and sometimes from promiscuity toward monogamy. If we accept as fact only this one thing about men, then any one marriage would be more or less likely to be unstable, while at the same time marriage as an institution would be a valuable social check upon the chaos of promiscuity.

One thing that seems to be evident from history is that marriage as a property relationship is more stable than marriage as a personal relationship. It is not until women emerge from property status that the tension between monogamy and promiscuity is really a problem. It is women with voices and a certain amount of power who force men to choose between possible types of relationships.

We can easily imagine a man having a mother, a housekeeper, a wife who has produced his legitimate children, a concubine, a sister, and even a female friend, all living under the same roof. The trouble is, we can't imagine him in America. In America, custom requires that the mother and sister live elsewhere and all of the others be rolled into one: the wife. Wives require it, too. When courtship was about joining properties, then it could be short. Now that marriage is about being everything to one another, courtship takes a long time and can break down at any point. It is difficult to find a mate who is equally good at every function, and it is also difficult to know yourself well enough to know which function you care about more than the others. And then, of course, as the marriage project moves through its stages -- householding, child rearing, professional success, aging -- the functions you once cared about change or evolve. The great lover who can't manage to get a dirty dish into the dishwasher becomes more annoying than exciting, the wonderful friend who is infertile is a figure of tragedy, the terrific mother who harps about responsibility comes to seem like a nag.

And the tension between monogamy and promiscuity remains, now transformed into a dilemma of character. The trouble with serial monogamy, which I define as being faithfully married to one person until you can't sand it anymore, and then being faithfully married to another person who fits the new standard better, is that each transition in the series comes as a personal defeat.

-- Jane Smiley, "Why Do We Marry?," Harper's Magazine

             Alan from Glasgow visiting Don in NYC