@204. Bi. 'Baby farms...'. The couple get the baby 👶 on delivery 📦 if they request on their application.

Wouldn't you say that your relationships now are more nearly contract-governed than your marriage was?

So Bi, if what you say about sexual desire is generally true—and I’m inclined to agree—and given what men “need” in terms of sex, it makes you wonder why any red-blooded het male in his right mind would ever commit to marriage. Knowing that the odds heavily favor being sexually unsatisfied after a few years, even if you’re a caring partner.

And what about the women? I’ve got my own little self-involved hobbyhorse here that focuses on husbands, but there’s no way this is a good deal for wives either. If sexual desire is an expression of their joy, and sexual desire evaporates as a matter of course, that kind of says it all. Why commit to this broken arrangement? It's nuts. (Apparently I’m not the only one to wonder about this, because as I said before, marriage rates in the US seem to be plummeting.)

I’d say the middle-aged man is just tired of being in a sexually dead arrangement, and stepping out with the sexiest match he can land. Seems like a logical outcome of what we’re discussing.

@169 WA-HOOOOOO to Harriet bythe_Bulrushes for scoring this week's Double Whammy (@100 + @69 = @169)! Savor your highly envied riches!! and
@200; Equal WA-HOOOOOOs to BiDanFan for hitting the Double Hunsky Award and all its fabulous glory. It is indeed a proud moment when we reach three comment screens. Well done and bravo!

@212. Griz. Well, I didn't know I pulled that off. Maybe I've gotten sucked in too deep on this one :). But there is nothing like exercising your imagination.

@211. Late. I'm not sure there's any across-the-board sense that marriage serves the purposes of sexual gratification. It's a dynastic arrangement; it consolidates bonds between families; the couple is a unit of consumption, and, in terms of a characteristic division of responsibilities, facilitates childrearing. But historically and even now, did the most powerful in society ever suppose the husband would get his oats from their wife? This could be imposed in theory on the poor--for the sake of social cohesion.

If we are playing dystopia / utopia now, I'll repeat my plan. I think we should separate the idea of coparenting from the idea of romantic/sexual partnership. This is what happens by default about half the time anyway (people get knocked up by people they are not already in lifetime commitments with, or people break up after the children are born). Then what ends up happening is you are coparenting with an ex- often someone with whom you are in (or have been in) lots of material and emotional conflict.

Seems like it would be better to choose a coparent- through a process like dating I suppose, but explicitly for a coparent. The qualities that a good coparent would have for a particular person will be different than the qualities that that same person looks for in romantic/sexual partners. It seems far more practical to coparent with a very good friend. You reproduce with this person, you raise children together (perhaps in the same house, perhaps not) and each of you meanwhile pursue your own romantic and sexual relationships- which may be monogamous (serially or not) or may not be monogamous.

It's too much pressure to expect one other person to be a life partner, a coparent and a sexual partner, all for decades and decades- meeting all those needs. It's amazing it ever works at all. And Harriet is correct that it's a relatively new invention. In the past, these duties were divided up between family members and yes, it was the norm for men to have mistresses basically forever. These burdens were mostly on women though, so the question is how to build a different model without the misogyny or outdated patriarchy. To answer this question, Harriet seems to identify monogamy as the main culprit. I disagree- it works for many people, even if not most. And yes, there are people to manage to maintain sexually attraction to others for their entire lives. I think the problem is expecting your sexual/romantic partner (in whatever arrangement suits you) to also be the same person with whom you want to birth and raise children. These are two very different roles requiring different skills and different relationship qualities, etc.

Of course we are talking of utopias here. We'd have to assume we have other infrastructure in place (health care that is not attached to one person's job, public school and childcare, etc). But in a world like that, I'd say it would be best for people to be free to seek whatever romantic/sexual relationships they want and separately - if/when they choose to become parents- to seek a coparent with whom to raise children. Then the one relationship's needs do not have to conflict with the other. It also eases the burden for both people in the coparenting relationship. When you meet happily divorced and healthy coparenting couples you often see this- since the children are shared between two homes, each parent has more free time than a married couple that has the kids every day forever with no week off, etc.

Anyway, that's my only contribution to the above discussion.

Harriet @208: There's your answer: your "one marriage-like relationship" was a role play for you. You were being kinky by playing the role of "monogamous wife." The women we are talking about aren't playing a role. They ARE monogamous wives. They AREN'T going against their nature to pretend to be devoted one-man women; they ARE devoted one-man women. This is why you misunderstand the concept. Because you think it is something people can choose, can turn on and off at will. You are a tourist. You are exactly like a rich American who visits the Taj Majal on a group tour and leaves India completely oblivious of any poverty whatsoever in that country. You do not know what goes on in the mind of a naturally monogamous person, particularly a naturally monogamous woman. And because you've had this experience, you think you do. Do you now see how wrong you are? It would be like me asserting that I know all about what having a penis is like because I have used a strap-on.

Late @211: "given what men “need” in terms of sex, it makes you wonder why any red-blooded het male in his right mind would ever commit to marriage."
Love makes people do stupid things.
Also, if we are looking at statistics, married men are healthier and happier than single ones. Men do better out of marriage than women do; they get someone to do their housework and laundry, feed them and help with their life admin, while women get an increase in the amount of housework, laundry, cooking and life admin. It makes you wonder why -women- get married. Also, a trend is not a foregone conclusion! There are clearly plenty of couples who are happy both in bed and out long term. When you're in love, you think you will be one of those couples who beat the odds. Half of marriages end in divorce, but no one why says "I do" thinks at the time that they'll be one of them. Right? So looking purely at the sexual aspect, a man is in a relationship, he's getting regular good sex, the woman is keen to make this a permanent commitment, and this seems like a much better idea than stringing her along until she dumps him and then he's back to sporadic sex at best. Your married 50-year-old man is still way more likely to be getting regular sex than a single 50-year-old man.
And I don't think we're talking about "a few years"; the trend is a few decades, no? Although plenty of marriages do in fact fail at the five-year mark or less, for reasons that may or may not have anything to do with sex. You could just say how can anyone look at divorce rates and decide to get married?

So, yes. Why would men and women know that she'll likely lose interest and still get married? Because at the time they don't think either of them will lose interest. Oxytocin is a powerful drug. At the time, they both feel like they will be madly in love with each other, body and soul, for the rest of their lives, despite statistics. There is my answer. Is it illogical? Sure. Is it illogical for the starry-eyed lover to think their partner will never get fat or go bald? Yes. Is it illogical to think that their partner will never cheat, or get bored with them? Again, yes. Since sex results in children, we as a society have decided it's best for those children if we lock their parents into a relationship which will ensure they have two people, not one, looking after them. The institution of long-term marriage exists for the benefit of their offspring, not the married people themselves. And divorce is so complicated to punish people for not playing by the rules, for making a "til life do us part" gamble that doesn't pay off, and not wanting to lie in the bed they made for the rest of their lives.
I think you and I may be at similar levels of cynicism about the whole thing, the more I think out loud about it!

EmmaLiz @215, I don't really have a theory on an alternate way to organise society for the purpose of child raising, since I personally never wanted children anyway, and am only grateful that medicine and societal attitudes have made it possible for me to have sex without the consequence of children. So my view is "if you want to keep having [sex, sleep, hobbies, money], don't have kids," but I know that some people do want kids, and I'm afraid I don't have an answer for them.

@215. Emma. This was also my idea--but you said it more succinctly in your second sentence. I'm not sure that monogamy isn't central to the doubling of the sexual/coparenting relationship; the psychological mechanism would seem to me to be that the principal parent and homemaker is constrained--becomes disposed to compromise, rather than self-assertion--by virtue of how she is dependent on her spouse for romantic fulfilment.

@216. Bi. I don't think I did it as a roleplay at the time. It seemed to be a stage, even a resting-place I'd reached. My then-partner had a deeper need for it than me: a need to have a wife at home while fooling around on the side 'secretly' with men. I knew this early on. The irony--or irony on irony--was that he really wasn't attracted to women and I was.

To ciswomen, that is; there were transfeminine and GQ styles and persons he liked.