A double disadvantage

Friday night, we went with a few couples from our ward to do sealings. The sealer (who is also our home teacher and a man for whom I have tremendous intellectual respect) emphasized the fact that each spouse "gives" him- or herself to the other, who elects to "receive" the giver. This underscored to me that my wife and I haven't fully given ourselves to each other. We're always at least a toe--sometimes a few limbs--outside of the marriage. (More about Me And The Temple in a future post.)

Tonight, we had a multi-family FHE with a couple of neighbor families. It wasn't really FHE, although it was more of an FHE than I manage to pull together under our roof most of the time. It was mostly the kids playing kick the can and the adults engaging in freeform conversation around a fire. So we'll call it a Fireside and check it off of some list that I'm sure is somewhere.

One of these couples--also in our session Friday--is extremely frank about their past and ongoing challenges. Not in a shock-value/one-upmanship way, but just because that's how they are. Off-the-charts brainiacs, great kids, Straight & Narrow, turbulent marriage. The conversation went meta, turning to the question of whether any of us could identify a "truly ideal" (loaded, I know...I'm just reporting the news) relationship among any couples that we know well -- old, young, related, unrelated, living, dead, etc., anything was fair game. The group came up with TWO.

(One nice thing about spending time with other couples is that the more my wife gets to peek behind the veneer of relationships that she once idealized, the less she expects out of ours. OK, that's the couch potato way to put it. What I mean is, "The, uh, more she realizes that each couple will have its own share of challenges, sadness, disappointments, etc.")

In conjecturing reasons for such a short list, a consensus emerged that the husbands tend to be more jerkish than do the wives. I tend to agree. At first, I wondered whether the man's --in general-- physical and financial advantages create and maintain in her fears, respectively, of pain and poverty that allow him to be cavalier and callous, or worse.

And then I wondered whether it has more to do with the Natural Man's --again, in general-- innate incompatibility with monogamy (notwithstanding C.S. Lewis's articulate defense of it as being in fact very natural...I can't find the quote, but he asserts, in part, that the yearning of one for the one other is the soil from which our race's entire body of romantic poetry and song sprang forth), a struggle that can breed frustration, bitterness and resentment, all of which he projects on and embodies in her, the woman to whom he swore monogamy --at least mortal monogamy-- in front of God, angels and witnesses, and he's now second guessing, as he does from time to time, what he got himself into.

Speaking of C.S. Lewis: “A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women. Women, whatever a few male songs and satires may say to the contrary, are more naturally monogamous than men; it is a biological necessity. Where promiscuity prevails, they will therefore always be more often the victims than the culprits. Also, domestic happiness is more necessary to them than to us. And the quality by which they most easily hold a man, their beauty, decreases every year after they have come to maturity, but this does not happen to those qualities of personality —women don’t really care twopence about our looks— by which we hold women. Thus in the ruthless war of promiscuity women are at a double disadvantage. They play for higher stakes and are also more likely to lose. I have no sympathy with moralists who frown at the increasing crudity of female provocativeness. These signs of desperate competition fill me with pity.” (from God in the Dock)