Snipped from AlterNet.org.

If you look at yourself and your life, if you’re married, would you say that marriage “seems” to be a natural thing or something imposed on you by our cultural norms? Perhaps in our current society the rules of the game have changed from our ancestors whose biggest priorities of the day were finding food and shelter. We now have a society in which food is as close as the nearest 7-Eleven and shelter is abundantly available. So where does that leave man when it comes to the reasons for pairing up and even more importantly, staying together?

From the Pew Research Center and the National Survey of Families and Households, they reveal that couples become bored and unhappy sooner than was previously thought. It’s more like three years into their pairing than seven. Remember that seven year itch? Well, it seems we are scratching sooner. Some relationship experts say that this is when your genes are saying, in effect, that no child has been produced, so it’s time to move on.

Biologists speculate that the pair-bond is a “hyperpowered program” that has been streamlined through millions of years of evolution for the sole purpose of producing offspring. So there are those who say this “pairing” is programmed into us and we unite and live happily ever after. But there are others who say that since offspring was the target, for the male this meant finding a fertile female who could deliver and raise it. And, for the female, it meant finding a male who could provide the strong sperm and an ample nest. These did not have to be mutually inclusive activities. The male had plenty of sperm to go around and the females had plenty of sperm to pick from. So are we programmed to stay together or not?

Maybe we inherited the desire for both, thus our tormented species and high divorce rates. Perhaps what we have today is a sort of mass societal imprint that leaves us knowing we “should” stay together but not really wanting to.

Here is a portion of the article that explores the concept of societal pressure regarding monogamy.

Guggenheim Foundation fellow Laura Kipnis, who in Against Love: A Polemic (Pantheon, 2003) argues fiercely but with a sardonic smile that love — not even monogamy or domesticity, but love — is not an evolutionary legacy but “a new form of mass conscription,” a lockstep drill like organized religion, performed under “marching orders” from nefarious overlord forces that don’t want us to notice our “flagging ardor,” which is the lot of the committed. Kipnis rages against “domestic gulags,” against “the straitjacketed roles that such familiarity predicates … the boredom and the rigidities which aren’t about to be transcended in this or any other lifetime.” Invoking Karl Marx, she compares love to a factory, calling them both “social institutions … [that] come to subsume and dominate” their victims “like a hostile alien force.”

If you would like to read the full article click the image below.