“The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people—no mere father and mother—as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.”

—Pearl Buck

I grew up in a sea of aunts and uncles and cousins and grandmas and they were my playmates and baby-sitters and role models and disciplinarians and teachers.

Precocious as I was, I was always, as a young boy, running up to the tallest human around, book in hand, asking, “What's this word, Uncle Mike?”

Ever wondered why black people to this very day tend to refer to other blacks as “Cuz,” or to my “Auntee,” or “Uncle?”

In the pre Civil War South, when slave families were commonly torn apart by death and separation, black children were taught to address all of their elders in this manner, so that when/if Mom was sold off, the older adults present would feel some sort of kinship to the manufactured orphan, and adopt them into their family.

(To be fair, it wasn't much better for Southern whites at the time either, so they did he same thing. The average marriage lasted, you guessed it, seven years, and the odds of a child growing to adulthood with both his birth parents were abysmally low.)

But I digress, as I am wont to do.

As the economies of the West have morphed from agriculturally based through the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age, families have morphed from extended to nuclear to subatomic.

The safety net of economic security for the family is gravitating toward the state, and emotional security is largely just being ignored.

I decided that there was no more obvious case of a totally dysfunctional human institution than that of lifetime monogamous marriage.

Of course we don't really have that now, though we all pay lip service to it.

We Have To.

Everybody Else Does.

What we in fact have in our culture today is serial polygamy, multiple spouses in succession.

In this way, we can all pay homage to the whitened sepulcher of True Romantic Love.

This has horrific consequences for the welfare of the children of the marriage.

To summarize, since about the age of eighteen, I have not believed that our Western Judeo-Christian concepts of marriage and monogamy, as defined by having sex with only one partner your entire life, are conducive to either happiness, or mental health, or for the best interests of the offspring of the relationship.

So, I resolved that I would live my life ethically, but healthily, and ruled by my own notion of ethics, as opposed to the dictates of those ideas in our culture that are clearly at odds with human nature.

I've never since my early twenties, ever seriously dated a girl without discussing this at length. If they had a problem with it, well, oh well, not the girl for me.

Of course, as it turns out, this is much easier said than done.