Women Chasing Their Bliss

For those of us who are wondering why men and women cannot get along any more, Australian columnist Jana Hocking has the answer. To her mind, we have advanced civilizationally to the point where traditional relationships are dead. 

Hocking thrills to the notion of non-traditional relationships, without noting that the Western world has always offered people other than marital relationships. 

What she means, because she does not quite dare to say what she means, is that traditional marriage has been sundered by the feminist revolution. She does not quite say it, but she ought to have said it, but women no longer want to be wives. They find the role constricting. They prefer to follow, even to chase after their bliss. 

In Hocking’s stories women cheat on their husbands and partners with impunity. They even have agreements that allow them to cheat ethically, whatever that means. They exchange partners, toss off old partners, embrace new arrangements without a second thought about the consequences, for children, no less.

Given that broken and especially fatherless homes are a significant causal factor in childhood mental illness, she ought to have been slightly more circumspect about running after her bliss.

Dare I mention, in Hocking’s world, women’s experiments in bliss chasing always work out well. 

In any event, Hocking declares that traditional relationships are dead. 

Controversial opinion: There is not one single couple in this entire world who is in a “normal” relationship.

Seriously, take a good look at your friendship groups. Sure, John and Sarah seem pretty normal, but dig a little deeper and they’ve had their own fair share of drama or kinky interests.

After I wrote about the surge in singletons asking for ethical non-monogamous (ENM) relationships on dating apps these days, my DMs were inundated with “normal”-looking people telling me about their own experiences being in ethically non-monogamous relationships. We’re talking teachers, doctors, builders …

Let’s define some of our terms here. In the first place the singletons who are looking for permission to cheat-- and who call it ethical-- are not looking for commitment. They might, after a time, if they are women, start complaining about the absence of commitment in their lives, but such is life.

Dare I mention, yet again, that Hocking has no interest whatever in what these types of relationships produce in terms of social disharmony and family chaos.

As for the obvious point, the institution of marriage has always been rather flexible. Adultery has been common practice in Western civilization, and even in some others. Women who did not want the burdens of being wives, always had the option of being mistresses, courtesans, concubines and tarts. 

Since most marriages from the beginning of recorded time have been arranged, it should not surprise us that the marital estate also left room for adultery. You might say that adultery was the province of males, but, truth be told, women had their own ways of cheating with impunity.

During the Middle Ages, at the time of the Crusades, European wives who had been abandoned when their husbands rode off to the Holy Land developed something called courtly love, a systematic ritualized seduction of younger boys by older women. After all, women were in charge if their manors when their husbands went off on the crusades, and the only males who were still around were boys-- chimney sweeps, gardeners, game keepers, cooks and stable boys.

So these women pronounced these boys to be troubadours and created a form of seduction which, in truth, became the basis for courtship leading to marriage. In principle, and according to the relevant texts, these seductions were never consummated, but only the most naive believe that the troubadours were telling the whole truth about their practices.

As you probably know, before the Protestant Reformation, courtship did not lead to marriage. It produced adultery. And yet, when Luther and his followers were excommunicated from the Church and from society, they wanted to marry. Since they had no property, no power, no social standing, they found the default position, and married for love. Love marriage is an invention that we owe to Protestantism. Roman Catholic countries have always been far more lenient about adultery.

In truth, this modified marital institution was practiced by the Puritans who came to settle the place we now call the United States. Puritans were opposed to adultery because they wanted marriage to be based on love, not on an arrangement.

Better yet, love marriage favored women because it ultimately gave them a free choice of a spouse. Before the Reformation and the Puritan revolution, such a free choice was largely not allowed.

And yet, in all these circumstances, marriage as an institution was defended as the foundation of social order. Divorce was either forbidden or discouraged. Nowadays women no longer care about social order or stability. They no longer seem to care about the circumstances in which they are raising their children. 

As you no doubt know, among the most important factors in a child’s good mental health is the participation in family dinners. If there are no families, there can be no family dinners.

Women now do what they want when they want with whom they want, and damn the consequences. If they had given the matter any thought at all, they would have recognized that the practice ignoring commitments and vows and traditional defined roles also applies to men. 

Besides, women who do not want to be wives, and who are asserting same with their behavior, will probably have more difficulty becoming wives. Duh.

And the result of women chasing after their bliss has been a raft of divorced women with children, women who never learned that you cannot be hot forever. Female hotness is an asset, but it is a diminishing asset. Even with Botox and all manner of cosmetic enhancements, they are not really fooling anyone, except perhaps themselves.