WHY MEN DON’T WED THE WOMEN THEY BED

Men know it — women don’t get it. That’s because men think about it a lot more than they ever talk about it. They talk about it with other men a lot more than they talk about it with women. They learn very early that they will pay dearly if they ever even raise the subject with the female of the species. Hence, men dare not speak of it around women.

Interesting, this particular point was not raised in John T. Molloy’s excellent book, Why Men Marry Some Women and Not Others: the fascinating research that can land you the husband of your dreams, (Hachette Book Group USA, 2003). Perhaps that’s because it was written for a female audience, and as I’ve already said, it’s a subject men don’t raise with women unless they like being in the doghouse. He did approach it obliquely when he pointed out the conundrum of gentlemen preferring blonds but wedding virgins (or at least situational virgins).

Nobody wants to be tricked or forced into raising someone else’s child. We may choose to do so voluntarily, as in the case of adoption, foster care, or step children, but not, I repeat NOT by deception or force. And many prove none to happy about those supposedly voluntary cases. The injustice of state laws that make a non-father financially responsible for children born during a marriage, just screams out at you. That’s just indolent taxpayers, and lazy judges, reaching for a convenient scapegoat.

On any given day, talk shows and court TV illustrate the suffering of men yearning to know if that child is really theirs’. I witnessed the pain of two men whom I personally know, who learned years after the fact that their wives had children fathered by other men who then pawned them off on my friends to support and raise. British researchers report finding a 4% “paternity discrepancy” in western society. That’s about 200,000 fraudulent U.S. birth certificates every year in which the mother lies about who the father is. More than 30% of DNA tests in paternity cases come back negative.

Not even poor, dumb animals want to be tricked or forced into raising another animal’s offspring. Though it sometimes happens that way.

When a stallion takes over a heard he rapes the pregnant mares, inducing an abortion so that he can then introduce his own offspring. When a lion acquires a new pride he kills the kits so that his efforts will go into his own descendants. When a ewe loses a lamb she will care for another only if the shepherd fools her by tying the pelt of her young on an orphaned lamb.

The Cuckoo, Cuculidae, order Cuculiformes is a brood parasite and its victims are unwitting. It pushes the eggs from the nest of another, lays its egg there to be cared for by the victim foster parent, then goes on its merry way.

 When was there ever any doubt about who the mother was. There is the Biblical account of two women claiming the same baby, but the wisdom of King Solomon exposed the truth which both women already knew. There are occasional newspaper stories, or hollywood movies, of babies being mixed up in the hospital, but such occurrences are exceedingly rare.

An 1863 issue of the New York Times gives us a hint of just how seriously women would take it if, like men, there was a real world possibility that they were not really the mother of that baby they’re raising. An Irish immigrant woman held the old country belief in ferries. It was reported to her that ferries had been seen around her New York City home, thus introducing the possibility that her three year was actually a ferry, and not her own offspring. The old world test was to heat up a shovel and sit the baby on it. If the baby were a ferry, so it was said, it would fly away rather than subject itself to such a painful procedure. In the reported case the baby died of the severe burns.

The closest woman come to such an experience doesn’t even involve the betrayal of deception, and yet we find many full of emotion and anger. More than a few stepmothers are mad about their husband’s child support payments. The rage is worse yet for those actually raising step children. The stories of Sleeping Beauty, Hansel und Gretel, and Cinderella weren’t dreamed up out of thin air, but have a basis on common human experience. Lest you think the phenomenon a thing of the past, try a few minutes of the Doctor Laura or Dr. Phil shows for an earful of vented spleen on the subject by resentful step-mothers.

The issue is long standing and deep rooted, so that various societies have devised customs for dealing with it, or resorted to humor (many a truth is spoken in jest), e.g.,

Eunuchs were used as harem guards.

In several sects of Judaism, being Jewish is based on the mother’s linage because patriarchal genealogy is deemed too unreliable.

In some tribal societies, female circumcision (the removal of the clitoris and the labia minora) is practiced as an initiation rite to provide brides that will remain faithful.

Adultery is a capital offense in the old testament. Assaulting or even killing your wife’s lover has in practice rarely ever been a capital offense in western society.

“He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath.” — King Lear, Act III, scene 6, lines 19-21, by William Shakespear

A long running joke in Samoa has it that, “She doesn’t know who the father is because there was no moon that night.

An English joke tells of a noble who had three sons. Two were strong, vibrant, two fisted men, while the other was a complete wimp. On his death bed the noble asked if the wimp were really his son. His wife’s reply: “Yes dear, but the other two aren’t.”

In Braveheart, a movie based loosely on the life of William Wallace, the writers have it that the princess whispers to the bed ridden king that the child she is carrying is not his biological descendant but rather the product of an illicit affair she has had with his arch enemy Wallace as played by Mel Gibson. As the scene concludes the king has become so apoplectic that it ends his life.

French courts recently ruled that a man may sue his wife’s lover for the money he expended on child support.

In Latin America today, the most common form of plastic surgery is restoration of the hymen. “She’s a virgin, it’s a miracle!”

Pre-nuptial living together is sometimes justified by the argument that it increases the likelihood of a long-successful marriage by determining sexual comparability. Statistics now prove that such marriages are the least successful, with the highest divorce rate.

While the women’s liberation movement has pretty successfully ended it, there was once a double standard for men and women. Men sewed their wild oats and had bachelor parties while brides wore white to denote their virginity, chastity, and purity. There always was that old saw — why buy a cow when the milks free? The higher the ratings for television’s “Sluts in the City,” and the more it was emulated around the country, the fewer marriages there were.

Marrying a woman of high moral standards is the only assurance that the children a man puts all his resources, time, money, energy, and love into raising will actually be his own.

Tags: he's just not that into you, John T. Molloy, marriage, significant other, situational virgin, sluts in the city