Marriage and Promiscuity

Let me directly cut to the chase. It’s been a question which is constantly pestering me from many days. It’s a simple question, “What is the relation between marriage, love, cheating and promiscuity”. The blog though does not answer this question, as it is difficult to find any answer but the effort is to search for one.

Marriage: Have you ever wondered why one should get married? Well apart from a study which said Cancer survival rates are higher if you are married. Why should one get married? Okay, that’s an entirely unrelated question for this blog.

But really, many of us get married without even knowing what marriage is. I mean what are the rules and regulations one should follow after getting married? What is an acceptable behavior and what is unacceptable? Is there a rulebook or some sort of thing?

From an evolutionary perspective, human offspring require significant effort and time to ensure that the offspring can survive on it’s own. This could have led to early human ancestors to form some kind of agreement where both of them devote time and effort for the offspring. Any form of sexual activity means within this period means sharing of time and resources thus reducing the survival rate of the offspring.

This might have made promiscuity an unacceptable behaviour. Promiscuity means that the male has to compete with other male species for continuation of its genes. The female wants the offspring to be stringer so that they have better survival rate. This combined with promiscuity means that only a smaller portion of males being able to transfer their genes to offsprings. As a result there will be lesser genetic diversity being more prone to diseases.

This makes sense why we still consider promiscuity and unacceptable behavior. But should cheating be considered unacceptable behavior in the current scenario?

PS: Here we are looking at marriage between any two consenting adults and is not restricted to marriage between a man and a woman.

Love: Even though much of the argument which applies to marriage applies here, love is different from marriage. Unlike marriage there is no obligation/commitment to raise on offspring. If love is some “divine connection between souls always praying for the happiness of the other”, where did the concept of cheating come in between. If being sexually active with multiple partners is cheating, then isn’t this love less inclined towards divine soul and more focused on one’s body. I mean a person can be in divine love with you and sexually active with someone else, unless, love has got something to do with sexual freedom. To put it bluntly, if love is finding happiness in the other partner’s happiness then, why am i concerned with what the other person does with their body?

Sex Workers and Promiscuity: Even though it seems that sex workers show promiscuous behavior, the definition might have to be relooked. They are involved in many transient sexual relationships, it’s more of a professional choice than personal. The profession requires them to be in many transient sexual relationships, it might have been a personal choice too. If we consider this as any other profession the societal outlook towards them can be changed eventually considering them also as normal human beings.