Amba wrote a nice response to my post about my parents’ divorce, in which she reflects on what her own marriage means:

Jacques and I don’t have kids, but the longer we have stayed together, the more I’ve had this weird sense of responsibility to keep on staying together for the sake of the other people in our lives who somehow count on us as a unit, a phenomenon. Friends we’ve been out of touch with for a few years have sighed with wonder and peace to find that we’re still together. A lasting relationship between two people becomes like a feature of the landscape in the lives of their friends and family. Starting out as a promising sapling, it thickens like a tree, becoming ever more solid and stout and trustworthy. People can rest in its shade. Eventually, it comes to seem as permanent and mythic as a local mountain’s silhouette against the sky. At times when the going got rough and I’ve fantasized about some other direction for “my life,” I’ve realized that my life is not only my own any more. The need would have to be imperative for me to destroy what has become a landmark for others.

Yeah, that was the idea I was getting at. And, given their reaction to the divorce, a lot of my parents’ friends felt the same way. It’s another thing that I didn’t understand at the time that I do now.

It also reminds me of an article Jennifer emailed me a couple weeks ago, in which Frederica Mathewes-Green argues that the natural purpose of sex is reproduction. Despite the fact that I argued the same thing on this blog recently, I actually disagreed with a lot of it. Some of her claims about animal behavior are off (chimps, for instance, do mate at times other than estrus). And she can’t seem to think of a survival advantage for lifelong marriage, so she claims its real value is in overcoming our existential loneliness.

That may be true enough in our society, but it seems like an uncharacteristically modern (for Frederica) way of looking at it. The real survival value of mating for life, it seems to me, is what amba described — that the marriage accrues an entire network of relationships around it. This would have been even more true in societies where the only real social structures were kin-based. Every marriage creates not just one relationships but a multitude of in-laws, meetings of his friends and her friends, and sometimes half- and step-siblings. If the couple divorces and marries others, all the relationships change. So even if the divorce doesn’t do anything to that particular couple’s kids, one can see how it would affect the continuation of the community and therefore the species.

Of course, animals don’t have to mate for life to form successful social groups. But it does seem to matter to human beings, maybe because every human relationship is unique. Animals like sheep seem to care about little beyond whether you’re in the herd or out of the herd, but people have fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, first cousins, second cousins, first cousins once removed, best friends, drinking buddies, mentors, and so on and so forth. We know them all, and remember our history with all of them. Like a snowflake, every little community crystallizes in its own particular way. And that, more than any cosmic isolation, may be what really separates us from the beasts.