Contract Marriage Intro

And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

Genesis 2:22-25  

The following is a work of fiction. But not merely fiction. Indeed, it is much more than fiction.

In our age, the institution of marriage is under attack from all sides. So much so that most people, even most Christians, have no idea what marriage is. Surrounding the issue of marriage are the issues of sexuality in general. Sodomy, transgenderism, adultery, fornication, divorce, delayed and denied marriage, birth control… all of these are attacks on the meaning and importance of marriage.

Marriage is a fundamental institution created by God. Its destruction or even diminution will lead to the destruction of our society.

For most of history, marriage was understood to involve mutual obligations to the extent that the word ‘contract’ would not be out of place. These obligations, historically and naturally, were dramatically different between the man and the woman.

The woman agrees to be sexually faithful to the man so that any children she bears he will recognise as his own and feel responsibility toward. She places herself under his authority, which, historically, ranged wildly… and at times included his right to physically discipline her, his right to own her property, and, above all, his right to her exclusive sexuality… both in the positive and negative sense.

The man, on the other hand, was agreeing to provide for and protect his wife and the children she would bear from the relationship. His commitment to sexual exclusivity was typically less, but his physical commitment was typically more… involving both more arduous and dangerous work, but also a commitment to protect their lives with his own.

Our modern American society, on the other hand, has elevated the ideas of ‘consent’ and ‘friendship’ and ‘courtship’ to the highest pinnacle of sexual evaluation. Everything is permitted if it is ‘by mutual consent’; nothing is insisted on because it was committed to. A woman being told to have sex with her husband even when she doesn’t feel like it is, we are told, actually an argument for the husband to rape his wife.

We are told that marriage  (or any other sexual relationship) cannot last, indeed should not last, where one or the other party has grown bored, grown apart, or is dissatisfied.

And more and more, we are told that marriage is an ‘equal’ relationship… a statement which violates both historical understanding and natural facts.

Let us take an example of this contradiction. A study was held on a college campus where [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight/201009/how-college-students-respond-being-propositioned-sex] a cute woman walked up to a variety of men and asked if they would have sex with her. Seventy-five per cent of them said yes. The study was reversed… and not one woman said yes.

A similar study was done where various men and women were asked if they had friends of the opposite sex. They were then asked if they would consider a sexual/romantic relationship with those opposite-sex friends… and if those opposite-sex friends desire a sexual/romantic relationship with them. Again, the results were dramatically unequal. A very large percentage of the ‘just friends’ males desired a sexual/romantic relationship and perceived the female as feeling the same way. A very small percentage of the ‘just friends’ females desired a sexual/romantic relationship and perceived the male as feeling the same!

]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/men-and-women-cant-be-just-friends/

https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/files/2015/09/just_friends_2000.pdf]

Similarly, women historically have sought out men who are more intelligent than they are, better educated than they are, make more money, are stronger… or some combination of these. Women, in other words, are designed to try to ‘marry up’ and men to ‘marry down’. In our day,  while that instinct is still there, it has become socially illegal to talk about it. In either direction, really. The woman can’t sit around with her girlfriends saying, “I’m looking for a six foot two man who makes a hundred thousand dollars a year, although I’ll settle for a man who has his doctorate”. Still less can a man write an advertisement for a wife, “Must make less than sixty thousand dollars a year…”

In this story, I try to look at these principles and how they might, in a dystopian world, play out. Given that there are different principles, and given that I wish to bring certain contrasts to the fore, I basically only provide two futures.

But I propose neither of them in totality, indeed one I reject root and branch. (I might keep a few leaves.) Both of them are there as a foil, a backdrop, a playing field upon which the issues of this book are to be revealed.

This book uses ‘foreign’ language (made-up words) to describe several relationships and groups of people. Some of this language is intentionally foreign in order to distance the reader from their ‘normal’ meaning of the word. Some are there to provide a ‘foreign’ aspect to the book and remind readers that they are on another planet. And some are there because I like fooling around with languages.

Several times in Scripture, we are called to learn from the way pagans behave. In some cases, it is even literally pointed out in the form of ‘even these pagans…’. At other times, we merely see a pagan acting in a way that should shame us.

And many times, we have a pagan who is living his life in an incredibly unGodly way… except in one area. So we see Abimelech, who could easily have killed Abraham to take his wife, still reacting in shock at the idea that he had slept with a married woman! Or Herod, willing to commit murder in order to fulfil his oath.

This book includes no religion. This is quite intentional. It is not being done because religion is unimportant or because I don’t think that there will be religion in any future society. It is, and I do.

Nor do I think that religion is irrelevant to the issues in the story. It is fantastically relevant. Indeed, that is the problem. If I put religion in the story, then we would need to focus on the truth of the religion and its relationship to the issues.

What this book intends to do is the reverse: focus on the issues and then ask the reader to look back at the truth God proclaims in His Word and see how they relate. What has God said? How should we then live?

Warning: This book is about sexual relations. It is not graphic, but that is literally the theme of the book, so those issues are present in implication and deed. You were warned.

Links

Contract Marriage Chapters, Newest to Oldest

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I would like to give credit for the genesis of many of these ideas to the Liaden series by Mr. and Mrs. Steve Miller, which is available for free on the web. They do a great deal of cultural exploration, although they rather dramatically skip the moral exploration. (And their math doesn’t work.)

Other concepts were taken, in one form and another, from the book Freehold by Michael A Williamson.