Afterword

This story is fiction, and was written purely for purposes of entertainment. But the fact is that there are hundreds of thousands of people in the US alone who want to be in a marriage kind of relationship, but are denied that opportunity because it violates custom, law, and religious judgment. There were issues raised in this fictional account that real people struggle with every day.

Often, people in a monogamous marriage feel like, “This is what I have to do,” and not “This is what I choose to do.” This isn’t knocking monogamy; not at all. It’s just the way some people feel. There are hundreds of millions of people who are completely happy being in a marriage between one man and one woman who love each other ... and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, who want something different.

As recently as 2006, the well-known relationship therapist Esther Perel observed that traditional monogamy is on the wane and perhaps increasingly untenable. “Many social norms don’t fit human nature,” she wrote. “For most of history, monogamy was one person for life. At this point, monogamy is one person at a time. The first freedom was that we could actually, finally have sex with other people before we are together in a legal sense. Now we want to have that freedom while we are together. The conversation about consensual non-monogamy today is the conversation about virginity sixty years ago, or the conversation about divorce twenty years before that.”

That divorce rate causes some people to think that marriage is going to entirely fade away. One comedienne does a bit about why a man would ever choose to marry a woman when by doing so he risks her leaving him and taking half of what he owns. She asks why a man would take a woman who already divorced one man, and might have a child. Now, if he marries her she’ll take even more if she leaves him.

Well, the reason why a man might do that is because he loves her. And there are perks to being married. There are tax perks. There are insurance perks. A legal spouse can make medical decisions for the other spouse. A legal spouse can decide where the other one is buried. If there is no marriage, then someone else will make all those decisions, based on blood relationship, and may have no idea what the deceased wanted.

So there are reasons to get married, and that brings us back to atypical relationships. America is finally beginning to come to grips with same sex marriage, though it isn’t over the hump, yet.

There is hope for those whose relationship doesn’t look like a Norman Rockwell pain’ting.

In February, 2020, the Utah legislature passed a so-called Bigamy Bill, decriminalizing the offense by downgrading it from a felony to a misdemeanor. In June, Somerville, Massachusetts, passed an ordinance allowing groups of three or more people who “consider themselves to be a family” to be recognized as domestic partners. A little later the neighboring town of Cambridge followed suit, passing a broader ordinance recognizing multi-partner relationships. The law has proceeded even more rapidly in recognizing that it is possible for a child to have more than two legal parents. In 2017, the Uniform Law Commission, an association that enables states to harmonize their laws, drafted a new Uniform Parentage Act, one provision of which facilitates multiple-parent (more than two) recognition. Versions of the provision have passed in California, Washington, Maine, Vermont, and Delaware, and it is under consideration in several other states. Courts in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana have also supported the idea of third parents.

And if two parents are better than one – which almost everybody agrees with – then why are three parents worse? We’re seeing a movement away from parenting being defined by DNA and toward its being defined by intention. Those who adopt are just as much parents (if not more so, sometimes) than the biological ones. Step-parents are the same. Foster parents can be the same.

Through it all runs the tradition of marriage. And it is a tradition. The problem is that, over the years, the tradition has changed. All one has to do is read the various religious texts to see that.

I’m not against religion. I think spirituality can add a lot to our lives, but it isn’t for everyone, and when “special” interest groups want to call the shots for everyone else, that’s when problems occur. In December of 2022, for example, the Indonesian government updated the old Dutch colonial statutes and, with the stroke of a pen, made it a crime to have sex outside of the “traditional” Indonesian values, meaning marriage. The problem was that millions of Indonesians didn’t have a marriage certificate to prove they were, in fact, married (in whatever tradition they had gotten hitched). Some of them involved plural marriages, too, which is also a no-no in that current cultural climate.