Healing in a Virtual Village – 3

 Childless Marriages

When I was in my late twenties, and still trying to pursue a career as a research biologist, I had a recurring distressing dream in which I had a young child or children under my care, and was trying unsuccessfully to rescue them from some peril. At the time I was single, had experienced several short-term intimate relationships with men that had ended badly, and had poor prospects for soon achieving the sort of career stability that would make raising a family possible. I had become severely depressed, and doubted my sanity.

That career ended dramatically with a nervous breakdown. I ended up marrying, switching to a less demanding and less intellectually satisfying line of work that paid the bills and afforded some stability, and giving birth to a daughter, now a beautiful and talented young adult. I have not had a “lost child” dream since she was born. I did become depressed when her father left me, but nothing so profound as what I experienced earlier. I consider myself a sane person.

This is not intended as a sermon against women who choose careers as opposed to childbearing, or even against a workplace and mindset which holds out to gifted and ambitious women the hope that they can have both, but creates conditions which force postponement of having a family until it is too late. Rather, it is an exploration of the proposition that the tension that is created when people, especially women, remain in the reproductive pool but continually postpone having any children, can severely undermine emotional health.

At this point, someone is likely to counter with the argument that societies where childbearing is a woman’s primary function are riddled with women whose emotional health is abysmal because they feel trapped in that role, and that furthermore those societies breed like rabbits, producing runaway population growth since modern medicine has removed disease mortality as a check on population. The ghost of Thomas Malthus may be invoked.

If you look at the historical record it is apparent that human populations have always been capable of rapid growth when conditions favored it, and also are capable of self-regulating. Populations moving into new territory or exploiting a new resource base have high birth rates. Stable societies whose population is close to what their environment can support have a wide array of mechanisms for preventing further rapid growth.

One of the commonest mechanisms, and the one which seems to have predominated in Medieval Europe, is non-reproductive adults. When people marry, they have large families, or attempt to. Infertility and an unusually high infant mortality rate are both regarded as great misfortunes. However, some of the children in a large family never marry. Traditional cultures have designated and accepted roles for such never-married individuals. They may be religious celibates, or participants in extended families, or homosexuals, among many possibilities.

There are two important differences between the traditional village environment and the present day with respect to decisions to have children. First, most people know whether they will pursue a reproductive or non-reproductive role before they reach adolescence, and the feedback they get reinforces this. Second, the people who are engaging in reproductive behavior, that is, normal heterosexual intercourse, expect to have children, and usually do, though not always at the maximum rate that nature allows. Our ancestors were not entirely ignorant of ways of reducing the likelihood of conception but were most likely to invoke them when they already had several children who had survived infancy.

Now, contrast my situation and that of women in America today. I was raised with the expectation that I would eventually have children, which coincided with instinctive biological urges. From the age of thirteen I was capable of having children and felt a powerful urge to form a relationship with the opposite sex. That was in 1961, when the culture still encouraged girls that young to avoid actual sexual intercourse, but by 18 going on the pill and climbing into bed with any man you were attracted to was becoming normative.

So, for seventeen years, what I was experiencing, repeatedly, was short-term barren marriages that ended with abandonment – either with my partner explicitly rejecting me, or with external conditions, not of my choice, that made a continuing relationship highly problematic. In virtually any village environment, a woman rejected by her husband because she was unable to bear children ended up an outcast. This is one of the reasons Jesus of Nazareth, in Mathew 19, condemns divorce.

Although it was much harder for me economically to be cast off by the father of my child, and certainly a bitter disappointment, I think it was psychologically more difficult to rebound from those failed relationships years before, and not just because I was too busy being a single parent to have time for depression. I think it was also because my instincts were telling me that the marriage, for all its flaws, had fulfilled its basic biological purpose.

Most people have a strong desire to have children. This follows from basic biology. A species that fails to reproduce itself, for whatever reason, quickly goes extinct. A population whose birth rate is below replacement value for an extended period of time will most probably be overwhelmed or absorbed by another population of the same species that has better reproductive success.

For optimum social functioning, that desire needs to be managed. For optimum emotional and psychological health, shifting the focus away from an obsession with physical satisfaction of (especially male) desire for sexual gratification, and towards a more integrated approach in which the human need for emotional and spiritual intimacy, the desire for children, and the desire for sexual gratification are seen as inextricably entwined and liable to produce misery if the balance between them, within a single individual, is constantly changing.

Photo Credit

Arthur Rostein, “Negroes, descendants of former slaves of the Pettway Plantation,Gees Bend, Alabama, 1937″:
History Matters (Public Domain)

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