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Village life: Fidelity suits flock

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By Jan Worth-Nelson

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

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I was making the queen-sized bed and folding my husband's underwear when I heard a report on bird monogamy. I always keep National Public Radio on while I'm doing my household chores so as to be less bored.

It was a science journalist's favorite story of 2010. In the August issue of Nature, a quartet of British ornithologists reported on their study of effects of sexual behavior among 267 bird species.

They concluded, in part, "in cooperative species, helping is more common when promiscuity is low; and that intermediate levels of promiscuity favor kin discrimination. Overall, these results suggest that promiscuity is a unifying feature ... in explaining transitions to and from cooperative societies."

It seems that birds are more likely to stick together if they're 100 percent related to their kin. Or, in another way of putting it, if everybody knows their daddy. It seems that promiscuity, at least among birdies, weakens the development of complex and cooperative societies.

At the risk of overgeneralizing to humans whose propensity to philander seems as much in our genes as the good-hearted impulse to fold our husband's laundry, this study gave me pause.

My generation, notoriously, is brattily intolerant of marital misery. About 40 percent of my Baby Boom cohort had left our first marriages by our mid-40s. Eventually, we hit 50 percent.

We're not the only ones fleeing, of course. The overall divorce rate, while having slightly fallen over the last decades, is still somewhere around 3.7 percent per capita per year, leading to about a million divorces a year.

I am somewhat of an expert on monogamy. Well, I am a serial monogamist. I have been serially monogamous with many men. (Oh, calm down, it was the '70s). After a late adolescence during which my rambunctious serial monogamy sometimes meant one guy last week and another guy this week (but only one at a time), I have turned out to be a faithful wife.

I am on my second marriage, and part of a convoluted family tree of serial monogamists. My husband is on his third marriage.  My first husband also is on his third. His wife on her second. My husband's first wife is a widow from her second marriage. His second wife is on her second husband. Her husband is on his second. The children of all these marriages — I think I have the math right — add up to nine.

None of them, biologically speaking, is mine. My life often intersects with other women's children, bearing mixed results — perhaps supporting the bird study's implications that many partners lead to offspring dystopia.

And to be sure, the kids fight it out, angling, sometimes bloodily, for their place on the tribal power grid. The emergence of grown-up cooperation may be decades in the making, the damage from this Baby Boom proliferation of shifting partners already done.

But where does that leave the original mating pairs, especially a woman like me who mated without adding to any litter?

Well, after a tumultuous and mercurial conjugal life, I'm here to shout out — "Yay, monogamy!"  I hope my current monogamy is not serial. I hope it's my last monogamy.  But my reasons are not the same as the reasons of the birds. It has nothing to do with kids, shared daddies or consistent DNA.

The childlessness of my marriage, launched past our reproductive years, is one of the great advantages of our union. Some of our worst fights and biggest heartaches have had to do with various familial spawn. Anybody in any kind of blended family knows exactly what I mean.  But the fact is, none of the kids are minors. Many are well-launched. And though there are lifelong issues of the heart to contend with, we are responsible now mostly for only us.

And this time maybe we are getting it right.

I've sometimes asserted it took the travails of my first marriage to make the second one work. My husband often says, in his case, the third time's the charm.

Despite the absence of children in our nest I not only fold my husband's clothes but greet him gladly whenever he gets home. On these wintry nights I snuggle into our queen-sized bed with him gratefully and wake up glad to have his ursine body next to mine.

And now that I'm in my 60s, the decade with the lowest divorce rate, it's not so hard to understand an old woman's monogamous leanings. At my age I am lucky not to be alone. Women, after all, outlive their men these days by 5.3 years. And given my good fortune in that regard so far, I want to stay with the man I know. I don't want to have to explain myself from scratch. I don't want to talk about my childhood all over again — enough already with the tiresome psycho-history.

I opt for homemade rituals, the ease of our aging bodies together. I want the man who has seen me at my worst and who is still here to be the man I sleep with. I want to be a "we." I want to have familiar, rousing fights with established ground rules. I want somebody to be kind to, day by day. Without that familiar, daily tenderness, we would languish — I am sure we would fail to thrive.

So maybe the findings of the ornithologists do apply to me. Now that I'm securely and well paired, I am a much more cooperative person and much less likely to be a burden on the flock.

But it's also clear it doesn't take kids to keep a human couple together. In fact, it might be the opposite. In a lot of ways, our freedom to be birds of a feather is what secures our nest. As for variety being the spice of life, in this case, it's for the birds.

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Columnist and Poet Jan Worth-Nelson has lived within walking distance of East Village Magazine since 1981. Her 2006 Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, is widely available. You can find her essays, fiction and poetry on her web site, www.janworth.com and her blog, http://nightblindblog.blogspot.com/index.htm. She is the interim director of the Thompson Center for Learning and Teaching and teaches writing at UM-Flint.

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