Till death do us part?

Apr 11, 2010 Features / Columnists, My Column

By Adam Harris

One of the most remarkable things about the human being is how they select their mates. Given the number of attractive people and the number of ugly people one would expect that all the attractive people would gravitate to each other. The ugly people should then have only their own to select from.
This would therefore ensure a progressive succession of very attractive people and ugly ones. And here I am talking about the physical appearances because in reality while some people are, as a friend once said to me, ‘drop dead handsome or drop dead gorgeous’ others are not as facially attractive.
By no stretch of imagination would I consider myself to have the visage that would knock a woman dead unless she dies from fright. But strange as this may seem, people do not only look for the fairest of the lot. There are a host of other attributes that would make the perfect mate.
Some people are attracted to popularity, some to the way people speak and some to just the way some people carry themselves. Those who form alliances with the latter more often than not go their separate ways, very disappointed.
It may be for this reason that parents say to their children, “Wait. The right person will come along.” But young people, being what they are, always feel that they know more than their parents, that their parents are old fashioned. They therefore make decisions that they sometimes regret. Of course, their parents were the same.
Way back when, I recall that boys would see girls. If they happen to be in crowds they would discuss among themselves, the attributes of the young woman. They would then attempt to identify their mate from among the crowd.
What follows always make me smile. The young man sidles up to his choice and attempts to start a conversation. If he manages to grab her attention a conversation begins. But more often than not the woman puts on a face and appears to want to go about her business, uninterrupted.
The man would pursue, sometimes after he manages to secure a contact number and a relationship may develop. A few decades ago, men were required to ‘write home’. That was simply a case of a man penning a missive to the girl’s mother—why not the father is not clear—seeking permission to visit the home.
This is the first step to being permitted to talk to the individual without someone running around to the parents to report that their daughter is talking to a strange man on the streets. More often than not, things graduate to the stage where the couple become engaged. Sometimes, marriage follows.
I went through the process except for the engagement. By then I suppose, society had changed and the rigid laws were not in place. In my time, though, the women were not chaperoned. They could pretty much go and come as they pleased, provided they reach home at a certain time. Mothers were the ones who, like hawks, wanted their daughter to have the best.
It is nice to hear some women talk about no sex before marriage, that they are keeping their virginity for their husband. That is a very noble concept. I am not certain how many women actually went to their wedding bed virgins, but I do know that there was less promiscuity. Some who did ended up divorced because of poor performance in bed. They were they the shy ones, even after marriage.
Some old people once told me that their husbands never saw them naked. Tell that to some men today.
The ordinary people simply wanted to get married so more often than not, the woman did her best to please, right down to going to bed before marriage with the hope that her sacrifice was enough. Of course, they were also responding to raging hormones, but pleasing the man thing was an excuse. The result is often a baby. Children being born out of wedlock is almost the norm these days. The society no longer frowns on it.
However, there was a time when women, if they were teachers, or soldiers, or in the public service, had to quit their jobs in disgrace. The children were bastards, a very derogatory term, but coined by society. I was one but Forbes Burnham made my birth right. He got rid of the term so that today no one cares whether his or her parents are married.
There are many professional women, all of them over seventy, who were so principled that to this day they are either virgins or heading to the grave as unwedded women. These women were serious when it came to selecting their mate, so serious that no man fitted the bill.
Last Sunday, Mrs Sybil Wiltshire, by way of a tribute to an old friend, recalled that the woman had such high standards that she demanded the very best in men. “She failed to realize that such men no longer existed. They either had to be made or were just not born.”
Whatever the case, people are attracted to people. Men always boast how they caught the woman. And this is one of the attributes of the woman. She manipulates the man and he believes that he is the person in charge. She sits and smiles when she has him firmly hooked.
Men have never realized that it is the woman who fixes the wedding date. Today, though, it is a different kettle of fish. There may still be some of the old fashioned dating but from my perspective, money and other worldly possessions dictate the relationship. The man with the most bling is the one most likely to get the woman. It matters not that his head is as empty as space.
Small wonder that fewer people get married these days. Stable relationships may be things of the past.