Wed 20 Jan 2010 |
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 News that scientists have discovered a gene that is known to treble your odds of living to 100 and may help you to ward off Alzheimer’s merely adds weight to a wealth of research that states that women especially have a high chance of living until they are well over 100 years old. While this is great news, as you can imagine, it does throw into the limelight a few pointed questions. Much of what we consider to be socially acceptable and many of our social institutions, such as that of marriage, have been formed by our standard of living and life expectancy. Child brides were the norm once, when people expected to be dead by 50. “Lifelong commitment vows” and staying with the same person all your life was perfectly feasible when that stretch never seemed to exceed thirty years. The 21st century (and the 20th before it) brought about many changes regarding occupation, making it perfectly acceptable to drift in and out of decade-long careers and change professions during different stages of one’s life. It also has brought an increasing upward trend is relationship breakups. The suggestion (and it is only a suggestion at this stage) is that maybe we are not really designed to be with the same partner for that long in our lives and maybe two-three, long-term partners in one person’s lifetime is the way to go. What works in our working life possibly could also work in our love life with variety and enrichment providing the stepping stone which leads to better and stronger relationships until we find the one we finally want to stick with till ‘the end’. I know I am possibly stirring an hornet’s nest here with all this but if you look at statistics you have to draw some conclusions and the numbers themselves, in every society, paint a picture decidedly different from the rosy ‘lifelong partner’, ‘till death do us apart’ one which is popularly sold to us by movies, Mills & Boon stories and magazines. Does that suddenly mean it is ok to have open relationships, multiple partners or serial affairs? If we stipulate that this has always gone on (and it has) making it suddenly ‘ok’ is not going to help it increase or decrease in incidence. Finding the right partner for you and staying with them for the rest of your life is still possible, just like it is still possible in our fast-paced, always-changing world to find a job you like doing it and stick with it until you die. Life (and love) is always what you make it. If you accept it as a social norm then the normative thing to do is to move on from partner to partner after some time until you find what you want. You respond to a lengthier active life with more variety and more experience. If you accept that what you really need is to grow up and mature yourself then there is real value in using experience to temper instinct and make choices which are as intellectual as they are emotional. The point is that it really comes down to the individual. We are handed, by technology and medicine, longer, healthier, more active lives. What we do with them now is up to us.
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I agree with the suggestion, more and more the idea of spending the best years of your life with only one person (partner) gives us the shivers. We put our signature to a contract that says "until death gets you apart" or something like that. We used to be ok with the idea of a simple life, you live, you die, you go to heaven... but nowadays we think, what if "this is it"?, I am loosing the chance to meet other great people? to share my life with more than one lover? Are we opening our eyes to a new reality? or are we just getting less patience and more selfish?. Do we trade jobs because we want more or we can´t get enough? Do we change partners because we can not commit anymore?... Are rules changing? or we just got sick of them?
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January 21, 2010
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