Chapter 1
Even Swans Aren't Swans

Whoever sold us on the concept that we are supposed to be in love forever and to the one person has clearly never heard of what swans get up to at night. This romanticised and perfect version of who we are supposed to be when we are in a committed and monogamous relationship is a ridiculously hard ideal to live up to. Swans, as we know, look perfect from the perspective of the dry land. As we walk around a lake they seem to glide effortlessly across the surface of the water, in pairs - with their mate for life. What happens beneath the surface, however, is another story. They are paddling like crazy and have these ungainly webbed feet that belies the serene and gentle waltz that so enraptures us. Reality is, they work extremely hard to be that serene.

What of their love? When they have paddled themselves into a spot for the night and when observation leads you to think they have settled in for the night, according to scientific research, the female swan goes a-wandering to where the bachelors dwell and has her fill of the earthly delights of procreation from a variety of bachelor swans who are statistically speaking more than happy to oblige her. On return in the wee hours of the morning, she assumes the role, once more, of mate for life and the illusion of that perfect feathered love is left intact.

A study by an Evolutionary Ecology group at University of Melbourne (Australia) was conducted in relation to the mating habits of black swans at Lake Wendouree in Ballarat, Victoria. It revealed that mating occurred outside the black swan couple.

When considering extra-pair paternity (EPP) markers (for want of a better word) they found the rate to be 15% of offspring and in 37% of the broods and this was deemed to be higher than for other species such as geese.

The authors of this paper make it clear they “found no evidence to support (of) any of the hypotheses to explain EPP in the black swan” (pg. 1631). I like to think that nature allows the lie to stand to ensure the gene pool expands and enables the female to have the pick of the bevy of male swans: they exist for the female swan’s taking and the procreating.

My point is that mythologising and science diverge when it comes to this particular black swan population.

It is extremely hard for us to face the demise of an intimate relationship, not only due to what we personally invest in that relationship but perhaps because of society’s expectations of what love and marriage is or should be. We have candy coated love. We have embroidered marital love with metaphoric white silk and obscured it with tulle. We have set it up as an ideal as if it were endlessly obtainable.

MARRIAGE: MYTH OR MIRAGE

Weddings promulgate the myth that marriage is other worldly, divine and magical. We invest heavily in that day, monetarily and emotionally. We want to see our unions washed clean in the love of a couple setting out on the journey of marital bliss. Yet there are no modern guide books, no road maps, no wedding guests present who give us solace in the middle of the night when things go horribly awry. From the get-go, the myth and the reality of marriage are at odds with one another.

Society imbues marriage with all sorts of religious and emotive overlays. Since time immemorial, the institution of marriage has been invested with religious significance. Whilst secular marriage has evolved in countries around the world, usually by virtue of the state sanctioning marriage pursuant to the law, religions have attempted to hold market share by administering at wedding ceremonies. For less observant nations or mainstream religions in decline, weddings are one of the few occasions that families gather under a religious roof to mark that occasion.

For the modern day secular sophisticate, there is something incongruous about that desire to be wed before “man and in the eyes of god.” It may have more to do with tradition and continuity of what has been done in a given family than a deeply religious or fervent belief that only God can sanction a marriage. Even in our choice of who weds us, we return to that swan like concept of the perfect love. We return to the tradition of the church wedding.

We opt for all the traditional trimmings as well. The white dress, the flowers, the veil, the bridesmaids, the speeches, the cars, the wedding photographer/videographer (in this day and age of digital memory, wedding albums and video are still big business), the honeymoon. In other cultures, there is a harkening back to traditional wedding dress even when traditional dress in daily life may have all but disappeared.

Then we exchange vows and at the time we mean them – we are in earnest as we stand in front of family and friends. Whilst some couples may opt for modernising their vows, the core concepts remain the same.

“I, [name], take you [name], to be my [husband/wife], to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part.”

Th s most traditional of the wedding vows and whilst the concepts are laudable, do people simply say these words as a matter of form and not actually accept the contractual meaning or consequences of breaching such vows? Do they say them because: “That’s what you have to say if you get married.” Or do they truly embrace the contract, which is the essence of any marriage, and do they consider they are breaching a contract when their marriage founders?

There have been attempts to modernise the traditional wedding vows and to imbue them with a sense of the everyday of married life. Consider the following example, which is a version of the traditional vows and is tinged with the intimate and personal nature of the relationship. Notwithstanding this, the hallmarks of together, forever remain apparent.

“I [name], take you, [name], to be my [(optional: lawfully wedded) husband/wife], my constant friend, my faithful partner and my love from this day forward. In the presence of God, our family and friends, I offer you my solemn vow to be your faithful partner in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, and in joy as well as in sorrow. I promise to love you unconditionally, to support you in your goals, to honor and respect you, to laugh with you and cry with you, and to cherish you for as long as we both shall live.”

For many couples making these vows, they are said in earnest, there is little room for doubt or scepticism or statistics about the failure rate of marriages. They do not place conditions or riders on their utterances. They are embraced wholesale. The couple fervently intends to live up to the vows and the vows’ aspirations. What is of concern about the wedding ceremony is the undue emphasis and expense placed on one day in the life of the couple as opposed to the reality of married life thereafter. What many people spend on that one day in their life is completely disproportionate to the costs of daily living.

In that precious, swan-like moment of downy white gowns, gossamer veils, lily of the valley and baby’s breath, we forget about all the hard paddling we are going to have to do in our married lives, we forget about the bachelors lying in wait at the top of the lake and simply believe that our marriage will be one that defies he statistics and will be one that prevails. The reality is marriages fail. Not all marriages fail, it is true, but enough do. Our conditioning sets us up to expect marriages to prevail. Love against all odds is our internal love mantra.

Leaving aside notions of courtly love or Austen’s heroines’ expectations of fi ding love in a marriage, the concept of love and marriage going together like a horse and carriage is a comparatively new phenomenon. Modern love in marriage is predominantly a product of western affluence.

Whilst I am not partial to the phrase developed countries I will use it here to illustrate the point of how affluence has allowed the course of romantic love in marriage to blossom.

The twentieth century enabled a new era to develop in relation to marital relationships: the era of choice in a life partner, chosen by love as the criteria. The imperative to marry to consolidate wealth whereby the landed gentry married off a daughter to a burgeoning industrialist to prop up the family’s failing estates, or the concept of one neighbour marrying off their child to their neighbour to consolidate land holdings, started to dissipate. Whilst this is a gross generalisation, this was due in part to the emergence of the middle classes and an improvement, albeit at a slower rate, in the lives of the working classes. In the more rigid hierarchical societies, class and money were intertwined and the notion of someone marrying beneath them for love would have been frowned on by parents and family. The same strictures applied to inter racial marriages. The 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner explored and exposed the prejudices of both sets of parents when confronted by their adult children’s desire to be wed “for love” in a racially mixed marriage.

The other imperative for us to marry was that of survival. Religious leaders advocated opposite sex unions to comply with articles of faith but cynically speaking it was to ensure a succession of adherents to a particular faith. An agrarian

society required many hands to sustain a family unit. In parts of the world today, many hands in a family are considered a necessity or a sign of a family’s affluence or a guarantee of their sustainability. A family living in an early industrialised city required many hands to feed, house and clothe its members.

It was all hands to the family pump and concepts such as promoting the rights of children or valuing childhood were unthinkable. More hands meant more work in whatever capacity they could in order to pour a pittance into the family’s coffers and thus stave off starvation or a horrid existence in the poor houses.

Monogamy, some would say, is not a natural human condition (and apparently it is not the swans’ either). The reason for this may arise from preternaturally long-life spans of humans in the twentieth century onwards, particularly in developed countries. Prior to advances being made in medicine, the development of penicillin and other lifesaving vaccinations, emergency medicine and the shift way from agrarian and industrialised based economies into the service economies, there were any number of factors that could whisk you away to the nether world. Accidents on farms and in factories were common. Infant mortality, illness and malnutrition were everyday occurrences.

Homelessness and being dependent on State or Church was all too frequent at a time when the State did not provide much in the way of earthly succour. War was more prevalent and dispatched one half of a couple on the battlefield or due to injury or illness (usually the man) thus resulting in the widow remarrying. The risks associated with childbirth were high and death a frequent visitor to women the world over (and indeed this is still sadly the case in developing countries). Women, without a safe means of birth control, would succumb to the butchery of back yard abortionists and risk their lives to feed the mouths already straining the family at the financial seams.

It is interesting to observe organised religions challenging governments whenever attempting to dilute the institution of marriage by making divorce more readily available. Religions rely on the scripture and tenets of their faith to justify their stance against the inexorable march of the many who seek marriage equality for all.

You may be asking yourself, what has this got to do with divorce and more importantly, what has this got to do with me? Th s didactic Cook’s tour of modern love is aimed at putting love, marriage, and divorce into a societal perspective. It is aimed at helping you understand why you may not have been able to pull off one of the most difficult relationships you are likely to enter into in your lifetime and to persuade you to be kinder to yourself if you are the one leaving and help you understand why you might have been left y your ‘life’ partner.

I am encouraging you to go easy on yourself and instead of focusing on the ‘failed’ relationship and marriage, focus on what you did well together – particularly as parents and what you may be able to replicate from that grab bag of parenting tools into the future. You may not be a couple, but you are still parents. You need to ask – what sort of parents were we and what sort do we want to be post separation?