From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Sat Nov 11 2000 - 04:07:01 MST
"J. R. Molloy" wrote:
>
> Greg Burch (an extropic attorney) writes,
>
> > I can think of a lot of "extropic" people who HAVE maintained long-term
> > stable pair-bonds: Einstein (albeit after one failed try, and then in a
> > fairly ideosyncratic way) comes readily to mind, as well as Salvador
> Dali,
> > Thomas Jefferson (until his wife died), Eric Drexler . . . just to name
> three
> > other random examples . . .
>
> Okay, we can probably cite an ample number of examples on both sides of
> wedlock. As extropy accelerates, will marriage gain or lose adherents
> and/or percentage points? As people live longer and healthier lives it
> seems to me they will tend to include more than one pair-bond, and so they
> will extend their families (their significant others) beyond the tenets of
> marriage. IOW, the trend toward dissolved marriages will continue (as it
> has for the last three decades).
It depends on what you mean by marriage. If you mean "until death do us
part" then I think that will decline as people acheive longer life-spans
and eventual immortality as you mentioned. The until death vow made
more sense when people were lucky if the lived long enough to see their
kids marry. People change and grow apart even when they love each other
very much. The all-consuming love is obviously in part a firmware (at
least) bio-pattern in humans. Much of the wisdom of managing one's sex
life and relationships is learning to be careful about fully engaging
that pattern until one is reasonably sure the person is right. Most of
us fail at that all too often because the drives are pretty darn
strong. But we will learn, especially over a long life, to tinker with
such. I also expect that the forms of love, sex and relationships will
change, mutate and generate all kinds of new forms as we change
ourselves and therefore all of our institutions. Eventually we will
probably tend to make contracts for specified periods of time and/or
specified purposes like having and raising kids with options to renew.
- samantha
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