Human behavior and relationships

Human Behavior and Relationships in Marriage

"Love and marriage/Love and Marriage/They go together like a horse and carriage." Within the refrain of the old Frank Sinatra song lies all of the contradictions between the different paradigmatic approaches to the relationship of marriage. How much of what we call a marriage is natural and how much is learned or due to cultural pressures? A horse may be a natural animal, but the carriage is man-made and artificially constructed, and serves the demand of culture. Likewise, the biological demands of the human species require reproduction, and human beings have a biologically ingrained sexual drive. Yet beyond this accepted need of physiology, many social and cultural psychologists would remind us the biological demands of reproduction do not explain monogamy, and the cultural containment of this drive through marriage -- nor can it fully explain, some might argue, homosexuality and even the union of heterosexual couples who choose not to have children.

Biological approaches to human relationships often seem to have an all-encompassing explanatory approach. For example, a biological evolutionist would argue that monogamy, which does not seem to spread around a man's genetic matter to its maximum degree, is a way of protecting gestating females or the young. Homosexuality might be seen as fulfilling the need of a tribe to have certain non-procreating members of the human race to teach and tend to the next generation. A cultural explanation would counter, however, that cultural and social influences dictate how we marry, and who we marry, and are not simply the product of our genes. For example, in our own contemporary culture, the 'wedding industry' hardly fulfills a biological need. It satisfies a need that culture has created. Family and friends attach importance to the collective celebration of a union, and the particular method generated by our own society has created a particularly large and costly variety of celebrating such a union. Culture even creates the Western ideal that dresses must be white, while in other cultures such as Japan and India, the bride wears red. The cultural associations and symbols attached to marriage, such variation argues, are not genetically or biologically encoded, but are societal products.

After the union has been formed, social pressures may generate expectations of how many children and who cares for the children. A society that depends upon the labor input of children such as a farm may require many children -- or a society where masculinity demands many children may encourage a man to pressure his wife to produce more children. Conversely, in society where birth control is widely available, and working outside the home is socially desirable and economically necessary to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, having more than two or three children may be regarded as unusual and result in the shrinking of the family numbers, regardless of a biological drive to procreate.

The ways that married couples negotiate the raising of children will vary as well from culture to culture. In some lands, the nuclear family raises the child, in other areas, an extended family such as the child's grandparents may have equal input into the baby's upbringing, where in traditional cultures a village raises the child and has an equal investiture in its growth and development as the biological parents. The roles that males and females may also vary -- although a woman biologically gives birth to a child, a man may assume more or less care for the child, depending upon the situation of a couple. A man who loses his job and has a wife who must support the family temporarily may care for his child, even though a biological explanation for human behavior might theorize that a man has less of a hormonal attachment to the child, and the species would benefit if males generated more children with a wider range of females.

The psychodynamic approach also examines the interaction between culture and biology but from a more personal perspective, given its origins in psychoanalysis. Freud asked the question of why human beings marry outside of their kinship group, even though the first object of affection for both men and women is the mother, specifically the mother's breast during the oral stage of human development (Stevenson, 1996). Culture dictates that the child submit to the father and sublimate the Oedipal desire to kill the father, thus resulting in a more stable society, for no society could exist where parricide was condoned. Biological explanations would note, however, this also results in a more healthy genetic balance for the human race while exponents of a cultural approach would disagree, noting many taboos exist that actually inhibit genetic intermixtures of race and religion -- although a biological approach might again subsume such objections by noting that this sustains the genetic integrity of the tribe, while still allowing for some necessary variation. Furthermore, some biologically oriented theories posit that psychological affiliations for religion and a need to obey religious dictates regarding marriage are genetically passed along as clusters of genes (Rubin, 2002).