Is Marriage Natural?

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

Got your attention, didn’t I. “Is marriage natural?” I suspect everyone’s knee jerk reaction is “Yes. Of course.” And I’m over 20 years married myself. It works.

But is it natural?

To unpack that we have to look at how marriage started.

Consortship in Chimpanzees

We can learn a lot about ourselves by studying our closest relatives.

Actually, contrary to popular belief, our closest relative is not the chimpanzee. It’s the bonobo. Bonobos are matriarchal and quite different…and don’t practice consortship.

So what is consortship? It’s a form of sneaky mating engaged in by chimpanzees. In a chimp band, the dominant male gets more than his fair share of mating (the same is true in bonobos). But lower rank males can often ensure that they will father a child by luring a preferred female away when she’s in heat. The pair then stay together and mate exclusively. Consortship can last as long as three months. Although males may get aggressive to try and get females into consortship, the female can typically escape if she so chooses…and is more likely to follow him if he’s been nice to her.

And here’s the thing: Consortship is more likely to result in pregnancy. We don’t know what the biological advantage of it is, but there seems to be one.