Friday, April 13, 2007

Writing With A Vengeance...Marriage Contract?

Eve has not been writing…long enough for kind friends to ask me if everything was ok. Eve is blessed to have such nice friends.

More accurately speaking, Eve has been deprived from writing. For some strange reason, Singnet always fails to display the page where I publish the blog. Thus, Eve can only try to steal chances to write when she is using other networks.

Thus, Eve will be writing with a vengeance every time she does.

A friend just came back from a 12 day trip through Yunnan, Dali, Lijiang and Shangri-La. She told me of this old practice one of the tribes still practices up till today.

In that tribe, it is pretty much a matriarchal society. Women are the head of the household and are the decision makers. They hold the financial power as well. Men well, don’t do much really. What made the tribe interesting was it was one of the few tribes that had no marriage contract.

This meant that men could jump climb over walls and jump into the bed of any woman in the tribe. She has a right to refuse of course. However, a couple can stay together and not be married. Their relationship can be known publicly or left for their own knowledge only.

One is free to sleep with anyone except one is not allowed to have multiple partners. Should the woman be pregnant, it is the responsibility of the woman, not the man. If a couple no longer wants to stay together, they can simply part. Thus the women are pretty much like the men in our society. There’s a whole lot more freedom in relationships as well. Not quite the old fashioned typical traditional tribe right?

In the modern society today, the practice of not having a marriage contract is growing. More and more, Eve sees friends who decide to be together but not go through the ceremony of marriage. To them, they see each other as spouses anyway. Thus, marriage is not always necessary.

Eve thinks it boils down to the couple. Marriage is an important stage of life that Eve thinks one should never walk in without careful thinking. If a couple does not intend to have children and have enough faith in each other, marriage may or may not be necessary. After all, if a piece of paper is needed to prove love between 2 people, then maybe that love is not ready for marriage in the first place?

1 comment:

xuan said...

Very interesting tribe.....

I guess it's that piece of paper that gives women a sense of security (whether it actually exists or not is an entirely different issue)which the guys couldn't give..