Urbanization, communication, transportation, all these multiplied the number of encounters between men and women and the opportunities for economic, sexual and emotional interactions.

For the first time in centuries, women were able to judge and to compare their male partners to other males in every conceivable way sexually also.

Increasingly, women choose to opt out of relationships which they deem to be dysfunctional, abusive or inadequate.

75% of all divorces are initiated by women. In the West, women are driving the divorce industry.

Women had become aware of their needs, priorities, preferences, wishes.

Generally, women are more in tune with their proper emotions. They cast off emotions and thought patterns inculcated in them by patriarchal societies, males, chauvinists and cultures that sustained through peer pressure and reputation based coercion, a specific type of gender role.

So women are exiting gender roles and not paying attention to reputation based coercive mechanisms.

The roles and traditional functions of the family were gradually eroded and transferred to other social agents. Even functions such as emotional support, psychosexual interactions and child rearing are often relegated to outside subcontractors, total strangers.

Emptied of these functions and devoid of these intergenerational interactions, the nuclear family is reduced to a dysfunctional shell, a hub of rudimentary communication between its remaining members, a dilapidated version of its former self.

The traditional roles of women and their alleged character, propensities and inclinations are no longer useful in this new environment.

Gender roles and sexual scripts are in flux.

This led women to search for a new definition, to find a new niche.

Women were literally driven out of their homes by the disappearance of the functional disappearance of home and gender.

In parallel, modern medicine had increased women’s life expectancy, had prolonged their childbearing years, had improved their health dramatically and had preserved their beauty through myriad newfangled techniques, cosmetics and so on.

This gave women a new lease of life, multiple lives so to speak.

In this new world, women are far less likely to die of childbirth or to look decrepit at the age of 30.

Women are able to time their decision to bring a child to the world or to refrain from bringing a child to the world, not to have children.

They do this passively or actively by having abortions.

Until the 1920s, only women were expected to abide by a strict code of sexual exclusivity. Men openly, albeit most of them discreetly, kept mistresses and lovers on the side. They patronized brothels and whorehouses to sate their sexual exuberance.

In many cultures, polygamous men maintained errands. As women’s lib, feminism, gender equality gradually took over, sexually emancipated and empowered women assumed many hitherto male behaviors, regrettably also psychopathic male behaviors.

Alarmed by this turn of events, men suddenly became paragons of virtue akin to women in previous generations. Men now vow to adhere to a single sexual partner.

Men are becoming romantic. Men are attempting women to revert to time, to go back in time, to re-occupy traditional gender roles and sexual scripts. It’s too late, of course.

This abrupt about face wrought mayhem on the monogamous bond because it forcibly equated sexual exclusivity with love and bonding, and it regarded cheating as a proof of absence of love and bonding.

Contradictory expectations from one’s intimate partner are unrealistic. No single person can be a passionate, exciting lover, an empathic, patient friend, a stalwart companion, a good father-mother, cook, a handy person, an intellectual equal, an adventurer, a stable breadwinner, and myriad other functions beside. No one can fulfill all these roles. No single person can do all this.

And so there’s a need to outsource, and this explains the recurrence of emotional and sexual affairs, the disruptive outcomes of overwhelming, all pervasive, and we, postmodern existence, and the inflated expectations from one’s intimate partners.

So even as social monogamy and peer commitment and bonding are still largely intact and more condoned than ever, and even as infidelity is fervently condemned, sexual exclusivity on the ground in real life, mislabeled usually as sexual monogamy, sexual exclusivity is actually declining, especially among the young and the old.

Monogamy is becoming one alternative, one alternative, of many lifestyles, and marriage is only one relationship, one type of relationship, one solution, among numerous negotiated solutions. It’s sometimes not even a privilege or a unique relationship, as it competes for time and resources with work, same-sex friends, friends with benefits, and opposite sex friends. We may be heading towards the future of serial monogamy devoid of sexual exclusivity, emotional attachment and bonding within sexually open marriages, and sexually open partnerships. The partnerships and marriages will focus on emotions.

Sex could be safely outsourced. Whether it’s open nature is proclaimed and promulgated, whether it is tacitly accepted and overlooked is immaterial.

The reality is that even now, even today, most marriages and relationships are actually open, because the majority of people engage in extramarital, extra-diadic sex.

The contractual aspects of marriage are more pronounced than ever. Everything is on the table from extramarital sex. Is it allowed? Is it not allowed? Is it not allowed? Is it even encouraged in case of lifestyle, swinging, prenuptial agreements, how to raise kids? Everything is negotiated. The commodification, transforming people to commodities. And the preponderance of sex, premarital sex, extramarital sex, sex is commodified. Sex is preponderant. It’s no longer scarce. So sex is robbed of its function as a conduit of specialness or intimacy. It’s no mechanical. It’s no physiological function akin to, I don’t know, scratching your back or drinking water. Child rearing is largely avoided. Natality rates are precipitously plummeting everywhere.

When you do have children, you outsource their child rearing to others, to strangers, to institutions, daycare centers, what have you.

So people have sex outside the relationship. They don’t have children. And when they do have children, they give them out, they outsource them, give them to caretakers outside the family.

So why do you need a family? Why does anyone need a relationship? The family has lost both its raison d’être, its reason to exist, and its nature as the venue for exclusive sexual and emotional interactions between adults and for childbearing and rearing.

Professed values and prevailing social mores and institutions have yet to catch up to this emerging multifarious reality.

The consequences of these discrepancies between values, axiological and reality, the consequences are disastrous. About 40 to 50% of all first-time marriages end in divorce, and the percentage is much higher for second and third attempts at carnal bliss.

Second and third marriages disintegrate at the rates which border around 80%, 70%. Open communication about one’s sexual needs is tantamount to self-renation.

In many cases, as one’s partner is likely to reflexively initiate divorce. Dishonesty and cheating are definitely the rational choices in such an unforgiving and punitive environment.

In other words, there’s a mismatch between our values and how we live.

And so this creates guilt, this creates shame, this creates conflict and dissonance, and this creates enormous pressure and stress on all relationships leading to their ultimate disintegration.

Indeed, more surviving marriages have to do with perpetuating the partner’s convenience, their access to commonly-owned assets in future streams of income, and the welfare of third parties, most notably their children.

Earth-wild sexual exclusivity often degenerates into celibacy or abstinence on the one hand, or double parallel lives with multiple sexual and emotional partners on the side on the other hand.

One-night stands for both genders are usually opportunistic. Extra-pair affairs are self-limiting as emotional involvement and sexual attraction wane over time.

Infidelity is therefore much less of a threat to the longevity of a dedicated couple than it is made out to be.

Most of the damage in adultery, infidelity, most of it are cheating. Most of the damage is caused by culturally conditioned social, social opprobrium and punitive attitude.

The deceived partner is traumatized, so the cheating is deeply and dramatically felt.

The reactions to conduct that are almost universally decried as deceitful, dishonest, and in breach of vows and promises, it’s all true.

But the cultural and social component in this reaction is tremendous, because rationally there is no threat to the cohesion and longevity of the dyad.

Only 3% of women, for example, who have extramarital affairs abandon their husbands and go on with the lover.

But the roots of the crumbling alliance between men and women go deeper and further in time.

Long before divorce became a social norm, divorce used to be frowned on and even used to be illegal in many countries. Long before it became a social norm, men and women grew apart. They became too disparate, incompatible, and worrying subspecies.

Traditionalist, conservative, patriarchal, religious societies put in place behavioral safeguards and guardrails against the inevitable wrenching torsion that monogamy entailed.

So these societies demanded no premarital sex, virginity even, no multiple intimate partners, no cohabitation prior to tying the knot, no mobility or equal rights for women, no mixing of the genders.

These were guardrails, because these societies realized that monogamy is an unnatural arrangement when life expectancy is doubling and tripling every century.

We know that each of these guardrails, safeguards, firewalls, habits, does indeed increase the chances for an ultimate divorce. I mean, each bridge of these guardrails increases the chances for divorce.

As Jonathan Franzen elucidates in his literary masterpieces, it boils down to a choice between personal freedoms and the stability of the family.

The former decisively preclude the latter, or you’re free, or you’re married.

During the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, discrete extramarital affairs were an institution of marriage. Sexual gratification and emotional intimacy were outsourced actually, while all other domestic functions and property management were shared in a partnership.

And this was true for both genders.

Women had lovers too. The industrial revolution, the Victorian age, the backlash of the sexual revolution, belligerent radical feminism, and the advent of socially atomizing and gender-equalizing transportation, information processing, and telecommunication technologies. All these led inexorably to the hollowing out of family and hearth.

In a civilization centered on brain power, men have lost the relative edge that brawn used to provide overbrain. Muscles are no longer in demand as they used to be.

Monogamy is increasingly considered as past its expiry date, a historical aberration that reflects the economic and political realities of by-gone eras.

Moreover, the incidence of lifelong singlehood has skyrocketed as people hope for their potential or actual relationship partners to provide for all their sexual, emotional, social, and economic needs, and then they get sorely disappointed when they fail to meet these highly unrealistic expectations.

So people remain single, many of them lifelong singles.

In an age of economic self-sufficiency, electronic entertainment, and self-gratification, the art of compromise in relationships is gone.

Relationship skills, intimacy skills, emotional intelligence, they are in rapid decline. They’re being eradicated according to studies by Jean Twenge, Kate Campbell, and others.

Single motherhood, sometimes via IVF and the identifiable partner involved, the sperm donor, single motherhood has become the norm in many countries.

Even within marriages or committed relationships, solitary pursuits, such as separate vacations, or girls’ night out, or boys’ night out, solitary pursuits have become the norm.

People don’t do things together even when they are ostensibly together.

The 20th century was a monument to male fatuity, male idiocy, wars, ideologies that almost decimated the species.

And so women were forced to acquire masculine skills and masculine attributes and masculine traits and behave as men did in the past. Women were forced, coerced, pushed inexorably to fill men’s shoes, to become men in factories, in fields, in the workplace, raising families all by their own.

Women had discovered militant self-autonomy, self-efficacy, and agency. Women found out that men are superfluous, superfluous, not needed. Women had found out the untenability of the male claims to somehow be superior over them.

In an age of malignant individualism, bordering on narcissism, men and women alike put themselves, their fantasies, their needs, their careers, first. Everything else, family included, be damned.

With five decades of uninterrupted prosperity, birth control, and feminism, women’s lives. Most of the female denizens of the West, at least, have acquired the financial wherewithal to realize their dreams at the expense and to the detriment of collectives they ostensibly belong to, such as the nuclear family.

Feminism is a movement focused on negatives, obliterating women’s age-old bondage, for example, getting rid of men.

Feminism offers few constructive ideas regarding women’s new roles, new sexual strategies, new sexual strategies.

By casting men as the enemy, feminism also failed to educate men and to convert men into useful allies in this new reality, in this new environment.

Owing to the life expectancy, modern marriages seem to go through three phases.

Infatuation, honeymoon, procreation, accumulation of assets, children, and shared experiences, memories, and exhaustion, outsourcing, bonding with new emotional and sexual partners for rejuvenation or the fulfillment of long repressed fantasies, needs, and wishes. Divorces and breakups occur mostly at the seams between these three phases, the periods of transition between these phases, and especially between the stages of accumulation, procreation, and exhaustion, outsourcing.

This is where family units break down. With marriage on the decline and infidelity on the rise, the reasonable solution would be, of course, polyamory or swinging, swapping sexual partners, the lifestyle.

Households with multiple partners of both genders, all of whom are committed to one another for the long haul, romantically involved, sexually shared, and economically united, this may be the future.

Alas, while a perfectly rational development of the traditional marriage, and one that is best suited to modernity, polyamory, swinging, group sex, and so on, they are emotionally unstable.

There are arrangements which are emotionally unstable. There’s romantic jealousy. It ineluctably rears its ugly head. There’s possessiveness. There’s fear of loss, abandonment, anxiety.