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Thoughts for the pessimists
What makes your brain tick?
According to researchers, any part of your body, if you don't use it you lose
it, and particularly your brain, the more you use it the more brainy you become.
Relationships
What have social scientists found out about the relationships between men
and women that is not either obvious common sense or by now already well
known?
Not a great deal, it seems, to judge from some of the best books on
the topic in the late 20th century.
One, an academic book in 1986, 'Human
Relationships', by Steve Duck, Sage Publications, which lists references to
over 400 books and papers:
Here is one of the interesting tit-bits that these books contain:
Polyfidelity - by Eve Furchgott
Polyfidelity, a multi- family structure in which clusters of families come
together around shared values, interests, life goals and mutual attraction.
Inside such a Best Friend Identity Cluster (B-FIC), family members are
non-monogamous, relating to all their partners without a hierarchy of
preference.
Thus in a heterosexual polyfidelitous B-FIC, each of the women has a sexual
relationship with each of the men, and no group member relates sexually to
anyone outside the family group.
While different groups might work out different methods for determining who
will sleep with whom every night, the method used successfully by actual
polyfides in the United States is the 'balanced rotational sleeping
schedule'.
The arrangement has each person sleeping with a different partner each night,
sequentially (using the chronological order of when people joined the group
as the sequence), until at the end of the list, at which time she/he comes
back around to the first person again.
Romantics might consider such a system too 'mechanical', but those who use it
think it is a marvelous way to ensure that every twosome in a B-FIC has equal
and ample time to build their own special, one-to-one intimacy.
Being one-preferential does not imply that the relationship inside any dyad
(set of two people) is identical.
Every combination has its own unique
qualities (called 'love- joy' by practitioners of polyfidelity) which does
not have to compete with any other dyadic relationship.
Polyfidelity offers a number of obvious advantages over more traditional
family and intimacy styles.
It caters to the desires of those who like sexual
variety, yet allows this to occur in the context of lasting, deep, meaningful
relationships.
This blend of spice and stability is very refreshing to people who, in other
situations, have had to forefeet a stable home life in order to experience
variety, or vice versa.
The problem of having unrealistic expectations of what one partner can
provide that often occurs in two-adult families is solved; no one individual
needs to be all things to anyone else.
For single parents, or parents in general, polyfidelitous household is a
marvelous environment in which to raise children.
The burden of
responsibility and care that would otherwise fall on one or two individuals
is spread throughout the group, which allows the adults to be involved in
many activities besides childcare, and gives the children a healthy
assortment of good role models; adults with whom to build caring, trusting
relationships.
Source: Extract from 'The Book of Visions'
What's the moral in these stories?
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