Marriage is one of the most underrated elements of overall adult wellness in our modern society. Remember from last month’s post that being married significantly reduces your chances of hospitalization, need for surgery, dying after bypass surgery, getting pneumonia, getting rheumatoid arthritis, gum disease, viral infection, dementia, clinical depression, heart attack, cancer, being jailed, being murdered, being killed in a car wreck, and committing suicide.
It is definitely an important part of Natural Lifestyle Matching. Science tells us that in prehistoric times our ancestors pair bonded, or what we now call married. This was crucial for humanity. Please let me explain.
THE STORY OF US
The typical female young adult requires a minimum of 1800 calories per day for her basal metabolic needs. When she gets pregnant, she requires an average of about 500 more per day which puts her at 2300. Altogether, it requires around 74,000 extra calories for a woman to produce a baby! Also, after the baby is born, she requires about 500 extra calories per day to be able to nurse the baby. In those ancient times, it could be around three years of nursing before the baby was weaned.
In our world today that is loaded with food-like substances that are high in calories and low in nutrients 2300 calories doesn’t sound like very much. We must remember though that during these times humans were often having to walk up to 12 miles a day and procure food like roots by lifting heavy boulders and foraging around all day. Then they would have to chew for hours to get a little nourishment from the raw fibrous vegetation.
It wasn’t just any old calories that the woman needed for her body to create a healthy new human being either. Much of the baby’s brain is made up of omega-3 fatty acids so her diet needed to include a good deal of that. Also, there was a need during the pregnancy for high levels of iron which is a key to oxygen transport to the explosively growing baby’s brain, and energy and protein rich food. The husband going and hunting animals for these purposes fit very well during this time period where animals lived naturally and grazed on omega-3 rich grasses. During this time of pregnancy, she could continue to gather vegetables etc. which was extremely important for the well-being of the couple because hunting was not always reliably successful. Also, as this baby became a young child and the next one came along they could continue the process over and over until she reached menopause.
MARRIAGE AND HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM
For many other species, some of them even closely genetically related to humans, this was not the case at all. They mated and still are mating promiscuously, and the female was just on her own after she got pregnant. There was no calorie surplus and specialized nutrient surplus for those species from the husband-wife provisioning. In God’s intelligent design, only humans have been created with brains that are proportionally three times bigger than any other primate and five times bigger than any other species of animal. Looking back scientifically, the key to this has been the human mutually supportive marital relationship.
“A man will leave his father and mother and the two will become one flesh”
This is scientific evidence is corroborated in the Bible in, amongst other places, Mark 10:6-8 CSB where it says “But from the beginning of creation God made them male and female. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and the two will become one flesh”. Mutually self-sacrificing, committed, lifelong love was built into humanity from the beginning and was ordained by God. God also reinforces this further in His word by illustrating the relationship of the Trinity to humans. He calls the church the bride of Christ. There is a wedding of Adam and Eve in the beginning of human history and another wedding of Christ and the church at the end of history.
FEMALE SEX IQ
The science shows that human females especially have this positive marital instinct, and I would characterize it as intelligence as well. Many of us overlook God’s instructions for living to Eve in Genesis 3:16 CSB where he endows her and womankind future females with this innate drive. He says, “Your desire will be for your husband”. This is the glue that strengthens and empowers many marriages, families, and therefore societies in their quests for success.
Speaking of success, in the next several posts we are going to be illuminating how the Natural Lifestyle Match of marriage benefits both females and males in so many different ways. To finish off here though I would like to leave you with the recent research called the Success Sequence. It has been discovered that if young people will lifestyle match their predecessors as recently as the 1960s and 70s and graduate from either high school or college, get a job, get married, and then have children, in that order, they have a 97% chance of being financially successful.
MUCH MORE TO COME
We will discuss this mutually life-giving, complementary relationship and Natural Lifestyle Match between a man and a woman with its plethora of wellness benefits for both much more in upcoming posts.
