There have been a lot of pieces of late on whether humans are “meant” to be monogamous. At The BreakUp Box, we think all romantic love is a beautiful thing, no matter how it shows itself. What’s important is that the people involved compassionately understand and respect the others wishes. From understanding, love, and respect, good things will come!

 Still, it is interesting to look at the arguments. Over at Salon.com, Tracy Clark-Flory interviews NYU sociology professor Judith Stacey, who studies alternatives to monogamy. She says that:

 [M]onogamy is a powerful ideal and it appeals to a lot of people. [But] Ultimately, it’s an ideal that leads to its own undoing, because what’s natural is human variation.

On the other side, an interview with Justin Garcia of Binghamton University, who notes that:

Most people around the world pair bond with one person… Romantic love has evolved, as biological anthropologist Helen Fisher has brilliantly argued, to promote those love bonds, to keep people together.

 Looks like quite the interesting debate, but one thing is for sure – whatever the reasons, romantic love is a universal phenomenon!

http://www.karilife.com/2011/07/break-up-box.html

Our new friend Kari at KariLife.com wrote an article about The BreakUp Box concept at the Examiner.com newspaper a while back.

That article was an inspiration to our idea to help people do this with TheBreakUpBox.com, so we had to reach out to Kari and show her!

See it here at The BreakUp Box Relationship Blog.

Thanks for the write-up, and look forward to hearing more great things from you in the future, Kari!

kanyi:

This is a thorough and tasteful treatment of a tricky issue by Seb Benthall.

First thing: there’s a lot of problems with the way the article is written that will make those on the other side of the debate unwilling to dignify it with a response. A lot of the argumentation is built on top of sexist assumptions which have been pissing off feminists for years, so it’s not a critically informed entry into the debate.

That said, it has some good points. It resonates with I’m guessing you and also me and probably a lot of other guys. Why?

Well, it seems to account for a lot of the way I’ve experienced life as a straight man: deliberately competing in abstracted social contexts for respect, which by credible assumption by the author is translatable to, let’s be frank, poontang. Which is scarce in a sense and so worth competing for. And, indeed, there are as many losers as there are winners, so being a man in this context isn’t always peachy. We’ve all been shut out of venues in which we can’t compete. I’m a privileged and lucky guy so I’ve come out pretty well, but lots of men haven’t. However, these social structures that encourage competition for respect are very productive for society—they create art, medicine, governance, etc.

The problem is that this account does not do justice to the problems faced by women (and gay men? unclear) when entering these structures (created by men?). Women’s participation in, say, engineering classes is reacted to very often with hostility and discouragement. There is good reason to believe that this hostility has as much if not much more to do with women’s lack of motivation in these areas as does any innate lack of desire to, i guess, uh, breed “up”.

A charitable interpretation of this would be that the men in these contexts are just exhibiting the same brutality of competition to women in these fields as they extend to each other. But that doesn’t make any sense because women in those fields are not competing with the men around sexually. More likely is that women’s participation in those fields makes it more difficult to treat those social structures as ego battlegrounds for achieving relative dominance over others. Being out-competed by a woman by something you’re doing in order to impress women is a kind of game changer that is difficult to accept, emotionally. Sheer denial could account for the psychological reaction there.

None of which justifies the circumstances, of course. But I think there’s room to accept both Baumeister’s descriptive account of what straight men are up to when they set up these competitive structures without accepting a lot of his (probably just sexist) assumptions that these structures are more “natural” for evopsych reasons. The mechanism for reconciling his account with those of angry feminists could be as easy as recognizing that including women in those structures is bound to create confusion and disturbance in those areas. The question then becomes whether the strict sexual competitiveness of segregated structures is more productive for society than a more openly inclusive but socially confusing structure. The progressive point of response to that question is, ‘of course not.’

But that raises all these other questions…..

New Blog Post - How to Write a Love Letter

we are really happy to have been noticed by our friends on Bloginity.com, who wrote about The BreakUp Box as a way to get over your ex.

Bloginity is one of our favorite fashion blogs out - and we would love to have The BreakUp Box become a fixture with the international fashion set!

thoughtsofateenageblogger:

Everyone deserves to be loved. Everyone. No matter who they are or what they look like, everyone deserves a little bit of love.

So I give that to them. Some more than others, some just a tiny bit, but there is love for everyone, no matter how small.

But it’s when someone abuses that love that…

ah!

cute

carefreewhitegirl:

Carefree White Girl leaves for 4th of July weekend, but not before breaking up with her boyfriend. When he e-mails her 8 hours later he says: “i have a bunch of your shit. I can’t look at it, it hurts too bad.” Before shutting her phone off to go grill brats and dogs and bison and set off fire works in a field she writes back: “Hey Shane, I actually landed in Portland, a bunch of friends are celebrating the 4th on an island off the coast of Washington. Anyway, I’m not sure when I’ll be back, my friend Tom is doing a huge art installation on this island and I’m thinking of sticking around and helping him. So my friend Paul just sent me this link! They store stuff for you when you go through a breakup i guess!? Maybe it’ll be useful?! I don’t really need any of that stuff back right away or anything. yours, xx -carefree white girl”

have always loved the blog. honored! the breakup box should definitely make us all more carefree!

new post over at The BreakUp Blog 

http://www.thebreakupbox.com/blogs/news/3491332-whats-in-my-breakup-box