I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
The very systematicity that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another (e.g., comprehending an aspect of arguing in terms of battle) will necessarily hide other aspects of the concept. In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept (e.g., the battling aspects of arguing), a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor. For example, in the midst of a heated argument, when we are intent on attacking our opponent’s position and defending our own, we may lose sight of the cooperative aspects of arguing. Someone who is arguing with you can be viewed as giving you his time, a valuable commodity, in an effort at mutual understanding. But when we are preoccupied with the battle aspects, we often lose sight of the cooperative aspects.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnsen, Metaphors We Live By
Metaphors structure your thought and communications. These metaphors can be helpful or harmful, or a little bit of both.
Metaphors also enforce societal norms.
“Jane cheated on John,” your friend tells you, and you know she’s not talking about bending the rules in a game of Monopoly. “Cheating,” in marital vernacular means having sex with someone outside of a relationship, or it could mean emotional cheating — using another man for the kind of intimate talk and support that one should only go to a husband or boyfriend for.
Cheating means breaking the rules of a game or other situation for personal gain, but it’s so entrenched in our cultural storytelling around adultery that people don’t even question whether it is a true representation of a relational situation.
When you say someone cheated on their spouse, you highlight certain aspects of the situation: the cheater is the bad one, there are rules about relationships given to us by our culture, and the non-cheater was transgressed upon. Or, should I say, it doesn’t merely highlight those aspects of what we have come to believe about marriage, or other serious relationships, it actually goes further and establishes them as the default.
One can imagine — well, at least I can imagine — a culture in which a marital relationship is considered the primary but people generally allow for married people to have secondary relationships outside the main one.
In Big Love, a television series about a polygamist man living with his three wives, first wife Barb doesn’t think that her husband Bill is cheating on her with Nikki and Margene. No, she thinks he is “living the principle.” For some Mormons, it is considered a test of faith and devotion to God’s law.
Our culture’s structuring of the marital relationship is not some universal way of doing it. In The Gift, Lewis Hyde writes of the Uduk tribal group:
[For the Uduk,] marriage is not a constraining institution. The Uduk are matrilineal; neither in structure nor in ceremony is an Uduk bride (or her fertility) given in marriage….
Uduk women are very independent; they readily quit an unsatisfying union. Marriages typically last only three or four years. Not being the property of the men, not even gift property, Uduk women are self-possessed, literally and figuratively.
This brings to light another metaphor about marriage, that of a woman being given to a man in marriage. “Who gives this woman to be married?” we are used to hearing in wedding ceremonies. The woman is metaphorically a gift given to the man.
I bet the Uduks don’t relate stepping out of your marital relationship to cheating in a game with rules, because they don’t (1) think of wives as gifts or property of men or (2) that a marriage is, and should be, some kind of long-lasting arrangement.
Even the word adultery is a kind of metaphor. It shares a root with “adulterate” which means to make a substance impure by adding cheap or improper ingredients. It comes from the roots ad- meaning “to” or “toward” and alter meaning “other.” So it means “approaching another.” There’s no part of the word that means the inappropriate or unlawful approach of another — this was added by Roman society and religious institutions.