Exogamy

Family gathering in Yorkshire, 2019

In my family of eight siblings, the first four, born just after World War II, all chose mates outside our family’s culture. It wasn’t what my parents wanted. They sent us to Scandinavian Lutheran colleges with the express hope that we would find upstanding Lutheran husbands (the first four were all girls). Coming of age in the late 1960’s, this just didn’t happen, which I believe to have been somewhat endemic to the times.

The second group of siblings stayed much closer to home and our childhood culture. They had watched the pain we caused our parents and, as one told me, “sided with them.” I have heard stories of other large families in which the same thing happened. Or, the younger ones, if they came of age in the 1960’s, were the ones to leave while the older ones found their footing in the towns, farms and cultures in which they had grown up. 

What I am pointing to is a particular time when it was possible to question whether the ideas and habits you grew up with were the best for you, whether you wanted to explore more diverse habits, and even move to a city where the possibility of meeting people unlike you was more common. It wasn’t necessary. It was just the fact of travel possibilities, educational opportunities and youthful excitement converging to create a desire for a more open field upon which to play. Institutions had cracks in them. We slipped through the cracks and didn’t looked back, though we came home often, and were welcomed.

Unlike Jane Austen’s “universally acknowledged” truth that young women must be searching for a man with a good fortune, my sisters and I were all equipped to work. We were looking for partners, not anyone in particular. My next sister met her British husband in India when they took the same train. After many adventures my third sister found a lasting partnership in Portland, Maine. The last of the four found her husband, of Welsh extraction and now a Zen Buddhist, in an office in Minneapolis. And I have settled in California with a native of the state whose parents fled the dust bowls of Oklahoma.

Exogamy, the custom of marrying outside one’s social group, has always had different positive aims: it helps keep the human gene pool strong and it promotes friendship between tribes or clans. When I began publishing my fictional series, So Are You to my Thoughts in 2015, I did not know what it was about. I wanted, in general, to show my younger brother and sisters what it was like for us. With fictional characters and incidents based on friends, cousins, and family, the series shows the truth of the post-war generation.

The United States is a tribute to the anthropological concept of exogamy. Go to any lively college town, or almost any playground in the country. You will see more displays of physical characteristics than you can imagine, and all of us human beings. In many other places in the world there is more constraint about who studies together, who plays together, and certainly who can be chosen as mate.

Most Baby Boomers will see some aspect of themselves in these exogamous matches. Why not? Why not find for yourself a partner who has a harmonic that matches your own, regardless of your two heritages. Of course it is easier if you share habits, foods, religious institutions, and values. But a couple can still make a strong family if you don’t. Strong families make resilient children, who in turn make their own strong families. This recursive pattern is the basis for healthy and progressive human lives. It is the basic theme of the exogamous matches in So Are You to My Thoughts.

My sisters and brother and I didn’t know just how far away from each other we would get, but methods of communication have improved greatly. As soon as Skype  existed, my next sister and I began a weekly phone call between Yorkshire and California. Travel is also much more common for our generation than for our parents. As children in an isolated town in North Dakota, our house was full of National Geographic’s and encyclopedias. We put a finger on the globe and spun it to see where we would end up. By this time, we know. The details of our long lives have included many chances to move out into the world. We mostly took them.