DailyJim: Endogamy, monogamy, and the limits we place on love

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of The Daily Gym. Today is Tuesday, May 28th, 2024, and I want to talk about.

Endogamy, monogamy, and the limits we put on loving other people.

So, I was watching a movie called Origin the other day, and it introduced me to a concept of endogamy. This idea is only being allowed to love people within one's group. And I thought it was really interesting because it talks about caste and caste systems and how often people are not allowed to love somebody or marry somebody from the other side, from the other group. And I thought about how that very much relates on a much more personal level of monogamy not letting us love people outside of our pair bond and in the movie she talks about how caste is often reinforced by this idea it's the pillar number one is that we're not allowed to love or form deep relationships with people outside of our particular group now side note outside i'm recording this from outside of bremen germany outdoors so you may hear lots of birds in the background i don't know how this is going to turn out but the house where we're doing the project is very loud so i figured let me go outside.

And i think we don't realize how we put such limits on love the endogamy one is endogamy one One is where we say, okay, if you're white, you're not allowed to love somebody who's black. If you're black, you're not allowed to love somebody who's white. If you're rich, you're not allowed to love somebody who's poor. If you're a Dalit, I think, it's the quote, untouchable group in India. If you're one of them, you're not allowed to love a Brahmin and vice versa. If you're Israeli, you're not allowed to love a Palestinian. If you're Palestinian, you can't love Israeli. If you're Ukrainian, you probably can't love Russian. if a Russian can't love a Ukrainian, et cetera, et cetera. We reinforce this over and over and over again. And I think it runs even deeper. I think it runs to the level of monogamy, where we often say, you're not allowed to love another person. You're only allowed to love me.

And then we wonder why we have such problems in the world. We wonder why we have such division when we're really putting limits on how much we're allowed to love other people. And this concept might be quite controversial for some because I think the idea of monogamy is so tightly held in a lot of cultures. But I also wonder if that is causing a lot of the division in the world. And what it would be like if we didn't hold on so tightly to that value. If that we let ourselves love other people, not just outside of our culture, not just outside of our in-group, but just love other people, just other humans beyond one human. And I've just been thinking about this a lot, just how many limits we put on love, how many limits we put on intimacy and affection, how many limits I put on it. And if I find that somebody's in a relationship, I will back off. Even if I'm not attracted to the person, even if I don't have sexual desire towards them or romantic desire, or even if I don't feel very close to them or whatnot, I can feel myself distance just because maybe fear that the other person in the relationship won't like it. Maybe they won't like it and they want to limit themselves. ourselves. So I think there's just a lot of times in society where we distance from other people because of their group or just because we're not supposed to get too close to other people in general. And yeah, especially as I'm here on this project about conflict resolution where we have musicians from eight different countries that are in conflict with each other, I'm just thinking a lot about.

Like even last year, we had one participant who was like, I don't want to be in photos because if people back home in my group found out that I was here, I'd be in trouble. Not from the other group, but from people in his group. Because it's almost seen as being a traitor for just hanging out with people from the other group. Sharing a laugh, sharing humanity with other people seems to cause problems. And yet again, it's not just a group to group thing. It's also interpersonal. personal it's also a lot of times if somebody is married or somebody is in a an exclusive relationship they're not allowed to even have fun with other people we're not talking about having sex or we're not talking about getting married to them or living with them we're just talking about maybe enjoying a laugh or enjoying the food or just appreciating a deeper conversation with them Sometimes that is not only taboo, but grounds for betrayal or separation.

I just wonder what life would be like if we relaxed that a little bit and we had the courage to love ourselves, other people, and people from different groups as well. Just humans.

Why can't we just love humans more, man? Why can't we just let ourselves love humans? because I think most of us do. We see photos or videos of people being killed and it hurts. But then we go, I'm not supposed to love that person. Why are you not supposed to love that human being that died? Why are you not supposed to love the human being who did the thing to kill the other person? Can't we still love both human beings? Why do I have to pick and choose which human being I'm going to love? Can't I just love? I'm just tired of these limits that we place on love out of fear. It's mostly just fear that we're going to get hurt, or that we're going to lose our culture, we're going to lose our identity, we're going to lose blah, blah, blah. Can we realize we lose things in life, but it only hurts if we love something. The only way to not feel any pain is to not love anything, and that might be death. I mean, I hate to put it that way, but if we don't love, what's the point of living? So on that note i'm going to get back to this because they're going to do a cultural presentation i'm really excited to learn about these different cultures and realize they're all the same thing like cultures are different but we're also the same we're human beings that do so many we only have so many possibilities within our lives and uh just grateful to be around them and i think i'm late so i should go all right talk to y'all soon bye.