Long love and cultivating the next generation do not require participation in the religious institution of marriage. Being married is technically conforming oneself to a hierarchy though it does not have to be in practice. An illustration of marriage-free and very long love, albeit fiction can be found in the 1980 film and cast of Somewhere in Time.1 The film uses time travel, real or imagined as a literary device to explore the timeless nature of real love, defining the “cult classic” sub-genre for multiple generations. Every October since 1990, fans of the film, many costumed and hardly limited to women have met those still living who were involved in making the film at historic Mackinac Island, Michigan where the film was shot.2 The protagonists, Elise McKenna (Jayne Seymour) and Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) never married on or off screen, seemingly due to fate interceding at the same point in time in both cases.3
By co-inventing here and elsewhere better mechanisms for interpersonal synergy toward completing mega-projects to ensure human self-preservation – beyond the maintenance of social stability which if prioritized for its own sake often yields civilizational stagnation, eight billion of us can maximize the ongoing human endeavor of which we are all parts. We can and need to combine better as generations, individuals and ideally, about four billion super-committed couples who can and hopefully do re-commit every ten years, or become part of new dedicated partnerships without social, economic or even parental pressure. As with any social convention, we can do far better than the current norm and we can also do far worse.
Gay marriage, which has proven effective in raising kids is puzzling in that an oppressed people petitioned through law to join a social system rife with historic oppression (marriage) as co-equals, following the model in the 1990s of the gays in the military campaign, militaries being inherently oppressive though with paradoxical goals of perpetual liberty. Progressive straight couples who wanted to be allies to their gay friends would have done better to renounce their religious vows, religion being another tool of historic oppression and recognize their own and their gay friends’ civil unions only. In the United States’ socio-institutional context, that we have pink-washed the expansive national security state appears to have been the long term goal of the gays in the military campaign since the very beginning of the Bill Clinton administration (1993-2001).
In order to do far better and not far worse than the status quo of anything, contextual awareness in needed. Since the moon landing of July 20, 1969, resulting from the space race between the U.S (1791-present) and the Soviet Union (1917-1991) as part of their geopolitical competition, humans have been a nascent solar system civilization or multi-world species, though our proven ability to traverse distance in present human form remains confined to the Earth-moon system. Since Apollo 17, the last human moon mission in December 1972, the age of the author (52), we have failed to reach beyond our grasp by not going “on to Mars” among other mega-projects.4 I argue that this aversion contributes to the systemic infighting we experience among nations as well as within cultures including within families, given as sacrosanct by social traditionalists but in most cases are just one more dysfunctional hierarchy among many – synergized dysfunction en masse.
Without ambitious space co-exploration among eight billion humans, inclusive of each human’s inner space by each and for each, our cultures will clash, break and disintegrate into time, such is my broad reinterpretation of Samuel Huntington’s contested work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).5 In my view, Huntington makes the all too common assumption that human groups, however delineated are akin to game board pieces across our globe and that life is inherently a game of zero-sum power. Another common observation is that synergy or the team concept among humans at all levels is more natural, at least for the majority of humans for the majority of time, including during any given time period experience by most humans.6 “Human nature,” a tired refrain often implying the Christian doctrine of original sin abandons the equal or more likely reality that human nature is an eternal divide between good and evil, living and dying deep within each human as a complex individual, shaped by cultures, including but not limited to parents, present or absent.7
In a recent post, I observed that the recent Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) movement hinted at the possibility of peacefully bypassing the nation-state system hierarchy (1648-present) and thus nullifying instead of overcoming it through traditional bottom-up revolution, usually mortally violent.8 Here, I would like for us to think about what might come after MGTOW, after men have made our point about not being taken for granted by some or even all women in a downward vortex of negative synergy, such is the claim. Whatever the truth(s) may be in regard to the compelling phenomenon of MGTOW, positive togetherness among super-synergistic and interconnected human dyads going forward is more likely to be achieved without marriage than with it.9
In full disclosure, I have been married twice to women of excellence for a total of just over two years, each marriage separated by 15 years and two graduate degrees, one worthy co-national try and one worthy international try. I am also in an international non-married partnership (with rings) of two lifetime(s) that began in Summer 1987 at the ages of 14 and 17 on a language and cultural immersion trip from the U.S. to Mexico, was reignited in Spring 2013 on Facebook and continues past my partner’s early departure into the unknown in early July 2024, partly through her two grown accomplishing adult children, 30 and 25.
As eventually fully free humans on the move across galaxies, we must always guard our individual freedom of choice to reproduce biologically and/or ideologically, even to the point of lethal violence against institutionalized oppressors writ large as a last resort, both in the interests of human self-preservation and to stand up for the defenseless such as in Palestine, the Congo, Sudan, South Sudan and for Ukrainian conscripts against their government. Beyond these examples of the moment, without structural renewal, it may become necessary to kill and leave in the sea of time those structures that are negatively synergistic by design and waste precious lifetime over generations, such as the war-based nation-state system as I argue elsewhere in the posts on this site.
REFERENCES
1. “Somewhere in Time (film),” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somewhere_in_Time_(film). Retrieved July 8, 2025.
2. Somewhere in Time Official Website. https://www.somewhereintime.tv/. Retrieved July 17, 2025.
3. Samantha Ibrahim, “Jane Seymour: I ‘fell madly in love’ with Christopher Reeve, but then he broke my heart,” New York Post, April 26, 2022. https://nypost.com/2022/04/26/jane-seymour-christopher-reeve-fell-madly-in-love-during-1980-film/. See also, “Christopher Reeve & Jane Seymour Weren’t Faking It in Their Romantic Scenes,” Facts Verse. Posted May 11, 2022 (4:07): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV06r6e7LiU. Both retrieved June 17, 2025.
4. The Mars Society. https://www.marssociety.org/. See also, 100 Year Starship. https://100yss.org/. Both retrieved July 18, 2025.
5. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). See also, “Clash of Civilizations,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations and CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS – Montclair State University, PDF. https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~lebelp/1993SamuelPHuntingtonTheClashOfCivilizationsAndTheRemakingofWorldOrder.pdf. Both retrieved July 20, 2025.
6. See also, Peter Corning, Synergistic Selection: How Cooperation has Shaped Evolution and the Rise of Humankind (Singapore: World Scientific, 2018). https://complexsystems.org/publications/synergistic-selection-how-cooperation-has-shaped-evolution-and-the-rise-of-humankind/. Retrieved July 20, 2025.
7. See also, “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956),” goodreads, webpage. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/450864-the-line-separating-good-and-evil-passes-not-through-states and “Human nature,” Wikipedia, webpage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature. Both retrieved July 20, 2025.
8. Martin Schwab, “Multicontinental mobilization can bypass global oligarchical control,” 3×3 Global Drills, June 16, 2025. https://3x3globaldrills.com/2025/06/16/multi-continental-mobilization-around-global-oligarchical-control/. See also, Vidushi Gupta, “What is the MGTOW movement and its impact on men?” Agyanetra, April 4, 2024. https://agyanetra.com/mgtow-movement-and-its-impact-on-men/. Both retrieved July 20, 2025.
9. See also, Unmarried Equality. https://www.unmarried.org/. Retrieved July 20, 2025.
3x3 GLOBAL DRILLS 