by LJ Frank

From a bed of flowers, to hay or pine needles, to palm leaves or sand, to a stiff-board mattress to assuage the needs of the spine, to assorted makeshift adaptations, the conjugal bed (etymologically rooted in conjugere or join together) has evolved to a film worthy wet dream – heaps of money employing strategic plotting of a character’s delights and or sufferings.  Philosophically the conjugal bed is not an obligatory matter as much as the expressionistic hues of an unfolding artist’s canvas.

From a different angle, the natural fragrance of a barn’s stall covered in fresh straw or a lush valley cloaked in wildflowers may be deliciously preferrable to the bottled artificial odors of the penthouse boudoir and oily bath.

The nature of reality – that which we see and experience through our methods and processes of perception and thought are the effects of experience and education plus the social, psychological, cultural, and religious constructs, including the ordinary twists, and turns we endure each day, if the poets are correct.

Religious dogma tends to interpret the conjugal bed harsher than the openness of the woven fabric of the sensual-spiritual, and philosophical. In an organic minimalist voice, the bedding of the theologian is composed with answers, whereas the bedding of the philosopher is textured with questions.

A complex irony lay in the conjugal verdict, that is, beyond the poetry of romantic love and exuberant sex, is that the effect of the conjugal bed may lead to the wish to depart or escape from an existing circumstance and or situation. That situation or circumstance is where a person feels exposed, enclosed, hemmed in, or entrapped (whether single or not) with a foreseeable route to another future life experience called into question. Unless, through the social and or civil structures that give therapeutic space, legal or not – to flee, separate, divorce, marry, remarry, or simply move on to another partner or not, leading to another potential and subsequent conjugal bed (or expression thereof). 

There upon, licenses, rites, rituals, and statutes generate revenue, i.e., money. Religion and monogamy have in the past served as a method of generating sizeable revenue from dress, drink, dowries, honeymoon suites, etcetera, in addition to captuing the meaning of soul for the sake of control. All the while suggesting the conjugal bed was for “family value” but really meant empowering others in the revenue sharing of your marital affairs.

Within the context of the conjugal bed, self-disclosure and eroticisms of the body and mind can be problematic and at odds with each other, and bubble to the surface in an assortment of shapes and interpretations: (see Sidney Jourard, Diane Wolfhal, along with Mary Eden and Richard Carrington), Chaucer, Shakespeare, among so many others.

With the introduction of artificial intelligence and adaptable organic and mechanical human like forms the conjugal bed takes on new meaning with changeable human like parts.  

If money and children aren’t the impetus there appears to be few pragmatic reasons for a marriage under the auspices of a religious or civil office.  In fact, the future of marriage and the conjugal bed are in effect, embracing the non-linear with fluid contours and designs. Adaptation has always been key to survival, and not that of the fittest.

A financially stable partner with genes that are attractive to the potential other, still appears to be of unspoken significance as part of that situation, even as the female becomes the primary “bread winner” and inevitably into a more dominant role or at least one that is increasingly selective, on whom she enjoys in the conjugal bed. Circumstance and situation continue to rapidly change.

Philosophically, marriage or partnerships in general don’t create harmony in people. Harmony is a product of meditation.  Nor does marriage or partnerships build character…character is genetic to be built upon or not. Laws, rules, and statutes are not substitutes for personal responsibility and choice, assuming the given that humans have free will beyond the natural boundary of genetics and their predisposition factor.

Lev Nikolayevich (Leo) Tolstoy in Book Four of War and Peace pondered ~ if one man only of millions once in a thousand years had the power of acting freely, i.e., as he chose, it is obvious that one single free act of man in violation of the laws would be enough to prove that laws governing all human action cannot possibly exist.