A Beautiful, Adulterous Husband - Good For The Gene Pool, Good For Women, And The Best Of Natural Selection

Harvey Adams was a handsome man - chisel-jawed, bright blue eyes, tall and elegantly poised, intelligent, and apt - and not surprisingly he was the idol of many women. 

Harvey, however, was married to his longtime sweetheart, Margaret  - not uxoriously by any means, but faithful, respectful, and honest, so despite 'the nearness of you', his favorite song of the 40s sung by Ray Eberle with the Glenn Miller orchestra, and the coterie of cloyingly attractive women that followed him, he remained in the thrall of the lovely, proper, and orderly wife.

 

'What's wrong with you?', asked his friend, colleague and former college roommate with whom he travelled to Smith, Wellesley, and Vassar every weekend to meet young women and sleep with them at the Taft while his classmates were at the Yale Bowl. Harvey's friend saw his settled and ordinary sexual propriety simply not right.  Sexual diversity was the key to evolutionary advancement, the colleague annotated, and the best and the brightest had a duty to populate the world, plus of course, it was a lot of fun.  

'Eugenics', replied Henry, surprised at the suggestion.  He had been brought up to honor, respect, protect, and preserve women, not to abandon them for an insignificant, immature dalliance and despite what he had come to realize was his indefinable but irresistible attraction for women, he felt obligated to remain faithful. 

So no blandishment by his friend who banged on about demographic differentials, the exaggerated birthrates of dysfunctional inner cities, and the one or two child procreative, restricted policy of the white, Anglo-Saxon upper classes, could change his mind.  

As things would have it - the stars aligned and serendipitous circumstances in place - he met Melissa Barnard, a woman of precise bearing, poise, and natural elegance who had the same philosophical bent as that suggested by Harvey's roommate.  'I would bear your child in an instant', she said a number of weeks later at the Rodney, a hotel on the beach in Dewey, Delaware, and meant it without the usual female codicils, intimations, or implied threats.  

It took infidelity - it was quite a while before Harvey even admitted to himself that he owed it to himself if not others to court other women - to get him off the mark.  Not that he loved Margaret any less, but that there was no inconsistency in plurality either.  A man was not such an emotionally monogamous thing to be unable to have an intimate affection with more than one woman. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald had written in his story The Rich Boy that there are many kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice; and although he meant it with nostalgia and a hint of regret, he was also writing about the marvelous opportunity there was to be a part of the many, not just among the few. 

And so it was that Melissa became pregnant with Harvey's child, bore it alone, and quite happily became a loving single mother to a gorgeous, beautiful, intelligent little boy.  She told Harvey, but without a scintilla of regret or demand.  They together had produced a beautiful child, and he should have others. 

After the experience with Melissa, his natural reticence receded and he engaged in more affairs. Because he could, and because the potency of natural selection was such that the most desirable women were attracted to him, and he squired a series of intelligent, intellectually endowed, creative and talented women.  

Some were diffident about pregnancy - the tenor of the times was prohibitively against it, especially for single women.  Women were of a generation that could do without men and their offspring, better off in fact; but yet no feminist could change the natural instinctive impulse to mate and to mate well; and so it was that Harvey was presented with more offers than he could accommodate. 

When a woman became pregnant, their lovemaking took on a new, special, and surprising dimension.  The women became even more female, more feminine, more responsive, and more giving.  The women had been transformed by pregnancy, and Harvey had been their benefactor. 

Shakespeare understood the evolutionary importance of selective mating, and in the first twenty Sonnets he wrote about the Fair Youth's obligation to procreate

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But, as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory.
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.
 Pity the world, or else this glutton be—

 To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee

Eligible men and women aim high, settle for less because class, education, privilege have stacked the deck and the best and brightest tend to marry each other without direction or indication.  It is this deliberate, acknowledged assumption of human inequality, and efforts to increase it which have been so troubling for the diversity-equity-inclusivity, race-gender-ethnicity movement.

Everyone is equal, physical beauty is a chimera, superficial and dead end.  Only inner beauty counts and everyone has their own waiting to be discovered. 

Of course this is nonsense.  Physical beauty, intelligence, grace, charm, and education have always been markers for success, and in every economic, social, and cultural milieu, they are favored.  So the natural next step - the procreation of offspring inheriting the best of the best, the genetic combinations of both sexual partners - is to be applauded, not criticized. 

Where was the dutiful wife in all this? True to female form, she prided herself on having been the one to secure a man like Harvey.  He might have other women and children by them, but she had him in tow. Not surprisingly he was a good husband, for he loved women and treated them well.  Theirs was simply a non-conventional marriage, one of the diverse many in the world, beneficial for both as long as contractual obligations were filled. 

Sperm-donated children often want to find their siblings, i.e. the many children born to one man whose DNA has been shared, but although many of Harvey's children knew him as their father, they had no interest in siblinghood.  They were the loved, cherished, and protected children of good women who had deliberately, and lovingly mate with Harvey. 

As far as Harvey was concerned, his own legitimate children, those with his wife, were the only members of his family.  The rest were God's children, America's, or even something more grand which he was too modest to admit. 

It was a good life, a privileged life, and what man could ask for more?  Harvey was a good man, a good person, a mensch.