Familial and Societal Relationships

There is a wide gap between perceptions of a person's family and his/her society, and accordingly the person is required to adjust his/her behavior every now and then while moving back and forth between family and society. This gap is ushered in because the individual's family life need to be free while his/her social life need be disciplined. Ideally, even free family lifestyle must be in coherence with social disciplinary norms, so that the person need not to readjust him/herself while shuttling between family and society.

The family of a person has two components - wife/husband and all others including parents and children. Why do I put husband/wife separately from all others? Because, wife/husband relationship is an evolved relationship and keep on changing with circumstances, while those with others, like parents and children, are naturally forced on the persons. Therefore, wife and husband can depart and say that they no more have a relationship. But nobody can ever say that he/she is no more a child of the parents, or that he/she is no more a parent of the children. So, wife/husband relationship is societal while those with other family members are genetic or natural. For this very reason, many animal species have no fixed husband/wife relationships but all have parent/child relationships at least for some time until maturity of the off-springs.

The humans decided to live at fixed places and forming societies, or to become social, with a principal aim of distribution of work among themselves due to growing range of products and services needed by them, wherein every one was unable to produce everything to satisfy his/her needs.

Within the parent/child relationships, there exist genetic symbiosis making the relationship easily maintainable but in a societal relationship, there exists no such natural linkage making it difficult to maintain. Therefore, more compromises become necessary in the society than those in the family. A husband/wife relationship being a societal relationship, its maintenance need a lot of compromises on both sides.

All societal relationships warrant every individual to follow social disciplinary norms. Here, I stress on norms, and not on social customs and traditions. Norms are naturally evolved in a society so that nobody in the society appears to be abnormal. Conversely, social customs and traditions might have been artificially imposed on the society through distortions in norms which need to be checked and reset every now and then. Particularly, in countries which have been slave for thousands of years, selfish rulers and social leaders enforce customs and traditions on the society to serve their own narrow ends at the peril of individual values of the persons. Ideally there must be no gap between social norms and customs and traditions. 

Since, basis of societal relationships is distribution of work which forbids exploitations in the society and makes every relationship of give-and-take type. So, no body has a right to get anything without giving due in exchange. This is applicable to husband/wife relationships also but not on parents/children relationships.