By Nancy Hakizimana – The first man in recorded history did not pursue the first woman. He did not write her a letter, he did not rehearse a single opening line, he was asleep. Genesis brushes through this like a footnote, which is part of what makes it funny in retrospect. God does not consult Adam, there is no swiping, no nervous coffee. There is simply a procedure and a man who wakes up already married, like someone coming out of anaesthesia going “wait, what did I miss?” Every love story since has involved at least one person who was awake for the start of it. Adam set the bar at the floor and somehow, we still tell the story like he was the protagonist.
So, what does the story of the first marriage tell us? Maybe it’s about trust because the thing being made required more care than his waking opinion could offer. You don’t ask the patient to hold the scalpel. Or maybe it’s a cosmic joke at the expense of every person since who’s insisted they “knew right away.” Dude,your ancestor didn’t even get to vote! Or maybe the story isn’t about Adam at all because he’s furniture in his own origin myth. Adam wakes up into a relationship the way the rest of us wake up into a random weekday that is already in progress, already shaped by forces that didn’t check with us first.
Compare this to literally every love story we’ve told since. Modern romance runs on the idea of the deserving pursuer. In Say Anything, Lloyd stands outside Diane’s window holding a boombox over his head, and we treat this as the gold standard of devotion. Noah builds Allie an entire house with his own hands in The Notebook. In Greys Anatomy, Meredith tearfully begs Derek to “pick me. choose me. love me.” And then later built a house with candles outlining their future home. Even Edward Cullen in Twilight, for all his problems, at least had the decency to be conscious while stalking Bella through a forest.
Adam did none of this, his entire romantic resume is one line. And yet we built the entire Western romantic tradition on a guy whose love story has less effort in it than a Tinder bot.
Compare him to Quincy in Love & Basketball, choosing Monica, losing her, and choosing her again on a literal court, because he understood love was something you had to play for. Or to Darius in Love Jones, who spills his drink on Nina at the bar, then redeems himself onstage minutes later by dedicating a poem to her, titled “A Blues for Nina,” in front of the whole room. Collins and Angel in Rent meet because Angel stops to help a stranger lying in the snow, a relationship beginning with someone choosing, fully conscious, to notice another person. Janie in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God gets three marriages and three chances to figure out what she wants. That is three more decisions than Adam ever got. Janie searches, Janie chooses badly and then well, Adam just…wakes up. He’s the least active protagonist in the history of protagonists, and somehow he’s the one we built a creation myth around.
However, choosing has never been quite as universal as romcoms make it sound, of course. Huge stretches of human history and culture have run on arranged marriage, where the first real conversation happens after the contract is signed. So maybe Adam isn’t the outlier I’m making him out to be, he’s just the first entry in a longer, less cinematic tradition. The twist is that even arranged marriage usually leaves both people conscious for it. Adam couldn’t even manage that.
However still, there’s another way to read this that is a little less petty toward Adam, though I want to keep the comedy intact. So much of how we’re taught to live is about putting in an effort. Effort is supposed to be proof of seriousness; if you didn’t put an effort for it, did you even deserve it? But the first relationship in the human record rejects that premise. Adam doesn’t put an effort. The most important event of his life happens entirely without his input, while he’s doing the single least productive thing a person can do. His sole contribution is unconsciousness, and the story treats that as sufficient.
So, not every good thing requires effort. There are seasons where striving simply does not move the needle, no matter how hard you push, and the story of Eden oddly points to this. The first man’s life changed when he wasn’t even trying.
I don’t think this lets anyone off the hook for showing up to their own life. But there’s a difference between sleeping through your life and sleeping through the one part of the process that was never yours to manage. Adam didn’t sleep through his marriage as he showed up for the parts that required him.
So, here’s where I land, the first marriage in human history began with one party unconscious and the other freshly assembled minutes earlier, and from that chaotic beginning we built thousands of years of insisting love is about choosing each other. Adam never got to choose, he just got to wake up. And maybe that’s better than choosing as you get to find out, after the fact, that something was already worth opening your eyes for. Make of that what you will. Adam certainly didn’t get the chance to.
Nancy Hakizimana is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at VU.