Monday, July 4, 2011

Monotonous Monogamy

For as long as I can remember, our Political leaders, Christian statesman, Sports champions, Heads of state, Youth icons, Singers, Actors and other public figures, have been involved with sex scandals and marital infidelity; the list is endless, the Profumo scandal, Pamela Bordes, Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods, Kennedy s, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Julian Assange, Dominique Strauss Kahn, Berlusconi, Ireland's President. Shane Warne, Pakistan Supreme court Judges, no one is spared.

The impulse to be something other than what we are in our daily, monogamous lives, the thrill that comes from the illicit rather than the predictable, is something I imagine many couples can identify with.

Some people need more than one partner, just as some people need flirting, others need lovers of both sexes. We can’t help our urges, and we should not lie to our partners about them. In some marriages, talking honestly about our needs will forestall or obviate affairs; in other marriages, the conversation may lead to an affair, but with permission. In both cases, honesty is the best policy. People should not live in toxic, miserable marriages all their lives.

Monogamy is harder than we admit and articulating and imposing a sexual ethic that defies stark reality for a societal ideal of marriage, and trying to conform to the Global obsession with strict fidelity, is self defeating.

We acknowledge the advantages of monogamy, when it comes to sexual safety, infections, emotional safety, paternity assurances. But people in monogamous relationships have to be willing to acknowledge the drawbacks of monogamy around boredom, despair, lack of variety, sexual death and being taken for granted.
In its place we can propose a sensibility and tolerance for a variety of partnered arrangements, from strict monogamy to wide openness.

The mistake that straight society made was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitarian and fair.

In the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed, we extended to men the confines women had always endured. And it’s been a disaster for marriage.

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