The Case for Monogamy : Part 2

The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book: Twelve Steps to a Happy Marriage
by Various

(Page 14 of 16)

This is the testing period of the marriage. Each partner must continually get used to the new outline of the other's personality as it is showing itself, without losing sight of the value of the essential quality that persists. Of one thing both can be sure: each still has need of the other.

In today's mail comes a letter from a businessman who admits that he had got out of the habit of showing his wife how he felt about her in the rush and worry of trying to keep his head above water financially. Now that she in her loneliness has lost her heart to another man, the husband almost breaks into poetry in telling of his feelings. Not vindictive, he is just hopeless. If the wife could have had imagination enough to realize the strength of his need of her, she would never have wrapped herself in loneliness away from him.

The drop from the temporary bliss of the beginning of love to the lasting burden-sharing of the rest of life offers many a chance for hurt feelings. Those who lose confidence in their own or their partner's ability to keep on trying to live together on a reality basis are generally the ones who want to keep one foot in the dreamland of immaturity. If he drinks and she sulks, both would rather think themselves martyrs and talk over their troubles with sympathetic friends than get down to business and do something about their problems.

Quarrels are intense in proportion to the depth of tender emotion in the background. Not understanding what is happening to them, the husband and wife think it is the end of love, and he may be tempted to accept comfort from another woman, she from another man. Then they need desperately to know, "What is the case for monogamy?"

History shows that monogamy has always been accompanied by increasing vigor in the society or group practicing it, and that its opposite - freedom from social restraint in the relationships of men and women - has always been associated with social or group decay. But modern young people are interested in the meaning of monogamy for them personally.

Monogamy is a going on in the healthy spirit of meeting what life brings, not running away from it. Escape into a substitute relationship is a going back to the dreamlike stage of late adolescence, putting new promises ahead of present performance, and attempting to make life stand still, so that one may continue on the threshold of maturity without ever stepping over into the place where one must make good one's promises.

No human craving, from infancy to death, is stronger than that for security of affection. What misleads people into thinking of going outside their marriage association, or wanting to break it for a new one, is their failure to understand the slow growth of permanent affection. Looking back at the intensity of its beginning in romantic love, they suppose it is dwindling, when it is really taking root.

As a child that has been spoiled at home has a hard time getting used to the lesser attention he receives away from home, the married person who believes that courtship love is the essence of marriage finds it hard to come down to the quieter affection that can endure. This is the person who, unable to stand being valued only for his or her real worth, complains to an outsider, "Nobody understands me." The outsider, flattered, murmurs, "I do," and romanticizes about "this fine, unappreciated person," only to discover when it is too late that the person was only too well understood by the unfortunate first partner.

One may not be able to make oneself grow up suddenly and all at once, but one can hold on to the principles one knows to be worth fighting for, by the simple process of refusing to let go. All kinds of wonderful qualities needed in marriage may seem to be conspicuous in oneself chiefly by their absence, but one can always play for time. Even if infatuated with another person, one can hang on to what one knows is right until Time, the mighty leveler of passion, comes to one's help.

An exceptionally happy married woman, after going through this ordeal, said that at the time when she was almost carried away by an unexpected infatuation for a business associate of her husband's, it seemed as if nothing was real but the lover. Neither the memory of past happiness with the husband nor the thought of his future misery if she should leave him was able to mean more to her than so many words. Only, in her half-stupefied condition, she had the wit to remember, as one might recall the multiplication table without caring anything about it, that she had always previously despised people who acted on impulse without trying to find out the probable consequences. Therefore she stuck to her self-imposed rule that she would have no contact with the man, even by letter, until she could get over the strange numbness of her emotions toward her husband. Then, gradually but thoroughly, she came out of her trancelike infatuation, until she found it hard to remember that it had ever happened.

The time to put on the brakes in checking runaway emotions is before they gain momentum. While the feelings aroused still seem harmless, the person can redirect his or her energy toward a more desirable object such as finding new grounds of communion with the spouse or sublimating its expression by turning it into constructive artistic or social channels. To wait until disaster threatens before taking oneself in hand is to pile up, at best, a guilty feeling that one has not done one's best to meet the needs of the mate.

Those who "step out" in the frantic forties and foolish fifties complicate the picture for their younger observers. What they are trying to find is not so much a new thrill as the reliving of an old glow - the hopefulness of their lost youth. Not content to live over in memory the high hopes that were theirs when life was new - because of the gap between expectation and realization - they close their eyes to the new disillusionment they are heading for, and think only to shut out their sense of inadequacy in their present association by steering full steam ahead for another encounter, in which the odds are even more against them.

Garden City Publishing Co. reprint edition, 1949, by special arrangement with Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Copyright, 1938, by PRENTICE-HALL, INC.