The Case for Monogamy : Part 3

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

(Page 15 of 16)

One may think one doesn't care much about the partner, one may get tired of listening to the same old jokes, the same set of worries, the same reminiscences; but let there be a misunderstanding, and one finds that one must care tremendously or one could not be so devastated. No association is so humdrum that it cannot be quickened into life, no matter how long it has been meagerly taking its course.

Certain types of people, whom we might lump together as a restless, discontented lot, enjoy "shopping around" for doctors, for jobs, for friends, for lovers, never staying long enough with any one doctor, job, friend, or lover to have to take any back talk. As soon as the first signs of a candid relationship appear, they are off, bag and baggage, to newer hunting grounds. We may suspect that what they really want is to outrun their own personality.

This appears in their willingness to slough off even their children, in an adolescent impatience with any barrier to an immediate desire. So contrary is this to nature that regret follows closely their decision. The children, however, are laden with a burden put on them by their parents. Instead of joyful confidence, they experience a divided affection. Driven to a choice of loyalties or caught between competing rivals who attempt to win their love, they are thereby denied security, the one gift every home owes a child.

Depending as he must upon his parents for this, it is a shattering experience for him to find that the twofold support of his existence is no longer holding together. He wants and needs not his mother or his father, nor just his mother and his father, but his two parents love-linked together as the one source of steadiness in a universe which otherwise is in flux and turmoil.

The child who finds his parents have given up trying to maintain their affectionate interdependence is hurt beyond any other hurt that can come to him. Precociously matured by being denied that security of encircling affection which is his right, he is forever cheated of his childhood and therefore can never become fully mature emotionally, but must have great gaps in what should have been the slow development of his emotions, before they hardened into adult form.

The monogamic fellowship normally encourages the coming of the child. Neither husband nor wife can awaken in the other the strong normal urges that come to expression in love fellowship, without bringing forth the desire that seems rooted in human nature for a child of their own. In any case, when the child does enter the home, experience soon makes plain his need of security. Where there is no monogamic commitment, he is forced into family life that is confused, incomplete, and uncertain. In such a situation, open as he is to first impressions, he suffers most, and not infrequently so deeply as to carry emotional scars for life. The friend of children recoils from the thought of any sort of transient motherhood or fatherhood. Monogamy provides a stable home in which each member - husband, wife and child - although they are copartners in love, has an indispensable, unique, and satisfying role.

Monogamy is not a fettering of human impulse, but a registration of the deepest yearnings of men and women. The laws that define and support it are merely man's efforts to express the common opinion that has taken form out of the experiences through the centuries of a great multitude of persons who, like ourselves, have sought success in marriage. Those who think of monogamy as something imposed on human nature through external authority, a sort of strait jacket of emotional restraint, are obtuse to the overwhelming testimony of human nature. Monogamy is not established by a thundering edict from Mount Sinai, but by the quiet, persistent inward-speaking of human need. The one-man-one-woman craving is so deeply laid in the structure of all of us that any other way of mating and establishing a home is alien to desire, the thought never arises, except when the one-time expectations have been lost through personality failure.

Monogamy is not something that suddenly and finally takes shape, a petrifying of emotion that for a season in courtship flourishes. It gets its vitality through a growth process, continues with life, a spreading of an affection always forward-looking; anything else is an indication of a faltering marriage. In the beginning love announces the awakening of mutual need. Then the feelings flow swift and strong and carry each toward the other. The impulse to possess, to annex, to have possession of the beloved, is a consuming hunger. It is a covetous grasping, a recognition that the other is indispensable. Out of this comes a union, and from then on, the two grow not only together, but also their common fellowship grows, becoming their way of life.

The passion to possess the other one, who seems external, fades away, and in its place comes the joy of mutual sharing, the security of an exploring fellowship. It is thus that monogamy offers love its fulfillment. There must be this welding of self with self if the emotionally awakened man or woman is to escape loneliness. Self-expansion in power, distinction, or pleasure does not suffice. Any by-oneself fulfillment only brings home the profounder need of a different achievement, not in separation, but through union, the fusion of two persons in a constant intimacy.

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