Monogamy, an essay in three parts

Part I -- How It Started

If you plan on reading Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day" be warned that a small spoiler is contained below.

In the middle of Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day" there is a love story. World War I has exploded across Europe at long last and our young lovers are fleeing across the countryside seek a safe haven.

Pretty standard fare...except this is Pynchon who never does anything standard. Our young lovers are Yashmeen, a European heroine with a head for numbers; Reef, rugged American adventurer from a very colorful Colorado family, and Cyprian, the Brit who has mooned after Yashmeen since college days despite the fact they were both, for most of their lives, confirmed homosexuals. It does change things, doesn't it? Except...it doesn't. Sure, at first Cyp is there more as an audience and Reef, he's sure he's far too macho to ever be gay, except, by the time Cyprian leaves the other two, it's very plain that all three love each other very much.

While I have mixed feelings about "Against the Day," I really enjoyed their story and, to no one's surprise, it got me thinking. When did we decide that love was a two-way street; that it needs to be confined to two people and two people only? Yash, Reef, and Cyp get away with it because the world's gone to war and no one is really paying any attention to them. They also get away with it because they are fictional characters in the book of a very liberated author who will let them. Still, Cyprian, realizing the world won't let their relationship survive the war, stays behind in a monastery so the two people he loves most can continue to be together.

Ok, I hear you, gentle reader, saying how could anyone so hard-bitten and cynical even have been interested in a love story? Is there really something that softens Mother's heart? Whether it's a combination of primary and secondary sexual traits that attract someone and makes them want to procreate and continue the species, or whether it's the compatibility of life scripts between people so that each individual finds and bonds with people they perceive as meeting their pyschological needs, let's acknowledge that we are attracted to some people more than others, that we emotionally bond with other people, that we find other people physically attractive, and when all of that comes together and is mutually held, we call it love and it is a good thing. Is it limited to couples only? Is that a blessing or a curse? Is not the companionship of more than one person better than the companionship of only one person? If romance between two people is good, would not romance between three be even better?

In my very unscientific sampling of my THH guinea pigs, I mean research group, it appears that most people, regardless of their other beliefs, have some need or desire for monogamy, here meaning a single relationship between two people. Even the resident anarchist leans towards monogamy. Two people. One life-time commitment. Exclusivity. But we didn't start out that way. Like most mammals, we started out a much less discriminating species.

Part II -- A Brief History of Monogamy

Back in the early days of humankind, groups divided themselves into men and women and pair off collectively, meaning all the men were one half of the couple and all the women were the other half. But then, we got civilized. One of the first things we did as civilized beings was to decide that property needed to be passed down to our progeny. For that to happen, we had be certain of who our progeny were. Thus, the male-dominated relationship wherein women could be killed for infidelity was established. Men had to have some degree of certitude that they were passing on their property, title, wealth, etc, to actual, real, blood descendants, and the way to do that was lock up and repress the women. So, we all got civilized and each man got to marry and bind his women to him, which eventually became just one woman. And thus all the wealth did stay in the family and life was good -- for men and their first-born sons anyway.

And what were women told? Women were told about true love. They were told fairy tales about how if they became submissive slaves, cheerfully doing all the household drudge-work, their prince would come and carry them off because he had a castle that needed a good cleaning by a cheerful submissive…or something like that, sometimes I get a little fuzzy on my fairy tale details. They were told good, virtuous, lady-like women put up with their men folk so they could experience the rewards of child-bearing, and that their men, deep down, loved them. If their man beat them, it was out of love. If they fooled around, well, it was probably something you as an ignorant woman did, so you better do better next time. What you didn’t do is get out and get yourself another man. Only brazen hussies and wicked, fallen women did things like that. Nor were you able get out and get by with no man at all. Good women did what they did for “love,” but it also kept them from becoming paupers, because they had no means of self-support. Remember, all that wealth, property and so forth was being passed down to male heirs. So good women did what they were allowed to do. They met a man, they got married, and then they had kids.

And that is where monogamy came from. Sounds romantic, doesn’t it?

Part III – The Wow Finish

But wait! ‘Cause here’s where it gets interesting! In the post-WWII era, suddenly corporations discovered what valuable assets women are. Women are able to earn their own money, they can hire their own cheerful submissives to do the drudge-work, and have their own property, wealth, etc. to pass on to the progeny, and they know which kids are theirs because child-birth isn’t something you forget easily. What happens? In the words of Tammy Wynette, “Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E becomes fin-al to-day…” Half of all marriages famously end in divorce. People wait longer to get married. Fewer people get married.

We’ve been conditioned to still want, based on my unscientific sampling, one person to love us and choose us above all others. Yet, the reality for a lot of us isn’t a single life-time marriage, but serial monogamy, consecutive true loves, mates for every age and stage of adult life. How great of a leap is it, then, from consecutive relationships to concurrent ones, and if we can accept concurrent relationships, how far is it from there to shared relationships? Personally, I think it’s damn near impossible to find one person to love who loves you back. Finding two people to love you and to love each other: It seems like such a long shot. Thinking back among the world’s great lovers there are Neal and Caroline Cassady and Jack Kerouac; Anais Nin, Henry Miller and Mrs. Miller. Then there are all those so-called adult films that aren’t really very adult at all, and that 80-year-old man and his three young bouncy blondes on late-night cable. Doesn’t sound like a very promising group. But when you are going against a society that insists on pairing people up two-by-two, you are bound to run into difficulties. That isn’t to say that I don’t believe it could happen, but it would take an evolution of society far beyond what we’ve reached today.

Concurrent relationships would require less sense of ownership of another person than anything we’ve had since our cave-dwelling ancestors. Don’t we still make remarks about “sinking her claws” into a man or “slipping a ring on her finger before she gets away”? They would require a re-shaping of our mythology about true love, something else the unscientific sampling was fond of. To maintain our belief in true love, we will tell ourselves that only our mate is attractive to us and only our mate meets our emotional needs. Until that relationship falls apart and we go looking for another. And we will ignore the possibility that if we can love consecutively, we also are capable of loving concurrently, that there’s more than one true love out there, there may be a lot more true loves out there.

To get all the way to a shared relationship, we also would have to reshape the idea that there are straight people and gay people, and accept that there is straightness and gayness in all people, including ourselves. It has taken years to get some people even to accept that there are gay people and they have a right to exist, and there are still those clinging to the notion that there is something “evil” about homosexuality. So, yes, I think society will keep embracing monogamy, though I think it will become even more of an ideal and even less of a reality, and we will beat ourselves up about our failure to find it. Three will be kept in the domain of certain adult films, half-crazed literary figures, and the characters they create. Society will continue to enforce an antiquated system of ensuring that the only seed that finds its way to a womb is planted by the rightful owner and we will call it true love.