Radical Monogamy
Just admit you only want/need one lover
If you have brain cells to spare I recommend this nonsense article from Vice entitled ‘Radical Monogamy’. This is a type of relationship that is broadly defined as:
“…it’s a progressive alternative to the “old monogamy of our parents and grandparents [that] doesn’t really work today.” The latter doesn’t work, they believe, “because it is often predicated on heteronormativity and misogyny and very frequently breeds boredom, disloyalty and stagnation.”
According to the article, the concept doesn’t appear to have permeated the mainstream outside of Twitter arguments — that’s because it’s dumb.
My Medium blog is spectacularly unsuccessful, usually my posts only garner about fifty hits. My most successful post, however, is a secular rebuttal of polyamory, which at the time of writing this has just over 11,000 hits. It’s the post most people have clapped and liked and shared. It’s the post most people write to me about.
The take away from all the correspondance I’ve received is that people, especially women, do not like polyamory. At all. Polyamory is not popular. It’s a niche form of relationship structure. Yes, it’s existed since time began, but that doesn’t mean people were/are having a good time. Don’t take my word for it, go read Reddit for fifteen minutes or so.
Polyamory has become trendy in the past few years. I’ve seen several publications cover this ‘new’, ‘exciting’ type of relationship without a single word of critical analysis. The collumn inches extolling its virtues drowned out any refutations of polyamory as a vehicle for human happiness. The only voices that were heard were of the polyamorous who liked it.
There were, however, many, many people who realised that polyamory was just an excuse for their partners to cheat on them, or who after requesting an open-relationship found it impossible to close again, or who needed spreadsheets to keep track of their lovers and formed a satisfying bond with none of them.
Whilst this was going on, I wrote erotic books for women who obsessively fantasised about finding ‘The One’ true love of their life or having an intense experience with one other person and one other person only. Women resort to romance novels to experience the type of loyalty and security they find hard to attain in real life. Very few people can cope with the jealousy of knowing their beloved is being physically intimate with another person.
It’s true that how we view marriage as an institution has evolved, especially since how the way society views the role of women has changed. But that didn’t mean the baby should have been thrown out with the bath water. A decline in marriage has been disasterous for children, especially working class children, whose seperated parents are less able to provide them with emotional and financial stability outside of it.
If you don’t want a heteronormative or misogynistic marriage, the solution isn’t to go live on a polyamorous commune, the solution is to not marry someone heteronormative or misogynistic. Boredom, disloyalty and stagnation are challenges of marriage rather than its innate features. We shouldn’t blame the institution for the fallibility and failings of the people in it.
‘Radical Monogamy’ is the old monogamy gussied up in new clothes. The only sensible take away from the Vice article is that monogamy is good again because the trendies have reverted back to it. They’ve been burnt by their low quality, debasing experiments with polyamory but they don’t want to admit it so they’re marketing it in a new way.
I’m not fooled and you shouldn’t be either.
Thank you for reading — I hope you found my thoughts interesting. You can find links to my other work here: https://linktr.ee/sayde.scarlett
