In Defense of Monogamy
As good liberals we are not allowed to criticize how somebody else organizes their love life. As long as it’s between consenting adults, people should do whatever they want, have as many or as little sexual partners as they want. So writing a defense of monogamy today seems a little off-putting. What used to be cheaters, tramps and perverts are now respectfully referred to as people with either a medical condition (sex addiction) or a sexual identity (polyamory), making any criticism taboo.
If criticizing someone’s identity or medical condition wasn’t already violence enough, why am I doing it in the name of monogamy of all things? Isn’t there something odious about it, something old-fashioned, patriarchal, repressive? Maybe the only way monogamy can survive today is by becoming just another identity in the LGBTQ alphabet, or maybe even a medical condition (sex tunnel vision?).
To be safe, I will not criticize polyamory as such, but rather the way in which someone might arrive at it. The radical claim of psychoanalytic theory is that people are not simply born with sexual identities, but that different sexual identities are just so many attempts at dealing with a certain impossibility inherent in sexuality.
So I want to criticize polyamory in the way in which it responds to the impossibility of finding a romantic partner that fulfills you and makes you happy for the rest of your life. This impossibility is one we all know and recognize, regardless of gender, identity, or medical condition. It’s the fantasy of the finding the “one”, your “soul mate”, the prince in the Disney movie. This idea is impossible to escape, since it lurks in every romance movie, every love song, every poem. In psychoanalytic terms, it is just the fantasy of obtaining the impossible, sublime object of desire that will fulfill me and make me whole, applied to the field of romance.
The problem is that this fantasy is by definition impossible to realize. In every relationship there comes a moment where your lover loses their sublimity: it could be a fart, it could be a weird facial twitch, it could be their taste in music. Whatever it is, it spells the end of the honeymoon phase, and we start to wonder: is this really it? Is this person the one for me, or is my soul mate still out there somewhere?
But in the year of our Lord 2022, nobody really believes in soul mates anymore. And yet I claim that we still get a certain satisfaction from this fantasy. We still enjoy romance movies that stage this fantasy, and it still brings us satisfaction in the first few intoxicating months of every new relationship. But then every disappointment brings us back to reality, like the drug user’s depressing low after the euphoric high, and we have to find a way to live with this split between dream and reality.
The solution of (some? all?) polyamorists is then to chase the high: since the soul mate is impossible, why not jump from partner to partner, avoiding the low by breaking things off before the honeymoon phase wears off? This is not an honest solution however, since enjoying the honeymoon phase requires investment in the soul mate fantasy that you claim to disavow. Or worse, and this is where things become unethical, you can avoid investment in the soul mate fantasy but still enjoy the honeymoon by imagining that your partner really believes in it. Here we find the Don Draper archetype: someone who goes from partner to partner, creating this fairytale romance, telling them what they want to hear, leeching off their enjoyment and then bailing before the bubble bursts.
Ok, so what is the solution then? Why am I defending monogamy? Am I advocating some sad, depressing type of monogamy where you accept that the dream isn’t real and resign yourself to live forever with some farting person who listens to bad music? No, I am advocating for a new type of monogamy which collapses this split between dream and reality. Where, what makes my partner sublime is not some fantasy image of a special person who is meant to fulfill me, but precisely the fact that this person is ultimately a complete random person I just met at a party some day. The very fact that they could have been anyone else, but crazily I decided to spend the rest of my life with them and only them, is what makes them sublime. As such I truly love them because of their farting and bad taste in music, not in spite of it.
Originally published at https://maarten.substack.com on April 3, 2022.
