Quotes About Monogamy

Geneticists claim to have isolated the genes responsible for vole monogamy. If the addition of a gene can turn a vole Don Juan into a loyal and loving husband, are we far off from being able to genetically engineer not only the individual abilities of rodents (and humans), but also their social structures?

A dog's love is forever. We expect infidelity from one another; we marvel at this one's ability to hold that one's interest for fifty, sixty years; perhaps some of us feel a secret contempt for monogamy even as we extol it, wishing parole for its weary participants. But dogs do not receive our sympathy or our suspicion—from dogs we presume an eternal adoration.

I think if you're in a committed relationship, unless you have some sort of an understanding, monogamy is something that should exist.

But certainly not everyday you can find someone who wants to have a monogamous relationship

Men and the pursuit of them are strongly intertwined with my mental health. I would say, in my defensive defense, that the problem with being a serial monogamist is, there isn't anybody random or unimportant: everybody you sleep with really means something, which is to say each of them is on your public record. At some point I wake up thinking, Fuck this! I don't want another man in my bed ever again. What I really want is a cat.

This was why people picked one person forever and ever amen—because that one person mattered more than anyone else. There was no democracy in monogamy, and Cy got that now like he never had before.

When children of any age learn of a parent's infidelity, they usually find it extremely difficult—if not impossible— to trust that someone they love will not lie to them, reject or abandon them, or otherwise cause them pain somewhere down the road. They very often learn not to put their faith in love, and they may also learn that they are not worthy of receiving monogamous love, because according to the evidence, their betrayed parent clearly wasn't.

Qu'en savez-vous? dit le docteur. Mais quoi qu'il en soit, le nombre des épouses varie simplement comme le mode d'alimentation de l'espèce. Les lapins, les Turcs, les moutons, les artistes, et d'une façon générale tous les herbivores sont polygames; les renards, les Anglais, les loups, les banquiers, et d'une façon générale tous les carnivores sont monogames.

I don't know, monogamy is a weird thing for me.

If somebody says to me, 'Oh, you're gonna get married and you'll never be attracted to anybody else again,' I'm like, right, sure. It's just not practical to me on an emotional level. Just because I'm married, I'm not dead.

Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that's what? Children. Monogamous relationships.

This situation changed with the patriarchal family and even more with the monogamous individual family. The administration of the household lost its public character. It was no longer the concern of society. It became private service. The wife became the first domestic servant, pushed out of participation in social production.

Measure after measure, it's the same. We aren't classically monogamous or polygamous. As everyone from poets to divorce attorneys can attest, we are by nature profoundly confused—mildly polygynous, floating somewhere in between.

That was the real danger with not being monogamous. It wasn't really the sex, though that bugged me a lot. It was the fact that it meant the other person wasn't satisfied, that they were still looking. If you're still looking, sometimes you find it, whatever it is.

Asumption: monogamy is the natural state of love.(...) It is not! It is an infantile idealism to wish to find everything in one other being

It may now be deemed 'normal' to wear cut-off shorts, expose bellybuttons, marry someone of either gender and watch a little porn for fun, but it also remains indispensably 'normal' to believe that true love should be monogamous and that one's desire should be focused exclusively on one person. To be in dispute with this founding principle is to risk being dismissed, in public or private, with that most dispiriting, caustic and shameful of all epithets: pervert.

I've never been very successful in a monogamous relationship, but I'm looking forward to the day when I can assume that responsibility.

Penguins mate for life. Which doesn't really surprise me, because they all look exactly alike. It's not like they're gonna meet a better-looking penguin someday.

You won't do our things with another girl, or say the same things, will you?

Despite a 50 percent divorce rate for first marriages and 65 percent the second time around; despite the staggering frequency of affairs; despite the fact that monogamy is a ship sinking faster than anyone can bail it out, we continue to cling to the wreckage with absolute faith in its structural soundness.

Until now monogamy has been the default setting, and it sits on the premise (however unrealistic) that if you truly love, you should no longer be attracted to others.

All relationships live in the shadow of the third, for it is the other that solders our dyad. In his book Monogamy, Adam Phillips writes, "The couple is a resistance to the intrusion of the third, but in order for it to last it is indispensable to have enemies. That is why the monogamous can't live without them. When we are two, we are together. In order to form a couple, we need to be three.

Eventually, if desire withers, monogamy too easily slides downward into celibacy. When this happens, fidelity becomes a weakness rather than a virtue.

By turning our backs on other loves, we confirm the uniqueness of our "significant other." "I have found The One. I can stop looking." Miraculously, our desire for others is supposed to evaporate, vanquished by the power of this singular attraction.