Quotes About Monogamy

Almost everywhere people marry, monogamy is the official norm and infidelity the clandestine one.

When I ask her if her open marriage isn't painful, she answers, "Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's not. But monogamy—which we never negotiated, by the way—was painful, too.

Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance. Excessive monitoring can set the stage for what Stephen Mitchell calls "acts of exuberant defiance.

In London alone, there are 80,000 prostitutes. What are they but . . . human sacrifices offered up on the altar of monogamy? —Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism

Monogamy is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal, for it confirms our specialness. Infidelity says, You're not so special after all. It shatters the grand ambition of love.

At its best monogamy may be the wish to find someone to die with; at its worst it is a cure for the terrors of aliveness. They are easily confused. —Adam Phillips, Monogamy

When you ask people if they are monogamous, I suggest you ask them first what their definition of monogamy is.

monogamy should be an "opt-in." If people were given more opportunity to choose, he offers, maybe some of them wouldn't have opted in and then they wouldn't be in trouble for adultery. Rather than penalize those who fail monogamy's standardized test, we should recognize that the test is disproportionately difficult.

What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?

Women want to find one man to satisfy their many needs while men want many women to satisfy their one need.

Mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. But there were also husbands, wives, lovers. There were also monogamy and romance. "Though you probably don't know what those are," said Mustapha Mond. They shook their heads. Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy. "But every one belongs to every one else," he concluded, citing the hypnopædic proverb.

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channeling of impulse and energy. But everyone belongs to everyone else, he concluded, citing the hypnopaedic proverb. The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic , self-evident, utterly indisputable.

Here nobody's supposed to belong to more than one person. And if you have people in the ordinary way, the others think you're wicked and anti-social.

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.

Woman wants monogamy; / Man delights in novelty. / Love is woman's moon and sun; / Man has other forms of fun. . . / With this the gist and sum of it, / What earthly good can come of it?

We believe that the fundamental sexual unit is one person; adding more people to that unit may be intimate, fun, and companionable but does not complete anybody.

A subset of this myth is the belief that if you're really in love, you will automatically lose all interest in others; thus, if you're having sexual or romantic feelings toward anyone but your primary partner, you're not really in love. This belief has cost many people a great deal of happiness through the centuries, yet is untrue to the point of absurdity: a ring around the finger does not cause a nerve block to the genitals.

We urge you to regard with great skepticism any sentence that begins 'Everybody knows...' or 'Common sense tells us...' Often, these phrases are signposts for cultural belief systems that may be antisexual, monogamy-centrist, and/or codependent.

The word adventurer is sometimes used pejoratively, suggesting that the adventurous person is immature or inauthentic, not really willing to "grow up" and "settle down" into a presumably monogamous lifestyle. We wonder: What's wrong with having adventures? Can't we have adventures and still raise children, buy houses, and do the work that's important to us? Of course we can; sluts qualify for mortgages just like everybody else.

Let us point out that monogamy is not a cure for jealousy.

The cultural ban on having sex with your friends is an inevitable offshoot of a societal belief that the only acceptable reason to have sex is to lead to a monogamous marriagelike relationship.

The binary nature of monogamy-centrist thinking tends, we think, to cause problems: you're either the love of my life, or you're out of here.

Content with one woman?... That is impossible. If you could, then any man can, and any man can't.

For most men, most of the time, monogamy is a safe compromise between the wild bonanza of polygyny (achievable only by an elite few) and the reproductive death of complete mating failure.