There are now online forums for acting polyamorists, a magazine called Loving More that has 15,000 subscribers, perhaps and somewhat surprisingly, the results of a 14,000-person Oprah.com survey—in which 21 percent of people said they have an open marriage. All of that got Haag thinking: Should we stop calling infidelity a problem, and think of it as the future? "Marital nonmonogamy may be to the 21st century what premarital sex was to the 20th," she writes—"a behavior that shifts gradually from proscribed and limited, to tolerated and increasingly common."
As a local radio guy is fond of saying, "men are only as faithful as their options." Two questions for the audience:
1) Do you believe this to be true?
2) Are you okay with it?
4 comments:
I asked Susan Armey about this, and she was busy learning to reload. Looks like for her and Dick, monogamy is no myth.
Or, for that matter, for Mrs. Bubba and I. She knows how to reload and fire, and there are some things a good wife doesn't share. Never mind that I don't exactly relish the thought of sharing every kind of glippety glop the promiscuous could bring into a relationship, to put it mildly.
1) It depends on the man.
2) Absolutely not. What a hell it is to be a slave. And make no mistake, for many, this would be like dropping off a drunk at a liquor store. His only options might be Boone's and Colt 45, but at a certain point it wouldn't matter.
Tragically I can believe these numbers, in large part because I think younger generations have a view of marriage that rivals the greatest of HHHYYYPPPEEE you and the Benster have ever covered.
There was a Yahoo article out there the other day that talked about the unhappiness of "meh marriages" - i.e. the supposed relationships dangers when spouses aren't deliriously happy 24/7. The concept that marriage, or any relationship, takes a tremendous amount of work and isn't always puppies and rainbows seems to be lost on an increasing number of people. So they justify seeking fulfillment outside the marriage by not defining their online flirtations as "cheating."
I've been meaning to write about marriage and the cultural perceptions and pressures it faces, how the only portion of the population that seems to want to marry today are the gays, and a study of civil union v. marriage v. holy matrimony, but the day gets late and my ambition flags.
In this, the wedding season, however, I especially want to pass on what Bonhoeffer wrote to his sister as she married and while he languished in a Nazi prison:
"Marriage is more than your love for each other. It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God’s holy ordinance, through which God wills to perpetuate the human race till the end of time. In your love you see only your two selves in the world, but in marriage you are a link in the chain of generations, which God causes to come and to pass away to God’s glory, and calls into the kingdom. In your love you see only the heaven of your happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility toward the world and humanity. Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more than something personal – it is a status, an office. Just as it is the crown, and not merely the will to rule, that makes the king, so it is with marriage, and not merely your love for each other, that joins you together in the sight of God and humanity. As you first gave the ring to one another and have now received it a second time from the hand of the pastor, so love comes from you, but marriage from above, from God. As high as God is above humanity, so high are the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of marriage above the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of love. It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love."
Viewed from that perspective, there are myriad ways of cheating on your wife or of cheating your marriage, and sex is only one of them.
May God have mercy on us all.
Post a Comment