Reply to What percentage of people have the capacity to stay in and excel in a monogamous relationship?

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Reply to "What percentage of people have the capacity to stay in and excel in a monogamous relationship?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Reading these threads makes me wonder why there are so many dysfunctional people who can't do well in relationships. My entire extended family just doesn't have these issues although we each acknowledge we have many faults of our own that we work on daily. We work hard, we save our money, we listen to and forgive others, and we try to be decent Christians and human beings that don't take more than we give and don't overpower anyone. We start and continue relationships with the plan to make it through life with its ups and downs. Is it just our society that offers too many temptations or do people have more mental issues than before? What is the source of the dysfunction? I'm seeing it in friends, in the news. Everywhere.[/quote]

So, I’m responding to you here and the post below where you label monogamy as the “virtuous” life. My marriage sounds a lot like yours except that after about twenty totally monogamous years we mutually decided not to be monogamous anymore, probably because of the usual midlife crisis, marrying young, feeling like we’d missed out on things. But we work on our faults. We save money. We forgive each other. We have been through MANY ups and downs from financial problems to medical problems to death and we have stuck by each other throughout all of that. I don’t think our lives are immoral. We are honest and caring toward each other and anyone else we are involved with (which isn’t always at sexy or sex-based as people think). We intend to stay married for the rest of our lives.

But I think maybe you’re asking why people cheat? Why they give up on marriage...because having an affair will very often cause divorce. It’s lying and a betrayal. Maybe partially because people live a long time and they can’t admit their boredom to one another? Maybe lots of people cheated—it was certainly pretty acceptable for men for a long time—women just looked the other way. Maybe because women have more options now? If they make their own money, they don’t have to stay in unhappy marriages. I think the cheating happens because people are afraid to be honest with each other, or maybe they want that excitement but don’t want to lose the stability.

I also think that under the surface of all of these perfect marriages, you will find many probably aren’t so perfect. That doesn’t mean that those people don’t invest heavily in their relationships. But it can be work. And having dedication to a marriage is probably something I feel is a virtue, but I’m not sure I feel qualified to judge how other people should perceive that.

I think maybe we need to accept that a lifelong marriage is not necessarily the right thing for everyone. People do change. Sometimes the work to save something isn’t worth the saving, or one person tries and the other doesn’t. I don’t think lying is virtuous. But I don’t think monogamy for monogamy’s sake (especially as a Christian value...lots of those biblical prophets had several wives and concubines) is virtuous or not. It’s a choice people make—ideally a consensual one witH partners.[/quote]

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