“We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion” - Erica Jong

Monogamy is such a touchy subject in our society filled with theives, liars and cheats and my controversial or pessimistic stance on the subject comes from both personal experience as well as being a keen observer of people and their behaviors. I feel as though, much like Erica Jong infers in her quote above, that monogamy is not something that comes naturally to humans. We, if you ask me, are not a creature of soul mates or forever, but instead creatures of multiple partners and the here and now. Humans, by nature, only succomb to monogomy with the exhaustion caused by dating losers, degenerates, sociopaths, drug addicts, pathalogical liars, or if you're me, all of them rolled into one charming and handsome package.

But enough about my love life, lets take a gander back in history, as I can't even blame the Catholics for this one. It wasn't their fault that back in the day they were illiterate and unable to read the scriptures, thus they were left in the hands of Roman Catholic Priests and were to understand their word as God's Law. Before Pope Bene Ocho mandated priests into celibacy based on the fear that priestly offspring would inherit Church property or money, Catholic Priests actually had numerous wives and mistresses showing that perhaps even God wanted us to be polyamorous. Then Romans introduced to Catholocism the idea that only those who were poor and celibate were highly spiritual, giving up all worldly goods and pleasures bringing one closer to God, which in fact was more of a Greco-Roman paganistic concept than it was a traditional Christian one. Add to that centuries of tradition and expectation and you're left with our current society filled with judgement for numerous sexual partners and a feigning of monogamy for societal acceptance. Archaically, the definiton of monogamy is the practice of marrying only once during a lifetime and due to the fact that humans aren't monogamous by nature our society has created a loophole by allowing more than one marriage through annulment or divorce and has altered the true meaning of the word to fit our polygamous nature.

Beyond marital monogamy, social or even sexual monogamy goes against deep seeded evolutionary predispositions. Black vultures, prairie vols and beavers. Those are the three both socially and sexually monogamous animals found in the wild, and out of those three, only the prairie vol hasn't become that way to further the species, but intsead simply out of laziness. If humans were actually monogamous, we'd all only have one sexual partner in our lifetimes. Very rarely does that happen these days, which I think is great. Monogamy is unnatural. Some people claim that perhaps if I find the "right person" monogamy will come naturally with the relationship but I think, perhaps, I'm just that much more in tune with my animalistic nature than I am with societal conventions.