The Iron Curtain of Monogamy

Relationships are changing. People are raising families of all shapes and sizes. Families have more and more varying parents as well as half siblings, step siblings, you name it. I for one, do not see it as a bad thing. More like an inevitable changing of times based on the lack of pressure for the modern family to fit a particular “mode” and a surrender to an acceptance that sometimes humans just were not built to be with one person forever.

Call me pessimistic, but I just cannot see that is how we are made. People change. Perhaps the best part of relationships is that they come and go, and sometimes what fits one day changes two or three years down the line. That does not mean that the relationship was not important or substantial for that period of time. You see, I say this and my parents just celebrated their twenty-seventh wedding anniversary. Married as teenagers with as little foresight as adolescents in love, they are still happily married today. I guess what I mean is that monogamy should not be forced. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. Maybe some of us have more than one “right” person while others, like dolphins, mate for life.

Perhaps what is the problem is the feeling that by moving out of a relationship that does not work we have somehow failed. Personally, I think Hollywood movies perpetuate this ideal with female-centered chick flicks (that are actually anti-chick flicks if you know what I am sayin’) but that is a topic for another time. Granted, I have never been married, but I would hope that I would make the decision to be alone rather than live in a loveless or an “expired” relationship. But there are likely much more complicated matters than I can understand. What really makes me sad though, is the couple that knows they are settling.

From the outside more “European” relationship situations seem cold to Americans. We often see a lack of commitment in an unmarried family and therefore a lack of love. But this is not the case. If real love is present, who would want to make their loved one stay with them when they are unhappy or go through a messy separation process? Reality can seem cold, but it likely ends a great deal of heartache in the end. Statistically, long term devoted relationships without a marriage license experience less infidelity than an equally long marriage. To be fair though, marriage fidelity statistics are not too hot anyways.

This being said, let’s lighten up a little. Holding on too tightly to this ideal of lifelong monogamy is not going to create any love stories. If anything, more relationships are going to work out without the pressure of a marriage and lifelong commitment timeline. I would hope to take any relationship where it needs to go, and enjoy the ride, not the destination.

Photo: Flickr through use of CC