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Updated: May 23, 2025
Under monogamy, moreover, all family relationships are more definite and strong, and thus family bonds, and ultimately social bonds, are stronger.
Essentially the social unit is the Family, and even where, as in Mohammedan countries, there is no legal or customary restriction upon polygamy, monogamy still prevails as the ordinary way of living. Unmarried women are not esteemed, and children are desired.
And, at any rate, all my experience, all my thought, all my hope argue for the dignity of permanence in human relations. Anything else is bad for the individual, for the family, for the state. As civilisation, as evolution advances from lower to higher, we find it makes more and more for monogamy. Our highest types of men and women are monogamous.
At thirty aman is terrified by the inhibitions of monogamy and has little taste for the so-called comforts of a home; at sixty he is beyond amorous adventure and is in need of creature ease and security. What he is oftenest conscious of, in these later years, is his physical decay; he sees himself as in imminent danger of falling into neglect and helplessness.
But this in no way implies that the father is unknown, for monogamy is the rule; as is usual the question is one rather of social right than of relationship. The maternal uncle is the male head of the house, and exercises under the mother the duties of a father to the children.
It is this that led Plato long ago to say that the man or woman apart from the other is incomplete, a partial person, hungering for the needed lover. Monogamy is, however, not a mere getting together; it is a growing together.
Impotency at the time of marriage, of course, made the marriage void without the intervention of any ecclesiastical law. But Aquinas, and later theologians, allow that an excessive disgust for a wife justifies a man in regarding himself as impotent in relation to her. The law of monogamy was also relaxed in cases of enforced or voluntary desertion.
Also this may account for the strong way in which a gipsy woman is often drawn to the “Tarno Rye,” the young English gentleman of whom Matthew Arnold was thinking when he wrote the ‘Scholar-Gipsy,’ and her fidelity to whom is so striking. It is often in such relations as these with the Tarno Rye that the instinct of monogamy in the Romany woman is seen.
But the whole subject of the sexes is wrapped in hypocrisy, and the breaches of morality are committed less by the celebrated than by the obscure. The savage sarcasm of Schopenhauer's refusal to discuss monogamy because it had never yet come within the range of practical politics is still justified. I remember once reading an anecdote about a besieged town.
And what puerile fables, what transparent lies are told to reconcile the poor slave to her lot! A man's rib! And she is the weaker vessel! Nevertheless, she is the power behind the throne. And if the man possess her, does she not equally possess him? Is not monogamy the mainstay of our morals? Is not God to be thanked that he has given us light to see the horrors of polygamy?
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