I have been debating monogamy. I was chairing, rather than speaking for or against, the motion that ”monogamy is bad for the soul”. This proposition attracted a full house to the Royal Geographical Society in London, among them Hugh Grant and Jemima Khan who were, no doubt, in search of reassurance.
It is, after all, a matter on which everyone has a point of view, as was made clear to the entire audience of 750. It was an occasion both hilarious — the word ”pussy” being used in a non-feline context in this august building — and serious when a pretty girl in the audience admitted she had once been part of a harem and it had worked very well.
You stub your toe badly in debate if you can’t agree what the words of the motion mean. And so it was with monogamy. Some seemed to think we were debating fidelity to one person at any one time, but allowing for changes over the years.
Others took as their definition lifelong marriage to the same person. It seems this latter occurrence is regarded as so rare or so difficult as to virtually disqualify it from consideration. Yet when it came to the final vote it went overwhelmingly against the motion, paying tribute to the universal wish to be part of one sustained relationship for a lifetime that now regularly stretches into our 80s.
People want to celebrate their diamond jubilee in a golden glow of children and grandchildren: the apotheosis of a happy life. The ideal lives on.
You have, of course, to be getting on in years to have contemporaries who have already managed to do this. And it’s interesting to speculate, given the overwhelming desire to achieve it, what exactly it is that makes marriages last.
From purely anecdotal evidence, I tender the following checklist.
It helps if each one comes from an emotionally stable family background. So much is a truism. But also coming from a desperately turbulent home can also motivate children to make a sustained marriage their life’s ambition. I have a friend whose mother had six husbands: she deliberately set out to create a stable home and is still at its heart.
Second, it’s good to agree from the start on what you expect of life in terms of work, success, lifestyle and family. This is not as easy as it once was, what with the modern emphasis on personal growth, employment options changing, the see-saw of the life/work balance, and the upward and global mobility of jobs.
Next you have to weather the infidelity years. Genetics and biology tell us that men are likely — even programmed — to stray. Social changes mean women feel increasingly free to do so, or perhaps they are less inhibited by society’s disapproval. Where once infidelity was quietly tolerated, its pain endured, couples now find it easier to split. Women with jobs and incomes of their own don’t have to put up with philandering partners. But I have friends who rode out the hormonal years and, looking back, wonder what all the fuss was about. Surviving together the loss of trust is a major rite of passage towards lifelong marriage.
All the long-term couples I know have avoided boredom. And this is probably easier today, when women are out and about in the world every bit as much as men, and the 1950s kitchen-sink wife with nothing to say is dying out. An equivalence of intelligence and energy is probably a help.
Then there’s the matter of parallel or contingent sexualities. It doesn’t matter how much, how often or how eccentric. Just as long as you both agree: in sharing porn or bondage or celibacy, it’s the sharing that matters. I have friends with odd arrangements that suit themselves and perhaps no other. Given our outspokenness about sex, this is the sort of thing that must be getting easier.
So, on balance, I would say there’s a higher chance for lifelong marriage than we and the sociologists might suppose. The testimonies of those who have got there suggest that given the will there’s almost no crisis that cannot be survived together. And the celebrations when they come, bringing together decades of friends to marvel, envy and applaud, are truly wonderful. — Â