The Autonomy of Monogamy

Marriage may be summarised as the project of doing an utterly remarkable thing: surrendering at points our hungry claims to being loved in order to take on the new and unfamiliar burdens of actually loving.

To marry is to recognise that we require structure to insulate ourselves from our urges. It is to lock ourselves up willingly, because we acknowledge the benefits of the long term; the wisdom of the morning after the storm.

For instance, it’s precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the possibility of meeting someone else—someone who might genuinely have been a better marriage partner; who could ever say?—that makes marriage meaningful.

The point of marriage is to be usefully unpleasant – at least at crucial times. Together we embrace a set of limitations on one kind of freedom – the freedom to run away – so as to protect and strengthen another kind of freedom: a shared ability to mature and create something of lasting value, one whose pains are aligned to our better selves.

Over time, the argument for marriage has shifted. It’s no longer about external forces having power over us: religions, the state, the legal idea of legitimacy, the social idea of being respectable … What we are correctly now focused on is the psychological point of making it hard to throw in the towel. It turns out that we benefit greatly (though