The Autonomy of Monogamy

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

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.