October 11, 2022
by Alexis Goodman
Popular culture and media is going to give you a hundred reasons why you shouldn’t stay with one person your whole life. “Monogamy is a myth,” they will try to tell you. It will be pounded into your head time and time again that people grow up and grow out of love.
The Huffington Post puts this attitude on full display, “It’s perfectly acceptable and okay to be in a relationship and leave it and go to the next one and grow and evolve. We need to redefine what marriage is. I think it’s important. We don’t need to listen to church or religion anymore. We need to listen to the way the world is and grow. The same way you’re desiring to grow.” The articles intent was to convince its reader that marriage “until death do you part” is just an illusion.
What an uneducated and limited scope of human capabilities this remark is. It casts us off as nothing more than creatures with human features but animal characteristics. We understand ourselves to be the most progressive and civilized mankind has ever achieved, and yet we compare ourselves to primates, citing them as reasons as to why we should not be expected to be monogamous.
Despite the world’s agenda against marriage to one person only, and despite their desire for devolvement, there is also a plethora of reasons as to why we should fight for monogamy.
Someone far ahead of his time but also fairly unknown to the world is J.D. Unwin, a social anthropologist. One of his greatest works was a book he published in 1934 titled “Sex and Culture”, a study of eighty-six countries and their relationship with flourishment and sexual freedom.
In his book, he says, “Sometimes a man has been heard to declare that he wishes both to enjoy the advantages of high culture and to abolish compulsory continence… The reformer may be likened to the foolish boy who desires both to keep his cake and to consume it.”
Written almost a hundred years ago, we see similar aspirations being professed today. We want a progressive and intellectually stimulated world all the while adhering to our most base desires. Unwin also includes, “The inherent nature of the human organism, however, seems to be such that these desires are incompatible, even contradictory.”
The book provides example after example wherein it is shown that as a civilization falls into the “sexual liberation” trap, it sees its downfall a mere three generations later. Currently, we are in the second generation for increased sexual freedoms, and we are already seeing Unwin’s predictions come true.
We now fear that since the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015, the legalization of polyamorous relationships will become inevitable. In John Witte Jr.’s article, “The Case Against Polygamy”, he states, “It’s not a sound principle of justice to make vulnerable people more vulnerable just to accommodate the desires of the powerful to undertake experiments in domestic living.”
He communicated a “stable marital house as a ‘little church’, a ‘little commonwealth’, the first school of love and justice, nurture and education, charity and citizenship. John Locke… treated marriage as… the ‘deepest font’ of liberty, equality, and fraternity.” Polyamorous and other such relationships would not profit our country and we should ward off any attempts made to institute them in society.
There are physical repercussions to having multiple partners in your life as well. A study published in February of 2020 included 2,537 men and 3,185 women over the age of fifty from England. The participants were asked how many sexual partners they’d had in the past and completed a self-reported health questionnaire.
The results were quite shocking. If a woman reported having had more than ten partners in her lifetime, then she was 91% more likely to report also having a diagnosis of cancer than those with only one partner. For men, the chances were at 69%. “Our findings, using a more proximal outcome, are in line with a large body of literature that suggests that specific STIs may lead to several cancers…”
The detrimental effects of turning away from monogamy are foretold and yet we ignore them. J.D. Unwin showed us that human progression has always been the movement from polygamy to monogamy, and we have watched our societies flourish because of it. Now we watch as our world closes their eyes to history and falls on its own sword. Few understand the implications polyamorous and polygamous structures can have on society; it is dangerous and our encouragement of it will only end with our demise.
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Alexis Goodman was raised on a ranch in Dadeville, Missouri. She loves spending time with her husband, reading, hiking mountains, and learning new hobbies. She is currently a student at Brigham Young University-Idaho, where she is working to get a degree in Political Science with an emphasis on American Government.