Where does monogamy start?

You cannot expect a generation of people who grew up in broken homes to all be monogamous. You cannot expect people who don’t know how to be loyal, to be loyal. Monogamy starts with the way in which you were raised. Did you have to carry out tasks to completion, or could you chop and change halfway through? Did you have to pursue long-term goals and commit to achieving the desired results? For example, did you get a black belt in a martial art or become highly competent at playing the piano? Did you stick to the choices you made early on so that you can reap the fruits of those seeds you planted? Monogamy is about digging a deep well and finding water, instead of digging several shallow wells and finding nothing. Yes, you might get tired of digging, you might even get bored, but you keep digging anyway. Monogamy is a mindset, a mentality, and an ability. Do you have that ability?

There’s also a particular attitude that people have in monogamy where they value each other more than they value things. One of the biggest reasons why relationships don’t work in our time is because people value things more than relationships. A person might stay loyal to a company but cycle through several relationships in the process. The job and what it can bring is more valuable than the relationship. It’s not by accident that, that is the case. What has taken place is a series of non committed relationships in which people dump each other frequently and hence there exists a fear of investing in another person. What’s the point of investing in another person if that person can just leave at any time and for any reason? There is no longevity in many relationships and so it is understandable why people prefer to value inanimate things and or pets more than other people. They are at least able to exercise control over those things and they derive some benefits without the fear of loss. It’s an attitude that begets insecurities in which no relationship can actually flourish since neither party is capable of real commitment.

Monogamy starts with chastity. Especially chastity in relation to women, and less so in relation to men. This is because a woman naturally carries the greater risk when allowing a man to sleep with her and would ordinarily need a commitment. When her instincts guide her to want a commitment and she values her sexuality to the extent that she would not allow any man to have sex with her unless he intends to remain with her in the long term, then she is likely to remain faithful. From her end, she would be monogamous because the bond with her husband was found in feelings of extreme vulnerability when she lost her virginity to him. When nature takes its natural course then she is paired with him for eternity. There are many women who are naturally inclined to stay single even long after their husband’s have passed away. They are unable to re-marry because they cannot connect with another man at that same level.

Men who practice monogamy are typically of two kinds: the first type of man slept around in his youth and then decided to settle down; whereas the second type of man adheres to monogamy because it is convenient as a result of his busy lifestyle in which more women would more or less be a nuisance. Both kinds of men are usually past their thirties or in their late twenties at the time they embark on their monogamous journey. Monogamous men are typically not athletic and have an introverted disposition. They are rarely massively famous with women and seldom exhibit alpha masculine traits such as: assertiveness, aggression, competitiveness, and disagreeableness. If you were to plot gender traits on a line with the most masculine traits on the right, and the most feminine traits on the left, monogamous men would fall somewhere in the middle. They’re not going to be warriors, leaders, or very wealthy men. Rather, they’ll be your average men who are largely content with never really having to do anything particularly out of the ordinary.

Between the two types of monogamous men, the most likely of them to remain monogamous is the one who had a few relationships before marrying a woman monogamously. Having gained experience in other relationships he would feel less curious about what it would be like to have other women. He also would have gained some experience in how to excel at being a husband and lover, as opposed to someone with little or no experience. In other words, a man is in a better position to practice monogamy having had experience with other women. Whereas a woman is in a better position to practice monogamy having had no experience with men. However, the only truly monogamous man is the one who married as a virgin and committed to be with his wife as his only woman until death. Those men are rare and well sought after, which has a tendency to direct them towards polygyny. In other words, when women come across a vastly loyal man, they vie to all be his wives, which normally results in him having more than one wife. In rare cases, you will find men who are truly monogamous normally amongst Muslims and orthodox religions who preach the fear of God into its adherents. In that case, men remain dutifully monogamous because it is either a requirement of the religion or because they have a proclivity towards being abstinent through religious practices like fasting and excessive prayers.

In this essay we are going to focus on men who are really monogamous and not those who have several sexual relationships as a precursor to monogamy. That practice isn’t really monogamy and has rightfully been called serial monogamy. In fact, serial monogamy is partly why real monogamy has such a low success rate in modern societies. Essentially, societies in which some men practice polygyny has a higher success rate with monogamy because marrying multiple women puts a limit on how many women any one given man can sleep with. Whereas in societies where marriage or commitment isn’t a precursor to sex, there are no limitations on how many women any one given man can sleep with except for his inability to entice them. A skilled man can move through hundreds of women, some of whom will desire endlessly to be loyal to that man who himself has no intention of committing. These men and the women they sleep with form part of the reason why monogamy fails in those societies, because a big number of women are passed around the room between massively desirous and successful men. Such women are then rendered incapable of being content with an average monogamous man, because she has the mistaken belief that she could have secured a high value man by virtue of high value men having slept with her. When in fact, she was just a bit of entertainment for such men, and nothing more.

It is clear that monogamy starts with choosing to live a clean lifestyle where chastity and virtue are rated highly. A woman will never find satisfaction in a monogamous marriage with a monogamous man if she’s been around the block because the other men, she slept with were likely not virtuous or monogamous and she will always have an instinctual admiration for men who are successful in their feats with women. A monogamous man is massively unsuccessful with women and can never be appreciated by a non-monogamous woman. Whereas such a woman might more deeply appreciate a polygynous man. On the other hand, a man who works hard for his entire youth enduring the burden of chastity should not marry a woman who isn’t chaste. Either she should be a virgin, or she should have been previously married to a man who died or who she divorced for irreconcilable differences such that she would find him (her ex) utterly undesirable. A man who marries as a virgin cannot compete with an ex-husband that his wife is still secretly in love with. He would have signed up for a losing battle.