True monogamy
One is not too few. In fact, it is too much.
Most swans are like any other: white feathers, undulating neck, orange beak. Indistinguishable from the rest. But every so often you catch sight of one so bright and elegant that it catches and holds your gaze. The others recede into the background, and, for a moment, sunlight sparkling upon the lake, it’s no longer just another swan. It’s the swan. In that instant, the usual order seems to reverse: not the bird belonging to the species, but— strangely enough— the species to the bird.
Once in a while, you might come across someone who suddenly stands out to you like this brightest swan: an exemplar of their species. Someone who is not a mere member of their sex but somehow seems to embody it so truly that it feels not that ‘Beatrice’ is a woman, but, as for Dante, that every woman is a version of ‘Beatrice.’
A person who is, in some sense, the category.
So while of course your partner will be just one member of the opposite sex, when you truly love someone, you experience a transcendent reversal: that it is not that the category contains your lover, but that your lover, for all their imperfections, contains the category. That the woman you love is not just one example amid the endless sea of women, but that within her, within your regard for her, within the fact that she is the one prevailing ‘she’ in your life, this one woman will be, in a way, your experience of all women.
Almost like how, for Adam, Eve was not one woman among many. She was woman.
Romantic imagination aside, even ordinary shared life confirms the same. If we spend the hours and years of our lives closely alongside one abiding ‘she’ or ‘he,’ then that one ‘she’ or ‘he’ inevitably becomes the face, voice, body, and temperament through which we come to know the opposite sex most intimately.
Monogamy is an enormous claim, then. It is not merely exclusivity; it is the entrusting of one’s lifelong experience of the opposite sex to a single person.
In light of this, monogamy is not failing because one person is too few. It is failing because, despite the appearance of our attempts, we are not actually practicing monogamy.
What I mean is:
Marriage is: one (1) man and one (1) woman.
Not one male body and one female body.
One whole man and one whole woman.
But who can honestly say that he or she is truly a man, or truly a woman, as if those were cheap and automatic facts? Who among us actually bears the full inward weight of these terms we use so casually? Have we reduced man and woman, the crown of creation, made in God’s image, to mere autopilot defaults, to materiality alone?
In other words: Who can truly promise his future wife a man? Who can truly promise her future husband a woman?
Most of us belong to these categories in a thin, nominal way. We are men or women in the way that any house with four walls and a roof is, technically, a home. And so what often passes for a monogamous pair is not one whole man joined to one whole woman, but 0.5 of a man and 0.5 of a woman, each insisting that the other make up the difference.
It’s no wonder, then, that so many marriages fail.
During a friend’s birthday dinner, one of the guests — not one of the usual members of our friend group — began making the usual smug case against monogamy. Eventually he asked the table: would you want to eat the same food for the rest of your life?
My friend’s eye visibly twitched. DoorDash, he said, was an insane analogy for a spouse. You have one wife the way you have one set of lungs. The line settled in me at once as perhaps the most grounded and soulful reframing of monogamy I had ever heard.
His point was clear: the person you marry is not one perishable delight among many, but something more like an organ: something taken up into the very fabric of your life, as close and vital to you as your own flesh.
Is it a “deprivation” to be limited to “just” one heart for a lifetime?
Only if it’s not fully beating.
Which is to say: the “problem” with monogamy is not that one person is too few, but that one person is, in fact, too much — too much for us to be willing to give.
We shrink from the task of becoming a fully beating heart: dependable, strong, generous. Not “perfect”, but alive: full of blood and life and mystery. Constantly pouring itself out.
And so a whole person is not one who possesses some finished set of traits, but one who has undergone a deeper shift: from self-seeking to self-giving.
A marriage either constricts into monotony or expands into depth depending on whether the two people are substantial and, above all, mutually generous enough to keep discovering more of each other over time. Given enough time, long love does not merely repeat the same familiar person; it reveals further depths of them. It lets us see someone’s thousand faces across time and context: playful, wounded, protective, brave, hidden, tender. What first appears to be “just” one man, or “just” one woman, begins over years of shared life to unfold into a whole landscape of manhood or womanhood. One person, expressed and known deeply enough, contains multitudes.
But offering that kind of fullness requires sacrifice: the death of the selfish self. The generic “female” or “male” has to die so that a full “woman” or “man” can come into being: someone vivid, differentiated, alive. Someone capable of becoming so singular in another person’s life that, as Richard Feynman wrote to his late wife: “my dear, you are better dead than anyone else alive.”
So striving towards fullness is not just a self-improvement project but an act of devotion: if someone is going to stake their lifelong experience of the opposite sex on you, then you absolutely owe it to him or her to become worth that bet — to become the brightest swan.
You seemed to have arrived at a very similar conclusion to that of Plato in "The Symposium", specifically in how, by dating a single woman, you are in effect communing with all of womankind. Well done!
Julia has described well the substance of monogamy, which is the fusion of two souls. It is a depth to which many do not care to venture, because, as she terms it, of the “selfish self.”
When romantic partnerships are primarily means to material ends — selfish ends, e.g., sexual gratification, social standing, money, and children — it is difficult to achieve a soulful connection with the other person. They remain an object, being used for that means, just like a chair, or a car, or a house. One does not share, with an object, the whole of their character and personality (i.e., their soul).
Many are comfortable with this arrangement because they care primarily about themselves, i.e., the selfish self, and not anybody else. They desire no soulful connection to a partner; or maybe to anyone, for that matter. Perhaps they lack an imagination for it, or self-confidence, or a spiritual consciousness. Whatever the reason for this thinking — when materiality fades, whether or not their relationships survive — it renders them lonely. Over time, the loneliness is crushing and leads to awful temptation.
We cannot read the minds of our lovers. Hence, the surest tests of a soulful connection are (1) loyalty and (2) trust. (1) Does someone forego material options in life to choose you, at a cost to themselves? (2) Does someone tell you the truth, no matter how embarrassing it may be? Generosity and sacrifice are the common elements in each test. Julia appropriately notes these as being entailed by monogamy.
When a person has the courage to set aside materiality, and bare themselves vulnerably, to another, only thus may their “thousand faces” be revealed. The soul, in all its depth, is discoverable. In our partners, then, we come to see the image of God in which they were created.