This essay is about monogamy and non-monogamy. It is a sometimes direct, sometimes an indirect, response to two articles on this blog, linked here and here, by Zach. To a lesser extent, it is a response to Brian Kemple’s article here. It is this author’s view that the discourse concerning non-monogamy is not appropriately framed. Kemple for some reason thinks that non-monogamy is related to the medieval problem of universals, and makes ridiculous claims, such as: “[I]t is a metaphysical impossibility that one person surrender him- or herself—that is, make a gift of oneself—to more than one other person.” There is no time to waste with people who do not understand existential philosophy. On the other hand, Zach’s writings make sweeping claims about love and commitment, while leaving little room for a lover to question what these supposed goods mean in non-monogamous relationships. Rather than raise objections one by one that will allow for easy replies, the purpose of this response is to defend monogamy by reframing the discourse of the non-monogamist in a way that allows the monogamist to retake the initiative of criticism.
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The rejection of monogamy is simply the refusal of the command, “Have no other lovers besides me.” The non-monogamist will say this command issues forth from jealous insecurity. He will say it is closed-minded, short-sighted, and naive. How can someone call himself a lover and mean it, unless he gives license to the non-monogamist’s desires, and especially the sexual ones? So the non-monogamist must reject the lover’s command; for he wants to keep open the future possibility of other relationships, recognizing that, in all likelihood, one lover will not be enough, will not be healthy, will not be happy in monogamy, etc. And even if the non-monogamist were to “settle down” with one lover, it would need to be provisional, since his “ultimate goal … is to experience positive emotions.” After all, the lover could change or die, much to the non-monogamists dissatisfaction. Best, therefore, to have other lovers in the wings.
Non-monogamy is not a moral wrong. However, it is worth questioning the non-monogamist as to the truth of the claim that he is “not rejecting romance, loyalty, sacrifice, commitment, or love” because, as he says, “if there are features of monogamous relationship that contribute to flourishing, they can and ought to be preserved.” But can these features be preserved? What makes a non-monogamist think so? Questioning this claim will be uncomfortable for the non-monogamist, since anyone who insists he is in love or committed also insists that one must take him at his word. But, given the dearth written about the possibility and meaning of love as it is supposed to arise in non-monogamy, it is important not to shut down intellectually in the face of questions. In fact, the non-monogamist is wrong to claim that non-monogamy is compatible with commitment and love; he is wrong that it entails a greater degree of freedom compared to monogamy. Moreover, the non-monogamist is confused about his own ends when he assigns moral blameworthiness to monogamy. But more than anything, the non-monogamist has framed his entire discourse in a way that is inappropriate to address the lover. And before one can properly discuss commitment, love, and freedom, the issue of how to address the lover must be resolved.
Considering the moral objections first, the non-monogamist cannot claim that only monogamous relationships are subject to vices like jealousy and possessiveness. “Rejecting monogamy doesn’t make someone a good person.” It does not abolish the conditions of jealousy. Jealousy is aroused “in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, or women who could have given themselves to us.” The non-monogamist can feel the pang of absence when his lover beds down with another; and, festering, the non-monogamist’s pain can become a desire dominated by the could-have-been. In jealousy, that is, the non-monogamist can come to hate the world that is because his lover could have been in his bed that evening, but preferred another. Surely, the non-monogamist may exist without such jealousy, but this is not his special purview.
If the non-monogamist were pressed to make his case, he would have to say that monogamy is a socially normalized means of legitimizing human vices like jealousy or possessiveness. That is, human beings are subject to jealousy first, and they have constructed monogamy to satisfy jealousy. Meanwhile, a non-monogamist, in his own view, may become jealous or feel possessive, but he cannot be so in accordance with his principles. From this vantage point, rejecting monogamy is supposed to “be viewed [both] as social critique” and as a means of personal improvement by habituating against vice.
The social critique, in its fundamental sense, depends on connecting monogamy unequivocally to an original form of vice. But the non-monogamist does equivocate, unless he can demonstrate that the command to have no other lovers entails a “because I am jealous,” or that erotic exclusivity and jealousy are two sides of the same coin. Even restricted to the arena of social criticism, the non-monogamist comes off as insincere. If institutionalized monogamy can be abused by vicious people, so can its rejection. It is no small irony that rejecting monogamy in many cases is just the philanderer’s way of normalizing and legitimizing a wandering gaze. Or it is a pleasure seeker’s excuse for making an instrumental use of other people for his sexual gratification. To this end, the vicious non-monogamist dresses up his desires (especially the sexual ones!) as “needs” and demands recognition of the right to a satisfaction of his “needs.” He treats the command to have no other lovers as illegitimate, and he dismisses the command as a jealous denial of his needs.1 But these “needs” are appetites shaped by vice – or so a social critic could claim.
Beyond the dialectical situation in which monogamy and non-monogamy contend over the meaning of virtue, sometimes going so far as to label each other’s virtues as vices (and vice versa), there lies the simple immediacy of the command to have no other lovers. It is this command that non-monogamists fail to address, regardless of their moral caliber. The lover – who is a person, and not a society – seems to be missed in the project of social critique; and he seems little more than slandered by the charge that he must be jealous, if he would have the beloved choose him to the exclusion of all other romantic or erotic partners. True, the non-monogamist’s desires may also call the lover to confront the non-monogamist in immediacy. Just as the lover speaks directly to his beloved, so the non-monogamist may state his desires directly to his partners. But in his critique of monogamy, the non-monogamist does not “stir without great argument” and thinking the social cause greater than all, he conscripts a crowd “greatly to find quarrel in a straw” and do battle over norms where on barren land neither he himself nor the lover mean to dwell. Thus, although he sometimes speaks of listening to a partner, the non-monogamist has framed the discourse of rejecting monogamy predominantly in social terms. In this, he turns away from his lover.
Of course, even in the social critique, the non-monogamist suffers from a case of ressentiment. He blames society for being “hostile” to non-monogamy and instituting a faulty “system of expectations and values that govern romantic relationships.” In this blame, he again refuses to face the lover who issues the command; for he cannot but hear the lover’s voice as an echo of the crowd. The corrupting influence of tradition has clouded and closed the lover’s mind. Hence, the non-monogamist believes that the lover issues the command of monogamy in bad-faith (another irony). It becomes the non-monogamist’s duty to speak for what the lover really wants, or what he would want if he were “free”: an open relationship. He speaks for all when he says, “Open relationships are for everyone.” But in the universality of this claim, the non-monogamist speaks past the lover, whose command does not belong to the universal. By fixing the idea of himself in the universal, the non-monogamist, further, does not allow himself to be singled out by the command; he does not confront what it is in himself that places society between him and his lover.
The beloved can only face the lover by heeding the command of the lover in immediacy, that is, face-to-face with the lover in the moment of decision that he precipitates. The moment leaves no room for mediation. It is not the deliberative or reflective moment in which, like trying on a dress before a mirror, one sees the contours of one’s life and decides whether a monogamous or non-monogamous style of relationship fits best. The moment of the command does not belong to a system of dialectical unfolding, nor to the universality of the ethical. It is indeed a moment of freedom, which cannot be wrested from the lover by the non-monogamist’s address to the crowd. It is indifferent to the reversal of values taking place in the rejection of monogamy by way of a social critique. When the lover commands the beloved to have no other lovers besides himself, he singles out the beloved in the latter’s free possibilities for love. In this moment, the lover and beloved are free to exist only for each other. This possibility for existing for just one other alone belongs to the “I can” of the beloved’s finite existence. One may think of a moment of tenderness, in which the lover whispers so that only the beloved can hear. This is not a moment that can be opened up beyond the two of them without changing its total significance. The beloved cannot be rid of his freedom in this moment to choose to exist for one other (or choose not to), nor can he be disspossessed of it by the lover’s command, since the command calls upon the beloved to freely choose the lover. Freedom, which is the source of all value, saves the moment of intimacy between lover and beloved from all moral judgment and from all reversals of value. Put philosophically, the moment of freedom in which one faces the lover is a non-evaluable source of value.
This formulation is yet too simple. It risks making the command into the basis of a contract, which parties freely sign. But a contract, as Hobbes correctly surmised, is meaningless unless it is enforceable, to which we might add, “enforceable as a limitation on the freedom of its signators by a third.” It is the third that makes a contract enforceable, and it is only with respect to a third that two parties can have their freedom limited. Contracts are for the crowd; they already involve a plurality; thus, they entail non-monogamy, which must needs be framed in a discourse that prevails only in the universal. For as soon as someone addresses and exhorts the crowd to validate a claim upon another, it ceases to be that person’s own command. The command of the lover places no limitation on freedom, but exhorts the beloved in all of his freedom to choose the lover. In this exhortation, the lover and beloved remain responsible and vulnerable to one another, having no judges set over them, no recourse to institutions.
In the vulnerability of love, one is not bound by the constraints of an institution. Instead, the lover and beloved are simply and immediately held as being responsible to one another. This responsibility entails commitment, which the non-monogamist understandably wants to claim can still be had in an open relationship. Nothing prevents the non-monogamist from acting in the way a committed person would. But such actions in conformity with commitment do not come from commitment. This is because they have an external limit that undermines what commitment is. In fact, non-monogamy entails a thorough rejection of acting from commitment between lover and beloved. Even if open relationships are not characterized by an association merely for-the-time-being, they are nonetheless characterized as relationships wherein a plurality mediates the commitment between any two. But this is not commitment at all, but rather only the pretension to commitment. It is a pretension insofar as open relationships always leave open the possibility of rescinding or suspending what commitment would otherwise require. And likely the pretension is designed to assuage the doubts and fears of one of the partners. That is, the kind of commitment the non-monogamist offers, being no commitment at all, can only have the purpose of making a more hesitant partner feel secure.
Commitment sometimes demands action, and when a non-monogamist claims to be committed to multiple partners, but such that his commitments necessitate two incompatible actions at the same time, then he feels the contradictory falseness of his claim. The contradiction runs deeper than such a dilemma, but here it gives palpable evidence even to someone firmly in the grips of bad faith. The non-monogamist is constantly having to reason and negotiate for the best deal with his lover. If the lover commands to have no lovers besides himself, if rather he commands that the beloved obey no commands before his own, the non-monogamist will demur. He will have to explain that the lover is asking too much and being unreasonable. If the lover challenges that commitment is not something conditional, then the lover is called petty or jealous. Of course, the non-monogamist will think of himself as having the lover’s best interests in mind. After all, he claims “open relationships are for everyone.” But he was not open to committing. For a commitment that is provisioned on “emotional health” or “happiness” or “well-being” is not a commitment, but something for sale, something with an exchange price, but which is no absolute basis of value. So the non-monogamist will always hesitate when asked for an absolute commitment, sometimes mouthing commitment, but invariably intending much less than to give all of himself to the lover. Again, this situation is morally questionable only inasmuch as the promise of commitment is a lying promise he makes to woo a lover. If the non-monogamist simply gives up the claim of commitment – if he rejects commitment along with monogamy – then at least he will not deceive his partners.
Regarding love, the matter is not entirely the same as commitment. Love, unlike commitment, does not give rise to such palpable contradictions in action, and so it cannot be made palpable how contradictory the non-monogamist’s pretensions to love are. This is because, in general, love does not require action in the same way as commitment. In truth, love can be for more than one person. It allows one to give oneself over wholly and absolutely an indefinite number of times. The non-monogamist is even right in the abstract that love cannot be exclusive. This is evident enough in a monogamous relationship, especially where there is a child, since the partners are to love each other wholly, as they are to each love the child wholly a second time. Or monogamous couples have friends, whom they love. Or they have had past partners whom they loved. In fact, love seems to be just that condition of our being where, divided up, it can be added back together into a greater sum than was its original amount. But even still, proceeding from the abstract negation of exclusivity does not entail non-monogamy – not even in the case of having had other lovers. The non-monogamist has the hardest time understanding this point, and this is because he is not in love, but only remains open to being in love through love’s non-exclusive forms.
Here, it is important to understand that I am not denying to the non-monogamist genuine feelings of philia or erotic attraction (both are correctly called “love”), from which feelings might be derived a great deal of virtuousness. A non-monogamist may be an excellent and loving friend both to human beings in general as well as to all his eromenoi (here, let us leave aside the connotation of eromenos as strictly a young boy; the noun does have a feminine and a neuter form, and we can think of the plural, ‘eromenoi,’ as those people or bodies that evoke erotic desires). And he may, of course, love his family. A virtuous non-monogamist may visit good will upon all of humanity, treating everyone with kindness, and giving to individual friends such a due as is measured and fit to the friend. At an extreme, the non-monogamist may extend philia to the wretched, as well as to those who foster enmity towards him – and he will cultivate universal philia the more he is a good person. In fact, it is just a Christian confusion to think that the love of mankind is anything besides universal friendship, which can be the purview of any virtuous person.
There is, however, a love beyond erotic attraction and friendship. This love is not constructed out of any conjunction of friendship and desire, nor any combination of the feelings, actions, or virtues associated with these. If we call this love agape, and its recipient agapetos, we must purify the words of their latter-day religious connotations. Agape is not God’s love for man; nor man’s love for God. It is a human love, the fulfillment of which would be commensurate with being singled out as the one who the lover commands, who is committed to seeing his possibilities for love and those of his lover as the same. This is what I call, being in love, which is monogamous love.
Let me make this abstract language more concrete. Agape is beyond friendship and sexual desire. It is nonetheless written into these other two kinds of relationships as the basis of their superlative forms. That is, a desire beyond all other desires for one’s beloved becomes exclusive of its own accord when, in love, it responds with willing obedience to the command to have no other lovers. The superlative of friendship that is understood through love consists in abiding in the friendship come-what-may, regardless of the friend’s effect on oneself. A friendship without love can be dissolved because the friends need only have philia for what is “good” in each other. But love beyond friendship is not an attraction to good qualities, but an abiding in the sameness of what is possible in a life with another person. Likewise, the superlative of eros is evinced in climax – an event that can be reached multiple times in succession, but never divided in itself. It is each time a moment that is singular unto itself and which draws two people into a sameness only possible in the sexual experience. And yet, it remains the case that agape is not reducible to these superlatives of eros and philia, even though friendship and desire in the extreme show us something important about agape – agapic love is a decision to wed one’s ownmost possibilities to being with another, and to do so without qualification or division. It is just this that non-monogamy rejects.
At this point, I will speak plainly and for myself. If my purpose is to respond to the non-monogamist, it is not necessary that I should have to provide an entire theory of love. That I have provided a husk of a theory is enough. For I have already said more about love than the non-monogamist has said or is likely to say. I believe this is because he is hiding something, or he is being dishonest with himself, or dishonest with his lovers. There are undoubtedly errors and ambiguities in my theory. But it would be helpful if the non-monogamist said more than “I love you; I am committed.” Let him tell me what he means by love and commitment. Better: let his lover ask him what he means by love and commitment, and let the lover decide whether the answer satisfies.
1 Irony upon irony, the non-monogamist assumes that wherever one lover cannot satisfy him, then many can (and this must be thought relative to his conception of himself as a subject of desiring, rather than as a general rule) – as if a purality of lovers, in series or simultaneously, will compliment each other and sum up into the whole of what one desires in love. Of course, remaining open in principle means never being satisfied, just as actually bouncing around between lovers indicates a restless kind of discontentment. In any case, the clearer we become about the meaning of love, the more we can see there is no reason to assume that a plurality is likely to satisfy where one cannot. Levinas writes critically about the concept of love the non-monogamist seems to have: “Love itself is thus taken to be the satisfaction of a sublime hunger. If this language is possible it is because most of our desires and love too are not pure [pure, here, in the sense that spring-water taken directly from its source is considered pure]. The desires one can satisfy resemble metaphysical [i.e., pure] desire only in the deceptions of satisfaction or in the exasperation of non-satisfaction and desire which constitutes voluptuosity [sexual eros, as in the moment immediately preceding climax] itself.” But, the non-monogamist will ask, why cannot the beloved choose the lover and another (and another)? Why cannot love be extended to an infinite quantitiy of persons? This is an honest question, albeit a naive one. Yet an all too direct answer can sometimes mislead someone naive. Once, when instructing a group of pederasts about the meaning of eros, Socrates (pretending the voice of a woman) describes eros as leading the pederasts from the body of one beautiful boy to many such bodies. Then, ascending by stepping upon the many bodies as one steps upon a stair, one turns to beautiful practices and studies, and comes upon the beautiful itself, the true object of desire. How fortunate for the pederasts that so many boys were willing to lay down for them.
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