Two by two: the case for monogamy.

Polygamy is better than monogamy, said a fourth of the adult students in my Bronx evening class! The most vocal advocate of polygamy was an intelligent young woman who had immigrated from Nigeria. She was aided and abetted by male students who were sympathetic to Islam and the Muslim custom of allowing four wives.

As the in-class debate raged on, I saw a new challenge of multiculturalism before us. African bishops are not the only ones who must argue for the hegemony of monogamy. Here in the United States we may yet confront a resurgence of claims for group marriage. Some unreconstructed Mormons have never accepted imposed monogamy and a growing number of immigrants and homegrown secular liberals might agree with them. Could an ACLU-Mormon-Muslim coalition successfully challenge our civic and religious commitment to monogamy?

How do we mount "a monogamy offensive" capable of convincing doubters? Or--to be more honest in the face of our terrible divorce statisics--how do we keep our present system of "serial monogamy" in place? Those like myself who favor monogamy and yet have been willing to extend marriage to homosexuals have a special challenge. Already several opponents (all male) have figuratively flung down the gauntlet at my feet. A gauntlet, you may or may not remember, is a medieval mail-male glove that was hurled at enemies to provoke combat.

"Well, Sidney," say my attackers, euphemistically called "conversation partners" in PC speak, "if you're ready to give up the traditional requirements of heterosexuality for marriage, how can you not allow marriage between three or four or more? Why only two?" Somehow these fellows think that once you breach the dike of gender, no pun intended, monogamous marriage itself will be swept away in a flood of permissiveness.

But I've never found unsupported slippery-slope arguments very convincing. Why should we absolutize traditional customs when so many of them, i.e., abortion, war, and exploiting the poor, cry out for change? More reasonable arguments for privileging monogamy in our civil society can be made, even without turning to Christian belief. Bottom-up arguments support the institution of monogamous marriage.

Social scientists, for instance, who study group process, find a vast difference between dyads and all other numerical combinations of human relationships. With each member added to a group there ensues a geometrical progression of potential interrelationships: with three there are nine, with four, twenty-four, etc. The really BIG move, however, is from a two-person relationship to three or more. Where there are only two persons in a relationship there exists only one symmetrical mutual relationship.

This boundedness as a unit is why dyads gain their strength and intensity as psychological bonds. There is no third party to break open or diffuse the one-to-one focus and mutual dyadic interaction. Two persons can become united as one in a way that is impossible for three or four persons. Attentional focus in a dyad cannot so easily be distracted from the other, nor in a dyad can two or more persons gang up on one party.

The symmetry of a monogamous dyad works toward the equality of those in the relationship because there must be constant give and take in a bounded unit, particularly if it continues over time. This is why feminists for the most part have advocated monogamy; women in this kind of marital unit have more of a chance to achieve parity when they do not have to compete with other wives, concubines, or lovers.

Of course some women within polygamous societies will defend their familiar system. My Nigerian student claimed that one of the advantages of polygamy was that your husband was more apt to leave you alone, and so be less of a bother! But she did admit the oppressive pressure on women to procreate in order to be validated, as well as the existence of other family tensions over whose children or which siblings will be favored. Cultural observers have always noted that any competition for resources works against women and children.

In the long run, taking into account some of the testimony of sociobiologists, I do not think it an accident that pairbonding has been the winner in evolutionary selection when offspring require concerted care and parental altruism. Two bonded mates working full-time for their mutually shared progeny produce more survivors. And with homo sapiens you have an extended socialization period of dependency (thirty-plus years?) along with capacities for foresight, promises, imagination, language, and intense emotions. Love, intimacy, kinship, and attachment to others constitute the human condition. If the most intense and complete psychosocial bonding, attachments, and intimacy are made possible by pairbonding, along with positive social consequences, then there will be a valuable species-specific predisposition for marriage and monogamy.

When two people are limited to a monogamous dyad in space and through time any emerging problems or challenges in the relationship cannot easily be avoided; they must be worked out within the union. But conflicts and challenges that are overcome can be incorporated into a single history or narrative that builds up strength and enduring stability--or at least increases the force of inertia.

Human sex also differs from that of other primates because self-consciousness makes it possible to integrate sexual drives for the pleasure with intense emotional attachments, intimacies of communication, and mutual social exchanges. One psychologist has even suggested that changes in evolution which afforded face-to-face postures during sexual intercourse helped human consciousness evolve, since being passionately aware of another increases awareness of one's self. Delighted mutual eyegazing during face-to-face monogamous mother-infant nursing must serve the same purpose, say I, with a shudder at what it must be like to nurse twins or triplets.

Third parties not only diffuse intimate unions, but the sexual choice of one sexual partner means the rejection of sex with another. The intense jealousy that appears when one's partner sexually chooses another arises not only from sexual deprivation but from the fact that the beloved's gaze, interest, and desire are turned away toward the one preferred. Completely self-disclosing conversations or pillow talk cannot be held with two lovers at once. Someone will be relegated to the periphery.

Those who might aspire to the simultaneous couplings depicted in Indian temples or in open marriage orgies have other problems. Which partner(s) does one attend to? Group sex and/or casual promiscuity can only serve individual sexual pleasure that must be dissociated from mutual tenderness or loving social and personal bonds. These efforts to isolate and exalt sexual pleasure end in emotional and erotic burnout as well as social debacle.

No, no. As embodied beings programmed for deeply intimate attachments and passionate bonding, we are made for marital monogamy and monogamy is made for us. Persons do not have to be sexually active or marry, but when they do it should be a face-to-face, one-on-one commitment with all group marriages forbidden. For the sake of human flourishing we should continue to privilege monogamous marriage. Two by two we go into the ark if we want to get a view of the rainbow.