“The Creepy Guys and the Nice Guys are exactly the same guys. Nice Guys are simply the guys who have successfully concealed their creepiness. And it gets tiresome and lonely having to maintain this facade of decency in front of all womankind. But it seems as if women don't just want us to be monogamous; they want us to want to be monogamous. as Alain de Botton points out in his pocket treatise How to Think More About Sex, the ideal – whereby the person you love, the person you have sex with, and the person you raise children with should all be the same person – is a fairly recent invention. evolution did not invent this system to make us happy. It invented it to make more people. The promise of sex is mainly an illusion. In college, a physiology professor once invited us "to compare the amount of time we spend experiencing orgasm with the time we spend arranging it." How many times have I ever gone to a party or a bar and ended up getting the phone number of/making out with/going home with someone I met there? In all honesty, very, very few. And of those few times, how many turned out to be actually fun? It's mostly not the reality but the tantalizing possibility of sex – reinforced, like an addiction to nickel slots, by the rare, unpredictable payoffs – that gives life its luster. I'm starting to think that what may be hardest to give up for the sake of monogamy isn't the sex per se so much as a certain self-image that goes with it. I like thinking of myself as single – it means being available, up for anything, faintly dangerous. Undomesticated. Couples, by contrast, seem inert, done. There's a chilling description in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King of young fathers who appear "essentially soft or softened in some way, desperate in a resigned way, their stride not quite a trudge, their eyes empty and overmild with the weary stoicism of young fathers." I once asked a writer I admired, whom I noticed was drinking soda water in a bar, whether he drank. " I'm spiritually a drinker," he answered. "I no longer practice." I wonder if it's possible to do something similar with monogamy, to quit actually sleeping around while somehow remaining "spiritually single"? What's the point of swanky dress-up events, or of going out at all, once sex is off the agenda? With that possibility off the table, doesn't the world start to seem denatured and dull? Read more: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/is-monogamy-insane-20141022?page=3#ixzz3GzNqe59G Follow us: @mensjournal on Twitter | MensJournal on Facebook ”
