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What do you mean by "not really attainable"? My parents have been married 55 years, and my wife's for nearly 60. Both sets of my grandparents remained happily married to their spouses until death. Of my parents' 6 siblings, only one has ever been divorced. Me, I'm a relative beginner, in the 20th year of marriage.

It isn't really that hard to attain if you think of love as something that you do, rather than as something that happens to you. If you make feelings alone the foundation of a relationship, it probably will fail. But if you realize that active committment can be a creator of love and happiness, you have a good chance of success.

Thanks for your comment, David. Reading it threw me for a little more of a philosophical loop than I expected from this post. My parents separated when I was 1 year old and my mom definitely emphasized independence and self-sufficiency as the path to happiness -- not commitment.

I'm not going to try to solve the nature-nurture debate here, but it's indisputable that you and I have very different models for building a relationship.

I wonder how much we are bound by our parents' model of love/relationships and how much we get to build for ourselves. What do you think?

*Monogamy, which is really no more than a useful social convention ...*

What isn't?

I'm having a hard time telling what you're trying to say, Jeffrey.

But to respond to the most superficial reading of your comment, a bottle opener is useful, but it's not a social convention and men taking off their hats when they go indoors is a social convention in which I don't see much usefulness.

But I don't think that's really what you're looking for. Can you dumb it down for dense Ruby?

Monogamy usually means for the rest of your life, but in today's world view, we are lucky if most can make it throughout one marriage, much less for life.
With my personal commitment to religion, it is out of respect for that commitment to God and each other, that let's no other man put asunder...
In the old days that was a lifetime of 50 or 60 years...If they can acheive such things, I truely believe we all can...
And yes, even in my own personal life, let me not be the one to throw the first stone, as I too have fallen short of redemption...

Ruby: I'm sure you're pretty bright in your own right.

I was an avid nihilist in my 20s as well, until a professor suggested I read Turgenev's "Father's and Sons"

Social conventions have important purposes. That's all I'm saying. Before we throw this one or that one to the curb, I think we should cautiously examine the possible unintended consequences.

I've got no real problem with your post, but the article in your update really is off the hook.

Continuing, a bottle opener is a social convention because opening them with your teeth is jockish and using a friends drawer handle could be construed as impolite.

Thanks for clarifying your comment. I agree with you about the FP article -- it just struck me as funny (funny ha-ha) that that particular magazine would have an editorial on that topic. I didn't think who anybody was doinking really rose to the level of foreign policy, I mean, unless it's a head of state of one country and a head of state of another country. But I learn something new every day.

And just so nobody gets the wrong idea, I'm totally not a nihilist. I'm just dubious about the moral import of who anybody is sleeping with. As long as it's not a kid or animal or something. Or my boyfriend.

But I'm sticking to my guns -- a bottle opener is definitely an object, not a convention, social or otherwise.

Ruby, you're right, independence and self-sufficiency aren't very compatible with long-term monogamy, at least if you value them more than cooperation and compromise for the sake of a satisfying relationship.

I'm totally with you, David. Cooperation and compromise are intrinsic to a good relationship.

But I'm not willing to put independence and self-sufficiency on an opposite pole. To me, that puts monogamy in bed with dependency and that makes my skin crawl.

Even if we're just talking birds and bees and not who is washing the car this week, sometimes you just have to take care of your own or nobody else will.

But the whole question I'm trying to get at is what makes a monogamous relationship better? Hardly anybody is going to have one car or one dwelling or one job for their entire life, so why one partner?

But I'm not willing to put independence and self-sufficiency on an opposite pole. To me, that puts monogamy in bed with dependency and that makes my skin crawl.

In my experience, most people in (satisfying) monogamous relationships have the opposite reaction to the "monogamy = dependence" equation. While they don't welcome subservience (and shouldn't), they do welcome the ability to depend on someone else; it's a comfort, and it's one of the reasons they go for that kind of relationship in the first place. It is, to answer the question you posed, what makes a long-term relationship better than a series of shorter ones.

I can see why that might be viewed as a folly of human frailty, and in some cases, it is. But in the best relationships, it's not. It's a conscious decision to allow yourself to be dependent, to a certain level, on someone else. It's devotion.

(Don't get me wrong. Part of that devotion is to let your partner be himself/herself and do his/her own thing. That can, and does, co-exist with a reliance on someone else.)

I think what David is trying to say, Ruby, is that someone with your belief system has half a foot out the door in all their relationships before they even get started. That doesn't mean they're doomed to failure; it also doesn't make you a bad person. It's just the way it is.

"But the whole question I'm trying to get at is what makes a monogamous relationship better? Hardly anybody is going to have one car or one dwelling or one job for their entire life, so why one partner?"

It's true that most people end up practicing serial monogamy, but I don't think there's any evidence that those people are any happier than people who stay with their first spouse (assuming that there's no abuse in the relationship).

I could also ask, "better for whom"? I've seen reports that divorce is in general financially worse for women than for men. So in that respect serial monogamy is usually better for men.

And divorce and remarriage are hard on children (still assuming there's no abuse involved); step-parents and mom's boyfriend are among the most dangerous people for kids.

As to the cooperation / independence conflict, all I can say is that successful couples find their own ways of giving each other both, to the extent that they need it. But I've certainly seen marriages fail because one partner wanted more independence than was comfortable for the other, and vice-versa.

I don't think marriages have much chance of permanence if both partners aren't fully committed to that goal.

Also, here's an interesting quote from Dan Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness: "We expect the next car, the next house or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn't and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won't."

I think that's often true of the "next spouse," too.

David - Monogamy is one way to avoid divorce, but so is staying unmarried. So how about if people just don't get married? Your arguments don't seem to recommend one marriage nearly as strongly as they recommend zero marriages.

It's your opinion that people practicing serial monogamy aren't any happier than those faithful to one partner for life, but are they any less happy? I don't see evidence in the world of a great number of happy marriages. It looks like I'd have better odds in a casino.

David and Reggie, you guys seem to have the good marriages. Am I too too cynical if I invoke that lifetime smoker that everybody seems to know who has never missed a day of work and dies peacefully in his sleep at 95?

I'm not going to suggest that you don't deserve the happiness you've found in your relationships. But could it be that you're just lucky and not necessarily right?

I can’t speak for David, but for me, it’s not a matter of being right. Let me be clear: When I said earlier that monogamy trumps serial dating, I wasn’t trying to extrapolate that to the entire population; it was more of a “some people feel the same way that I do about this, and here’s why.”

I’m not going to pretend that monogamy works for everyone. It’s not a secret that it works for fewer and fewer people these days. (The Attali article you posted touched on that, and I won’t repeat his arguments here.)

What I do think is that if you’re going to take the plunge, there are things you should do to make monogamy work. A lot of people don’t do those things. They’re just not ready to be a one-man/one-woman person, but social mores pressure them to shack up, so they do. And that's pretty miserable, especially when things dissolve and you have to untangle a web of kids and assets and shared friends and experiences.