204. Non-monogamy as issue and non-issue.

I see it!  That's not adultery those people in Eliza Mundy's piece (Post 203) are calling "non-monogamy." Because they don't start pure.  There can't be adulteration.  Gays who hammer out a contract recognizing that "it's okay to be non-monogamous," husbands who propose "non-monogamy," wives who accept, have agreed on impurity.  So no issue.

But don't we have an adjacent issue?  As soon as those gays, those husbands, those wives, go to a Christian minister to marry them, maybe as soon as they ask society to give their relationship the traditional name "marriage," they raise the issue of qualification.  Gary Hall saw it right away: this ceremony, this name, is for promisers of purity. 

So you have to pick your issue.  You can't win at both.

203. "Non-monogamy"

In Liza Mundy's article in the latest Atlantic, "The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss," people keep calling adultery "non-monogamy."  Gay partners hammer out a contract recognizing that there are times "where it's okay to be non-monogamous," a husband can propose "non-monogamy" to his wife, and marriages can be more or less "monogamish."  "Non-monogamy," though, "is not a cause that women tend to champion" and Gary Hall of the National Cathedral will not marry two people "who intended to be non-monogamous" — that is, as explained earlier in the article, people who had "an explicit agreement about extra-relational sex."

These people don't care what they do to the mind of an English prof in his dotage.  Mine swirls with Paolo and Francesca, with Anna Karenina, with Hester wearing an "N" on her bosom, with Desdemona dead for a misunderstood contract, and Lear at his peak:  "Die?  Die for non-monogamy?  No. The wren goes to ’t, and the small gilded fly does lecher in my sight."  My wife doesn't have to worry about me going extra-relational on her (the intra-relational is plenty, thanks), but if she did I see it would be a lot easier than committing adultery.

I come out of the swirl with the predictable question: Must one, when one is liberated, liberate oneself from the English language, the language of our poets?

Note: I treat this conflict between the socio-political and the literary vocabularies more thoroughly in Post #82, and, as I have mentioned, in my Today's Sex and Yesterday's Poetry (Amazon and Kindle).