Why have we persisted?  It is idle to speak of monogamy as though it were a senseless rule imposed on unfortunate humanity by some all-powerful Superman.  We have imposed it on ourselves.  It is our doing.  Why have we done it?  Surely because, in spite of its alleged “impossibility,” its obvious inconveniences, there is some need in human nature which demands a permanent and a stable sex relationship to meet it.

I believe that there is something in our human nature which desires stability in its relations with other human beings.  It is perhaps a recognition of the fact that, though we live in time and suffer its conditions, we are immortal also and chafe under too strict a bondage to time.  Our relations with other human beings ought not to be evanescent!  There is something cheap and shoddy in the giving and taking of human personality on such easy soon-forgotten terms.  It is not only in sexual relations that this is true.  It is true of all human intercourse.  The longer care and devotion of human parents for their offspring is not a physical only, but a spiritual necessity:  and it is bound up with the greater faithfulness of human lovers.  In parenthood, in loverhood, in friendship, those who take their obligations lightly are not the finer sort of men and women, but the slighter, cheaper make.  It is not a love of freedom but a certain inferiority and shoddiness that makes it possible for us to give ourselves, and take others, lightly.  For in all human relationships it is “ourselves” that we give and take.  It is not what your friend does for you or gives to you that makes him your friend; but what he is to you.  It is his personality that you have shared.  And so there is something rather repulsive in quickly forgetting or throwing it away.  People who make friends and lose them as the trees put out their leaves in spring to shed them in the autumn, are not quite human.  The capacity to make friends—­to make many friends—­is a great power:  the capacity to lose them not so admirable.  Yet there are people who always have a bosom-friend, every time you meet them; only it is never the same friend.  And this is a poor sort of friendship, for it is poor to give and take so little that you easily cease or forget to give at all.

If this is true of friends, it is not less true of lovers:  it is more true.  For sex-love includes more of one’s personality, it more completely involves body, soul and spirit, is the most perfect form of union that human beings know.  How strange, then, to argue that one may treat a lover as one would not treat a friend!  Make one and lose one so lightly, and disavow all the responsibility of a love in which so much is given, so much involved!  It is true that all human love has a physical element, even if it is only the desire for the physical presence of the beloved one.  We all want sometimes to see and to touch our friends.  But in sex-love that physical element becomes a desire for perfect union, expressing a spiritual harmony.  Can one take such a gift lightly, and pass from one relationship to another with a readiness which would seem contemptible in a friend?