“What’s Big Love about?” my dad yelled from the den, scanning through the channels on the DirecTV menu.
“Some show about polygamists,” I yelled back. “I hear it’s pretty good.”
“Maybe I’ll check it out. Oh, wait – it’s on HBO. We don’t subscribe to them anymore.”
So Dad didn’t watch the show about one man and his three sister-wives.
I really wish I had a better opening for you, something profound about the lessons of love and life, some grand, sweeping poetic gesture that would bring grown men to tears like the speech at the end of Brian’s Song and would make romance novelists cringe in jealousy. But all I’ve got is a story about me and my dad and premium cable. But there’s no easy way to segue into the topic of romantic love among more than two people.
The argument for polygamy is something along the lines of “If you can hate more than one person, why can’t you be in love with more than one person?” And sure enough, there are fully functional relationships between multiple partners in the world today. And I’m not about to debate the merits of one lifestyle over another, decry the “sanctity of marriage” or anything like that. Instead, I’d like to ask a simple question: is the multiple-partner relationship a direction that society is headed in?
The divorce rate, as the news tells me every week or so, is around 50%. That means that at least half of all couples who wind up tying the knot thinking that they’re in love with each other are not. There’s an abysmally high record of failed second marriages too – it’s even higher than the divorce rate. And in this case, we can again assume that these people had found romantic love and it failed. Presumably, some of them went on to third, fourth or fifth marriages; Larry King alone probably raises the national rate of remarriage up a percent or two.
So here we have all of these people who are able to find romantic love with multiple partners. It might not run concurrently with the love they have for another partner, but it exists. Now, compound that with the decrease in overall marriages, the average number of married people who carry on an affair (20 to 30 percent) and the increase in the number of children born out of wedlock, and it seems that people are already looking for love in different ways. It’s no longer about just settling down with one person.
This isn’t to suggest that we will become a society of hedonistic ne’er-do-wells that corrupt the very institution of marriage, but rather that the concept of a single partner and a monogamous long-term relationship may change. As our society continues to develop and grow, people are looking past the evolutionary imperative of procreation towards more personalized goals. It may come to pass that the stigma of polygamy is lifted.
And that, at the very least, sounds like it could make for some entertaining television.
