Anti-Climacus

While I am waiting for a representative of my apartment community to come and do a pre-move out inspection, a brief thought on the Dan Savage/monogamy debate, two weeks after everyone else has had their say:

The point, as I've always interpreted Savage (see here for some text that supports the interpretation) is that his pro-open relationship/monogamish stance is a theory of marginal relationships, and is rather explicitly not supposed to be a norm. In a world where the expectation is that two people will meet, fall in love, and mate (exclusively) for life like, as Woody Allen said, "pigeons, or Catholics," then it's important to realize that at the margins there will be people who are not quite suited for that entire bundle--lifelong commitment and exclusivity--but who can handle part of it. So long as both parties are aware of that difficulty and are committed to working with it, there's no problem. Savage's role in that world is simply to remind people that something other that exclusivity can be an option. If the world were the opposite--the sort of place where monogamous, exclusive relationships were rare--then I get the impression he'd hit more heavily on the importance of stable family structures, especially when children are involved.

Goodness knows I'm the sort of person who's interested in taking any moral or social principle and expanding it to its limits to see whether it remains a principle worth upholding, but I think the monogamish option is explicitly not intended to work in those situations.