"I Just Wish My Husband Would Have an Affair" is the eye-catching headline of a story by Monique Honaman in Huffington Post this morning.
It tickled me because it is, I believe, a sentiment not foreign to many women and, perhaps, to some men.
If you are a Santorum devotee you are horrified. And if you are madly in love, still, you might also be horrified. But whether you are a hypocrite or a lucky, lucky wife or husband, you might agree with me: Monogamy is natural only to swans - and even an occasional one of those has been seen to stray.
The Chinese and the French share (in addition to excellent cuisine) an exquisite pragmatism that solves the dichotomy that exists between the biblical mandate for a sentence to hell, and human nature: concubines and mistresses.
For many, hell is life with one woman (or man).
Conversely, I am sure some of the liberated men and women have found similar hells on earth with multiple partners. Nothing is perfect.
While I hold no brief for those who desert and abandon their responsibilities, or those who cause hurt and pain and deprivation, I am equally incensed by the people who want to moralize on every subject extant and insist their beliefs be the only beliefs with validity.
If all the sanctimonious busybodies bent on organizing the world to their own narrow specifications would cool it, and spend their considerable bile in eating away at life's really bad stuff, how much happier we all could be.
I'm not advocating mass exodus from marriage. I am simply suggesting that we adopt a "to each his own" attitude and stop feeling compelled to castigate and humiliate and isolate all those square pegs who don't fit into round holes.
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