Monogamy Quotes

“Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“They'll say you are bad
or perhaps you are mad
or at least you
should stay undercover.
Your mind must be bare
if you would dare
to think you can love
more than one lover.”
― David Rovics

“There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don't want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don't want to fuck while pretending he's the one you do. That's called fidelity. That's called monogamy. That's called civilization and its discontents.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat cornflakes and sleep for a while, and then they want to have sex with another woman, and another, until they die. Women,’ and I thought I’d better pick my words carefully when describing a gender I didn’t belong to, ‘want a relationship. They may not get it, or they may sleep with a lot of men before they do get it, but ultimately that’s what they want. That’s the goal. Men do not have goals. Natural ones. So they invent them, and put them at either end of a football pitch. And then they invent football. Or they pick fights, or try and get rich, or start wars, or come up with any number of daft bloody things to make up for the fact that they have no real goals.’
‘Bollocks,’ said Ronnie.
‘That, of course, is the other main difference.”
― Hugh Laurie, The Gun Seller

“Some women's love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can't give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop's license to receive it.”
― Thomas Hardy

“Being faithful and monogamous is not natural for human beings. It takes work. Deep down we all know that. We have all been tempted to stray at some point or another. Even when it was only a fleeting thought and we didn't act on it. Every time we acknowledge that someone of the opposite sex is "attractive" or "sexy" we are doing nothing other than pointing out that they would be a suitable mate. Not acting on that natural impulse to want to mate with a viable mating partner requires a conscious decision. It's a constant struggle between what your body wants, and what the civilized part of your brain says you should do, in order to avoid the negative consequences of cheating on your spouse and ruining your long-term relationship. That's why affairs, and extra-marital sex, are often referred to as "a moment of weakness.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Why Men And Women Can't Be Friends

“Revolution in Love’. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“If love wasn't conditional, everybody would be in love with everybody.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Have you seen what wolves do to their prey? But they do mate for life.”
― Donna Lynn Hope

“When a man cheats, it is said it is because he is a dog. When a woman cheats, it is said it is because her man is a dog.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, Divided & Conquered

“Monogamy used to mean one person for life. Now monogamy means one person at a time.”
― Esther Perel, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity

“Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny,

the way monogamy is funny, the way
someone falling down in the street is funny.

I entered a revolving door and emerged
as a human being. When you think of me
is my face electronically blurred?”
― Jeffrey McDaniel

“When I tell her I feel like the other woman, she laughs, that's just learned sexist bullshit. We are all in charge of our own bodies and what we decide to do with them. We are all our own.

I believed it when she said it, like she'd opened up a new valve that had been stuck. I felt unconfined and open-minded and totally confused. Intellectually, non-monogamy made complete sense; emotionally, it felt like sandpaper across my eyelids.”
― Zoe Whittall

“When I hear that "Possession is the grave of love," I remember that a religion may begin with the resurrection.”
― F.H. Bradley

“I cant take it like this much longer, Milt," Karen said muffledly into the big CKC shirt with its male smell, allowing herself the luxury of letting the bars all the way down for once, enjoying for just this moment the eternal degradation of being a woman.

"I cant take it much longer," she whimpered, tasting it, the eternally caught and held hard in the grasp of some man, the forever humiliated heavy weight it was impossible to squirm out from under, the forever helpless except for the mercy of him who always takes what he wants without any, and that all women learn instinctively not to expect [...] That was all they wanted. That was all any of them wanted. You give them the greatest thing you possess, the most intimate secret, and they --- just take it. Well, let them have it. Let them all have some of it. Let them root and rut and rowel, as if it was no more important than that why were they all so anxious to keep it away from each other?”
― James Jones, From Here to Eternity

“I understood that if ever one wanted to live with someone you cooked for them and they came running. But then it is my idea of hell these days, living with someone. The idea of sharing your life with someone is just utterly ghastly. I know why people do it, but it's never a good idea.”
― Nigel Slater, Real Cooking

“That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he's forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it's called Monotony.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Anthropologist Donald Symons is as amazed as we are at frequent attempts to argue that monogamous gibbons could serve as viable models for human sexuality, writing, "Talk of why (or whether) humans pair bond like gibbons strikes me as belonging to the same realm of discourse as talk of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.”
― Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality

“Almost everywhere people marry, monogamy is the official norm and infidelity the clandestine one.”
― Esther Perel, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity

“To remain with a lover permanently, or at least for any significant period of time, had always seemed to me so limiting, so much like putting up a door, albeit a beautiful, elaborately carven door, between myself and the dark, mysterious entrance to the unknown, the unseen, the unexperienced; a door that closed those things off to me. It gave happiness, in my experience, to remain with a lover over some weeks or months, to explore them, to become comfortable with them, to express myself to the fullest extent that I thought they would accept. Over too long a period, however, I always found myself beginning to yearn for those things I was not receiving; those other forms of happiness that loyalty to one person caused to become inaccessible – to be glimpsed from afar yet always untasted, untouched, unfelt.”
― Yasmine Millett, The Erotic Notebooks

“The way you held me.
It’s what held me together.”
― Bernardo Moya, A Man Evolving: Confessions about monogamy, passion and broken hearts.

“Your beauty
is impossible to define.
Maybe divine?”
― Bernardo Moya, A Man Evolving: Confessions about monogamy, passion and broken hearts.

“Clem had her own conflicted feelings about monogamy, but she did know one couldn't simply decide fidelity was for chumps without having a conversation with their partner first. If a relationship stopped meeting someone's needs, they should end it if a new normal couldn't be negotiated.”
― Ann Aguirre, Boss Witch

“Disagreement about moral codes seems to reflect people's adherence to and participation in different ways of life. The causal connections seems to be mainly that way round: it is that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“Love is not a jungle safari
from one hunt to another.
Love is a sacred calling
of losing oneself in another.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“How a man treats his wife has to do with that individual man, whether in polygyny or monogamy.”
― Patricia Dixon, We Want for Our Sisters What We Want for Ourselves: Polygyny: A Relationship, Marriage and Family Alternative

“Rather than polygyny needing an explanation, it is monogamy that may need to be explained.”
― Patricia Dixon, We Want for Our Sisters What We Want for Ourselves: Polygyny: A Relationship, Marriage and Family Alternative