The Telegraph UK published a piece yesterday encouraging married couples to, at the very least, discuss the possibility of a “consensual non-monogamous” marriage.
According to the article, titled ‘Why men should give their wives a cheat pass this Christmas,’ monogamy might not be the only approach to long-term relationships, because “contrary to popular opinion, women tire of their sexual partners faster than men, and need just as much sexual adventure and novelty as their male counterparts – if not more.”
The article goes on to argue that monogamy is hard, citing a YouGov study that showed one in five British adults said they had an affair. “Once we admit [monogamy is hard], it will provide such a wonderful relief to a lot of people.”
But the idea of openly, non-monogamous relationships isn’t a new one either, according to The Telegraph. The public are already in the process of desensitisation, through television programs and sex-education in schools.
This year has seen, if not an explosion, then at least a creeping insinuation into our culture of the idea that monogamy might not be the only approach to long-term relationships. Two of the most talked about BBC dramas of the autumn, Wanderlust and Killing Eve, had at their heart characters who rejected traditional relationships.
In the former, a married couple who try out consensual non-monogamy to reignite their dull sex lives; in the latter, an attractive female assassin whose potent bisexuality and rotating cast of bed partners is almost incidental to the action. And that was just the BBC. Meanwhile we’ve had an MP, Labour’s Jess Phillips, recommending that schoolgirls should be taught about orgasms.
The end of the piece suggests a “pleasure revolution” to start putting “female sexual pleasure at the center of our sexual universe, [because] there’s a case to be made that could change relationships outside the bedroom as well.”
In his book, Successful Christian Parenting, John MacArthur rightly summed up our culture’s current obsession with the deterioration of marriage and family:
“The family was God’s first earthly institution. Before there was a government, and long before God instituted the church, He ordained marriage and the family as the basic building block of society.
“The destruction of the family we are witnessing today is, I believe, a harbinger of the ultimate collapse of our entire society. The more the family is threatened, the more society itself is in danger of extinction,” he warned.
The institution of heterosexual, monogamous marriage was not to no end. That is why it is so often the subject of attack. The relationship between a husband and wife tells a story. Marriage was created in order to reflect the union between Christ and his Church – one faithful husband, one faithful wife (Eph. 5:31-33).
Make no mistake, our culture’s current war on heterosexual, monogamous marriage is nothing less than a war on God’s created order.