Unlike the additional sex partners you fantasise about, this rare practice is actually more attractive than it appears. It boasts clearly superior protection from STIs and is also advantageous from budgetary and logistical viewpoints.
You can use monogamy as a way to organise your weekly schedule to include sex, without the need for any of the preparatory overtures of meeting, seduction and dating. You can also forget all that worrying about awkwardness when two of the people you’re procuring animal affirmation from (in a sexual relationship with) bump into you at the same time. You’ll also save on phone bills, coffee or meal expenses and won’t have to change your sheets as often.
There are of course downsides. Monogamy can result in a frustration of psychosexual urges, as you find yourself unable to seize and deflower any young thing carrying the imprimatur of sexual conquest. Commentators in earlier decades suggested this could be avoided by making sure your significant other represents your own parent of the opposite gender. Cold comfort for same-sex couples, who have nonetheless recently realised the advantages of monogamy and are converting to it in droves.
More importantly, though, monogamy allows you to control your partner’s libidinous urges, meaning you avoid feelings of jealousy towards their lubricity which somewhat vitiates the stifling of your own nymphomania, or satyriasis, as the case may be.
The most popular alternative to monogamy remains marriage, which is a method of avoiding monogamy from within the comfort of a heterosexual economic union. Monogamy has it beat for entry costs and success rates, but it can’t really compete in terms of social status
Slightly less cynical than voluntary celibacy, three stars.
This article originally appeared in Woroni in 2011.