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While I've been a fan of both of their writing for a good while, when it comes to issues of social liberalism/conservatism, I tend to agree with Dan Savage far more than I do with Miss Self-Important. Yet I found myself largely in agreement with MSI's recent take-down of Dan Savage's critique of monogamy. This, I suspect, has something to do with the fact that where Savage falters, MSI and I appear to agree, is visible simply at the level of common sense. No particular political or religious slant is required to see where things might not go smoothly if the presumption of monogamy were eliminated.

Basically, while the OMG-non-monogamy reaction to arguments like Savage's is usually applied to shock regarding non-monogamous marriage, what this would mean for that institution, as far as I'm concerned, the issues are at least as profound when it comes to introducing non-monogamy into pre-marital relationships, the sort that might end in marriage, or might not. Like I said, my fear, with Savage's monogamy-neutral stance, is that, in deciding that bringing in "other people" is fully compatible with staying in a relationship, young adults would start marrying partners they're kind of eh about, despite still being attracted to other people to the point of wanting to actually pursue relationships with those other people. The assumption of monogamy helps you be sure that when you settle down, you do so with the right person. By "right person," I don't necessarily mean Fate, just someone you can see yourself remaining monogamously tied to, even if, yeah, no one ever knows exactly what they (let alone their spouse) will be up to 15, 35 years down the line. Like I said, a presumption of non-monogamy isn't so great for the other partner who, fine, gets to avoid the hurt of being dumped, but who's not with someone all that enthusiastic.

What came up in the comments at MSI's, and what I ought to have mentioned before, is why this is a problem for everybody involved. Say you're 19, or 25, and you're in a relationship that's going OK, not great. You find yourself interested in other people. You can either a) dump the person you're with, or b) open up the relationship. Option (a) assumes monogamy - if others remain interesting, this gf/bf isn't it. How limiting!

Option (b), however, involves self-identifying as 'just not a monogamous person.' While there are no doubt some out there who are just not monogamous people, there are so, so, so many people who had a wandering eye when in so-so relationships, but in the one they end up in (or in ones in which it's the other person who loses interest first), they're fully capable of monogamy and indeed prefer it. This is, of course, that old cliché - 'he never told me he loved me, then three weeks after we broke up, he was engaged to someone else' - but there's truth to that. This is why when your bf/gf says, 'I just can't do monogamy,' you're right to be suspicious, not that cheating has necessarily occurred, but that the person you're with simply can't do monogamy with you. This is a safe assumption, even if .0001% of the time, the guy/gal really can't do monogamy, period.

As even Savage will grant you, monogamy's a whole lot more practical than any arrangement that has to be "negotiated," especially if kids are involved. (More on that in a moment.) So even if you leave out OMG traditional marriage, OMG traditional morality, think of Jesus, think of the children, it is, all things equal, a heck of a lot easier to be happily monogamous than to arrive at (optimistically) an equivalent level of happiness through negotiated non-monogamy. So it's inefficient, if nothing else, to decide that some huge percentage of the population is unfit for monogamy. Better that both partners in a relationship in which one or both are eh get the chance at monogamy that splitting from each other offers.

OK, so that's Part I. Part II: It's important, as MSI notes, that for all Savage's requests that children be protected, that marriages remain intact for their own good, he never seems to realize that children can be born outside wedlock. Now, perhaps unlike MSI and the social-conservative writer she links to, I don't think this is an issue of, heteros should only have sex with people they're prepared to have a kid with. Aside from that being unrealistic, it's unnecessary given the availability of effective contraception, and can potentially lead to ill-suited marriages between people who really just wanted to have sex. What I do think is, you want to be very sure the other person's on the same page. With college students/college-bound/recent-grad young people, often enough the man and woman are both horrified at the thought of a pregnancy. If it's near-implausible that either one wants there to be a pregnancy, or even that either would be even kinda-sorta OK with that result (even if both are, objectively speaking, pro-choice), more than one effective method of contraception is used, and pregnancy's a very unlikely outcome.

Once you involve people who are perhaps older, less panicked about pregnancy than your average ambitious and future-oriented 19-year-old, perhaps even with comfortable incomes and audible biological clocks, or even just once you involve multiple people, period, variables increase, and it's tougher to be on the same page. That, and the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy impact more people. Savage - take note, Chris Bodenner - does acknowledge that STDs can be a problem here, but kids, unlike STDs, are frequently a desired outcome of sex. What might result is an above-board version of the Aahnold situation, sure, but also it could be the wife who's then pregnant, not with the husband's child, or perhaps... and so many questions - continue the pregnancy? do we care whose kid it is, and what if some of us do, others not? And, once born, the same issues arise regardless of gender breakdown - what's this kid's relationship to its parent outside the marriage and its siblings born within the marriage? Discretion becomes a bit more complicated when "poly" produces a next generation.

UPDATE

Note this, from Prudie, in response to a 27-year-old woman whose bf of two years has been having an affair, or as much as an "affair" as one can have not two years into a dating relationship, and who seems committed to getting through it: "You two aren't married, you don't have kids, so I'm wondering why this mess seems worth all the work." Whether the relevant threshold is marriage, kids, cohabitation, or a certain number of years together - there's a point in relationships when it makes sense to stay together even if things are not good but not atrocious, when we might be sympathetic to Savage's plea to make it work. That time isn't when relatively little has been invested in a relationship.