Monogamy Too Monotonous to Last?

"Whoso loves believes the impossible." -- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Monogamy won't last. I know this because I read it in no less a journal than Foreign Policy last summer. And, man, it's been stickin' in my craw ever since. Those experts listed monogamy as a convention that has outlived its usefulness. They predict that monogamy, like the British monarchy and American political parties and the Euro, will not even exist 35 years from now.

That's harsh. Because 35 years from now, I had intended to be celebrating my 53rd wedding anniversary, and now, I guess I will be looking for a date.

That won't be so bad if one of my dates could be Dick Shortt, 71, of Stokley's Services in Norfolk, Va. I wouldn't mind sitting around with him and chatting about the future of monogamy. Because unlike those experts, Dick Shortt actually thinks there is a future for monogamy.

I love that in a man.

Especially when the man has some experience with making a marriage last. In this case, it has taken a lifetime. Dick and his wife, Connie, met as first-graders. . . Married 21 days before the Navy shipped Dick to Japan for two years. Raised five kids. They celebrated their 50th anniversary recently and will retire from their family business later this year.

All that has got Dick Shortt thinking a lot about marriage.

"I can't imagine anybody getting married who didn't think they wanted it to last forever," Dick said when I told him about the article.

Neither can I. But Foreign Policy pointed to both the rising demand for individual freedom and the jump in life expectancy. Those two supposedly prove that it will be nearly impossible to spend one's entire life with one person and to love only that one person.

Dick laughs at that, because when he talks about Monogamyland, he sounds like a tour guide. He makes it clear the real satisfaction over all these years has been about working out those individual freedoms with the same partner. That's what he thinks most people don't understand. Individual freedom and that long life span are supposed to be working for you, not against you.

He tells a lovely story about how he wanted aboat when their kids were young, and Connie didn't. "It wasn't herthing, but she told me I could get the boat as long as I would keep myinterest in it."

And he did. He didn't run out on the bay all alone, though. He tooktheir boys with him. The boat could have been a bone of contention.Instead, the pleasure over their compromise overshadowed everythingelse.

That same deep satisfaction is in all his stories -- fromdeciding how much to talk about the business at home, to how to handlethe death of their adult son, to whether to move to a condo later thisyear.

They joke that they could never remarry. Neither would everfind another who would be so agreeable, who would understand theirmoods.

Those magazine experts think that this kind of marriage isnearing extinction. I don't see that at all. Instead, I think coupleswho are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversaries are pioneers.

Even though they grew up in a more socially conventional time,these couples spent the most turbulent years of their marriages in the'70s, when the divorce rate skyrocketed. Dick and Connie Shortt aremarried 50 years because they want to be married -- not because theyhad to be married, or because it wasn't socially acceptable to getdivorced, or because they couldn't afford to part.

They are pioneers because over an entire life span their generation is the first with a real choice. And they choose monogamy.

How's that for individual freedom?

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