To love is to uphold the entirety of a being, as if it was a final offering, the one and only sacrifice which could bargain the forgiveness of our god. It rests on individuality, on the generous warmth which exudes from accepting our loved one completely. And sex is not a transformative act: The fact that I am me remains intact despite it. If this is true for me, then I cannot presume it isn’t true for other people. How then could sex effect change on love?
Love, on the other hand, is transformative. One cannot love and remain. An inattentive person might presume that fear of our partner falling in love with someone else, and not a superstitious relation with sex, is what sustains the widespread fear of non-monogamy. But I very much doubt this is true, at least in men. Most men still have a supernatural fear of female sexuality. They make it seem as if the medieval witch, the one bestowed with frenzied and orgiastic spells, is still a living archetype. Of course, this fear is directed towards their long-term partners; their girlfriends, their wives, and of course their mothers. Outside of this domain, women are either incomprehensible creatures that dwell somewhere outside the familiar world, or at worst an object from which to derive a satisfaction that grows more morbid and obscene the more impure and vile it is conceived to be. Such is the triad of all women before many men’s eyes: Sanctity, Mystery, and Sin. Nothing exists in-between. There is no individual. And it is this, I think, above anything else, what impedes most men to live love somewhat more freely.
Monogamy, on its turn, certainly has virtues, and may in fact be outright desirable under certain circumstances. In truth, one can never advocate for one type of contract over the other—only a fool can claim in general the superiority of partnership model $x$ over some other model $y$. To my eyes, the only advocacy in place is this: That people should be educated so as to understand that many valid models exist, so that however love is lived may be a product of a free choice in accordance to their interests and philosophies—neither convention nor passivity. The tragedy of monogamy is not its contract—for it is advantageous in many ways—but rather that it is held by many as a default with no alternatives. The ideal world is neither monogamous nor polygamous, but surely contains a fair mixture of these along with all shades in between.
Some claim that we are biologically inclined to forming monogamous couples. The use of biological claims to account for social arrangements must be considered with great suspicion. In this particular case, I believe there are reasons to say the claim is particularly unfounded. We are, of course, animals bestowed with a phylogenetic endowment. Primatology, at least as developed by Franz de Waal, provides some interesting insights into sexual selection and pair-bonding. But to see how little one can rely on an evolutionary perspective on the matter, suffices to observe how different these behaviors are in our two closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos—the first a violent creature that strives for dominance, the latter comparable to the youth at Woodstock.
However, I do think it is the case that the conventional arrangements of social life tend to produce monogamy de facto, even if the contract allows for sexual exploration beyond the boundaries of the couple. For most people, life is a time-consuming struggle—and one sweeter to fight in companionship. If a couple assumes the serious commitment of mutual support through the scuffle of life, in all its sweet and stormy ways—the pursuit of success in a certain domain, the raising of children, the ownership of a home, the caring throughout illness—then even if their contract imposes no restriction to their individual freedoms, it is likely that they'll seldom have the time or interest required to pursuit sexual pleasures outside of the couple. This should in no way be interpreted as saying that social conditions drag people down into monogamy—there is no downward sense in this. The force which mutual love bestows upon the soul, even before the cruelest hardship, is the most precious thing in life. The friendship and companionship that emerge from struggling together to rise victorious over the many forces which threaten us every day—in essence, the feeling of a family, regardless of the shape and kind which it may take—is the deepest well of meaning.
Of course, a counterpart of this exists in loveless marriage. How miserable such marriages are escapes my range of experience—though I have known unhappy marriages, I knew them in my childhood and should not wish to suggest that I fathomed the subtleties of their unhappiness. For unhappiness, unlike its counterpart, is always subtle and unique—always idiosyncratic and mysterious. Nonetheless, I do not think the problem of unhappy marriages is as relevant today as it once was. Divorce is legal almost everywhere, and it seems to me a cordial divorce is obviously preferable than a miserable marriage, even for the raising of children. The legal difficulties and stigma which divorce once carried are gone. The process is one which will probably produce significant economical loss, and when it comes to the relationship of parents and children, the legal system is undoubtedly unjust to men—perhaps one of the very few examples where institutional power favors women. Notwithstanding, the continuation of an unhappy marriage is worth almost no cost—where individuals cease to flourish and cooperation does not exist, there is no place for dignity—perhaps no hope as well.
With regards to jealousy, it is often easy to recognize that its source is one's own insecurities and nothing else. The first observation should be that one's shortcomings and fears should not justify the restriction of anybody's liberty. It is our responsibility to deal with our feelings. To restrict the sexual freedom of a partner in order to avoid a distasteful feeling is analogous to prohibit that a friend smokes because we don't like the odor of tobacco. We may reasonably concede that he should not smoke in front of us, or even in our very proximity, or perhaps when visiting our home—but we could obviously not forbid that he smokes. There are, or so I have found, two strategies that may dissolve our insecurities and jealousy altogether.
The simplest one is to imagine our partner with someone else with as much detail and intensity as we can. Frame the situation in the same context in which you frame the memories of yourself having sexual encounters with other people—give it no more and no less entity than this. See how in the touching of their skins nothing supernatural exists, nor in their kiss nothing eternal, nor in their words nothing evil. Conceive now that there is joy. Ask yourself: What is wrong with this? Repeat this enough times—you shall find the answer to be: Nothing.
The second one, less imaginative, is to have sex with other people. If your contract allows for it—this is, if this involves no dishonesty—this empirical test should suffice. For you will find that your love for your partner remains untouched and as pure as always after a sexual encounter with someone else. You shall see that if the sex meant little then it carried not relevance at all—that if it meant something, this something does not affect whatever love you felt before. Asking yourself the question: "What was evil about this?", you shall find the answer to be: Nothing. And it is your moral obligation (and an easy intellectual step) to concede that if it implied no evil when you did it then it implies no evil when someone else does it—and this includes your partner.
The power of the previous methods lies in demystification. The idea of sex often carries a supernatural power, but only because this power is artificially bestowed on it. Imagining it in its rawest form, or practicing it altogether, should suffice to reduce its magical aura to dirt.
Curiously enough, there is one question which is never raised when people think about these matters—a question which, from my point of view, should be the first and foremost one. Namely, is a world with more sex a desirable world? This of course has equivalent formulations: Is sex a good? Does sex produce happiness? Etc. The undeniable truth is that, given reasonable conditions—e.g. diseases and unwanted pregnancies are avoided, there's no coercion involved, etc.—sex is certainly a source of joy. It is true, at least in my experience, that this joy grows proportionally with the amount of love and trust which one feels for the other person, but the $y$-intercept—the baseline level of enjoyment, if you will—is certainly high on its own. Once this question is faced, its answer being so trivially positive to my eyes, then facing whatever discomfort the ideas of sexual freedom pose to us becomes a moral obligation.
As a last note, there is one point that my generation—and perhaps future ones—failed to grasp on this matter. It is true that sexual relations are of social importance. As a prove, one needs only point out the social effects of the contraceptive pill, which still echo and unravel to this very day. It is true as well that the question of sexual relations carries significance to the individual, insofar as sex is as much an aspect of life as any other—and one often imbued with strong affect. Notwithstanding, it is usual to find people that dwell on this matter in a sort of onanistic fashion—they have made of this question the question of their lives, and have built from this or that sexual model a sense of identity. Superficially (but not without truth) one may firstly observe that this suggests some intellectual mediocrity, insofar as the difficulty of the matter does not lie on its complexity but on our unwillingness to face it with honesty. Once an intellectually honest attitude is taken, the problem of answering the questions surrounding sexuality is rather trivial. In terms of ethical and intellectual scope, the question of sex is very limited, and should not occupy much of our lives. Precisely because there is no model generally superior to any other—precisely because the issue lies in providing people with the education required to organize their lives in original and free fashion—the issue of sexuality is merely a small sub-problem of the wide-scale problems concerning intellectual education, propaganda, and indoctrination.