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Tuesday 18 November 2014

"Forsaking All Others"? Sologamy and Tiring of Waiting for Mr. Person Right

I thought I had accidentally stumbled into The Onion, or one of Eye of the Tiber's very best pieces of satire.

But no, First Things was serious!

Sologamy's a real thing!

“I... promise to enjoy inhabiting my own life and to relish a lifelong love affair with my beautiful self.”

I have maligned a public figure with the worst wig hair, (that my pretty imaginative, if I do say so myself, self can image, ) in the world by thinking that he had achieved and displayed an utterly  unmatchable egotism, but no.
And for that I am sorry.
What is going on here? In the Christian tradition, marriage has historically been understood as a lifelong, conjugal covenant between a man and a woman, a union of love that involves the giving of oneself to God and to others. Today the institution of marriage, which has flourished not only among Christians but across many religious traditions of the world, is being challenged from many angles and by many practices. Until quite recently, these were all regarded as inimical to human flourishing in society. Such practices include so-called same-sex marriage, polygamy, incest, polyamorous relationships of various kinds—and now sologamy.
In some ways same-self marriage is the logical outgrowth of what cultural critic Christopher Lasch described in his 1979 bestseller The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch, building on Sigmund Freud’s classic essay “On Narcissism” of 1916, applied the term to the sense of grandiosity and excessive self-love that seem to mark not only psychologically disordered individuals but post-sixties American society as a whole.
I guess it was to be expected...

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