eBook - ePub
Monogamy
About this book
'A couple is a conspiracy in search of a crime. Sex is often the closest they can get.'
All the present controversies about the family are really discussions about monogamy. About what keeps people together and why they should stay together. Now, in a book of 121 aphorisms, Adam Phillips asks why we all believe in monogamy, and why we find it so difficult to think about.
Everyone knows that most people, however much they may love their partner, are capable of loving and desiring more than one person at a time. It may be reassuring, but it is in fact very demanding -- and often cruel -- to assume that only one person can give us what we want.
At least in sexual matters, sharing seems to go deeply against the grain. Monogamy is so much taken for granted as the foundation of the family and of family values that, as with anything that seems essential, we are very wary of being critical of it. But, as Adam Phillips suggests, it is surely worth wondering why the faithful couple has such a hold on our imagination, and how it has come to be such an ideal.
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Yes, you can access Monogamy by Adam Phillips in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Psychology & History & Theory in Psychology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Landing Page
- Title Page
- Epigraph
- Preface
- Contents
- Not everyone believes in monogamy…
- Once we know the rules…
- Profoundly committed to the better life…
- Infidelity is as much about the drama…
- Coupledom is a performance art…
- Our survival at the very beginning…
- We work very hard…
- The only tradition…
- The most difficult people…
- Like a magnet…
- If it is the forbidden…
- Growing old together…
- One is unavoidably faithful…
- We are the only animals that think…
- We may believe in sharing…
- We would like there to be…
- It is impossible to promise…
- At the beginning…
- In private life…
- If sexuality is for pleasure…
- A couple is a conspiracy…
- Anyone who believes in the value of suffering…
- It is not a question…
- To describe a couple…
- Exaggeration…
- If I am faithful…
- At its best monogamy…
- There is always the taken-for-granted…
- As yet, the promiscuous…
- Why are so many of our fantasies of personal freedom…
- Monogamy comes with…
- If, say, you allow yourself…
- Choosing monogamy is not…
- People have relationships…
- Only the child…
- Why are we more impressed…
- There is a difference between…
- In the beginning…
- If sex brought us in to the family…
- Every marriage is a blind date…
- Suspicion is a philosophy…
- Partner, spouse, wife, husband…
- No one is indifferent to praise…
- For the monogamist…
- Rules are ways of…
- It’s impossible…
- We can never be quite sure…
- If I believe that…
- Our erotic life…
- Jealousy and passion…
- Serial monogamy…
- What would we do without…
- The outlaw…
- There is no such this as sexual competition…
- The secure couple…
- Most infidelities aren’t ugly…
- There are fundamentally two kinds of writer…
- The point about trust is…
- In our erotic lives…
- Self-betrayal…
- It is often easier to get…
- In our erotic life…
- We need to find…
- It is always flattering when…
- No one gets the relationship…
- Monogamy and infidelity…
- The best hideout…
- We need to replace…
- There is always someone else…
- The compulsive monogamist…
- About pleasure…
- Because erotic life rearranges the world…
- Infidelity makes a life…
- More has been written about how relationship’s don’t work…
- Babies tell us nothing about infancy…
- Why is anthropology…
- A sexual relationship is like learning a script…
- About monogamy we would like…
- Realists love compromise…
- If we could find a cure for sexual jealousy…
- You can be occasionally unfaithful…
- Each of our relationships is different…
- There are people…
- The most difficult task for every couple…
- We can be morally satisfied…
- We begin to feel safe…
- Just as there are only two kinds of relationship…
- We only really value a relationship when…
- Our children are the people we have…
- Everything we say is an experiment…
- Since the second half of the nineteenth century…
- There is comfort in…
- One is never cured of anything…
- Coupledom is a sustained resistance…
- All prophets of the erotic life…
- One of the most striking things about reading stories…
- We want to be the same…
- The opposite of monogamy is…
- It is always a temptation…
- Our survival depends upon our realising…
- Masturbations is traditionally taboo…
- The climax of monogamy is…
- If a law was passed saying that…
- Not everything turns into its opposite…
- The fact that jealousy sustains desire…
- The questions for the couple are…
- Most people would never…
- It is a poorly kept secret…
- What happens when couples ‘rediscover’ each other…
- The things about people that we fall in love with…
- Familiarity may increase our affection…
- The hardest thing to give up is…
- It may be purgatory to be left out…
- How can we be unacceptable…
- One way of loving people is to acknowledge that…
- Everybody, one might say…
- One of the commonest solutions…
- From time to time every couple believes…
- In a society without scapegoats…
- We are never misunderstood…
- Monogamy and infidelity…
- About the Author
- By the Same Author
- Copyright