Monogamy is Actually a Great Time

Don't let a consumer mindset convince you otherwise

This Weekly Edition of Inkwell features Ben Christenson

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I WAS SITTING in the college cafeteria with my fiancée when I realized we had no future.

Not literally. We’re married now, but I had no vision for what our life would be. In the run-up to the wedding, there were a million details and lots of anticipation. But if this were a plot diagram from English class, the climax was the wedding day, and the rest of our lives was the falling action until the denouement on our deathbeds.

It’s like The Notebook—you fall in love, there’s some stuff in the middle, and then you die. I stared down the 60 years in the middle and sweated bullets. I didn’t turn aside, though, because I knew this was the right thing to do. I was a Christian, blame it. I was going to shut up, eat my broccoli, and get married.

Then, shortly after, the same type of thinking happened when I was expecting my first child. Facing this major adult milestone, I was suddenly gripped with a desire to beat the video game Skyrim. On one level, it was a flare-up of Peter Pan syndrome—I wanted to pretend, if only for an hour or two, that life was as simple as killing a goblin. But more than that, it was part of a series of goodbyes to my old life before the baby came. The last time I’d play Xbox guilt-free. The last time I’d sleep well. The last time I’d be in shape.

Just like when I got married, there was the perception of the “before” time and the “after” time, and I was staring down a mostly unpleasant and unavoidable middle stretch. But I did it anyway, because I’m a Christian, blame it.

NOW THAT THE DUST has settled, I’m surprised to find how much I enjoy married life. Not just in a “consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds” sense. But what was supposed to be a dry middle span is actually just a really fun time with my wife. I wouldn’t trade my life or go back in time for anything.

So far, the best explanation I can find for this mismatch between marriage expectations and reality is what Catherine Shannon calls the “Great Diminishment.” She writes that the Abercrombie clothing brand of the early 2000s was better than Madewell is today, that hardwood floors are better than their laminate successors, and that pre-war apartments are better than new constructions—and young people don’t even know what they’re missing:

This is a generation that’s being force-fed Dua Lipa blasting in their ears at an overpriced birria-tacos-and-ramen-mashup-pop-up spot, wondering why the world feels hollow. I want Gen Z to know that everything in life doesn’t have to feel flimsy, plastic, and grey.

The irony of this “Great Diminishment” is that greater consumptive appetites lead to worse products and diminishing returns. Yet a Stockholm syndrome can set in, such that we just embrace that “life is flimsy, plastic, and grey.” You wind up thinking it’s just the way reality works: If you believe all relationships fall apart, then falling in love is as good as it gets. If you believe life is a zero-sum game, then children are a total suck.

And while I wouldn’t necessarily subscribe to those beliefs, a cynical, shortsighted self-centeredness is in the water for young people. It shapes our sense of what’s possible and thus what’s worth wanting.

IF CATHERINE SHANNON can explain what is going on, Wendell Berry can help explain why. In his 1989 essay “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” he writes that the popular model of marriage has become “two successful careerists in the same bed” who, during their temporary association, “typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.”

For Berry, the way we work, eat, relax, marry, and start a family are all interconnected. Suppose we are employees in giant bureaucracies rather than farmers of our family plot, or “global citizens” rather than fifth-generation residents of a small-town community. Then we become conditioned to prefer cheap, convenient, disposable products over well-crafted, local, and durable ones.

The consequences of consumption running wild, without any spiritual, moral, or natural considerations, are steep. Pornography has distilled the “freedom” of an industrialized sexuality and thereby destroyed a generation. Our built environment is increasingly made of efficient mid-rise apartments and coffee shops with the same Instagram aesthetic—yet soulless and interchangeable. An hour on TikTok is irresistible but ultimately forgettable.

Berry writes that these efficiencies and luxuries of our industrialized society come at a great cost to our marriage and sexuality: we naturally import a transactional and transient way of thinking into our married lives as well.

Berry contrasts the consumptive life with the productive one, where commitment opens up new and sustainable possibilities. Your home can be beautified, your leisure time can be cultivated, and a relationship can continually unfold and deepen.

As Helen Roy put it when I interviewed her, a truly loving relationship is “profoundly healing and profoundly generative, in more ways than one.” Children are the obvious physical manifestation, but she says building a life with her husband has improved every area of her life:

When you’re the type of person who’s willing to pursue marriage sincerely and become a pillar in your community, you’re willing to work harder in every area of your life. The false idea is the zero-sum thing. … Love is generative, it actually amplifies your life. It’s effusive, it’s not subtractive.

For this kind of marriage, the wedding day is when life together begins, and the birth of the firstborn only expands the capacity to love. Just as in baptism—where we are united with Christ in his death and raised into a new life in him—the death of a bachelor(ette) or the death of a DINK offers new and more abundant life.

A FEW MONTHS BEFORE my wedding, I got drinks with a friend of mine in his 30s. I was relieved when he told me, “I’m heading into year seven of my marriage, and far from the ‘seven-year itch,’ I am utterly infatuated with my wife.” At the time, I understood this to mean that he’s “kept the spark alive.” That, unlike all the crabby older couples scoffing at my puppy love, he’s kept up that “first date that repeats endlessly” energy.

In hindsight, I think he meant something closer to what Wendell Berry is talking about. He’d had four kids and gotten a real job. His wasn’t a marriage without stress or responsibility. But he’d tended to it faithfully over the years, especially after seeing some of his friends get divorced. So by year seven, when the typical consumptive couple has had their fill, he found he was just getting started.

While novelty and stimulation have obvious appeal, there are deeper pleasures that can only come through repetition and tranquility. While your first fight isn’t fun, what about the first time you make up and find your relationship is better for it? While the honeymoon phase must end, what about realizing that your spouse is admirable, entirely independent of your rose-colored glasses?

While texting grocery lists is easy to mock, what about having someone to tell your petty drama to, who takes your side one thousand percent and understands exactly where you’re coming from? While a strong presentation can attract a mate, what about the moment when you utterly fail, and rather than walk away, they cling to you even closer? An inside joke is fun, but what about an entire lexicon of shared references?

Now, you may say that this is just the coping mechanism of an out-of-shape and boring dad: Actually, gray hair is a crown of glory, and savoring the real beauty of a marriage takes time, and children are a blessing! And I don’t mean to be naive, as if aging, marriage, and parenting don’t bring their own unique challenges. They do, and they are exhaustively documented in my experience.

But when I talk to friends who are still infatuated at year seven of marriage or simply say “Children are awesome,” or see the blessings amid the physical trials of aging, I catch a glimpse of what my future could be.

Far from the doldrums, the past few years have been the best of my life, and I have reason to hope that the best is yet to come.

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Ben Christenson
Writer & Editor

Ben has written for Hearth & Field, Front Porch Republic, Mere Orthodoxy, and others. He writes while his (amazing) wife watches their three kids, three dogs, one cat, and innumerable chickens. You can read more of his work at benjaminchristenson.com.

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📸 Photography by Elizabeth Sanders

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