This growing together comes from no deliberate, effort-making program. It grows out of the affectionate living together. It is a day-by-day consolidation, not only of interest or experience, but of satisfactions. It is this that led Plato long ago to say that the man or woman apart from the other is incomplete, a partial person, hungering for the needed lover. Monogamy is, however, not a mere getting together; it is a growing together. It furnishes the opportunity for continued unrivaled intimacy, and its on-going not only strengthens the life together, but makes it pregnant with the forces that lead to character growth.
Monogamy is therefore a preference, usually so much a matter of course as to seem the natural way of living. This explains its supremacy among the schemes of human mating. It is a product of love ties, but only as these flourish in a maturing intimacy. It asks no more than that each member of the fellowship grow with the other.
Monogamy is indeed a test of character, but not in some extraordinary, aristocratic way that would put it out of the reach of most of us. Although its benefits cannot be had for the mere asking, it is denied to no one who in sincerity lives in love with the person of his choice. It is an achievement, but not in the sense that one eventually awakens to discover that he has at last arrived at a monogamic relationship. It is rather a hand-in-hand walking through life of a man and woman, each having chosen the other and offered his every possession. It as surely adds to character as it demands character.
The vitalizing union provides incentives that enrich both character and ambition. The two sharing a common life add more, do more, and feel more than each found possible in their one-time isolation. This in turn strengthens the union and makes each more indispensable to the other. They do not attempt to duplicate each other, but knowing that their love is secure, each gains through the life contact of the other. It was thus that Robert and Elizabeth Browning each affected the quality of the other's work, both being able to write deeper and more human poetry as a result of their marriage.
It is most important for an understanding of monogamy that it not be thought of as a monotony, a petering out of the energy of love until the high hopes of the confident lovers disappear in a drab, toilsome existence. This fading out does come to married people just as it does to those who have never married. Rightly used, however, monogamic fellowship protects by making adventure in life more zestful because it is shared. However hard and dreary experience becomes, it is more so if one walks alone and less so if its testing is met by two who travel onward in love. Monotony is always a reflection of inner losses. So long as we are alive to what is, so long as we have the feelings that uncover the zestfulness of things, we keep out of the desert. Monogamy cannot guarantee enthusiastic living, but undoubtedly, by encouraging mutual love, it protects the roots from which most of all each of us draws vitality.
When the relationship becomes monotonous, there is the same confession of failure as when day-by-day happenings grow stale and repellent. The difference is that when love goes, the fortress has been taken and all life flattens out.
The exclusiveness of monogamic fellowship, the out-coming of the deep hunger for a unique experience in affection, can be greatly misinterpreted by failing to see that it is human nature's effort to keep to the golden mean as one is driven by tremendous impulses toward the supreme man-woman comradeship. In all such relationships there is on one side the extreme which shows itself when one member of the intimacy crushes and destroys the personality of the other. This eventually spoils the union by making it a conquest of one by the other. The opposite disaster appears when there is no fusion at all but merely an alliance of two independent, self-centered persons who come together in the spirit of temporary self-interest and refuse to develop a common life. Even when they maintain the letter of the monogamic code, they lose its spirit.
In contrast with these unfortunates, victims of will-to-power and self-centered passion, those in monogamic fellowship enlarge the life they share. One often notices, as did Hudson, the naturalist, in his description of the English shepherd's home, that husband and wife reach such understanding that they share feeling without recourse to words; and gather so much in common that as they travel through the years they do, indeed, seem to grow even to look like each other. They winter and summer together, and when time sends the children to their own adventures, we hear these life-tested lovers, hand in hand, saying:
"Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made."