The Spiritual Return of Monogamy (With a Wink)
Monday, July 7, 2025.
Or, How We Grew Tired of Infinite Options and Rediscovered the Erotic Power of Saying No
Why Is monogamy whispering its way back in? What a quaint development for 2025. Because nowadays everyone has a poly friend. Or three.
Relationship structures come with menus.
“Monogamish” is a lifestyle, not a phase.
We’ve got flowcharts for fluid bonding agreements, Google Docs for jealousy protocols, and a booming TikTok market for explaining how to manage six partners with two full-time jobs and a kombucha starter.
But amid all the spreadsheets and sacred slings, a new voice is emerging. It’s quieter, less judgmental than the moral purity of the past. Less purity, more poetry.
Less “one man, one woman,” more one person, one universe.
This isn’t a return to 1950s constraint. It’s a philosophical return to erotic containment—an intentional, almost mystical monogamy that says: What if choosing one person over and over again is the actual thrill?
Not Your Grandma’s Monogamy
This movement isn’t about moral panic. There are no purity rings. No abstinence pledges. No lectures about “the sanctity of marriage” delivered by people who wouldn’t know intimacy if it texted them three times in a row.
It’s about depth over novelty, devotion over optimization, and the strangely subversive act of tending one soul garden instead of planting seeds across ten fields of possibility.
In the age of swipe culture, to love one person deeply feels like rebellion.
Who’s Leading This Return?
Philosophers. Artists. Spiritual seekers. And a surprising number of people under 35.
Alain de Botton, whose viral essay “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person” made more couples cry than Instagram ever did, argues that true love is not about perfection, but persistence in the face of profound imperfection.
Another favorite thinker of mine, bell hooks, in All About Love, saw love as an ethical commitment—not a passing emotion, but a spiritual practice.
And younger people, disillusioned by the “infinite scroll” model of relationships, are starting to ask more difficult questions:
Does freedom always feel good?
What if discipline is the sexiest thing of all?
Is there such a thing as sacred fidelity—not to a rule, but to a person?
What We’re Tired Of
People are quietly confessing what they no longer want:
The Emotional Chaos of managing multiple attachments while pretending nothing hurts.
The Paradox of Abundance—where having many options results in numbing, not connection.
The Romantic Gig Economy—where no one wants to be tied down, but everyone’s exhausted from being endlessly available.
The counter-movement is not anti-poly. It’s anti-fragmentation. It’s pro-wholeness.
The Erotic Intelligence of Containment
Esther Perel, patron saint of paradox, once said: “Eroticism thrives in the space between longing and obstacle.”
Modern monogamy—when chosen consciously, not inherited blindly—places a velvet rope between self and other. It creates friction, not sameness.
Mystery, not access. And in that friction, erotic energy builds. Saying no to the world can make the person you say yes to glow in the dark.
This is not about denying desire. It’s about investing it. Making it rarer, more focused, and therefore more potent.
The Difference Is Consent
Here’s the line between the spiritual return of monogamy and its more toxic predecessors: consent and clarity.
It's not, “You’re mine, or else.”
It’s, “I choose you—and I keep choosing you.”
The modern monogamous couple is not under the illusion that this choice is biologically predetermined or culturally default. They see it as radical. Sometimes exhausting. Often transcendent.
They are not saying “polyamory is bad.” They’re saying, “I want to pour all this weird, beautiful, erotic energy into one vessel—and see what kind of wine it becomes.”
Cultural Narcissism and the Quest for One Real Thing
We are, to put it gently, living in a narcissistically disordered era.
We’re told that to be loved is to be seen, admired, mirrored, constantly.
Monogamy—actual, gut-level, kitchen-sink monogamy—disrupts that. It insists that love isn’t about being witnessed by everyone but about being known by one.
It doesn’t scale well. It doesn’t perform well. It doesn’t trend. But it satisfies.
Sometimes quietly. Sometimes like a slow burn under your ribs that lasts for decades.
Not “The One.” Just This One.
One of the great myths of monogamy is that there is one perfect match. That if you choose right, the rest of life unfolds in harmony.
The spiritual return of monogamy rejects that premise entirely.
It says: This person is not perfect. This relationship is not easy. But it is ours.
And that shared ownership makes it sacred.
The wink? It's the recognition that monogamy isn’t necessarily natural, easy, or guaranteed.
It’s intentionally chosen. Curated. Repaired.
And—if you’re lucky—re-enchanted every time you come home.
Will This Last?
Maybe. Maybe not.
Like every romantic experiment, this return will have its critics, its failures, its growing pains.
But it offers a necessary counterweight to an overextended culture. It dares to suggest that maybe the most intimate thing we can do is stay.
That in a world of algorithms, we might still choose poetry.
That in a sea of options, we might say:
“No, thank you. I’m with someone.”
And mean it.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.