For God and Country...and three points

There is a moral to this. There is no such thing in this world as love. Until the day we go to Heaven, there is only childish infatuation and jealousy, duty, despair. A sickly moral, admittedly, but better than endless burning.

I wanted him to make me feel pretty. Isn't that sad? - The Sunlight Dialogues

Given the near collapse of my circle of friends over the last year, I have, again, begun to question the practicality of monogamy. If the friends I chose at twenty don't hold up when I'm thirty, I really wonder how I can pick one person who works out forever. And forever isn't even really forever. It's like 75 years max, a tiny little blip on the scale of cosmic time, but we call it forever when someone makes it to that 75th anniversary, because hell, it may as well be.

Perhaps it is me (most likely it is me). I hemorrhage friends, always have. I outgrow them, or they outgrow me, or they stop being worth the effort. The trick, it would seem, to successful monogamy is to find someone who is always worth the effort. Maybe committment, ideally, isn't what you pledge to someone, but rather what they inspire in you.