Has Monogamy Become Outdated?
Question: Sadhguru, I had this belief, or maybe I was made to believe this whole concept of "one life, one partner". But when I see or observe, monogamous relations do not seem to exist anymore. The whole idea of it is gone. What do you think about it?
Sadhguru: In most of the world, it is not really gone. Even if you go to the United States, where there seems to be so much promiscuity, when people marry, they believe it is for life. Of course, two years later, life gets over - that is another matter! But when they get married, they believe it is for life. That is why they invest in diamonds. They think it is a lifetime investment.
Unfortunately, relationships go wrong for all kinds of reasons. One reason why they go wrong so easily is that people are meeting much later in their life. When people met much younger, at 17 or 18, their personalities were not concretised. Two people became like one person very easily.
Now they are meeting at 30, and both are concretised - two concrete blocks. I see that generally if young people marry, they hang on. If people over 50 years of age marry, they hang on because they have again softened up. Between 30 and 50, it is a bit of a concrete block. Friction happens because the personas are strong. If they are wise, they will find something beyond.
Whether monogamy or polygamy or whatever kind of "gamy" , the important thing we need to understand is, you and I are here because a man and a woman came together. Maybe you think that because they are parents, they do not love, they do not have sex, and just because a priest uttered a mantra, you were born. No, it is not like that. Someone has a physical need, so they handle it through marriage, and we are here because of it.
At a certain stage in your life, when you are 18, you may be against marriage. But when you were three years of age, you were for marriage - your parents’ marriage. Were you not glad that your parents had a stable marriage? When you are 18, you think of free sex, no marriage and everything. But once again, if you become 50 or 55, you will look for a relationship that lasts.
It is your life, so it is for you to consider whether you want to live a life where you are emotionally always looking for someone, or whether you want to settle it in a certain way so that you can use your intelligence and time to create something else: your work or whatever you are doing. If emotions and body are settled, your ability to use your intelligence will be much better than if you have to walk around to find someone every day.
I am not making light of this but in the US, I see many women over 40, 45 years of age, wonderful people, who go sit in a bar and wait - these days they have all gone online - but otherwise, somebody needs to pick them up today.
I think it is so terrible. A woman at 45 should have been loved and respected in a proper atmosphere, but now she is sitting there and looking for some strange guy to come her way, and she is going to make the judgment in the next 10 minutes when he buys her a drink or dinner or something. This is tragic.
This does not mean everyone will go that way, but you must think of the larger well-being before you break a social structure. You must think whether we can replace it with a better structure. At any point in our life, whether it is a social structure or political structure or a psychological set-up in the society before we break it, we must think through whether we have a better alternative system. Without an alternative system, if you break the existing structure that is working reasonably well, things will go crazy.
(Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a bestselling author. He was conferred the Padma Vibhushan in 2017)