ommunity seems to condemn our present
rigorous insistence upon monogamy, unless feminine celibacy has its
own delights. But, as I have said, it is now largely believed that the
sexual life of a woman is more important to her than his sexual life to
a man and less easily ignored.

It is true also on the former side that for the great majority of
people one knows personally, any sort of household but a monogamous one
conjures up painful and unpleasant visions. The ordinary civilized
woman and the ordinary civilized man are alike obsessed with the idea
of meeting and possessing one peculiar intimate person, one special
exclusive lover who is their very own, and a third person of either sex
cannot be associated with that couple without an intolerable sense of
privacy and confidence and possession destroyed. It is difficult to
imagine a second wife in a home who would not be and feel herself to
be a rather excluded and inferior person. But that does not abolish the
possibility that there are exceptional people somewhere capable of,
to coin a phrase, triangular mutuality, and I do not see why we should
either forbid or treat with bitterness or hostility a grouping we may
consider so inadvisable or so unworkable as never to be adopted, if
three people of their own free will desire it.

The peculiar defects of the human mind when they approach these
questions of sex are reinforced by passions peculiar to the topic, and
it is perhaps advisable to point out that to discuss these possibilities
is not the same thing as to urge the married reader to take unto himself
or herself a second partner or a series of additional partners. We
are trained from the nursery to become secretive, muddle-headed and
vehemently conclusive upon sexual matters, until at last the editors of
magazines blush at the very phrase and long to put a petticoat over
the page that bears it. Yet our rebellious natures insist on being
interested by it. It seems to me that to judge these large questions
from the personal point of view, to insist upon the whole world without
exception living exactly in the manner that suits oneself or accords
with one's emotional imagination and the forms of delicacy in which one
has been trained, is not the proper way to deal with them. I want as
a sane social organizer to get just as many contented and law-abiding
citizens as possible; I do not want to force people who would otherwise
be useful citizens into rebellion, concealment