Monogamy

In his preface to this highly charged volume, psychologist Adam Phillips suggests that today's raging controversies over the nature of marriage and the soaring divorce rate are actually discussions about monogamy: What brings people together?  Why should they, in fact, stay together?  "What are couples for," he asks, "if they are not for pleasure?  And if pleasure doesn't matter, then what does?"

Phillips gives us 120 deliberately arguable aphorisms ("Every marriage is a blind date that makes you wonder what the alternatives are to a blind date." or "As yet, the promiscuous cannot grow old gracefully. But this may say more about our ideas of dignity, than of aging.") that discuss the concept of monogamy from every angle, discovering what it is and what it isn't, uncovering in it "a kind of moral nexus, a keyhole through which we can spy on our preoccupations."

No reader will come away from this wholly unexpected book without feeling challenged to re-evaluate, and perhaps reconstruct, the time-honored (or is it time-hardened?) notions we hold about monogamy.