Each of us defines 'sanity' from our own perspective, so in that regard, you are no more ready for the little white coat with the arms that tie in the back than any of the rest of us.
Ah yes, the "coat of arms."
Certainly each of us defines things in our own way, yet we also subscribe to the definitions that come from our culture. After all, if we did not do that we would never be able to communicate.
The dictionaries agree that the essence of sanity is "sound judgment." Although most of us attempt in good faith to make sound judgments most of the time, we are not all equal in our cognitive ability to do that. Some of this goes back to the DNA our parents bequeathed to us, some of it is in the lessons they gave us after we were born, some comes from all the other people and experiences we have as we go through life, and some is simply the result of our own reasoning.
Every day we incredibly smart folks see other more ordinary people making decisions that look bonehead-stupid. Does that mean they're insane? Or merely that they weren't raised right? Or that they've created their own philosophy and they made a few mistakes in the process? Or that the decision was above their IQ pay grade? Or could it mean that we're wrong, not them?
Obviously, you have to go by your own definition of "sanity" when deciding if a prospective partnership will be healthy for you.
What if you meet two copies (persons) of the same persona? What do you do then, as a monogamist?
But that won't happen. A persona is not a formula with five or six variables. You may be thinking of an archetype, but you only encounter archetypes in literature, from Homer down to this afternoon's soap opera. Real people are a mix of almost all of Jung's archetypes, and moreover different ones assume dominance on different days in response to that day's challenges and responsibilities.
To me, the "order" just seems evolutionarily contrived.
Don't forget that
Homo sapiens is one of a rather small number of species whose females are physically capable of copulation outside of their estrus cycle. The evolutionary reason for this is, presumably, that this is how a woman can keep her man at home after she's had children who, due to the singularly slow maturation of our species, absolutely require both parents to play a role in their upbringing.
In other species such as dolphins, whose young don't require dual-parent nurturing, it works just exactly the other way round: the females can mate with any male at any time, which helps strengthen the social bonds within the pod.
If I am understanding you correctly, you are suggesting that non-adherence to monogamy is the evolutionary order, with monogamy being a natural social order.
As noted, there is strong evidence for monogamy being part of our evolutionary programming. It doesn't have to be 100% rigorous; writers like Jean Auel assume that there was a fair amount of hanky-panky in Paelolithic tribes and it was not even considered naughty. But it does allow couples to bond and build a two-parent family.
There is a further destabilizing social concern when the ratio of males to females becomes highly disproportionate as in societies which select for male children over females.
Some societies seem determined to destroy themselves, don't they. You'd think that the men would remember how horrible their lives were when they were young and couldn't get a girlfriend, and not want their own sons to have that experience.
Monogamy is a successful strategy, though a challenging one, which confers significant benefits to the offspring of it's adherents, IMO.
The majority of inmates in American prisons grew up without fathers. Q.E.D.
It will be rather interesting in future to see just who decides to bear young, and who is expected to contribute to their rearing. I observe a considerable difference in the capabilities of the children who have been raised in a monogamous relationship, and those who have been raised by child care services and social media.
Israel has had stunning success with their kibbutz system. During the week all the children live together with six or eight full-time surrogate parents: people who have PhD's in parenting if there is such a thing. Their biological parents get them on the weekends. They've been doing this for two generations (my wife observed it on a kibbutz during her hippie-walkabout in 1969) so they've had plenty of time to study the effect.
The results have been overwhelmingly positive. So much so that American foster agencies are starting to copy the kibbutz system. (I have a friend who has made a career in this field.) One of the advantages is that if one "parent" leaves (death, military service, divorce, whatever), they've still got five others to maintain stability and continuity, instead of just one.
An interesting phenomenon that was discovered during this program is the
Westermarck Effect. Children who grow up feeling like siblings--even though they're really not--very seldom marry each other. It turns out that our species's very strong taboo against incest (compared to virtually all other mammals) has nothing to do with some sixth sense that tells us the other person has our DNA. It comes strictly from the experience of growing up as brother and sister, whether or not it's real.
This raises some serious questions about life in the Paleolithic Era. Nomadic hunter-gatherers lived in small extended-family units, so everybody was related. Did some of the kids run away in adolescence, in order to find an unrelated mate? This constant chlorination of the gene pool is certainly a species-survival strategy and may have been a factor in our success. The other pack-social primates have no such taboo and inbreeding is rampant in their species.
I just mean from the viewpoint that we all have the ability to choose our partners...
At least today, in the Western nations. It wasn't like that always, and it still isn't like that everywhere.
Nonetheless, choosing your own partner is apparently not highly correlated with love. One of my many Indian friends had an arranged marriage, and when he talks about it his eyes literally fill with tears. He said, "I could have searched the whole planet and I would never have found a woman as perfect and wonderful as the one my parents found for me. Every day I thank them for that gift."
In all seriousness, though, Fraggle Rocker is right...I don't really understand monogamous love.
It's not something you understand. It's something you feel.
I'm obviously an odd duck...but for me love is knowing and trusting someone more than anyone else on the planet, and feeling a deep sense of attachment to them. Also having a perverse affection for their flaws, so that even the annoying is dear.
That's as good a definition as any. Especially for you, since that's the way you experience it.
But then again, I fear the world, so knowing I have someone who will take my side in a fight, and whom I'd lay down my life for... that's what I'm about.
Hopefully she will also be able to help you get over that fear. We don't just graciously tolerate each other's weakesses. We help each other overcome them.
As one who has read a lot of Robert Heinlein's work, I would give the advantage to the children raised by committed polygamous parents, if I thought that our species was capable of such emotional maturity.
That's not much different from the Israeli system. It has the same advantages: better continuity, more parenting styles, someone to talk to if you're angry at the other one.
Our species seeks to bond with others, in search of intimacy, and far too many people mistake sex for intimacy, IMO.
Well it certainly is a type of intimacy. The cyclical trend of being intimate with people you don't know very well (oxymoronically to be sure) is simply an expression of revolution. It happened in the 1960s and it seems to be happening again.
If some songs are to believed, there are those who contemplate that love endures even beyond that.
Song lyrics, like all literature, transcend reality. They are not meant to be taken literally. They're full of metaphors to get us thinking about the universe in new ways.
should not have dredged it up again.
