One question that arises in my mind when I hear about polygamy is “Is polygamy right or wrong?”. I prefer to avoid political or religious reasons behind this. I would like to take a more pragmatic approach to this.
If marriage is about love and companionship:
My understanding of marriage is, it’s all about love and companionship. There could be many reasons, but it all boils down to this. So if it is all about love and companionship, what restricts us to share our love with just one person. Why should we just accept the companionship of one person? Wouldn’t we enjoy loving or being loved by many? Why not marry them all? Apart from the law what prevents us from doing so? It seems moral.
Life is a game:
I have heard many motivational people compare life to a game. I took the same approach to understand this bewilderment. Even though sports today is big business, it was created for people to have fun. It is in some form or the other created to keep people healthy and have fun. The comparison I am going to put forth would apply to any game, but I would like to take soccer as an example here as it is my favorite sport. If soccer was all about fun, why do we need boundaries(outlines)? Why do we need only two goalposts? In fact, why do we have just one ball that 22 players have to run and get? We can have 22 balls that each player has and they can keep running and scoring how many ever goals they want. Would that be fun? Even a two-person sport like tennis, imagine no outlines and the player could hit anywhere they want. How much fun would that be?
Rules make it enjoyable:
Rules were created to make the game fun and also make the game fair for every participant. Think of a soccer game where one team has a big goal post whereas the other team has a small goal post. It is the rules that make the game fair and also fun so that every participant enjoys the game. I would carry the same idea and apply it to marriage. The rules were created such that both the participants enjoy the relationship. We have rules that everyone should follow to make it enjoyable. The moment few play out of the rules is like a game of soccer where few are playing with hands where the rest of the players are playing legs. It makes the game boring.
I am sure few would have questions about a couple of countries where polygamy is accepted. I am not an advocate for polygamy or monogamy. I am just advocating for the point that whatever rules enforced it should be applied to all participants. In countries where men are allowed to practice polygamy and women are not, it is similar to the example I mentioned above where one team has a small goal post and the other has a big goal post.
Play by the rules:
There are times when rules enforced by government or religion contradict the moral values we have. Like I mentioned above, few countries allow men to practice polygamy and restrict women from doing so. Even though this rule is enforced by the government, it is an unfair rule. I know this contradicts my statements earlier that rules are created to make the game fun. There are outliers in everything. These rules are such outliers.
What do we do in such outliers? The only suggestion I have is “think of the participants”. When you are allowed to do a thing that your participant is not allowed to do, then you are playing an unfair game.
Another important point I would like to make is, choosing the right participants. You cannot run into a soccer field with a hockey stick and start playing the soccer ball with the sticks. Decide the game you want to play and play by the game rules. So based on what you want to practice choose the participants who also want to practice the same. This playing by the rule will not work if participants are playing different games. Each game has its rules. Similarly each practice has its rules.
So stepping aside from my topic whether polygamy is right or wrong, I believe whatever practice we follow, we should make sure the participants are practicing the same and the rules should be fair to all participants.
Let’s play by rules and let the rules be fair and let’s play with the right participants …
