Polygamy

I was channel surfing the other day and caught an episode of Oprah wherein she was interviewing this middle-aged man who actually has three wives and children all living under one roof. Apparently, there is a place somewhere in Utah where a sect of people actually practice polygamy.

The question in my mind wasn’t if whether we should condemn these people for their practice. It is not their fault that they were born to a culture that made them refute the universal belief that there is only one woman for every man. They were brought up believing that a man has the right to have more than one wife at the same time, if he wished to. This is no different with other cultures around the world. A few tribes in Africa practice polygamy. Even the Muslim religion allows a man to have more than one wife if the man can support all his families.

The question in my mind was if whether what they were doing actually had merit and why.

Men are said to be born polygamous. Despite the raised skeptical eyebrows of my male friends who are practically about to yell out their disagreement, we all know that this is true. And it’s not really their fault. They were just genetically made up that way. The simple fact that a guy during ejaculation, has a thousand sperms to spare, make him genetically primed to copulate with a thousand women at any time if he wanted to, while females who have only one egg fit for fertilization only at a certain time in a month, and has to be the one to carry the fetus for nine months, certainly makes it highly unlikely for them to want to copulate with more than one partner at the same time.

I’m not saying that we females should just accept this fact and turn a blind eye whenever our boyfriends/husbands cheat. Despite my jaded views regarding love, I still believe that not all men are polygamous. My Dad for one is the living proof. Prior to his marriage to my mother, he was a notorious “Ladies Man” or more popularly known as “Playboy.” He had a lot of girlfriends and even had two-three girlfriends at the same time. When I was young, unbeknownst to him, I used to read the loveletters and greeting cards from his ex-girlfriends which he kept in an old attaché case at the back of his closet. As my aunts and uncles recalled, when my father finally met my mother, he decided to give up his old ways and became a full-pledged one-woman man.

But the thing is, my Dad is only one among the very few men who can be considered the exemption to the rule. Most men ARE polygamous. Practically all of my friends who are in serious relationships have had their boyfriends cheat on them at one time or the other. And I found out about these affairs not through my own friends but through other people. I’ve never told them nor their boyfriends that I knew, I figured it was none of my business and nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news anyway. As for my own personal experiences, I’ve had a couple of boyfriends who cheated on me. I’ve also experienced being the one whom they were cheating with. And during not so satisfying relationships, I’ve also done my own share of cheating. Cheating has become a universal act. Nowadays, almost everybody does it. Everybody condemns it but if we look deep into our own conscience, almost everybody is guilty of it.

An intelligent point raised during the Oprah show by one of the three wives of the same man was that it is better to have one man raising and supporting more than one wife and their children under one roof than one man raising and supporting one wife and family while lying and sneaking around to be with his mistresses, leaving those mistresses to raise their own children alone without providing any support to them simply because the law does not allow it.

True. She was right. It is more humane to do the former than the latter. Yet, can we really live in a society that will allow polygamy to be legalized?

I have a cousin who had an affair with a rich married man. Her parents only found out about it when she told them that she was carrying his child. Her father practically disowned her but in the end, accepted her and and her son in his family when she finally left the married guy. Another cousin also had an affair with another married man, a Muslim at that. Considering that in the Muslim religion, polygamy is allowed but only if the man swears to support all his families and all parties involved are amenable to it. What happened next wasn’t pretty. My cousin and the Muslim guy were sued for bigamy and if I’m not wrong, there was even some jail time involved. I don’t know the complete story for now but I do know that she, the guy and their child are now all living under one roof.

I do not condemn my cousins for what happened to them. I think it is just their own misfortune that they had chosen to fall inlove with someone who couldn’t be completely theirs in the first place. Love is as always an addictive nuisance, you know it’s wrong but you can’t make yourself walk away from it. Neither do I believe that what they did was commendable. They knew the guy was married therefore, somewhere down the line, they should have been more prepared knowing that whatever they had with the guy was going to end someday. I believe that it is the fault of the married males for even considering an emotional and physical involvement with these females, despite knowing beforehand that they were already unavailable and had no right both morally and legally to do such an investment. I’d like to think of my cousins as being emotionally victimized by a society that makes men more adept and more powerful in his role in the family. If men and women were considered equals in their role in the family, and not as the more superior “Padre de pamilya” and the mere inferior “Ina ng tahanan,” what happened to my cousins could have been avoided.

But who am I kidding? We cannot change how society perceives the role of a man and woman in the family. Neither do I believe that legalizing polygamy will make for a better society. All we can do for now is hope for a better future. Stay single, get to know the opposite sex, date as many people as you want, get that urge to stray or that thinking that there is still someone better than the one you are currently with out of your system until you’re sick and tired of dating already, commit once you’re confident that you’re contented with your partner and finally, get married, not because you’re afraid he/she might end up with someone else but because nothing else will make you happy but to spend the rest of your life with that person and you don’t see yourself growing old with anyone else. Once that’s done, you’ve already fought half the battle The rest is now up to both of you.