 My name is Sandbak Nin, and I am the author of Malignan Selflaba, Narcissism Revisited. I have written before that the ancient institution of monogamous marriages is in-suited to the exigencies of modern Western civilization. People of both genders live and work longer, which renders monogamy impracticable. They travel far away and frequently. They are exposed to tempting romantic alternatives via social networking, various workplaces, social settings. Thus, even as social monogamy and pair commitment and bonding are still largely intact and more condoned than ever, and even as infidelity is fervently condemned everywhere, sexual exclusivity mislabeled sexual monogamy is actually declining, especially among the young and the old. Monogamy is becoming one alternative among many lifestyles, and marriage only one relationship among a few relationship, not even the most important or privileged one. Marriage now has to compete for time and resources with work, same-sex friends, friends with benefits and opposite-sex friends. The contractual aspects of marriage are more pronounced than ever in human history, with everything on the table, extramarital sex, allowed or not, prenuptial agreements, everything is negotiated and negotiable. The commodification and preponderance of sex, premarital and extramarital, robbed sex of its function is a conduit of intimacy, and since child rearing and child bearing is largely avoided, mortality rates are precipitously declining everywhere, or even outsourced. The family lost both its raison d'etre and its nature as a venue for exclusive sexual and emotional interactions between others. Sex values and prevailing social mores and institutions have yet to catch up to this emerging multifarious reality. The consequences of this discrepancy, but between what we believe or are led to believe and between reality, the consequences are disastrous. About 40-50% of all first-time marriages end in divorce, and the percentage is much higher for second or third attempts at connoble bliss. Open communication about one's sexual needs, fantasies and desires is tantamount to self-ruination, as the other partner is likely to reflexively initiate a divorce. Dishonest in cheating, therefore, are definitely the rational choices in such an unforgiving and punitive environment. Indeed, most surviving marriages have little to do with love or romance. They have more to do with perpetuating the partner's convenience, their access to commonly-owned assets and future streams of income, and the welfare of third parties most notably their children. First-time sexual exclusivity often degenerates in marriage into celibacy or abstinence on the one hand, or into parallel lives with multiple sexual and emotional partners on the other hand. But is infidelity the threat that it is made out to be? One night stands for both genders, unusually opportunistic and passing. Extra-pair affairs are self-limiting, as emotional involvement and sexual attraction wane inevitably all the time. Infidelity is therefore much less of a threat to the longevity of a dedicated couple than it is made out to be. Most of the damage is usually caused by culturally conditioned, albeit deeply and dramatically felt reactions to conduct that is almost universally decried as deceitful, dishonest, and in breach of vows and promises. But the roots of the crumbling alliance between men and women go much deeper and further in time. Long before divorce, men and women grew into too disparate, incompatible and warring suspicious. Traditionalists, conservative and religious societies put in place behavior on safeguards against the inevitable wrenching torsion that monogamy entails. So in these societies there is no primarital sex and virginity is demanded, no multiple intimate partners, no cohabitation prior to tying the knot, no mobility or equal rights for women, and no mixing of the genus. We now know that each of these habits does indeed increase the chances for an ultimate divorce. As Johnston Frenzen elucidated in his literary masterpieces, it boils down to a choice between personal freedoms and the stability of the family. The former decisively precludes the letter. If people have primarital sex, if they have multiple intimate partners, if they cohabit prior to tying the knot, if they are mobile and their women have equal rights and enter the workforce, if there is a mixing of genders, the rates of divorce are bound to go higher and higher inexorably. During the 17th, 18th and 19th century, discrete extramarital affairs were an institution of merit. Sexual gratification and emotional intimacy were outsourced, while other domestic property functions were shared in a partnership. The industrial revolution, the Victorian age, the backlash of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, belligerent feminism, and the advent of socially atomizing and gender equalizing transportation, information processing and telecommunication technologies, all these led inesorably to the hollowing out of family and hearth. In a civilization centered on brain power, men have lost the relative edge that brawn used to provide them with. Monogamy is increasingly considered as past its expiry date, a historical aberration that reflects the economic and political realities of bygone eras. Moreover, the incidents of lifelong singlehood have skyrocketed as people go for their potential or actual relationship partners to provide all their sexual, emotional, social and economic needs. With hopes so high, they get sorely disappointed when these partners fail to meet these highly unrealistic expectations. In an age of economic self-sufficiency, electronic entertainment and self-gratification, the art of compromising relationships is gone altogether. The motherhood, sometimes via artificial insemination or IVF, with no identifiable partner involved, has become the norm in many countries. Even within marriages or committed relationships, solitary pursuits, such as separate vacations or girls' boys' nights out, have become the norm. The 20th century was a monument to male fatuity, wars and ideologies, male-propagated, almost decimated species. Forced to acquire masculine skills and fill men's shoes in factories and fields, women discovered militant self-autonomy, the superfluousness of men and the untenability of the male claims to superiority over them. In an age of malignant individualism bordering on narcissism, men and women alike put themselves, their fantasies and their needs, first, all else, family included, be damned. And with five decades of uninterrupted prosperity, birth control, and feminism women's leave, most of the female denizens of the West have acquired the financial whirlwindle to realize their dreams, add the expense and to the detriment of collectives that they ostensibly belong to, such as the nuclear family. Feminism is a movement focused on negatives, obliterating women's old age bondage, but it offers very few constructive ideas regarding women's new roles in a new society. By casting all men as the enemy, feminism also failed to educate men and convert them into useful allies. All into the dramatic doubling of light expectancy, modern marriages seem to go through several phases, infatuation, honeymoon, procreation accumulation of assets, children and shared experiences, and then exhaustion outsourcing, bonding with new emotional and sexual partners for rejuvenation, or the fulfillment of long-request fantasies, needs and wishes. Divorces and breakups occur mostly at the seams, the periods of transition between these three phases, and especially between the stages of accumulation procreation and exhaustion outsourcing. This is where family units break down. With marriage on the decline, and infidelity of the rise, the reasonable solution would be swinging, swapping sexual partners, or polyamory, households with multiple partners of both genders, all of whom are committed to one another for the lowball, all of whom romantically import, all of them sexually share, and all of them economically united. Alas, while a perfectly rational development of the traditional marriage, and one that is best suited to modernity, polyamory and swinging are emotionally unstable arrangements, what, with romantic jealousy, in eluctably rearing its ugly head. Very few people are emotionally capable of sharing their lifelong partner with other people. So the question is not why there are so many divorces, but why there are so few divorces. Surely serial monogamy, in effect, a tawdry variant of what's happening today. Serial monogamy is far better, fairer, and more humane than adultery. Couples stay together and tolerate staying together, owing to inertia, financial or emotional dependence, insecurity, lack of self-confidence or no self-esteem, fear of the unknown and the tedium of dating. Not couples persevere or into religious convictions, or for the sake of appearances. Yet others make a smooth transition to an alternative lifestyle, polyamory, swinging, or consensual adultery. Indeed, what has changed is not the incidence of adultery, even among women. Their good grounds assume that adultery has remained the same throughout human history. The phenomenon, quantitatively and qualitatively, has always been the same, merely underreported. What has changed are the social acceptability of extramarital sex, both before and during marriage, and the ease of obtaining divorce. People discuss adultery openly, where before it was a taboo topic. Another new development may be the rise of selfish affairs among women younger than 35. These women are used to multiple sexual partners. Sexual affairs are acts of recreational adultery, whose sole purpose is to satisfy sexual curiosity and the need for romantic diversity. The emotional components in selfish affairs are usually short-term, and these affairs are usually in one-night stands and the like. Emotions in selfish affairs are muted. Among women older than 60, adultery has become the accepted way of seeking emotional connection and intimacy outside the dwindling and fading marital bond. These are outsourcing affairs. A day recently, couples formed around promises of emotional exclusivity and sexual fidelity, uniqueness in each other's mind and life, and more common in the 1940s, virginity. Marriage was also a partnership, economic or related to child rearing, or a companionship. It was based on the partner's past and background and geared towards a shared future. Nowadays, couples coalesce around the twin undertakings of continuity, and I will always be here for you, and availability I will always be here for you. Issues of exclusivity, uniqueness and virginity have been relegated to the back burner. It is no longer practical to demand a one-spouse to have nothing to do with the opposite sex, or not to spend the bulk of his or her time outside the marriage, or not to take separate vacations, and more generally, to be joined at the hip. Affairs, for instance, both emotional and sexual, are said certainties in the life of every couple. Members of the couple are supposed to make themselves continuously available to each other and to provide emotional sustenance and support in an atmosphere of sharing, companionship and friendship. All the traditional functions of a family can now be, and often are, outsourced, including even sex and emotional intimacy. But contrary to marriage, outsourcing is frequently apposite and unpredictable, dependent as it is on outsiders who are committed elsewhere as well. Hence the relative durability of marriage. In its conservative and less conventional and less conventional forms of luck, marriage is a convenient and highly practical arrangement. Divorce or other forms of marital break-up are not new phenomenon, but their precipitants have undergone a revolutionary shift. In the past, families fell apart owing to a breach of exclusivity, mainly in the forms of emotional or sexual infidelity, owing to a deficiency of uniqueness and privacy. Divorced women, for instance, were considered damaged goods, because they used to belong to another man and therefore could offer neither primacy nor uniqueness. Marriage is used to fall apart because of an egregious violations of the terms of harmony. For instance, sloth, dysfunctional child rearing, or infidelity. Nowadays, intimate partners bail out when the continuous availability of their significant others is disrupted, sexually and emotionally, or as friends and companions. Marriages are about the present and are being put to the test on a daily basis. Partners who are dissatisfied opt out and team up with other more promising providers. Children are serially reared by multiple partners and in multiple households. Whether this spells the end of civilization as annoyed or the beginning of the new dawn of a promising era really remains to be seen.