If you aren’t strong enough to stay committed to one person, that’s your business. Walk down that path of loneliness and confusion, but you can’t drag the entire institution of marriage along with you. Personally, I like circles but I hate squares. Can I subvert the laws of geometry and suddenly decide that all squares shall henceforth be circles? No, because geometry is geometry, despite my strange square-hating quirks. Similarly, marriage is marriage, no matter how many college professors insist otherwise.

Monogamous marriages are unnatural. On this, I agree with the emailer below.

Now, behold these enlightening thoughts that I found in my inbox this morning:

Greetings Mr. Walsh,

I am a college professor, author, and researcher. It was obvious to me before you ever stated it that you are a man of little education and limited intelligence. Still, I commend your newfound fame and congratulate you on the enormous amounts of money you must be making.

[Five more sentences of insults and pretentious self-aggrandizement]

…You have become a hot topic in some of my classes and this very much worries me. It wasn’t until your name came up for a fifth time that I decided to investigate you. Your prose are rife with fallacies and Neanderthalic musings, so I could easily disembowel and discredit any part of it. But I’d like to concentrate on what seems to be your most common themes: heterocentricism and monogamism. Whether you’re writing about marriage, “stay at home moms,” abstinence, or any other “issue of the family,” you seem to think that there is only *one* way and only *one* sort of family.

The truth that either escapes you or frightens you too much to acknowledge is that the “monogamous heterosexual relationship” is a largely unattainable (and undesirable) myth. Sexual unions between humans are not meant to be permanent. As we evolve, so does our understanding of these truths. Monogamy is not simply unrealistic; it is unnatural. You do not find it often in the animal kingdom, and where you do it is generally born of an evolutionary necessity. The necessity of monogamy among humankind has evaporated. This is particularly true of men, who are simply not biologically fitted for the “one woman” life.

You could use your platform for good but instead you use it to make those in open and poly relationships feel subhuman. Beyond the latent racism and sexism in your writings, it is your constant reinforcement of archaic relationship models that really does the profoundest of damage. Before you jump to any conclusions allow me to tell you this: I am married. I’ve been married for 15 years and my wife and I both sleep with other people. We are honest about this, which makes our open relationship more healthy than “monogamous” relationships built on lies.

Judge my choices if you like, but when you inevitably cheat on your wife, and then continue to sermonize about the sacredness of monogamous unions, I will return the favor.

I don’t expect you to use this email as you seem to only respond to imbeciles and easy targets.

And here is what I wrote back to him:

Good Day Professor,

It will be a challenge to type this response to you, sir, while I tremble in the blinding light of your godlike intellect. Do you begin all of your lectures by reciting your resume and viciously cutting down your audience? If so, I can only hope that you don’t teach a communications class. But if you do, then I can tell you that I receive at least 20 emails a day from people who must be your students. They’ve taken your strategy to heart. You should be proud.

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