There is a reverend by the name Vincent Mulwa, and he has been causing quite a stir of late. The good reverend is of the view that good Christian men should be allowed to marry as many wives as they can afford.
To support his argument, the reverend makes a number of claims. The first is that there are too many husbandless women and not enough men to go around, so to soak up this, surplus men should marry more than one wife. It’s not about men needing many wives, the reverend says, it’s about women needing husbands.
Claim number two is that nowhere in the Bible is polygamy explicitly prohibited. According to the cleric, only adultery, taking another man’s wife, is condemned in the Good Book.
And third, Rev Mulwa is of the opinion that monogamy is not actually Christian in origin but a culture from ancient Rome, which was then picked up by the church and spread all over the world. This includes Africa, where we were quite content being polygamous until the Christians came.
As is to be expected, Rev Mulwa is getting some pushback from the more conservative among his colleagues. Their counter-argument is that God’s original plan is each man gets one wife. Generally speaking, the conservatives’ view is if God had wanted it different, then the story of the Garden of Eden would have had more characters than just Adam, Eve, and the talking snake.
It has all been very entertaining, this back and forth between the renegade reverend and his conservative colleagues, but I won’t get in the middle of that doctrinal argument. This question of monogamy, though, it’s something that I wonder about. Is monogamy a myth? Can a man love more than one woman?
I’m not talking about lust; I’m talking about having special feelings for someone else in addition to the feelings you have for your spouse. Is it possible?
I think yes. It is possible for a man to love two women. It’s not common, but it can happen. One reason for this is the 80/20 relationship rule. If you’re not familiar with this rule, the theory goes that in a fairly healthy relationship, you only get 80 per cent of what you want. Eighty per cent is good enough.
And then it happens. One day you’re going about your happily married life, when without warning, Miss 20 per cent walks into your life. It starts with simply talking, sparks fly, and before you know it, you’ve fallen for this person. You don’t know how it happened, it shouldn’t have happened, you don’t understand why it happened, but there you have it, you’re in love with two people.
Is this wrong? I don’t know.
Here’s what I do think. Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way, trying to workshop this and think our way with arguments and counter-arguments on monogamy and polygamy, when what it comes down to is, feelings cannot be explained by way of reason.
The late musician George Duke wrote a song about this. Titled No Rhyme, No Reason, it is a beautiful track where the chorus goes: ‘Sometimes love has no rhyme, and no reason … At the strangest times, love can make a connection.’