But it is extremely difficult now to imagine marriage in terms of such dignity and generosity and this difficulty is explained by the failure of these competitive and possessive forms of sexual love that have been in use for so long. This failure unavoidably the issue of fidelity: What is it, and what does it mean – in marriage, and also since marriage is such a fundamental relationship and metaphor, in other relationships?

No one can be glad to have this issue so starkly raised, for any consideration of it now must necessarily involve one’ own bewilderment. We are apparently near the end of a degenerative phase of an evolutionary process – a long way from any large-scale regeneration. For that reason it’s necessary to be hesitant and cautious, respectful of the complexity of the problem. Marriage is not going to change because somebody thinks about it and recommends an “answer”; it can only change as its necessities are felt and as its circumstances change.

The idea of fidelity is perverted beyond redemption by understanding it as a grim, literal duty enforced only by willpower. This is the ‘religious’ insanity of making a victim of the body as a victory of the soul. Self-restraint that is so purely negative is self-hatred. And one can’t be good, anyhow, just by not being bad. To be faithful merely out of duty is to be blinded to the possibility of a better faithfulness for better reasons.

It is reasonable to suppose, if fidelity is a virtue, that it is a virtue with a purpose. A purposeless virtue is a contradiction in terms. Virtue, like harmony, can’t exist alone; a virtue must lead to harmony between one creature and another. To be good for nothing is just that. If a virtue has been thought a virtue long enough, it must be assumed to have practical justification- though the very longetivity that proves its practicality may obscure it. That seems to be what happened with the idea of fidelity. We heard the words “forsaking all others” repeated over and over again for so long that we lost the sense of their practical justification. The assumed the force of superstition: people came to be faithful in marriage not out of any understanding of the meaning of faith or of marriage, but out of the same fear of obscure retribution that made one careful not to break a mirror or spill the salt. Like other superstitions, this one was weakened by the scientific, positivist intellectuality of modern times and by the popular sophistication that came with it. Our age could be characterized as a manifold experiment in faithlessness, and if it has as yet produced no effective understanding of the practicalities of faith, it certainly has produced massive evidence of the damage and the disorder of its absence.

It may be that the principle of sexual fidelity, once again, fully understood, will provide us with as good an example as we can find of the responsible use of energy. Sexuality is, after all a form of energy, one of the most powerful. If we see sexuality as an energy, then it will become impossible to see sexual fidelity as merely a ‘duty’, a virtue for the sake of virtue, or a superstition. If we made a superstition of fidelity, and are thereby weakened by it, by thinking of it as purely a moral or spiritual virtue, then perhaps we can restore its strength by recovering an awareness of its practicality.

At the root of culture must be the realization that uncontrolled energy is disorderly- that in nature all energies move in forms; that, therefore, in a human order energies must have given forms. It must have been plain at the beginning, as cultural degeneracy has made it plain again and again, that one can be indiscriminately sexual but not indiscriminately responsible, and that irresponsible sexuality would undermine any possibility of culture since it implies a hierarchy based purely upon brute strength, cunning, regradlessness of value and of consequence. Fidelity can thus be seen as the necessary discipline of sexuality, the practical definition of sexual responsibility, or the definition of moral limits within such responsibility can be conceived and enacted. The forsaking of all others is a keeping of faith, not just with the chosen one, but also with the ones forsaken. The marriage vow unites not just a woman and a man with each other; it unites each of them with the community is a vow of sexual responsibility towards all others. The whole community is married, realizes its essential unity in each of its marriages.

Another use of fidelity is to preserve the possibility of devotion against the distractions of novelty. What marriage offers – and what fidelity is meant to protect – is the possibility of moments when what we have chosen and what we desire are the same. Such a convergence obviously can’t be continuous. No relationship can continue very long at its highest emotional pitch. But fidelity prepares us for the return of these moments, which give us the highest joy we can know: that of unioun, communion, atonement ( in the root sense of at-one-ment). To forsake all others does not mean- because it can’t mean- to ignore or neglect all others, to hide or be hidden from all others, or to desire or love no others. To live in a household is a responsible way to live in the world. One cannot enact or fulfill one’s love for womankind or mankind, or even for all the women or men to whom one is attracted. If one is to have the power and delight of one’s sexuality, then generality of instinct must be resolved in a responsible relationship to a particular person.