Is Monogamy Broken? What Western Marriage Got Wrong (And What We Can Still Get Right)

I'm going to say something that might sound strange coming from someone who has been happily married for nine years, who built an intimacy app with his wife, and who spends most of his professional life helping couples build deeper connection: the version of monogamy most of us inherited is, in significant ways, not working.

I don't mean monogamy itself is broken. I mean the specific cultural model of monogamous marriage we've built in the modern West — one person expected to be your romantic partner, best friend, sexual companion, co-parent, therapist, financial partner, intellectual equal, and spiritual companion simultaneously — is a historically unprecedented and practically untenable set of expectations that we've layered onto a single relationship without fully understanding what we've done.

The data supports this. So does Esther Perel, whose work on modern relationships has articulated the problem more clearly than almost anyone. And so does the experience of most couples who've been honest with themselves about the specific pressures their relationship is under.

A couple sits in silence, each deep in thought, embodying the frustration and distance in their relationship.

What the Data Shows

The statistics on marriage in Western societies are familiar enough to recite but worth sitting with: approximately 40 to 50 percent of first marriages in the United States end in divorce, with rates for subsequent marriages higher still. Among developed countries, the United States has one of the higher divorce rates globally.

What's less often discussed is what those numbers mean. The divorce rate has been elevated for decades. Interventions — marriage counseling, relationship education programs, various cultural campaigns for healthier relationships — haven't materially reduced it. Something structural is producing this outcome, not just individual failures of commitment or character.

The structural problem, as Perel and others identify it, is the expectation burden.

What We're Asking of One Person

Perel's analysis of modern marriage is worth engaging with directly because it's one of the clearest accounts of how we arrived here. She traces the evolution of marital expectations through several historical phases.

For most of human history, marriage was a pragmatic institution — an economic arrangement, a property transfer, a social contract between families. Love was not the point. Happiness was not the goal. The survival and continuity of family units was. As Perel has observed, we used to have an entire village to meet our needs for community, belonging, practical support, and meaning. We brought our problems to the priest, the healer, the neighbor, the extended family. Marriage served a specific and relatively narrow function within that broader ecosystem.

As that village dissolved — as industrialization, urbanization, and increasing social mobility separated people from extended community — we began asking the couple to absorb more and more of the functions that the village used to serve. Modern relationships are often burdened by the expectation that one partner should fulfill all needs: best friend, passionate lover, intellectual equal, co-parent, emotional support, and financial partner.

And then, relatively recently, we added the expectation of self-actualization. We now want to be met in our authenticity, we want to be driven to become the best self we can be. We want our partner to be all of the above and to also serve as the primary vehicle for our personal growth and flourishing.

As Perel writes, we once turned to God for transcendence, meaning, and ecstasy. We turn today to our partner to basically give us what we once looked for in the realm of the divine: ecstasy, meaning, transcendence. That's not a romantic exaggeration. It's a diagnosis.

Why These Expectations Produce Failure

The problem with this accumulation of expectations isn't that the desires are wrong. Wanting a partner who is also your best friend, who supports your growth, who is both emotionally safe and erotically alive — these are genuine and good desires.

The problem is that many of them are in direct tension with each other. As Perel describes it, we want our chosen one to offer stability, safety, predictability, and dependability — and we want that very same person to supply awe, mystery, adventure, and risk. Safety and mystery. Comfort and charge. The known and the unknown. In one person. Simultaneously.

These are not just difficult to provide. They are structurally opposed. The familiarity that produces safety and comfort is the same familiarity that erodes mystery and charge. The deep knowing that makes a partner feel like home is the same knowing that removes the uncertainty desire requires. You cannot fully maximize both, and the expectation that you should is not a personal failure — it's an impossible brief.

The divorce rate is, in part, the result of people concluding that their partner has failed to meet an expectation that no single person could meet. Not because love failed, but because the assignment was impossibly broad.

What This Means for Couples Who Want to Stay Together

None of this is an argument for abandoning monogamy or for lowering expectations. It's an argument for clarity — for understanding what you're asking of your partner and what you need to maintain outside the relationship for both of you to thrive.

Perel's practical insight is one of the most useful available: research shows that people who have more social resources, and more people to talk to about various issues in their lives, do better in marriage. The couples who sustain long, satisfying relationships are generally not the ones who have built an airtight two-person world where the partnership meets every need. They're the ones who maintain genuine friendships, individual pursuits, communities of various kinds — and bring a fuller, less desperate self to the partnership as a result.

This is the village principle applied to modern life. You can't recreate an actual village. But you can deliberately maintain enough relational infrastructure outside the marriage that your partner isn't being asked to be everything. Friendships that hold some of the intimacy needs. Communities that hold some of the meaning-making needs. Individual pursuits that hold some of the growth and vitality needs. A therapist or coach who holds some of the psychological processing needs.

When the partnership isn't expected to do all of that work alone, it can do what it actually does exceptionally well: provide the particular intimacy, the particular security, the particular long-term commitment and genuine deep knowing that only a decades-long partner can offer.

Monogamy Is Not the Problem

I want to be clear about this, because the analysis above can be misread as an argument against monogamy itself.

The problem isn't the structure of monogamy. It's the impossible expectations we've loaded onto it. A monogamous marriage with realistic expectations — where both partners maintain external relational lives, where the partnership is expected to provide its specific irreplaceable goods rather than every good — is a deeply sustainable and deeply rewarding arrangement.

What's not sustainable is the version we've inherited: the isolated two-person world where your partner is expected to be your entire relational universe, and where any need not met within the marriage is experienced as the marriage's failure.

Brittney and I are committed to each other in a way that deepens every year. We're also each committed to friendships, to individual work, to the various forms of community and connection that keep us both alive and full rather than desperate and depleted. Those external commitments don't diminish what we have. They make it possible to show up for each other more fully.

That's the reframe. Not lower expectations for what marriage can provide. Realistic expectations for what one person can realistically be — and the relational wisdom to build the broader infrastructure that makes those realistic expectations genuinely satisfying.

Ready to go deeper?

If this resonates, there are two ways to take the next step with Coelle.

Download the Coelle app — Guided audio intimacy sessions designed for couples who are ready to stop performing and start arriving. When you're not expecting your partner to be everything, what you do share can be more fully inhabited. Download Coelle here.

Work with me directly — I offer one-on-one sex and intimacy coaching for individuals and couples, drawing on my background in sport psychology and years of personal somatic work. The relationship expectations we carry are foundational to the work I do with clients. Learn more about coaching here.