Having Love Affairs Author:Richard Taylor Love affairs are like wars: Everyone finds them exciting, yet everyone knows they carry with them the risk of untold destruction. But just as wars are not going to be stopped by piously intoning " Thou shalt not kill," neither are people going to stop falling in love and acting on those deep and beautiful feelings just beca... more »use someone says "Thou shalt not commit adultery." Wars and the kinds of "moral equivalents" that people find in prize fights and football can be made less destructive, and so can love affairs, together with such substitutes for these that people find in fantasy and literature. We really need no barren, spiritless, and negative prohibitions, here or anyplace else.
No doubt there are advantages, both to individuals and to society, of strictly monogamous relationships between the sexes. But I have tried also to show that there are sometimes great values in love affairs, that the joys of such a relationship can be unique and unmatched in their intensity, and that for those in involved in them they can sometimes be more meaningful even than the fulfillment of monogamous marriage. Above all, as I have tried to show, they are not in any significant sense "immoral."« less