Ideally, when two people fall in love, they should be free to live happily ever after—anchored in romance, mutual respect, and the occasional spark of electricity. Reality, however, is a comedian with a dark sense of humour. Marriage is often presented as a union between two individuals. Technically, that’s true—just as a football match is technically about twenty‑two people chasing a ball. But that definition leaves out almost everything that’s really happening. In truth, no marriage—whether monogamous or polygamous—exists solely between the names on the certificate. Every marriage is a crowded social arrangement.
In monogamy, two people pose for the cameras. In polygamy, three or more take the stage. Yet behind them stands an invisible community—a hidden audience pulling strings from the shadows. Those unwilling or unable to summon the emotional maturity and relational skills to manage this unseen crowd would be wiser to remain single. Even the so‑called gold standard in many devout Christian circles—monogamy—is rarely just a relationship between two people.
There is a crowd of dead people who stubbornly refuse to stay dead. Their thought-forms and ideas continue whispering in the minds of the living. Leading this ghostly congregation is the Apostle Paul. He is a classic example of how the absence of experience does not always invalidate moral insight.
He comes from celibacy, yet his writings continue to profoundly exert extraordinary influence over how many married Christians understand intimacy. He never knew what it meant to share a bed with a wife, argued over household expenses, decoded the phrase “I’m fine” when it clearly meant the opposite, or even dealt with some of the sudden climate changes that hormonally occur in marriages. Regardless of these, Paul’s opinions on sex, marriage, and divorce still occupy premium space in Christian conversations about intimacy in 2026.
Through a potent blend of Christianity, empire and respectability politics, rigid Victorian notions of sexual restraint and pleasure, as well as pseudoscientific beliefs that linked women’s pursuit of higher education to threats to their uterus and mental well-being, continue to shape and constrain attitudes in some parts of the world.
In this moral universe, God sometimes appears less like the Creator of galaxies and more like a permanently distressed Victorian headmistress, forever clutching her pearls at the sight of female flesh pulsing, melting and yielding to masculine desire. Sometimes, depending on the Christian denomination, the God of the Victorian era even gets worried about married couples enjoying each other on days they are expected by the church to abstain in honour of the Virgin birth or the Ascension.
Beyond Paul and Victorian influences comes an impressive crowd of popes, bishops, priests, theologians and many other Comstockian moral regulators. Many of them spent their lives at a comfortable distance from marriage itself, yet developed remarkably detailed theories about how married people should think, feel, desire, reproduce, and occasionally refrain from reproducing. Then come today’s additions to the crowd: celebrity pastors, prophets, relationship coaches, YouTube counsellors, and self-appointed guardians of public morality.
Together, they patrol the borders of holiness and acceptable intimacy, packaging their opinions as divine wisdom. They issue patriarchal doctrinal exhortations on everything— from proper courtship, the submission of women and even who they might pair their reproductive Bluetooth with.
Useful or not, every marriage comes fully furnished with ex-lovers, almost-lovers, would-have-been lovers, should-have-been lovers, secret admirers, former crushes, suspiciously loyal “best friends,” and emotionally available colleagues. Others in the mix are prayer partners with excellent listening skills, as well as those fascinating human beings who have never accepted that the words “husband” and “wife” actually mean “hands off.”
As social beings, we gather people around us the way old houses gather dust and furniture. Some step into the role of emotional support. Others serve as backup plans or portable power banks. A few become emergency exits disguised as friendships, while others act like fire extinguishers—strategically placed for the moments we burn out. And then there are those who linger as permanent residents in our imagination long after they’ve left our reality.
This invisible community exists because of one inconvenient truth: no spouse—no matter how loving, intelligent, beautiful, prayerful, patient, fertile, emotionally mature, financially responsible, or heaven‑approved—can simultaneously be lover, therapist, best friend, financial officer, spiritual mentor, comedian, bodyguard, and eternal source of happiness every hour of every day for decades.
That job description would exhaust even God. Fortunately, even the church and some of today’s men and women of God continue to join ordinary people to prove this fact with examples and endless gossip. Consequently, most people spend their married lives carefully and skillfully arranging and shuffling this invisible population. There are many genuinely harmless ones. These are placed within safe proximity. The dangerous ones are kept at a respectable distance—at least officially.
Unofficially, things become more interesting. Some threats are easy to identify. They arrive carrying commercial quantities of charm and entirely too much free time. They laugh too hard at mediocre jokes. Their eyes can pierce and read our souls. Their smile can be scented candles in our hearts and even neutralise the occasional toxic atmosphere in our homes.
They possess a supernatural ability to text at exactly the moment one’s marriage is experiencing turbulence. Yet not all threats are rejected. Sometimes the attention of such people resurrects neglected parts of ourselves. Parts buried beneath school fees, postpartum depression, job losses, utility bills, pending house rent, household routines, and the slow attrition that wears the mask off the face of romantic love.
Sometimes their recklessness awakens our own. For some married people, danger functions like caffeine. Stability nourishes them but does not necessarily excite them. Safety protects them, but does not always energise them. Every now and then, they find themselves peeking over the fence, not because they necessarily wish to leave their marital home, but because they miss the sensation of climbing and catching a view of sunset on distant landscapes.
Many would never admit this publicly.
The church would faint.
Their spouses would demand clarifications.
Their mothers would organise emergency fasting and prayer sessions. Yet beneath the respectable surface of many marriages lies an uncomfortable reality: human beings often miss adventure long after they have secured stability. And so they flirt with temptation—not always physically, sometimes emotionally, sometimes imaginatively, sometimes digitally—allowing certain people to orbit the marriage like curious American satellites searching for a place to cruise through the Strait of Hormuz. The remarkable thing is that this entire drama unfolds inside societies that insist marriage consists of only two people.
It does not. It cannot. It never has.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of marriage is not that two people remain faithful to one another in isolation. It is that they somehow work to manage the crowd—past influences, present temptations, inherited beliefs, private fantasies, social expectations, and competing loyalties—without allowing any of them to seize the steering wheel. The miracle is not that marriage contains only two people or that two people should isolate themselves. The miracle is that, despite the crowd and the dense population, the two people can still find each other.
Email: amarkine51@gmail.com
