The picture featured above is one of my relationship goals. But the question I want to explore today is…Is monogamy natural? This post may ruffle a few feathers, as I know this was certainly a hard pill for me to swallow when I first started to look into this. Is it really possible to be with one person for the rest of your life? They say that there are seven women to every man in the world today, so it truly is a scramble for a man, let alone a good one. I hear time and time again that men are not made to stay faithful because of their genetic make-up, something to do with testosterone…I dunno…I’m not an expert on these matters but they are definitely different to us.

Muslim men are allowed to have up to four wives and contrary to popular belief it is not a sin to have multiple wives. In fact the majority of the patriarchs that we read about in the scriptures all had multiple wives. Abraham had 2 wives, Isaac had 2 wives, Jacob had 4 wives. Now I know what you’re thinking, if you’re anything like me you will say but this all happened before the law of Moses was established, (ok maybe you weren’t thinking that, I’m quite nerdy like that when it comes to scriptures) but David and Solomon had a bunch of wives too. David was punished for his sin of adultery only when he took another man’s wife and had sexual relations with her but before that he already had a couple wives. Solomon had too many wives to count and hundreds of concubines. Admittedly I don’t get why the concubine thing was not a sin, because I thought adultery was sexual relations with anyone you’re not married to, but he was rebuked for the marrying of “strange wives”, women who would turn his heart away from God. In Deuteronomy there are even instructions on how to deal with multiple wives;

Suppose a man has two wives, one whom he loves more than the other, and they both bear him sons, with the firstborn being the child of the less loved wife…

-Deuteronomy 21v15

Although I’m playing devils advocate here I’m not giving guys out there a pass to go and have many wives for the sake of it. I believe that men of those days and even today could have multiple wives because they had the means to take care of them. David and Solomon were kings so they could afford to have that many wives. In the old testament men were allowed to marry their brothers wives if they had died in order to take care of that family. It is the same in Islam, multiple wives were allowed because many men died in battle and there were more women than men. So in order to continue their linage they were allowed to marry more than one woman, but only for that reason! However I don’t like when men become muslims just because they want a licence to have loads of wives for their own selfish pleasure, when most of them can’t even take care of themselves. The Quran permits you to have more than one wife but its not a command.

If ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, Marry women of your choice, Two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one, or (a captive) that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice.

— Qur’an, Sura 4 , Ayah 3