WHICH GOES DOUBLE FOR WOMEN:

To illustrate Tolkien's profound view of married love, I want to share an excerpt from a letter to his son, Michael Tolkien.  Here is a truncated version of his letter.

Men are not [monogamous].  No good pretending.  Men just ain't, not by their animal nature.  Monogamy (although it has long been fundamental to our inherited ideas) is for us men a piece of 'revealed ethic, according to faith and not the flesh.  The essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called "self-realization" (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering.  Faithfulness in Christian marriages entails that: great mortification.

For a Christian man there is no escape.  Marriage may help to sanctify and direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains.  It will not satisfy him -- as hunger may be kept off by regular meals.  It will offer as many difficulties to the purity proper to that state as it provides easements.

No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial.  Too few are told that -- even those brought up in 'the Church'.  Those outside seem seldom to have heard it.

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