I was invited over to a friends house for dinner and to catch up on things and to meet his girlfriend. He is one of those guys, you know, sweet, smart, compassionate and creative. The problem was he always kept meeting these absolutely, unrealistically, Alfred Hitchcock terror chicks. He really wanted to be in love and to share his life with someone special and I guess to some extent that blinded him to the level of idiocy of the women he met.

I on the other hand, who was a neutral bystander always called his girls out, always saw their flaws and I wasn’t shy about letting him know what I thought, maybe sometimes being a bit to honest about it. It came to the point where he stopped introducing his girlfriends to me, didn’t even show me photos because of what I might say. Not that I was ever wrong (ha ha, sorry)… but, yeah anyway. After 13 years of friendship and several failed relationships, he decided he wanted to introduce me to his girlfriend.

I had heard about her a bit and from what I had heard she sounded like a really cool person, a nice match and counterweight for him. So there we were, in their studio apartment with that tiny kitchen, walls covered in Sci Fi posters and photos of them, their families, friends. Odd notes, funny postcards, stickers and refrigerator magnets. Little space, but packed with love and the lovely smell of a pot roast and baked potatoes cooking in the oven.

I meet people all the time, especially since I’m in the hospitality business. I see lovers, newly met couples, engaged or married couples, odd couples, fighting couples and passive aggressive couples. What I rarely see though are couples who are really best friends.

I know many couples look like best friends just because they are together all the time but when you talk to them and dig into their interests, personalities, similarities and conflicts you see that they are merely two people who have gotten used to each other. They have somehow mutated into one and the same being.

Then you have those rare couples who are one plus one, walking on the same path in life or maybe just similar paths. They become true best friends because they simply share same interests and have compatible personalities which build each other up, rather than compromising away who and what they are all in the name of becoming “one”.

The problem with the “mutated” couples are that they live and travel as one unit and if that unite starts limping, the unit runs a greater risk of falling. The “one plus one” couples on the other hand live and travel as two units which means, if one unit limps or falls down, the other one helps to redistribute the weight until normal balance and strength is regained.

During and after dinner they told me stories about themselves, experiences they had shared together, hobbies and interests that brought them closer to each other, then I had to pee. As I was standing in the toilet, stomach full from all the good food and mind full of thoughts about the two of them… then it hit me and I finally found the missing link in my war against monogamy as a norm.

By my experience people have a twisted way of seeing relationships. Most couples I meet are in reality not compatible at all, they are just two people attracted to each other from the start and then just two people who are used to having each other around. Monogamy should be, should ONLY be like when you have a best friend. That is the missing link.

When I saw my friend and his girl interact, they weren’t just lovers or two individuals in a relationships. They were Star Wars fans, nerds, gamers and so much more. The foundation of their relationship didn’t seem to be based on the fact that they love each other. It was a natural progression of two people drawn together by their mutual interests, attracted to each other and choosing each other as partners just like you would choose to have your best friend closer than anyone else.

Now maybe they’ll break up tomorrow or in twenty years, nothing lasts forever, but it gives a valid point to monogamy as a truly functioning construction. I still believe it’s unlikely to make such a match for most people and I still believe most people are kidding themselves in the relationships they are in but it definitely puts the construction back on the blueprint of the architecture that is my life.