Chesterton on monogamy

If I ever felt any allure from adultery, polygamy, or promiscuity, then marriage has cured me of it. One family is sufficiently expensive (and exhausting) for a lifetime. So I enjoyed the following passage from Orthodoxy:

Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.

The larger passage also makes for an enjoyable read. I've added some paragraphs breaks, since Chesterton was happy organize his thoughts in a somewhat German style*:

I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's) a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pairs in mere absence of mind.

The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice.

Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird. They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense for the cowslip.

Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

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*By "German style" I mean long sentences and endless paragraphs. Although, from what I've heard Germans actually enjoy endless sentences and interminable paragraphs.