A reader writes:
I have only one thing to add to this argument: To me it seems obvious that there is a range of sexual experience - from random drunken sex with someone whose name one cannot remember to passionate sex between two people who love and trust each other. I've had both of these, and many kinds in between. I have no moral commitment to monogamy, but my experience has been that the latter kind - sex between two people who truly love each other and genuinely want to bring each other pleasure above all others - is so much better than any other kind of sex that it's almost qualitatively different.
That's why, in my eventual marriage, I will insist on monogamy. I don't think I could be that free, sexually, with someone if, in the back of my mind, the possibility existed that they were thinking of someone else. I don't know that total intimacy is possibly without monogamy. For myself at least, I don't think it is possible. And being that filled with another consciousness is so overwhelmingly pleasurable that it's worth controlling my baser urges in its service. The choice isn't even that difficult.
Maybe once I've been married a decade, that equation will change, but maybe not. In any case, that's no reason to preemptively give up on the incredible power of human commitment to enrich our lives.