When one is not enough

In “The Good Earth,” Pearl S. Buck’s sweeping narrative set in rural China, we follow the life of Wang Lung, a farmer who grows rich off the land he cultivates. Wang Lung is a good man, frugal with his money; he doesn’t gamble or — at the beginning of his life, at least — visit the teahouses or their flesh trade.

As a young man, Wang Lung takes a wife, O-Lan, who is an asset to his home. She cooks, cleans and takes care of his aging father. She is thick and big-boned and even-tempered. She bears him sons, one after the other, then daughters. She is the cornerstone of what will become a great house.

But in his middle age, Wang Lung becomes smitten with Lotus, a woman from the teahouse. He acquires her with the silver hidden in his wall, wealth amassed from a lifetime of toil alongside O-Lan. Wang Lung installs Lotus in his inner courtyard, where he can partake of her delicate features — her soft skin, her perfumed body, her small, bound feet. He nearly forgets O-Lan, the beast of burden in his home, a woman who bore him sons and acts as his servant. Wang Lung is proud of this arrangement — one woman as his plaything and one as his workhouse — and he imagines all men would want it so.

And who wouldn’t? But let’s be honest. Women, too, could do with more than one man.

In Steve Harvey’s “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man,” Mr. Harvey says every woman needs four men: an old man, an ugly man, a gay man, and a Mandingo. “The old guy,” Mr. Harvey says, “he’ll sit around the house with you, spend his pension check on you, hug you, hold you, give you comfort, and won’t expect any sex from you because, well, he can’t get it up no way.” The ugly man, he does all the chores, like drop off the kids at school and wash the car.

The gay man is a great conversationalist.

And the Mandingo?

“When you see him, you know he’s going to put your back out,” Mr. Harvey says.

In essence, Steve Harvey and Wang Lung are saying the same thing: We are rarely contented with just one partner. Perhaps that accounts for the rise in polyamory — the perplexing practice of having a relationship with more than one person at a time, and everyone involved is mysteriously okay with the situation — and the popularity of books like “The Myth of Monogamy.”

And yet, I wonder. Sometimes it feels like the people behind these trends are trying too hard to make a point. After all, they have their own agenda, and usu- ally it involves justifying seamy behavior. If we’re not, in fact, hard-wired for monogamy, then why do we try so hard to make it happen? True, Wang Lung needed two women (and, in his old age, a third), and, also true, most women could use the four men Steve Harvey describes. But if we can embrace the definition of commitment, we have the potential to be contented with just one partner. It’s believing that — and practicing it — that is the ultimate challenge. 

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