I don’t understand why you are asking this question under an article that is all about answering the question.

Read the article.

No one is obligated to uphold a unethical agreement in the first place… Monogamous agreement has many of them from both ethical and practical point of view…

Note that that’s a line unpacked by over a thousand words of text around it, so “what I think” is what’s in all those words, not just this one line isolated away from its context. It’s also referring to romantic love, a specific subset of love generally. (For an example of a more recent discussion of mine, see Justin Brierley and the Meaning of Life.)

But with that caveat in mind, and attending to general sentiment, yes. Love consists of a cognitive relationship to the person (consisting of magnified admiration and compassion), not self-interest or mere reproduction. That’s why no one can really fall in love with a frozen sperm donation (or indeed even its actual—rather than imagined—donor, having never met them).

People can change (and thus fall out of love). But the metric remains the same (“will who I am now be happy being this person’s companion forever as who they are now”).

The only thing I would revise is that I was a monogamist when I wrote that, and I have much more myth-dispelling relationship experience as a polyamorist now, which affects my take on cultural assumptions in my choice of words, e.g. I don’t think living with is the metric, but being a companion to, i.e. having them in your life, in any trust-bond relationship. “Living with,” as in cohabiting, involves certain preferences and skills that can be incompatible between two people who otherwise love each other, such that they’d be better off maintaining their own spaces and spending time together in other ways.

Hence Solo Polyamory (although contrary to that summary, you can also be Solo Poly and still married and sharing a home; it’s more about how you organize your relationship).

To me, the decisive thought was not “Will she be great in bed?” or “Will she be a healthy mother to my children?” but “Will I be happy living with her for the rest of my life? When the answer to this last question is not only “Yes” but a resounding “Damned straight!” then what you have is love.

10 years had passed between when you published Sense And Goodness and when you wrote this.

What is your “decisive thought” these days when it comes to love? Is it still, “Will I be happy living with her for the rest of my life” or something else?

Except for the fact of having learned from that experience how not to have to ever do that again.

I do reject the premise that no one ever has reason not to tell their spouse about their affairs. But I also know full well that those situations are only created by monogamy. Once you are outside of that false paradigm, honesty is vastly easier and vastly less destructive. It is a great comfort to me that I shall never have to be in a situation again where I shall have to weigh the consequences of lying against someone else’s unhappiness.

And that’s why polyamory is better than monogamy.

P.S. I should make clear that in the disclosure you are referring to I said “My own income ranges between $15,000 and $25,000 a year.” So 15k would only be a bottom year. Yet still survivable. This year I expect to be a top year. And again, this is pre-tax net (I run my income as a business).

I can’t speak to the accuracy of any such data. Nor its relevance. I don’t think you know how statistics works. Or the need to control for confounding factors. Since over one in three of all marriages end in divorce, and I’ve only been divorced once, you could just as easily have said I’m perfectly average.