I’m not a Disease Thank you!

I don’t like the word Monogamy; Mono for short. You hear the word mono, and you immediately think of the disease mononucleosis - Infectious Mononucleosis.  So naturally it makes me cringe when I say that I’m the mono half of the couple.  On the other hand, you have Polyamory; or Poly.  Cute name Poly.  I’ve seen the parrot used as one of polyamory’s symbols.  We “mono’s” don’t even have a symbol because a nasty white blood cell just doesn’t cut it.  With all due respect to poly authors, while I understand that you are writing from a poly point of view, calling us mono’s makes it sound like we have a disease.  No one has a disease in this type of relationship!  It’s different wiring and that’s okay.

So I have decided to come up with a new word to describe us “mono’s”.  That new word is:  Soleamory (sole amory).  Sole for short.

How did I come up with this new word?  It wasn’t easy. First thing I did was to look up in a thesaurus words that are the same as monogamy.  What first turned up could describe any relationship - faithful, and committed.  Then I scrolled down the rest of the list – pure, celibate, plutonic, unblemished, prudish, and chaste to name a few.  This sounds like I should enter a convent of sorts.  Trust me; I’m not any of those listed words that come after committed. So this idea didn’t work.

I then remembered how the word Polyamory came about.  It’s a fairly new word.  It was coined in the 1970’s by the late Morning Glory Zell. She and her husband Oberon Zell brought polyamory to the forefront.  Morning Glory came up with the words poly (many) and amour (love); hence the word polyamory.  So I decided to break down the word monogamy, look up the words and take it from there.

Let me tell you, the word monogamy should be outlawed.  The word mono is from the Greek “monos” meaning alone; and “gamous” is Greek for marriage.  Alone marriage?  Really?  I always thought that marriage had two people in it.  The word mono also means one; so I again went to the thesaurus for other words with the same meaning as one.  I found the word sole.  Add that to amour and there you go – soleamory.

Think about it.  What sounds better – “I’m the mono of this relationship”, or “I’m the sole of this relationship”? I think sole sounds better because baby, we are the sole (and the soul) of our relationships!  Now I’ll have to start work on a cute symbol.