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Has Christianity (or any religion, for that matter) ever prevented serial monogamy or cheating? Or guaranteed a fulfilling marriage?
A male loser always struggled for a partner, regardless of the cultural context. The biggest difference is that in the past surplus men were burned off through a variety of mechanisms, while contemporary society only has suicide as a release valve.
Relative standard of 'loser', though.
My dad's in his mid-70s and comes from a family of 7 siblings from a working class Northern English setting. 5 sisters, all of whom were married before they were 20 due to essentially the non-viability of single life and the standard of 'good husband' being 'doesn't beat wife/kids too often, has an income, not a complete alcoholic'. Like a large part of the Incel issue is that there's a lot of men of reasonable means and unreasonable social awkwardness who'd make perfectly capable husbands and/or fathers who are kept out of contention due to 'the Ick'.
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Why would the standard be a guarantee? What other social institution is held to this standard?
Does feminism guarantee a fulfilling life for women?
Does welfare guarantee a better life?
Do traffic lights guarantee no car accidents?
Do police guarantee an absence of crime?
No, but these also don't solve these problems - they (allegedly) mitigate them.
Hm...this is actually relevant to your other response: Depends on the problem and the level we zoom in on; I think a reasonable observer could say that the ethnic Danes have "solved" mass illiteracy as an issue*, even if any individual may be illiterate.
You could argue that Christianity solved mass inceldom as an issue even if it didn't solve it for everyone... But was it an issue?
Unattached males are sort of a continual issue, like weeds, and there's evidence today that polygamous societies face challenges due to the sex distribution problem and the troublesome young men it leaves behind (it also goes in the other way; Mormon elders used to cast out younger men to monopolize females)
I guess it depends on whether you consider those sorts of situations as being the same species as the modern incel crisis we're talking about.
But Ancient Rome wasn't polygamous in the modern sense. As you suggested, rich men had access to multiple partners, just like in most Christian societies, but they could only marry one. This was also true of Ancient Greece, another key area for early Christianity. The Jews did practice polygamy, but it doesn't seem to have been common (this is debated) by the time of the early Christians.
It certainly helped that Christianity was compatible with the existing Greco-Roman monogamous approach, but Christianity didn't introduce it.
I'm kind of sleepy and I feel like I'm going full circle from my original post so I've kind of lost the thread here on the bone of contention tbh. I never said it invented social monogamy, more that it did promulgate sexual monogamy as an ideal though. Men weren't expected to be monogamous or even necessarily exclusively focus on women* beforehand. That's why Paul uses a constructed phrase of something like "husband of one wife" or "one-man wife"
Islam has a more restrained version of the same thing; it is formally socially and sexually polygamous and men weren't expected to be monogamous. But it closes access to women who "your right hand does not possess".
* Though you'd avoid well off Roman boys and other high class people if you knew what was good for you.
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