Why do we feel the compulsion to marry or live as a couple? This book explains why people get married, how society plays on our fears that without a partner an individual is, in some sense, incomplete, and how the result is a heavy toll of human misery. This book shows that modern marriage is the major source of unhappiness and bad health in modern industrialized societies and that modern marriage is often a matter of complementing neuroses and sick psyches inextricably intertwined, causing severe prolonged anxiety and depression, guilt, frustration, jealousy, identity crises and mental illness. The author of this book argues that "coupledom" is a way of devaluing, confining and controlling women. He also argues that marriage is an institution designed by men to disguise the fact that women, like men, are naturally polygamous.