Why We Care About Monogamy
I learned something today while reading a post at Diabasis with the wonderful name You Don’t Screw Enough, Part 2. Specifically, the post finally let me grok why we tend to put so much energy into the pursuit of a thing we call monogamy — a thing that in practice tends to look more like “as much monogamy for our partners as we can enforce, while we continue to screw whomever we can.” To explain this in my own head I’ve formerly relied upon a weaksauce theory having its roots in pop evolutionary biology, but this makes much more sense to me:
Having access to rare things is good for status, but ownership, the ability to exclude others, is even better. You get a lot more social mileage out of having Old Master in your study than just going to see one in a museum, owning beachfront property has far more cachet than just being able to go to the beach, and your securing admission to Princeton is made all the sweeter by knowing that for every applicant who got in, eleven are rejected.
…
Now if people are actually fairly promiscuous, then how socially awesome must you be if you can somehow monopolize the sexual attentions of a very attractive person? Impose a sacrifice of sexual opportunities on them? (Or at the very least, push their sexual alternatives into socially invisible spaces – the tryst with the gardener, the dalliance with the call girl.) At the extreme end of human societies we have potentates (marvelous word!) constructing harems with enforced monogamy for many, but even our humble middle classes have their own version of this, grabbing what little status they can by imposing monogamy on each other.
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=7082
That (status) is part of it for some cultures, times, and places, but one very important thing the author is leaving out is that it’s chiefly males who are imposing monogamy but either explicitly or implicitly allowed to still be promiscuous.
It’s only recently that “marriage” has begun to mean something closer to a union between “equals;” for most of Western history it’s been clearly patriarchal and property-oriented.
Beyond that cultural reason, and various impositions and controls put on female sexuality, humans are far from monogamous. People practicing consent-based non-monogamy these days are, in my opinion, restoring some sense of humanity to our culture’s sensibilities about human relationships.
When someone like Justin talks about experiencing a trusting relationship in monogamy, all I can think is “I prefer to experience trusting relationships with everyone I know” and “having sex with multiple people doesn’t preclude having a depth of emotional intimacy with multiple people.” The “benefits” of monogamy do not require monogamy at all. They only do in our culture because we believe they do, and fear not having them if we don’t behave monogamously.
Now that’s a very sad view on monogamy.
I’m monogamous because my wife being my wife she’s part of what I view as myself. I won’t share my wife the same way I won’t cut my foot to share it. Not shareable. That’s why I’m faithful too, I need another woman as much as I need a third foot which means I have no need for it.
I thought it was called ‘love’.
HWG, by the standards prevailing in our society, you are to be considered very lucky. I share those standards, and am lucky to be in a similar relationship myself.
But still I see all of the people around me who seem to honor their nominal monogamy more often in the breach than in the observance. And that’s interesting; that needs explaining. I wouldn’t expect a theory that explains it to be particularly not-sad, though.
For those of us lucky enough to have found a passionate relationship with another person who shares enough values, and is willing to work out compromises in enough other areas that the two of us can live together, it just makes sense. Some people are wired in other ways, and some people just don’t get a chance with the right person, or just can’t come to the right agreements. I really hope my gal and I stay together, and as time passes we’ll continue to find out how to make each other’s lives easier.
In a best-case scenario, I give up the oppurtunity to sleep with other people, as does she, for the sake of getting to know another person deeply, to experience things within a trusting relationship (we’re both very much interested in sex), and to have some kids (quite probably). If you can work it out with a person really worth living with, the rewards are much greater than the losses. Oppurtunity cost, do I spend my time and money building up a relationship with one person, or do I avoid the risk of losing that relationship, but never gain the benefits of being in a deep, personal committed relationship.
But then, some people aren’t interested in those rewards or don’t think the rewards are worth it.
Just as a matter of clarity, Adam P, the author was not “leaving out” your gendered claim. Indeed, if you click through and read the whole post, he expressly disagrees with it: “Let me be clear that neither of these proposed games is a “male” strategy or a “female” strategy. They are human strategies…”
@Adam P
Intellectually I really want to agree with you but my own experience won’t let me. I’m with you about the “culturality” of monogamy, it possibly even being un-natural (even though I’ll often argue that natural doesn’t equals good) and all. Up until the very day of my wedding even. See I originally got married because it was inconceivable for my now wife to do otherwise. She comes from a family, society and culture where living together out of wedlock is still very much ostracized (it would actually be illegal for me, foreigner, to have sex with her.) Because I love her I accepted to get over my reticence and do it. So it a very strange experience for me to feel that transformation in me that day, I truly became monogamous during the wedding. Before I was faithful because I didn’t want to break her (and then my) heart, after the very idea of going with another woman, even just for sex, just doesn’t make sense to me at all.
And when I read you say that “I prefer to experience trusting relationships with everyone I know”, words that we mine before, I can’t help but think, not that you don’t know what love means even if it was my first reaction, but that we have a very different definition of love. In my opinion a “trusting relationship” is just friendship, that’s a totally feeling from love. My wife and had little in common to start with, we don’t even speak each other’s native language, our relation didn’t grow out of friendship. As cheesy as it sounds it was (almost) love at first sight and even though I don’t find the words I can repeat that having “trusting relationships with everyone I know” does not exclude being monogamous. I have trusting relationships with some friends, I love my wife and I’m faithful to her, there’s no comparison between the two.
In kind of cold terms, there are strong neural correlates of the first months (up to two years) of “love,” and there are different neural correlates thereafter.
The experience of new love is fundamentally distinct from the experience of long-term love.
A promise of lifetime or long-term monogamy cuts one off from ever again experiencing the feeling of new love.
In my experience, there are many people who are capable of feeling this new love feeling over and over without necessarily destroying existing relationships. Not only that, for some lucky people, love (new relationship energy, as polys call it) tends to pour over into all our other relationships and even other aspects of our lives – making us smarter, more productive, more enthusiastic about life.
It’s fine if you’re not that kind of person, but vive la différence!
I don’t like the idea that the rewards of a relationship are bounded by how exclusive it is. My wife and I have been together for twenty years, but to say that we are monogamous is a stretch that just doesn’t fit. We have had others slip into our respective, and sometimes our mutual, lives and that has never severed our connection. If anything, it has strengthened our relationship to see how each other interacts with others as well as one another.
My wife and I fuck other people, but always together. We consider it monogamy. We work as a team, sharing our passage through life as much as we can, and not just in sex. We’ve worked together in the same office space day in and day out and enjoyed it a great deal.
I don’t know if we’re a good match, lucky match or just happy with ourselves enough to be happy together. However it works, when I discover anything new, fun or tasty, my first thought is that I want to share it with her. The same applies to her.
Alas, that’s gone askew when people in the BDSM community can’t understand that and seem genuinely confused or hurt that we only play as a couple. Some people have berated us for being close minded and not open to choice, often saying that we will regret it later. The idea that a pair of open minds can coincidentally and consensually choose a mainstream option is somehow an attack in some people’s minds. Odd.
Ironically, many in the “big bad mainstream” also consider our private lives degenerate, sleazy and certainly not monogamous. Heck, some would want us jailed for our morning spanking alone (a wonderful way to start the day!) And yet we’re also given the evil eye by various sexual subcultures for simply deciding to progress through a shared life.
It’s an outstanding life, regardless of what other people may think. I have been in other configurations in the past, and this is comfortable and thrilling.
@hwg
Interesting to read your personal experiences! There are so many, many factors influencing subjective emotions, it’s fascinating. And there are so many definitions of love, I feel like I’m always coming across new ones. I employ several, myself.
@Bacchus – thanks, I shouldn’t have jumped to a conclusion when I didn’t have time yet to fully read the article. Still, having now read the article, I disagree with premise #1. Human beings, universally, cross-culturally, are not all concerned with status. However, some are, in some places, and in different ways. And thus I also disagree with the author’s too-easy statement that the strategies he comes up with are human strategies. They make some sense in contemporary Western culture, but are more like the sort of ethnocentric-norm-justification typical of evolutionary psychology thought, than actual ideas about cross-cultural human experience and behavior.
Patriarchy goes deeper than what James says about “in a sexist society… women suffer more stigma…” Historically in the West women have not been in any position to be the ones imposing monogamy on others and winning status. The exceptions (if any) prove the rule.
And in some other cultures, monogamy isn’t seen as natural or cared about at all. The indicator according to some is whether a society adopted agruiculture and ended up needing to control property inheritence.
Nowadays with “self-determination” being a dominant cultural ideal, along with, paradoxically, the nuclear family, the odd concepts of “romance” and “companionate marriage” are spreading with globalization. Contemporary ethnographies are revealing how, for some people, in some places, adopting romance and passion as the important values in relationships are part of signaling participation in “the modern world,” and negotiating an “independent” identity while existing in still somewhat traditional cultures.
Given that, this theory that “caring about monogamy” may in some cases be explained as a status-bearing mechanism, it’s still an interesting idea. Always good to have one more theory in the toolkit.
It’s really interesting the way that some people describe their monogamy in terms of having found the perfect companion such that they have no need of “a third foot” – is intimacy really like a body part? Or is it like intimacy? Does fidelity need to have anything to do with a life companionship? On that note, does a life companionship need to be singular, or could one have many?
@Anon #9 – my compliments to you and your mate both, on wanting to play together. If you’re happy together, why shouldn’t you be happy together, plus someone else to play with?
@Adam – Or it’s simply a repercussion of being in a satisfying relationship that there’s just little incentive to find a third (or more) person. I don’t see anything wrong with it. We’ve discussed the fact that we wouldn’t mind a third spouse. There’s just not much appeal to expanding the family just to make it larger, and when discussing purely theoretical “people”, that’s the only real reason. If you find another person who fits as tightly as current members of the family, that’s great! More love is good! More for “bigger is better” sake doesn’t personally appeal.
So in the absence of a compelling reason to seek another person, it’s a bit unlikely to find them. Even if you do, there’s no reason to not apply the same choice of boundaries to multiple people. It’s not about “only two”, it’s about “only us”. It’s not about a third foot — it’s about being a united body. Two feet, three feet or six feet. When happens to be two people, and there’s not much interest in expanding or engaging in separate acts, it’s called monogamy.
Incidentally, the lack of active seeking applies to single parents with children in a different but related manner. Some don’t seek partners simply because their personal lives are, for the moment, full. Treading on weaker ice, I’d say that at least some people whose lives are fulfilled by their career, a calling or other pursuits and have no interest in seeking a partner or partners would also be related.
Reading the post reminded me of a quote from John Brunner’s “Stand on Zanzibar”.
Logic
The principle governing human intelligence. Its nature may be deduced from examining the two following propositions, both of which are held by human beings to be true and often by the same people: “I can’t so you mustn’t,” and “I can but you mustn’t.”