Monogamy: An unnatural history
Chapter 1: Introduction
From birth, the idea that finding one true love is the key to a fulfilled and happy life is preached across cultures.
As adults, we realize that humans are terrible at monogamy.
In 2016, million US couples got married, but over eight hundred thousand divorced. Our quest for and failure at monogamy has caused much pain and heartbreak.
If monogamy is so hard, why do most of us make it a central goal?
People choose monogamy because they fell in love.
Chapter 2: Love And Love
Monogamy and love aren't the same thing. We are attached to this idea that monogamy means love and love means monogamy.
Love is a feeling. Monogamy is a rule - to only have sex with one person. Most people live in a culture where they're expected to make that rule a legal contract called marriage. In many countries, breaking that rule is a crime.
In the US, adultery is illegal in at least 20 states, and punishments can range from a fine to three years in prison.
If you are in a monogamous relationship for years and you fell down once (cheated once) the whole relationship was a lie and a failure. Most human beings have ambivalent impulses. It is nice to have someone you can rely on, but there's also the temptation of novelty.
Why do humans invent a rule that's so difficult to follow and treat breaking it as such an enormous betrayal?
For more than a century, there's been a culturally accepted explanation - the standard narrative: men want to be free sexually and spread their seed, and women want to be exclusive and choose a provider. Women trade sexual fidelity to men in exchange for goods and services.
Men don't want women to sleep around, as they need to be sure of their genetic relation to the baby. If a baby comes out of a woman's body, there's no question about maternity, while paternity is uncertain.
Biologists have known that men are more inclined to seek multiple sexual partners, because male sperm cells are being produced all the time, while only one egg cell is produced each month.
There's an evolutionary payoff for males as being randy.
But there's one big issue with that explanation of promiscuous possessive men and demure women. For more than of that time, we lived as hunter gatherers.
Anthropologists refer to hunter-gatherer societies as fiercely egalitarian. There's no reason to think that our ancestors shared everything except sexual partners. Early explorers were surprised at the difference in sexual mores in hunter-gatherer societies.
A Jesuit who lived with the Nascape Indians asked, if you let your wife have this much freedom, how do you know that the child she bears will belong to you? The Indian answered, thou hast no sense.
Chapter 3: Chimps And Bonobos
You Frenchman love only the children of your body, but we love all the children of the tribe. If a child is crying, the adult nearest to that child picks it up. There's a commonality to parenthood among hunter gatherers.
One of those groups are the Bari of Venezuela where every man who sleeps with a woman while she's pregnant is considered a father of the child and helps provide for it. In that society, the child who had several fathers actually had a much better chance of surviving to adulthood because those men contributed.
We shouldn't be surprised that some cultures practice non monogamy because in the animal world, true sexual monogamy is virtually unheard of.
The most romantic creature might be the diplozoan paradoxum, a parasitic tapeworm that literally fuses together with its partner for life. But humans aren't tapeworms, we're apes.
Our closest relatives in the animal world are chimps and bonobos. We're more closely related to chimps and bonobos than the Indian elephant is to the African elephant. Chimps and bonobos are anything but monogamous.
Bonobos have sex at the drop of a hat. They have sex to say hello, they have sex to say goodbye, they have sex when they're stressed out. For both male and female bonobos, that free love philosophy makes evolutionary sense. The males get to spread their seed and the females get to take in the seed of multiple males, which then compete against each other to fertilize her egg.
It's survival of the fittest for sperm.
There are aspects of bonobo anatomy that seem adapted to promiscuity and intriguingly you can also find a lot of them in humans suggesting we may have evolved to be non monogamous too. In species that are more promiscuous, the males tend to be to larger than the females.
Chapter 4: Man And Woman
If there are males battling to impregnate women, testicles would be bigger and stronger.
Human testicles are intermediate between very large testicles in bonobos and chimpanzees and very small testicles in gorillas. The human penis is tied for the biggest among all primates, with a unique shape. This shape creates a vacuum in the female's reproductive tract that tends to pull any sperm that's already there.
There's also female copulatory vocalization, common among primates that engage in sperm competition. Humans and bonobos have sex to bond and not just have children, which might explain the way we face each other during intercourse. Humans and bonobos are the only two that face each other while they're having sex, and why we have a lot more of it than most mammals.
Monogamy is a more recent invention than most of us would expect. Around twelve thousand years ago, when most humans stopped being hunter gatherers and figured out how to farm, there was a concern with property rights, as the Greeks put it, you don't want a foreign seed introduced into your soil.
For thousands of years, marriage was the main way that you increased your family labor force, you made peace treaties, business alliances. Marriage was invented not to do with the individual relationship with the man and the woman, but to get in laws.
The idea of marrying someone for love only started a few hundred years ago. As we made a transition to the idea that marriage should be on the basis of love, it scared people. Defenders of traditional marriage said, oh my gosh, how will we get a woman to marry at all if she says, ew, I don't love him?
Men and women needed to find love and marry because they were two parts of a whole.
Men were aggressive and protective; women were nurturing and demure. They were opposites who completed each other.
The field of evolutionary biology also developed around this time, pioneered by male scientists who used their theories on sexual selection to explain Victorian gender roles. Charles Darwin wrote in the Descent of Man, woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness. Man delights in competition and this leads to ambition, thus man has ultimately become superior to woman.
If monogamy is all a made up construct, a way to enforce gender roles and social order, how do we explain that visceral deep rooted feeling we get when our loved ones stray?
Chapter 5: Coercion Of Women
It is important to understand why you're feeling jealous because jealousy is not just a feeling. It is usually rooted in something else.
There isn't any society where there was no sexual jealousy.
We also have impulses of generosity and a sense that maybe there are other parts of the person that are more important than the sexual person. And these coexist and they battle.
Non monogamy is getting more mainstream attention.
A 2016 study found one in five Americans had been in a non monogamous relationship at some point. And in another survey, a third of Americans said their ideal relationship would be non monogamous.
Monogamy as we know it has been through many incarnations. It's been forced, it's been useful, it's been beautiful, it's been subverted. As human society evolves, so will human sexuality.
We're trying to develop relationships that are not based on coercion (of women by their economic and legal dependence, of women by their bodies, of men by the social and economic structures).
Monogamy isn't natural. Because it's not natural, it's something that we're gonna have to work for if we want it. One of the things that makes human beings particularly interesting and maybe even unique in the animal world is that we're capable of doing things that are unnatural.
Monogamy is like vegetarianism. You can choose to be a vegetarian and that can be healthy, it can be ethical, it can be a wonderful decision, but because you've chosen to be a vegetarian doesn't mean that they can stop smelling good.
Chapter 6: Conclusion
If we're lucky, it's no longer about what kinds of relationships we should have in the modern world. It's about designing the kinds of relationships we want to have.
Humans may not have evolved to be sexually monogamous, but we have evolved to be adaptable.