A monogamous relationship is for many our romantic ideal, suggesting the stability and security most of us crave. But are we being unrealistic? Is monogamy a natural state for humans?
There are two schools of thought regarding the exact meaning of monogamy. One group of people believe that monogamy means being sexually and emotionally faithful to one person for the rest of your life, and the other one holds that it means being sexually and emotionally faithful to one person for as long as a particular relationship lasts. The first group are known as monogamists and the second are now often referred to as being serial monogamists.
Whatever the difference is between the two, the question that is often asked is: are human beings naturally monogamous? Despite the pressure on us to conform to the monogamous ideal, we don’t appear to be, what with rising divorce rates and the much publicized breakdown of family life.
According to recent research, one in five women believes monogamy is unnatural and a quarter say it’s an old-fashioned concept. Interestingly, it wasn’t the younger women who were sceptical about monogamy – women you’d think would be more likely to rebel against such a notion – but those in their late twenties and older, women who have tried the together-forever path and found it didn’t work.
Those women believed monogamy was completely unrealistic because relationships often don’t last forever. People get bored, grow out of love or desire sexual adventure outside of their current relationship. And experience seems to make monogamy even more difficult. In the same research, three-quarters of the women surveyed said staying monogamous gets even more difficult if you’ve had serious relationships in the past and nearly half of all the women questioned admitted they found fidelity a problem because they simply didn’t believe monogamy was realistic.
It would seem, too, that given an opportunity to be non-monogamous, or to cheat on a partner without him or her finding out, most people would take it. The newspapers are full of the indiscretions of Hollywood stars who have the opportunity, but perhaps not the privacy, to have sex with people other than their partners without, they thought, being caught out.
Why monogamy?
If monogamy is so unnatural and so difficult, why is it deemed so important throughout Western society?
Perhaps because it is the ideal romantic scenario. We all dream of meeting Mr or Miss Right, falling in love, marrying and living happily ever after. The most likely explanation for the importance of monogamy, however, is that, providing the people involved are happy together, it creates a stable environment for the rearing of children. Two parents, consistently caring for children as they develop from babies to infants to adolescents to adults is, like the ideal of being with one person for eternity, the stuff of dreams.
This is not always – or often – possible, however, and it could be that dreams of the ideal set-up actually prevent us from having a chance to find happiness in a relationship. Perhaps the pressures we put on ourselves and our partners are unrealistic. Can we really expect one person to fulfil all our needs for all time? Still, society, and often governments, advocate monogamy as the ‘norm’, an attitude which has been strengthened in the age of AIDS. We can’t dismiss the impact that AIDS has had on people’s feelings towards monogamy – nearly two-thirds of women say it has made them more likely to stay with their partner, regardless of how dissatisfied they may or may not be.
The dangers
Is the importance placed on monogamy dangerous and negative? Certainly, on a personal level, it can be. For fear of not being monogamous, one might stay in an unhealthy, dissatisfying relationship or, if one partner is not monogamous when the other expects complete fidelity, an otherwise successful relationship might be destroyed. No matter how attractive you find your partner and whether you could never dream of being with someone else, over time attraction and sexual feelings can fade while the love, respect and compatibility remain. If non-monogamy was more acceptable, if fidelity was not the lynch-pin for successful relationships, perhaps there would be fewer divorces and break-ups.
Not being monogamous does not necessarily mean the end of the relationship. Perhaps it is the importance placed on monogamy which destroys relationships that may have survived if the possibility and the meanings of affairs had been recognized.
On a social level the importance of monogamy can be prohibiting too. The concept of lifelong monogamy certainly makes policy-making easier – it fits us all into neat little categories – but such policies can cause misery if they do not relate to the realities and complexities of human nature.
Despite the fact that a husband and wife in a monogamous set-up is held up as the ‘norm’, it is difficult to accept it as such when all around us people are proving that ‘norm’ to be just one of many options.
The reality is that people all over the world live in their own custom-made relationships. Monogamists, serial monogamists, happy singles, gay, straight, living in communes, in arranged marriages… Relationships that can and do work, because those involved are abiding by their own rules, not someone else’s.
For some, monogamy is the perfect relationship – being sexually and emotionally committed to one person forever, secure and stable, works for them – but for others it isn’t.
Polygamy
Polygamy – living with more than one sexual partner – challenges all our beliefs about relationships, and carries its own problems, but in an atmosphere of genuine commitment and trust it can provide answers to a host of relationship problems. Participants are less dependent on one partner and more self-reliant; a third person can help to break destructive patterns and polygamy can provide everything that you could need in a relationship – something that is difficult to get from just one person.
Monogamy as a way of life is not necessarily a good or bad thing. What is important is that your relationship works for both – or all – of you. Good relationships of any kind depend on mutual respect, mutual responsibility, and substantial effort – but not always on sexual exclusivity. Monogamy is the socially acceptable model but is it better to bring up a child in a loveless but monogamous marriage, than in a happy communal environment?
Government policies and socially accepted values cannot force people into lives and lifestyles with which they are unhappy. Monogamy may always be perceived as the ideal relationship – perhaps it is – but it is also possible that there are better, broader and more natural options for those of us who find monogamy unworkable –options which hold promise for more individual fulfilment and a richer, more satisfying society as a result.