The Progressive Myth of Monogamy

An Exchange of Ideas

Introduction

Recently Scott Alexander posted a minor round-up of recent research on monogamy and polyamory, which occasioned a comment from Von that caught my attention.

You can read our entire initial conversation at the link above,

The latter parts of his comment (alas, not shown in the preview above) piqued my interest since, as will surprise nobody who’s read my fiction, I have long been fascinated by human bonding, marriage, family, and sexual customs. In his comment, Von looked like he might have had hand on the same elephant. I replied, and as the result of that conversation, Von proposed a letter/article exchange on the topic. I agreed.

He opened with this piece, wherein he states his belief that monogamy is more-or-less dead for the moment, and that everything our culture does is, in fact, polyamory. He argues this because his definition of monogamy leaves him little choice. We’ll get to his definition in a moment.

There certainly ought to be some interesting disagreements, as Von and I are operating from completely separate frames.

Von is (according to his bio) a theonomist, which is a theological splinter of American Fundamentalism developed into full flower by R.J. Rushdooney in the 1970s. The movement’s history is less important for our current discussion than is its distinguishing belief: The Hebrew law as laid down in Leviticus and Deuteronomy represents the only achievable utopia, as it was divinely ordained. Hard-line theonomists therefore wish to revolutionarily transform turn the US into a theocracy using these books as a legal code, softer theonomists simply believe that Christians should push in the theocratic direction for the greater glory of God. Based on both this and on the writings of his that I have read, I’m confident in labeling Von an idealist in the formal sense.

I, by contrast, am a naturalist and a pragmatist. I have spent my life living in and studying various fringe communities. I hail from a family of Christian missionaries and ministers. I’ve trained in theology, literature, and psychology. I’m a novelist, an atheist, and a political and cultural ecologist. I hew to no established political tribe because I am more-or-less viscerally allergic to idealism. My personal preferences lean towards the individualist, the libertarian, and the anarchist, but my studies and travels have shown me the inadequacies of these approaches just as it has shown me the inadequacies of the approaches I am more natively inclined against. I believe that so-called “best practices” are only practicable when they hew closely to the reality they are meant to affect.

Von and I are not going to agree on much. But I think he’s put his finger on something I’ve been noodling at for a long time from a different angle, so, as unlikely as it sounds, we appear to agree on two points (even though our reasoning supporting those two points utterly diverges). I will therefore kick off my side of this exchange with those two points before I move on to my own diagnosis of the state of mating customs in our age (which differs substantially from his).

Two Points of Agreement

Von argues that monogamy is dying in the West, at least for the moment. I think he’s correct about this.

Von also argues that polyamory is making a bid to replace monogamy, and has indeed half-heartedly replaced monogamy in practice in several notable parts of the cultural framework. On this point I think he’s half-right.

My reasoning on both points, however, diverges entirely from his on everything from the definition on down.

Definitions

Von defines monogamy thusly:

“The social practice of having only one sexual partner for life.”

He further defines polyamory as its opposite—i.e. having more than one sexual partner over the course of a lifetime.

He then proceeds to argue that, since modern dating does not demand a single-partner life, our culture is not monogamous.

Here I encounter my first problem. If I were to grant Von’s definition, the conversation would be over, because not only is our own culture not monogamous by that standard, no other culture in history is either. Not in practice, not in theory, and almost never in the ideal.

Well, I guess that’s it, then. Thank you for attending my TED Talk. Merch is in the...

...oh, right, the letter exchange.

Okay, obviously I can’t let that definition stand. It is both untrue and incoherent. I have attempted to work this problem out with him a couple of times, but he isn’t interested, so I’m left to fend for myself.

So here are the definitions I will be working from:

“Monogamy” is an umbrella term for a set of marriage and mating customs (both formal and informal) that prize the erotic pair-bond of a couple as the organizing principle of civilization.

“Polyamory” is an umbrella term for all marriage and mating customs that involve the socially-sanctioned maintenance of more than one simultaneous, ongoing erotic pair-bond.

And, of course, there are many sociosexual customs that fall outside these two umbrella definitions, including fertility rites, communal living, swinging, orgies, sexual hospitality, etc. (each of which would require their own article to do justice to).

Why do I choose these definitions?

First, each definition accurately describes the role of the erotic pair-bond with regards to the two major ways of arranging mating customs. In this way, the definitions actually match reality-as-practiced. Contra Von’s idealism, I simply cannot bring myself to posit an idea and then bend practice and linguistic conventions to fit it.

Second, while it is true that many people have, and occasionally still do, go all their lives with only a single sexual partner, this is not—and never has been—the human norm. The only place Von’s definition has ever obtained are in the narrow constraints of certain small religious communities. To grant his definition wouldn’t just end the conversation, it would be akin to using Marx’s vocabulary to discuss economics.

What Is *gamy For?

To my way of thinking, to understand a thing we must understand what it’s doing. What it’s ostensibly trying to do is secondary (and often irrelevant).

Every culture has mating customs for a very simple and straightforward reason:

The differences in the way men and women experience their sex drives are so profound, that sex—which is as basic to life as eating—can be profoundly destabilizing absent a context that provides harmonization between the two.

This isn’t just a problem for humans. Throughout the animal kingdom (and especially among predatory social mammals like ourselves), each sex fights for their interests using means fair and foul, direct and indirect. The sexes compete with one another for sexual access, for the right to be left alone when they want to be, and for resources (they also compete with their children for resources). And, among all social predator mammals, culture and customs emerge from this state of potential total war.

If it didn’t, the species would not long continue (at least, not in the forms they’ve taken).

In humans, culture tends to be much more elaborate than in any of our animal cousins, but its nature remains the same: it is the flux that allows beings with different interests to cooperate.

Please note that, as with any discussion of classes of humans, the following discusses the mean and cannot hope to encompass the startling variability within each group, especially at the fringes.

When it comes to mating, there are three principle existential interests at play:

Survival, bonding, and heredity.

First, survival: Women, being smaller, physically weaker, and more vulnerable than men, find it advantageous to attach themselves to a group to which they can add value in return for security. This group may be a the women’s group in a tribe in which men and women sleep and live separately and pair-bonding is not a significant factor in social or sexual customs. The group may consist of pairing with a husband. It could also be any number of the other arrangements that have been tried over the eons.

Similarly, in almost all contexts ever studied, just as women generally depend upon men for protection, men generally depend upon women for non-hunted foodstuffs and for a social refuge (however temporary) that allows them a different (and higher) rank than the one they hold in male society. This refuge has biological effects (testosterone production, serotonin regulation, etc.) that re-invigorates men to compete afresh in male hierarchies instead of being continually ground down if they are of low rank. Allowing men dependable sexual access also increases their buy-in to the tribal group, which enhances survival both by helping create more dependable warriors/hunters, and by reducing the number of dissatisfied males that might mount an insurrection.

Second, bonding: Women and men’s baseline sexual responses are almost at odds with one another. Women generally become touch-receptive as the result of bonding, and sexually-receptive as the result of certain flavors of bonding, whereas men generally become receptive to bonding as a result of touch (including, but not limited, to sexual touch).

Observe a group of men in any body-accepting context where fear of being perceived as homosexual is not a foreground issue, and you’ll find their filial bonds highly mediated by touch on all fronts—football players patting each other’s butts, veterans embracing, brothers bapping each other on the shoulder, horseplay, football and other high-contact sports, etc. While less common than once it was, it’s still not all that unusual for boys or men to become friends as the result of a fist-fight.

Because of this, when a man is interested in a woman, even a little bit, he’s prone to want to get straight to bed with her to figure out whether he has real feelings for her. Women, on the other hand, don’t like being tried out and then cast aside, and prefer to build their romantic bond more slowly so that they feel cherished and safe once sex enters the picture. Heredity-centric reasons for this aside (I’ll hit those next), being thusly vulnerable to a giant creature who could break you in half with his hands is a prima facia risky move—caution in such matters is warranted.

Thus, while both sexes crave both variety and security, men are more willing to trade security for variety, and women are more willing to trade variety for security—and yet, at the end of the day, both sexes crave both things.

Third, heredity: It’s in a woman’s interest to only risk pregnancy in a situation where she has—or thinks she can obtain through the use of sexual or social favoring—security for herself and any potential offspring. On the other hand, it’s in a man’s interest to put himself at risk only for children he knows to be his. Paternity tests are less than a hundred years old, and reliable ones are less than thirty years old. This means that, before right now, women’s sexual decisions were all made under threat of pregnancy and death (death in childbirth is a non-trivial risk in a pre-WW1 context), while men’s sexual decisions have usually (with some notable epochal and class exceptions) been made under threat of multi-decadal paternal obligation. Heredity thus has been a primary concern of both sexes at least since the Neolithic Revolution (~12,000 years go).

Women deal with the problems posed by heredity through enforcing, as a group, social structures that guarantee their security (this is why it is mostly the women in every culture who enforce morality and customs), while men deal with it by finding ways to make sure their women aren’t sleeping around when fertile. Usually this means “no sleeping around at all” (while men enjoyed considerably more sexual liberty), but every culture that didn’t literally keep women under guard has had customs around female adultery that are tacitly honored even when publicly condemned.

In light of the above, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb very far when I observe that the old Billy Crystal joke that “Women need a reason to have sex, men just need a place” isn’t exactly true. Because of the way touch mediates bonding in both sexes, men who are sexually indiscriminate often wind up feeling isolated and useless, just as women who are sexually indiscriminate often wind up feeling used and abandoned. Instead, I think it’s more accurate to posit:

“Women and men both need a context for sex, but each needs a different kind of context.”

So what then, of marriage?

To make a long story short (too late, I know), marriage and equivalent customs attempt to effect enough of a compromise between men and women to allow life and culture to continue.

But, since every single possible mating system is a compromise, none of them can work dependably without social support.

The Death of the Gamys

In today’s world, we often think of a “monogamous marriage” as synonymous with a two-parent home, or at least with a solid partnership that might produce children.

In so thinking, we evoke a snapshot of an institution that was already dying when it acquired that definition.

Since the mid 19^th century, the tradition of socially-enforced monogamy has slowly un-wound. With the move off the farms and into the cities, families went from multi-generational kinship networks to single-generation “nuclear” families. The magnitude of this change can’t be overstated, but it is often underappreciated.

With a nuclear family, the will of the parents becomes absolute—there are no uncles or aunts or grandparents for a child to go to if things are abusive at home. There’s no ready intercession available for disputes between parents and children. There’s no easy access to influences not sanctioned by the parents’ ego or interests. There are no economic opportunities available to children beyond those which the parents themselves can cultivate. Parents, by necessity, become dependent upon institutions, and eventually—as the rest of the cultural infrastructure erodes—the State.

When the State becomes involved, the incentives that keep a nuclear family together grow steadily less compelling. In the event of a divorce, welfare is available to support the dispossessed mother and children, as is alimony. Men are less well-protected (which has usually been the case in the English tradition) but they, also, are not entirely without institutional support. In today’s world, as hellish and unpleasant as divorce is, it often seems preferable to the difficult and risky work of turning a bad marriage into a good one, especially without a deep social and/or familial network bolstering the couple.

But the extended family is not the only thing you need to keep a monogamous society rolling. There are three distinct periods of life where the mismatch between male and female sex drives creates socially-destabilizing dangers, and those dangers must be dealt with if the family and the tribe is to survive. To mitigate these dangers, you need some form of prostitution.¹

Danger #1: The more embedded anyone is in an extended family, the less private their sex life becomes. Compared with life in the atomized world, girls are more easily policed and thus more likely to be virgins or nearly-virgins (meaning they’ve only had sex with those to whom they were betrothed) until their wedding, and boys are much more easily kept away from girls of marriageable age unless supervised. Young men between puberty and betrothal are impulsive, quick-to-anger, dangerous, and don’t know the first thing about how to talk to women. Prostitution, as a social institution, evolved partly to solve this problem. Keep their balls drained, keep their head clear, reduce their sense of alienation, and put them in regular contact with a woman who knows how to handle a man, and they learn some of the skills they need to be a good husband. It’s not a perfect system, but its universal presence from pre-history up until the early 20^th century attests to its efficacy.

Danger #2: Before easy access to reliable birth control, wives were pregnant early and often, and a significant percentage of women are not sexually receptive when pregnant. Even those that enjoy sex during pregnancy are not sexually receptive for a few months following the birth of a child. Moreover, when a child is born vaginally (as opposed to by Cesarean), the tearing of the vaginal tissues can make penetrative sex a life-and-death risk for women, as the thrusting at torn tissues can induce an air embolisms.

Prostitution has historically alleviated the pressure on women to return to the sexual relationship with their mate before they are ready to do so. Without it, men might instead find a lover who wants to become a wife, and find that lover more appealing due to her utter lack of post-partum withdrawal (without realizing that the same problem will recur once the new lover has given birth—men can be pretty short-term in their thinking about such things).

Danger #3: Widowhood—in both directions—was very common in previous eras compared to today. Life was more dangerous for both sexes, and both men and women often lost their first, second, and third spouses long before they themselves succumbed to infirmity.

Women who were thusly bereft sometimes found that it was safer to become a mistress to a married man, or to become a prostitute, than it was to attempt to re-marry. A new husband would have a claim on the property left by her late husband, and could wreak havoc in familial relationships if there were any children in the mix. On the other hand, a widowed man, having already become dependent upon regular female companionship and having had experience in dealing with and seducing women, is a danger to all the families in town as a potential Lothario—but if he is known to visit the local brothel, his social status is considerably less suspect. Everybody wins, from the madam to the hooker to the community to the man himself.

Looking around today, you may notice that we don’t really have prostitutes anymore. The oldest profession was outlawed in most of the United States in the early 20^th century’s Progressive Era, so its practitioners have become quite uncommon and difficult-to-find (and those that do persist are subject to regular harassment, rape, and other tortures by the authorities).

So what happened to the prostitutes?

The same thing that happened to the family.

The ideologues of the Progressive era decided that the heart of marriage, and thus the heart of the family, and thus the heart of civilization, was romance (instead of practical compatibility). Prostitution was outlawed only two generations after people started leaving the farms en masse. Without the context of the extended family, men who were dissatisfied with their wives were prone to falling in love with their rented mistresses and shattering their families—and, similarly, without the pressure of extended family to keep them in check (and to help mediate disputes), women in difficult marriages learned to use sex as a bargaining chip instead of as a vehicle for maintaining the bond at the center of the now-fragilized home.

And thus were the social foundations of monogamy greatly eroded.

The past hundred years have seen a longer unwinding of marriage and family life as a result—often for good (individuals can now much more easily escape abusive families or clans and start a new life elsewhere), and often—especially in the long run—for ill. When you don’t have a family and a culture and a tradition to provide context to your life, you don’t have anything to form your identity upon (whether by conforming with, or rebelling against, what you have received). When you don’t have a kinship network to help enforce the various implicit agreements in a marriage and to help protect your children from abuse, it’s very difficult to keep a healthy relationship going.

Is it any wonder that the divorce rate shot through the roof as soon as divorce laws were liberalized, or that marriage rates have tanked in the generations following?

Monogamy as a social institution is not just dying. It’s dead. Because of the power of human pair-bonding (and the force of law), nominal social monogamy will continue to be the norm when and where people actually bother to partner up, but because of the death of prostitution, men who don’t have a native facility with women are getting their sexual needs half-met with porn where no human connection can occur.² By taking the keen edge off desire in a human-free context, they are attenuating (rather than stoking) their drive to go forth and seek more fulfilling relationships.

Those who do partner up are faced with having to create a social structure around themselves that will support their relationship. Those who succeed in this will do a lot better than those who do not.³

And some of those who succeed in this are doing so through an unexpected, and almost counter-intuitive, vector:

Polyamory.

Hmm, given the broadness with which I’ve defined the term I need to hone in what particular sort of polyamory I’m talking about.

In my experience (and this experience is now haltingly being backed up by data—see Scott Alexander’s post linked at the beginning, and his other recent posts on the subject), polyamorists come in several varieties. The vast majority of loud ones you’ll run into are those who are seeking to trade-up their spouses but aren’t willing to admit it publicly (or to themselves). Another large and loud sub-group are those who maintain a number of arms-length romances so they have regular access to sexual and social variety without the burden of too much emotional intimacy or commitment. A smaller, but not-insignificant, group are those who are spouse-shopping by dating multiple people in parallel instead of in serial (a time saver, but a brutal one). Finally, on the Internet, you’ll hear the autistic hyper-rationalists who are trying to do things the “reasonable” way, working from first principles, because they’ve not acquired a comprehensive theory of human nature with their mothers’ milk.⁴

But the majority of very polyamorous people in the world are not loud. They are quiet, and private, and they’re doing something very different:

They are, usually unconsciously, reconstructing the tribal kinship system.

Like warriors who would share spouses before a dangerous operation (a custom that persisted in the US military through World War 2) in order to make sure that any widowed families would be well taken care of due to the multiplicity of bonds between them, these families arrange their relationships to maximize the safety nets which surround them. They share childcare duties, help each other maintain their primary pair bonds, socialize together, and share sexual and romantic intimacy with one another as their relationships direct (ironically, this intimacy does not necessarily include intercourse).

This works, when it does, because they are, on a micro-level, re-creating all the ground conditions needed to maintain a stable family:

Social support, mutual-aid safety net, nepotism networks, labor sharing, acceptable customs for all parties to experience sexual variety, and boundary policing.

This is what any mating and marriage system requires to be long-term viable.

I don’t think that these quiet polyamorists are ever going to take over the world—they tend to be fairly wealthy, fairly high IQ types who were raised in communal environments (either Christian cults or hippie communities, cults, and communes). They are, in other words, the one slice of the population with the cognitive capacity, the cultural background, and the financial latitude to successfully formulate and enforce their own customs.

Like most complex social arrangements, there is a high bar of shared invisible cultural lore that must pre-exist such an arrangement.⁵ But a look at these folks is instructive if we are to divine what it’s gonna take to re-make the family in the postmodern world.

Because, despite all the talk above about sex, this topic is ultimately not about who gets to bump uglies with whom, and whether the rest of us need to have an opinion on it. It’s about how, and whether, families will continue to function in the Westernized, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic world.

Given what birth rates have done across the WEIRD world, and the way in which single parenthood has risen as birth rates have fallen, this isn’t an academic question.

To my way of thinking, the sooner we get our heads out of our collective asses, stop idolizing romance and obsessing about sex, and start instead thinking in aggressively pragmatic terms about the local, social conditions that allow for long-term pair bonds and families to persist, we won’t have to worry about whether our culture is polygamous, polyamorous, monogamous, atomized, orgiastic, or patriarchal...

...because our culture simply won’t exist at all.

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This essay grew partly out of background research for The Art of Agency, which will see publication later this year.

If you found this essay helpful or interesting, you may enjoy the Reconnecting with History installment on Understanding Before Thinking, and this essay on learning to think through language and story: Are You Fluent in English?

When not haunting your substack client, I write novels, literary studies, and how-to books. You can find everything currently in print here, and if you’re feeling adventurous click here to find a ridiculous number of fiction and nonfiction podcasts for which I will eventually have to accept responsibility.

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1. Some people are able to exercise extraordinary sexual restraint, so why shouldn’t we expect such behavior out of everyone? Impulse control scales pretty directly with intelligence—the vast majority of the human race is of middling intelligence or lower, and the sex drive is powerful. It took decades of propaganda shaming men and women for their sexual and romantic preferences, ubiquitous access to pornography, internet-mediated mating, ubiquitous hormonal birth control, and universal social isolation to drive down teen pregnancy rates in the United States. It, similarly, took a decade of constant death, suffering, and disease from the AIDS epidemic to convince gay men in San Francisco to use condoms by default. Good luck basing any social convention on “everyone should refrain from doing things I don’t approve of.”

2. Like anything involving humans, sex, commerce, and culture, porn is a complex subject and its effects are very different depending on the contexts within which it is produced and consumed. I’m not going to get into that in this post except as to note that one of its functions is as a half-assed substitute for prostitution.

3. This is why wealthy people and people in close-knit churches tend to do a little better in the long-term relationship game than people who live in the mainstream. Both groups are able to create and/or find the community support and enforcement that makes maintaining a long-term monogamous pair bond possible.

4. Another small-but-prominent group you’ll run into are the shamen and the whores, whose social function has always been the exploration of the fringes.

5. Democratic liberalism, for example, doesn’t often translate very well to non-European parts of the world for the same reason: it depends on dozens of invisible, underlying, cultural constructs that evolved in specific and unique historical circumstances.