Is cheating better than polyamory? - part 2
Can polyamory supplement the social protections of monogamy?
You can find part 1 here.
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Like all great entrances, let’s begin by surveying a stone wall.
I often see this article, published by Dr. Joseph Henrich (Harvard University) and colleagues, cited as the bulwark defending monogamy as cornerstone to a healthy, flourishing, low conflict society. Its argument is that societies which enforce monogamy will have a competitive edge over those that do not because it encourages “social norms and institutions (formal and informal) that create societal-level benefits and reduce aggregate societal costs”.
The article then narrows to how “normative monogamy impacts individual psychology [and how these] effects aggregate up to impact groups”. The authors predict that monogamous marriage:
1) Reduces male reproductive competition and suppresses intrasexual competition. This shrinks the # of low-status, risk-oriented, unmarried men, thereby lowering rates of crime, personal abuse, intra-household conflict and fertility.
2) Increases parental (especially male) investment, economic productivity, and female equality.
The veracity of these claims I don’t dispute. This model has been scientifically generative in the social sciences of religion (here and here), family, morality, cooperation, reproductive inequality, among others. I’m convinced that monogamous traditions have laid the groundwork for many important laws and customs that provide and protect stable families.
Rather than refute this, I argue that we might improve the norms and institutions that have arisen from social monogamy to better resolve the residual conflict of those poorly served by monogamy: those who are motivated to have multiple partners but feel that they have no alternative to cheating.
To understand how we might do this, it’s important to note how Henrich et al. define monogamy and to what they compare it.
Marriage System Norms
First, rather than behavioral monogamy (i.e., actually having one and only one intimate partner), they write about normative monogamy, which – as they state – “refer[s] to the package of norms and laws governing modern marriage, not only to rules about spousal number” (italics added). This is important because it highlights how social monogamy in its institutional form is not just about whether people have one and only one partner but also the interconnected laws and norms that govern who: “(i) can marry whom (e.g. exogamy, incest taboos), (ii) pays for the marriage ritual, (iii) gets the children in the event of the groom's or bride's death, and (iv) is a ‘legitimate’ heir and can inherit property, titles, etc.” I’d argue it’s possible to preserve the wisdom of these norms without restricting spousal number.
Second, the authors are not comparing monogamy to all other types of non-monogamy. Rather, they compare it to the most common alternative marriage system: polygyny. This is the marital union of one man to multiple women, excluding one woman to multiple men (polyandry) and multiple men to multiple women (polygynandry). This is key because just like normative monogamy, normative polygyny refers to a package of customs, not just rules about spousal number. For example, although men are allowed to take multiple sexual partners (often with the normative expectation that these individuals will become marriage partners), polygyny norms typically restrict women’s sexual autonomy. Having sex with other men is sanctioned. This norm allows polygynous men to not just have multiple partners but encourages them to monopolize (i.e., control) them. This shuts other men out from having intimate relationships with these women.
So, yeah - social monogamy should suppress intrasexual competition because it prevents polygynous men from monopolizing more than one partner. But what if polygynous men monopolize women in the first place because polygynous norms restrict women’s sexual freedom? If polygynous women had the same right to pursue additional relationships as polygynous husbands, wives would not be removed from the mating pool. This would increase the operational # of women available to men and thereby alleviate male-male competition.
Let me present an alternate scenario:
Rather than one man exerting ownership over multiple women, why not allow him to marry these women but then protect women’s freedom to court and build other intimate relationships? Men will no doubt still attempt to monopolize or control women’s sexuality, but if marriage norms and institutions make it difficult, they will be incentivized to choose the only remaining option: become more desirable. That is, if you can’t limit a partner’s sexuality, your only ethical alternative is to be impressive. Appeal to choice. Competent, healthy men capable of protection and provisioning are highly valued, and men who foster their competence may incidentally lead more productive lives.
Improving Marriage System Norms?
What I suggest, then, is that we curate and preserve the traditions that build and protect strong pair-bonds without restricting people’s access to multiple partners. This seems to be what plural marriage advocacy groups and scholars are attempting (e.g., here and here). These modified traditions may be precisely what are needed by people who find themselves recurrently cheating in monogamous relationships.
I think polyamory and other forms of ethical non-monogamy have a well-defined set of relationship maintenance practices from which we might develop accommodations. But, of course, it’s important to be clear about what these practices entail.
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We’ll move here next. In part 3, I’ll feature the pre-print of the first data manuscript from my international research collaboration with thirty-nine other evolutionary, sexuality, and relationship scientists. We gathered data from 62 countries to document the relationship maintenance practices of people who are in polyamorous, swinging, and open relationships.
You can read this article for spoilers.
Using these data, I will argue that the practices that people commonly adopt in these relationships are sufficient to address the recurrent adaptive challenges introduced by having more than one intimate partner.
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References
Curry, O. S., Mullins, D. A., & Whitehouse, H. (2019). Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies. Current Anthropology, 60(1), 47-69.
Handley, C., & Mathew, S. (2020). Human large-scale cooperation as a product of competition between cultural groups. Nature Communications, 11(1), 702.
Henrich, J., Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (2012). The puzzle of monogamous marriage. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 367(1589), 657-669.
Lang, M., Purzycki, B. G., Apicella, C. L., Atkinson, Q. D., Bolyanatz, A., Cohen, E., ... & Henrich, J. (2019). Moralizing gods, impartiality and religious parochialism across 15 societies. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 286(1898), 20190202.
Norenzayan, A., Shariff, A. F., Gervais, W. M., Willard, A. K., McNamara, R. A., Slingerland, E., & Henrich, J. (2016). The cultural evolution of prosocial religions. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39, e1.
Ross, C. T., Hooper, P. L., Smith, J. E., Jaeggi, A. V., Smith, E. A., Gavrilets, S., ... & Mulder, M. B. (2023). Reproductive inequality in humans and other mammals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(22), e2220124120.
Voigt, S. (2024). Determinants of social norms II–religion and family as mediators. Journal of Institutional Economics, 20, e10.