Any discussion on Monogamy will eventually get into “What is love?” Compared to a language like Tamil (my mother tongue) where we have separate words for Romantic Love, Erotic Love, Motherly Love, Friendly Love etc., in English we use qualifiers before the word to denote what we mean.
In the context of monogamy, romantic love between a couple (straight, gay and lesbian couples) is what we mean by love. No one expects exclusivity in all other forms of love. You can love as many people as you wish, (and when you love too many people with equal intensity, you are a Buddha or a Jesus).
For me, the social moral code of monogamy is not the real mystery. Because a value system cannot exist across cultures, geographies and time, merely by diktat. The real mystery is, what do individuals feel when that promise is broken, even when nobody else knows? And why?
The “Friends” Paradox and the Myth of Pure Lust
The first popular cultural reference that comes to my mind, when I think of monogamy is from the TV show “Friends” – this dialogue by Ross: “We were on a break” to Rachel and Rachel’s argument that taking a break does not mean that they broke up completely and even if they did, sleeping with someone else hours later is still cheating. It wasn’t about the technicality of the breakup, but how quickly the illusion of exclusivity was shattered.
Most cultural artifacts over the centuries, from music and dance to theatre and movies, have shown infidelity to be a physical act – of having sex with another, while being in a relationship with someone.
But when you get closer and see objectively, on what happens when the infidelity is discovered, you find the repercussions follow a graded and proportionate scale.
- First and foremost, will it end immediately or will it continue.
- Was it a casual fling with someone unknown, or was it emotionally involved.
- The irresistible pull towards the other – is it fleeting or persistent?
To be gender neutral, let me use the word, the Betrayer, the Betrayed and the Other.
If the Betrayer and the Other sincerely agree to convert their relationship into a platonic-love relationship, will the Betrayed agree to that arrangement? If not, is it a trust issue? Or is it the practical belief that it is impossible for a couple to be in love and keep their relationship platonic? Because if it was just a non romantic love and affection, it wouldn’t have become lust in the first place.
Lust is probably the most hated word by people having affairs. From the Betrayed point of view, it is plain and simple lust. For the Betrayer and the Other, termination or continuation is still a hard choice.
If we look up the meaning of lust, where it is used outside sexual context, it denotes intense desire, yearning or longing. A mere sexual attraction, particularly when it is consummated with sex, should not become an intense yearning or longing for continued relationship, unless there is a non-sexual force present in it. This is why teenagers in love and people having affairs, object to the implication that it was “just sexual attraction and nothing more”.
The Other, sooner or later expects the same exclusivity just like the Betrayed did. And the Betrayer is equally hurt or feels betrayed, when there is infidelity in their partners, even though they themselves are guilty of that. It is fascinating to observe that even those who break relationship rules, cannot break their own hunger for exclusivity.
Most marriages survive casual affairs, precisely because the sexual attraction to the Other was fleeting and the emotional bonding with the Other is missing or not strong enough. Or more accurately, the bonding with the married partner is stronger and hence the marriage survives.
Leaving aside the social and cultural taboos and “what people will say and think” concerns, infidelity surely creates deep hurts and emotional pain in the affected partners. This pain and hurt seems to be common across cultures and geographies and across the entire history of mankind.
We don’t get upset about a person who is having multiple sexual relationships without committing to any one. Maybe because we are aware and we keep that relationship shallow enough. The betrayal is felt, only when there is an implied or expressed exclusivity that has been committed. And when we do expect exclusivity, we fear that even one sexual act with an Other would threaten our own relationship.
The emotional upheaval that infidelity causes (once it is discovered), is not only in the hearts of the Betrayed, but is also in the hearts of the Betrayer and the Other, who now have to get emotionally ready for a painful breakup. Or they should get ready for the guilt of breaking an existing relationship, to give priority to their own.
What makes love and break-up such a complex emotional roller coaster?
Does not matter what the sequence was – a friendly, platonic relationship meanders into a romantic-sexual territory or, a fleeting casual sex, repeated a few times, starts creating unexpected bonds in the parties involved. The presence of two different forces is undeniable.
The betrayal and fear, felt by the Betrayed, even when a casual sex infidelity is detected, is primarily because of the high probability of bonding (already happened or will happen soon) which is why the first demand is to terminate immediately.
Similarly, strong feelings of jealousy and fear occur in one partner, when they detect immense love and commitment that their partner demonstrates in another relationship, even if it has still not crossed the sexual threshold and hence remains platonic. However, this jealousy and fear is subdued or non-existent, when the partner senses that there is no sexual chemistry in their partner’s relationship with the Other.
We are afraid of infidelity and polygamy, not only as a society but even as individuals. The real feeling of betrayal is not in the sexual act per-se, but what it means. It is the emotional bonding with the Other that is the real problem. And that bonding has nothing to do with sex or reproduction.
Why Consensual Polyamory Remains Rare?
But what is wrong if this bonding occurs with someone outside the marriage? Worries about sharing of resources, properties and child rearing responsibilities are a valid reason. But our legal and social systems have sufficiently evolved and matured to codify and enforce these obligations. It is a problem, but not an insurmountable one.
Limited emotional bandwidth arising out of sharing available time, is another valid concern. But we have seen that in the last few decades we have normalized and accepted “career” as a valid avenue to consume substantial emotional bandwidth at the cost of time spent with family, partner, children. So hypothetically, polygamous families, if accepting of each other, can actually get more family time collectively than career oriented families.
Yet no matter how much we remove the social, legal, and financial frictions of polygamy, and replace secrecy with radical transparency and ethical communication, the source of jealousy, hurt, pain and the feeling of compromise, would still remain a mystery. Which is why truly gender equal and consenting polygamy remains a niche non scalable phenomenon across cultures. Rare tribal societies do exist, accommodating multiple partners, mostly arising out of skewed gender ratios, but in spite of social sanction, the emotional pain associated with sharing a lover still remains.
Why is it easy to share a sibling or a child or a parent or a friend with others and impossible to share a Lover? While we have learnt to collaborate and share and collaborate in every other human endeavor?
The Plains, the Hunt, and the Birth of Possessiveness
This has nothing to do with sex or reproduction. 95% of mammals don’t practice monogamy in any form. 20-25% of Apes and Monkeys (and 5% of all mammals) practice Social Monogamy – where the child rearing responsibility is shared between the parents – but there is no actual sexual monogamy. For the vast majority of mammals sex is purely reproductive and seasonal. There is not much emotional involvement or investment into the act of sex.
Bonding among siblings, parents, children and extended kins, is almost always many-to-many.
So on a stand alone basis, sexual forces and bonding forces, even at a fundamentally biological level, do not individually have any inherent logic for exclusivity. The more people you have sex with, the more is the chance of reproduction and species propagation. The more people you strongly bond with and support, the more good it is for the well being of the tribe, village, community. The emotional bonding required to share child rearing responsibility exists, even when partners get divorced and remarry.
Whereas the sex linked pair-bonding in humans, is fiercely possessive, deeply fulfilling and at the same time highly destructive when betrayal is sensed or discovered.
The answer to this enigma is in our evolutionary history. In a carefree world of resource rich forests, apes and monkeys travelled in packs, had social hierarchy, shared child rearing responsibilities but never needed sexual monogamy to survive.
In a competitive world of the plains, where hunting is the primary source of food, sex linked pair bonding (in addition to kinship bonds) seems to have become a very important survival tool for the humans. Later settled agriculture, locked this pair bonding code into place.
The mechanisms of how this came to be, could possibly be explained better by evolutionary biologists. But I would make a layman’s guess – that it is because of the sharp and abrupt fork of evolution – after millions of years of mammalian evolution, in resource rich herbivore environments, the human ape’s sudden fork into hunting as a source of survival (in competition with other carnivores who were ahead of us by millions of years of strategic advantage) is a uniquely human condition.
The fusion of sexual force and the bonding force – creating a new type of sex linked pair bonding force – should have happened over a very long period – hundreds of thousands of years, and thus the need and demand for sexual exclusivity is possibly written in the very DNA of our biology.
No amount of social innovation or experimentation or transparent ethical communication can make us happily share our lovers with others. Unless we advance so much on DNA tech that we could identify and edit out that program snippet and create a new version of ourselves.
The joy and exhilaration of infidelity can be deeply chemical, so are the jealousy, fear, anger and pain. It represents two different lineages of our evolutionary history. The carefree joyful living of a herbivore in a forest, and the fearful, stressful, struggle of a carnivore in the plains. It may appear to be two sides of the same coin. But it is more nuanced than that. It is like a new colour created by printing one ink over another—you cannot separate the colours once they are merged into each other.
While our languages try to separate romantic, erotic, and deep affection, our evolutionary biology fused them inextricably together. I am convinced other mammals and apes don’t love sex the way we do. Our experience is elevated by the very presence of the pair-bonding force. Subtract that and sex becomes a mechanical act that is not worth its time, irrespective of whether it is inside or outside a marriage.
Which brings us to the conclusion: That monogamy is a necessary condition for sex to be a fulfilling experience.
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