You're absolutely right, Baldur. Socially accepted relationship models vary dramatically across places and times. A style that's the norm in once place can get you stoned to death elsewhere. Certainly there are many people who practice monogamy and I never intended to suggest that wasn't the case.

When I say I don't believe humans are monogamous I don't mean nobody can or does choose to act monogamously. I'm saying that I think non-monogamy, either a pair bond plus casual lovers or the more-than-two equivalents of pair bonds (triads and other polycules), was probably the norm throughout most of our evolution since even before our ancestors diverged from those of chimpanzees and bonobos around 6 million years ago. Many people choose to be vegan but our biological mastery of persistence hunting suggests veganism was not our ancestral lifestyle. Likewise, I think our sexual adaptations say the same of monogamy. There might be some divergences in the sexual biology of long-separated populations, but I suspect not much. Our dispersal from Africa is a relatively recent event and all modern human populations interbreed with ease.

It has been suggested that monogamy arose with agriculture as a means of ensuring paternal certainty for the inheritance of land from father to son. The son of a woman with multiple male partners could be descended from any one of those men. Whose land should he inherit? Or should he get land from all of them? The bible sets down rules to enforce paternal certainty by treating women as property of their fathers until they are transferred via marriage to one man. Women who were not able to prove their virginity on their wedding night or committed adultery were executed.

If monogamy were natural it should come naturally. Does it? Look at cheating statistics. Around half of relationships have at least one partner cheating. In many cases cheaters insist they are in love with their partners and express disgust at their own behavior. And those who are cheated on are often willing to throw away all their investment in what may be an otherwise healthy relationship because they've internalized the cultural narrative that if someone has or acts upon an attraction to another it means they never really loved you. Even relationships where both partners refrain from cheating can be strained by mismatched libidos. Attempting to address this issue within the framework of monogamy has even led to the toxic idea that a married person cannot refuse sex with their spouse lest they become sexually frustrated and tempted to cheat.

I believe we are suffering from a mismatch between our biology and our culture when it comes to love and sexual exclusivity, just as we are suffering from a mismatch regarding love and age. We've uncritically accepted that we can only love one person at a time within a narrow bracket of our current age and beat ourselves up when our experiences don't align with these narratives.

Sex columnist and podcaster Dan Savage, in addition to being empathetic toward minor attracted people, does a great job explaining the damage that the monogamous ideal does to relationships:







• ( https link ) Dan Savage: Why Monogamy Is Ridiculous
[Anonymouse]