Jeff Schult asked me an interesting question on a comment on one my posts the other day and I've found myself musing about it while I washed my hair, went to war with the gophers eating my cucumber vines and otherwise went about my daily life. I figure the best way to exorcise this demon question is to blog about it. Then maybe I will win the war against the gophers.
His question was:
... implying, as it does, that statistically speaking, you've seen 1,000 open marriages, 999 of which were difficult to maintain and one of which was not.
... and also implying, with "wired that way," that perhaps humans are genetically disposed toward monogamy?
I'm not married or in an open relationship, so have no ax to grind, nothing personal to defend ... but in my life I've seen and experienced about as much or more evidence that we're NOT wired that way as I have that we are. Which leads me to suspect that we really aren't wired that way at all, since our non-monogamy comes bursting out of us despite every social construct we set up to corral it.
Which was a response to my assertion the 99.9% of us weren't wired to deal with our spouses/significant others having a sexual and/or emotional relationship with someone else.
It was an exaggeration for emphasis, anecdotal comment on my part. I certainly haven't known 1000 people in an open relationship. I'm adventurous and generally gregarious and outgoing but not to that degree. I don't know know how you could be unless you ran a workshop for people in that type of relationship. But I have known a few. I'm pretty non-judgmental and people tend to come out to me about all sorts of things because they can sense this.
Jeff seems to think that monogamy is something that is blessed by society and that we set up social constructs to keep people in that pattern. That it bursts out all over in spite of this. I'm not so sure. I think it runs much more deeply than that and that evolution has more than a little bit to say about why we end up in pair bonds.
As much as we humans like to think that we are above it all and not slaves to our animal brains...we are. Pair bonding makes sense from an evolutionary perspective when it comes to big brained creatures that have a long maturation process and require tons of resources to live long enough to continue the species. For the female of the species it means having help getting food and shelter for the offspring. For the male it means being sure you are providing for your own offspring.
Intelligence and societal advancement mean that those two things aren't really as important as they were way back when we learned to use tools, but in our hind brains they still matter. True enough that we aren't a wholly monogamous species. We like to go out and play with the other, or at least look at it and fantasize about it. But we aren't so comfortable with sharing our mate with someone else. Because sharing threatens our resources, I suspect. Or it would if we were still primitive.
So we get jealous.
And jealousy is really a pointless emotion. It doesn't stop anyone from dabbling elsewhere. All it manages to do is make the jealous person angry and miserable.
We have any number of serial cheaters in our society. Men and women who go out and have sex with someone else. Most of the time it isn't anything more than sex. They are still pair bonded to their spouse or SO. They'd never leave them in a million years. Because it is possible to be a sexual slut and still be emotionally monogamous.
So I have to sit and wonder exactly how useful our instincts are at this moment in time. We have birth control and abortion and those of us in the Western world don't have to fight for resources enough to survive. Sexual infidelity isn't nearly the threat it once was. And emotional infidelity is a much rarer risk because of our drive to pair bond.
Maybe in 1,000 years our instincts will have caught up to our technology. I wonder what relationships will look like then and whether or not we will have managed to rid ourselves of the propensity for jealousy. We also might have come up with a way to keep gophers off of cucumber vines.
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Has she had 728 lovers since her last divorce? She may be genetically promiscuous. One or two? She's probably genetically monogamous.
I'll have to say, it is much more enjoyable for me to hear about his exploits as his friend than it was as his wife.
I'm intensely curious about where we, meaning all of us big-brained bipeds, are *right now* with all this, though projecting out a thousand years is an interesting experiment in science fiction, too ... I've done far more reading on the subject in the last year than is natural, enough that some people clearly think it unseemly at best and perverted at worst.
I veered into the territory, in part, because it seems to me that we are in a period when relationships and our expectations of them are changing, and I think that there is an important big-picture story happening that isn't getting told much, and it is a very hard story to tell. At least I think so.
Once upon a time (1980-1981) Gay Talese put out a book titled "Thy Neighbor's Wife," which told the story of the sexual revolution to that point. It took him the better part of a decade to write it, and he took an incredible amount of shit from critics. It was porn, beneath his talent, they said. If you read it now, and you were there, then, you realize that he caught what was going on pretty well.
A lot has changed since then, and it has not been as well chronicled as it might be. That's what I think. ;-)
You are a TT'er...you know who Roy Kay is? His is an example of a marriage that works with the open thing. And yes, I know, people find him skeevy...but he is above all things honest in his relationship and his wife, Jane, while not as into the poly thing as he is, has made her peace with it.
They've raised kids together and generally have a decent relationship and life. I'm good friends with one of his "others" and have known him for a decade or so. It isn't a lifestyle that everyone can hack but it can work out.
He:"We had an open marriage!"
She: "You had an open marrige. I had a yeast infection."
When I was single in the early 90's, I would have to say that I knew of a lot of people that were unfaithful to their spouses. It was a relatively small town with little entertainment. Many people played in the bars just a little too often. In general, these people were there to party in all senses of the word. Divorce was very common, and no one doubted that the grass was greener on the other side. I was in my early 30's at the time.
Has the demographic changed on the divorce rate (50%), or are many of us at OS just getting older? I value having a partner with who I can enjoy our shared life. I don't think any "thrill" is worth giving this up, especially in view of finally finding "my one" at age 35. I think the story is that most of us over 45 or so have grown up, and re-set our priorities.
I don't really believe in "the one" either. I believe in "the one I have invested all this time and effort into and thus would rather fix it than throw it away". If that makes any sense.
There are all kinds of people I have the same kind of compatibility and frisson with as I do Bill, but I only have the history with him. I don't want to go through balancing a relationship, once the new wears off, again any more than I want to go through puberty again. I'm strange not a masochist.
I married a guy who was definitely not the one, or even a person with who I believed I could create a lifetime bond. It was time to get married, get over the one concept and be smart for once in my life.
That wasn't too smart -- not at all. It took kissing a fair few frogs after age 31 to find my kind-of-prince. I do not claim our romance has not been rocky, as it dropped down to the level of living apart for a year. I was faithful during all that time -- I think he was, too.
Even though I was the one who asked him to leave, it was worth waiting for him to figure out a few things. He did some thinking -- life is much easier. Most likely, I would not have waited, but I had come to figure out a few things on my own as well.
"You're still the one that I won't switch. We're still having fun and you're still the one."
I get a little funny in these conversations where people, including me, start saying "most" or "many" or "hardly anyone" .... or even "some." Because there aren't any really good numbers on any of this since about 1995 (look up the book "Sex in America" from then ...)
I'll grant or accept that *probably,* overall, people are not having a lot more sex than they were in the early 1990s. Because there are only so many hours in a day ...
The older I get, the more I accept the incredible diversity of thought and behavior in our species ... and I am struck that when we might find it statistically insignificant that 1 percent of adults in the United States behave a certain way ... I remind myself that 1 percent of adults is still more than 2 million people, walking around, with a completely different idea of what's normal than everyone else. Make it 5 percent ... and that means the next time you go to a PTA meeting or sit in a classroom, someone in the room isn't who you think they are, not quite.
Etc.
I think when we lived in caves, we were bonded in groups, not individual pairs. In a natural pack the eldest male would have special priveledge and the women would move up and down rank according to their mating with this top male, kinda like lions.
Men would only be as useful as their ability to provide and protect and women's value would be linked to fecundity or youth and ability to breed....oh yeah, what we have now.
"Marriage requires a special talent, like acting. Monogamy requires genius." -- Warren Beatty
and, less well known:
"Monogamy, which is really no more than a useful social convention, will not survive. It has rarely been honored in practice; soon, it will vanish even as an ideal. I do not believe that society will return to polygamy. Instead, we will move toward a radically new conception of sentimental and love relationships. Nothing forbids a person from being in love with a few people at the same time. Society rejects this possibility today primarily for economic reasons—to maintain an orderly transmission of property—and because monogamy protects women against male excesses." --Jacques Attali, writer, president of PlaNet Finance, an international nonprofit organization, and a contributing editor to FOREIGN POLICY magazine.
(I just ran across that last quote and included it because, well ... it seemed to me an odd place to find such a thought!)