Steelmanning Monogamy
I am a polyamorous relationship anarchist, but much of my social circle is monogamous. Six years ago, I wrote a post about good reasons to be monogamous. I'm not entirely happy with it and I figure it's due for an update.
What Is Monogamy?
For this post, When I discuss "monogamy," I'm using it in the traditional sense - an agreement between two romantic partners that they will be entirely exclusive sexually and romantically. It isn't always clear what people will consider cheating, but monogamy in the sense I'm using prohibits all sexual and romantic contact with another person, including non-platonic kissing, sex workers, sexting, and any emotional involvement beyond flirting. If it would be scandalous for Joe Biden to be caught doing it, it's cheating. This is important because there are a lot of reasons that apply to one kind of cheating, but not others.
Monogamy does not include a situation where you choose, for whatever reason, to have a relationship with one person only, but don't seek to control your partner's choices. For a relationship to be monogamous, there must be an explicit rule against seeing other people. If you're only seeing one person, it's not monogamy unless your partner isn't allowed to see other people. There are a million reasons why you, personally, might only want one partner, but this post will focus on reasons to prevent your partner from seeing other people.
1. Jealousy is Hard
Think about your partner kissing someone else. If you're like most people, it feels bad. For some people, it feels uncontrollably, all-encompassingly horrible. While there may be some benefits to becoming a less jealous person, the benefits are kind of speculative, it's very hard to do, and there's no guarantee of success. People have all kinds of self-improvement goals, and becoming less jealous might be pretty low on the list. For a lot of people, monogamy provides a sense of safety and security that is unavailable in a nonmonogamous relationship. Relationships are supposed to make people feel good. Why have relationships that make you feel bad?
Is this your true rejection?
There is a Lesswrong post which articulates the idea that people will often reject an idea for false reasons, and that we can often trick ourselves into thinking that we're rejecting an idea for one reason when our real reason is different. If something is your true rejection, then changing it will cause you to change your mind.
Jealousy is personal. Your experience with jealousy might not be someone else's. If your own jealousy is your true rejection, then you will not feel negatively toward other people's poly relationships. If a friend tells you they're opening their relationship, how do you feel? If your jealousy is your true rejection, you shouldn't have a negative reaction. If you do, it means there is an additional reason why you're against polyamory.
My response
Jealousy is indeed hard and how you deal with it is completely up to you. But jealousy of a partner is destructive in a relationship. When you say that you are jealous of your partner, what you are saying is I feel bad when good things happen to you. Becoming less jealous, even if you don't open your relationship, can be extremely beneficial.
One of the situations that led my wife and I to open our relationship was that I got an unexpected day off and she didn't. I was happy, but her reaction was mainly to feel jealous that she still had to go to work while I got to stay home. We realized this was no way to have a relationship. We wanted to be happy when good things happened to each other. We resolved to work on our jealousy and have successfully gotten over a lot of it. I'd recommend making that a priority for anyone in a loving relationship regardless of structure.
Opening my relationship was the only way I was able to get over my jealousy. I don't know how you get over negative impulses, but the only way that works for me is running directly at them and doing exposure therapy. If I structured my relationship to accommodate my jealousy, I would never have gotten over it because it would have been too easy to avoid confronting it. Opening our relationships was the only way that we were able to really face and work through our jealousy. These days, I feel genuinely happy when something good happens to my partners even if I don't get to share in it. Everyone is different, and I don't know if that will work for you, but it worked for me.
2. More People, More Problems
People are complicated and dangerous. I know from personal experience that dating the wrong person can wreak havok on the rest of your life. This cannot be overstated, and it's very hard to tell who is going to turn out to be destructive. Even if you trust your own judgment, (unless you're being overly controlling) you don't get to choose your metamours and they can be just as destructive in your life.
Plus, when there are more people involved in the relationship, that means more people's feelings and interests need to be taken into account. You and one partner may see eye-to-eye on something, but their other partner may see things differently. It complicates everything until your entire life becomes hours-long processing sessions with people you're not even dating. If you're lucky enough to find one person who cares for you, gets along with you, and treats you right, why risk allowing other people to become involved?
Is this your true rejection?
Would you be ok with your partner hiring a sex worker in a jurisdiction where it was legal? What about a having sex with a person who is in town temporarily and just wants casual sex? Or any situation where it's unlikely that the third party will be an ongoing part of your relationship? If this is your true rejection, those situations will sound more appealing to you.
My response:
Having romantic relationships with more than one person at a time definitely carries risks, and you get to have your own risk tolerance. If you're not willing to risk a multi-person relationship, that's a completely legitimate reason not to have one. I think the risk is worthwhile, but if you disagree, just make sure that's your true rejection.
3. A House Divided
Love might be a renewable resource, but relationships also take attention, time, effort, emotional labor, space, money, and other resources. If your partner takes another partner, that means all of that needs to get divided between the two of you. Sure, your metamours could add some resources, but they could easily end up taking more than they bring. And when it comes to attention, who says you'll get or even want any of their attention? What if you only want attention from your partner, but they need to divide their attention between you and other partners?
Sure, you could take another partner to make up for the shortfall, assuming you can find one, but that's just seeking to solve one problem by creating another. "Relation broken: add more people" is a recipe for disaster. If you're unhappy with your existing relationship, you can't solve that by starting more. Plus, who says you even want another partner? Maybe you're perfectly happen with just one, and don't want to get forced into a situation where your best choice is to take multiple partners when that's not what you want.
Is This Your True Rejection?
What if your partner only dates other people when you're busy or otherwise not spending time together? If this is your true rejection, this arrangement won't worry you.
My Response
Do you want your partner to pay attention to you if they would rather pay attention to someone else? Do you want them to use their time, emotional labor, and other resources on you if they would rather not? I don't. I want my love to be empowering. I want my partners to do whatever they want as much of the time as possible. That's part of what it means to me to love somebody. Demanding their time, attention, and other resources for myself is incongruous with that.
(Addendum 11/20/2020): Your Partner Dating Lots of People Is Less Scary Than You Think It Is.
4. Sex is Risky
Having a mature attitude toward sex means acknowledging that it carries risks. Sexually transmitted infections happen every day, and your partner could contract one and spread it to you. If your partner gets pregnant or gets another person pregnant by accident, that could have huge consequences for you and your relationship. If your partner takes other partners, they are putting you at risk.
Is This Your True Rejection?
Certain types of sex may be risky, but other types carry much less risk. Oral sex, for instance, carries little of the risk that PiV or anal sex carry. Manual sex carries even less. Nonphysical involvement carries none of it. If this is your true rejection, your rejection will be limited to activities like PiV and anal sex that carry the most risk.
My Response
Sex is much less risky than you might think. The most serious risks involved with sex are HIV and pregnancy, and the likelihood of either can be drastically reduced by using protection. If reasonable precautions are taken, the chance of contracting any STI are vanishingly small. I tried to find reliable numbers years ago, and the best I can figure is that the chance of contracting any STI other than chlamydia from a single sexual contact, even without protection, are tiny. They are so tiny that nobody even bothers measuring them.
Further, most STI's, other than HIV, are no big deal. The most common ones can be cured easily. HSV is asymptomatic for most people, an rarely has any effect other than mild irritation. Almost everyone has been exposed to HPV.
Lastly, research shows that people in nonmonogamous relationships have the same risk of STI's as people in monogamous relationships. If avoiding STI's is your priority, having a monogamous commitment is not an effective way to do that.
5. The Heckler's Veto
You might not have any personal issue with nonmonogamy, but plenty of other people do, and they can make all kinds of problems for you. Society is not very friendly to nonmonogamous people and can put enormous amounts of pressure on people to conform to the mononormative standard. Society punishes weirdos, especially when that weirdness is sexual. You can be fired from your job for being polyamorous and it's completely legal. Plenty of people will judge you unfairly. It could drive a wedge between you and your family. You might lose friends or other social connections, or have trouble making them, especially if you live in a conservative area. You may be subject to harassment. You can never get married to more than one person, which carries its own stigma.
And what if you're already marginalized, and trying to deal with everything above due to some other marginalized identity? Why take on more societal baggage and marginalize yourself further? Monogamous relationships are respectable in our society, and some people need that.
Is This Your True Rejection?
If you could be nonmonogamous out of the public eye, would you be ok with that? Is it ok if your partner has discreet sex in a way that's very unlikely to ever become public? If not, this is not your true rejection.
My Response
This may not be as big an issue as you think. First of all, it's up to you how public you want to be about your relationship. Not everyone needs to be up in your business. Even if they are, times are changing and nonmonogamy is becoming much more accepted. Still, this is a legitimate worry, and entirely up to you whether you think it's worth putting up with the stigma.
6. Focus on the Family
If you want to have children, nonmonogamy can complicate that. In addition to the stigma addressed above, now you're putting that stigma on your children. Also, how do you explain to them who your other partners are? Are they additional parents? Aunts and Uncles? Friends of mom & dad? And what happens when they bond with these people, and then you break up? Do they get visitation rights? What if they don't want to visit? How are your children supposed to deal with that? Raising children is already hard enough.
Is This Your True Rejection?
All of the above questions re: stigma apply. In addition, how sure are you that you want to have children with this partner? Is this definitely an issue?
My Response
You get to decide how you want to parent your children, but I want to raise my child with the understanding that she can live her truth however she chooses to, and I want to model that for her. I think she will learn a much better lesson from that than she would by her parents capitulating to societal stigma. We will have to be careful regarding who she can develop relationships with, but that would be the case anyway, as I plan on having many non-sexual, non-romantic friendships that she is exposed to. Given that the relevant studies show that the children of polyamorous families seem to suffer no ill effects, I think she will be fine.
7. Somebody to Love
Nonmonogamy sounds ok, but the brute fact is that most people are monogamous, so if you're limiting yourself to nonmonogamous people, you are severely limiting your dating pool. If you already have a partner, chances are they prefer monogamy. If you don't, chances are whoever you end up meeting will prefer monogamy. Going nonmonogamous probably either means leaving your current partner or severely decreasing your chances of finding another one.
Is This Your True Rejection?
If you had the opportunity to date a nonmonogamous partner, would you? This reason kind of evaporates once you find someone you'd like to date.
My Response
Limiting your dating pool is not always a bad thing. Thanks to the internet, your dating pool is enormous. You have to filter it somehow, and filtering for people who have a similar dating philosophy can be helpful. Further, your dating pool is kind of small, but so is the pool for your potential dates. Instead of competing with the millions of monogamous people on every app, you're only competing with the much smaller group of people looking for nonmonogamous relationships.
8. One for the Ages
Nonmonogamy sounds fun for some people, but what if you want a committed, lasting relationship? Like Dan Savage says, he's been to plenty of polyamorous weddings, but he's never been to a poly third anniversary party. Two-person marriage is a time-tested institution which is proven to create stable relationships. Nonmonogamous relationships sound like they are much more fluid and unstable. If you want a committed, lasting relationship, it's optimal to do it in a monogamous context.
Is This Your True Rejection?
If the evidence shows that nonmonogamous relationships lasted longer, is that what you would do? If not, this is not your true rejection.
My Response
This is pure speculation. There is no reason to believe that polyamorous relationships are any less stable than monogamous ones. Configurations larger than two are going to be less stable simply because they involve more people, but when such a relationship ends or transitions, some of the partners often end up staying together. It's up to you to decide if transitioning from a three-person relationship to a two-person relationship counts as "stable," but I don't see how just having a two-person relationship for the whole time is inherently better. Here is what polyamory researcher Elizabeth Sheff has to say:
My research findings indicate that the initial learning curve in CNM is steep, and many people’s first attempts at establishing a multiple partner relationship go down in flames. Some people bail out at that point, preferring the simplicity of serial monogamy. Others re-evaluate their boundaries, put effort into learning better communication skills, and try again with a different set of people. For those who develop the skills necessary for CNM, multiple partner relationships can be lasting, fulfilling, and stable. This is not to say that they never break up with any of their partners — poly folks divorce and recombine like other relationship styles. But the blanket assumption of instability is clearly false in the face of the many lasting and stable relationships I have found in my research. Just like in monogamy, friendship, and other forms of relationships, the level of stability depends on how the people involved handle themselves and their interactions.
Given the lack of real data, it doesn't make sense to assume that a nonmonogamous relationship will be less stable.
Additionally, stability is not necessarily a reasonable goal in relationships. From my friend Emily Dempsey:
Using the longevity of relationships as a measurement for the healthiness of a relationship philosophy is inherently monogamist thinking. I am not interested specifically in life-long relationships; I am interested in always pursuing whatever maximizes happiness for me and my partner(s), and sometimes, that means ending a relationship, and that's a *good thing*.
It's kind of like how divorce rates started going up as women got more freedom and autonomy and thus were more able to leave relationships that weren't serving them. The increased divorce rates were *good*. I likewise believe that, yes, polyamorous relationships are on average less "stable", and that that's *good*, because people's happiness is being prioritized over the longevity of a given relationship.
9. Monogamy is Easier
Monogamy tends to be easier than polyamory for a lot of the reasons already discussed, but it's also easier because we have cultural scripts for monogamy. Most people's parents were monogamous. Most of our relationship role models, real or fictional, are monogamous. With a monogamous relationship, you don't have to negotiate and discuss every little thing because you already know what to expect for the most part.
Nonmonogamous relationships are much more choose-your-own-adventure. There's no cultural template for it, so you basically have to design your relationship yourself, and if you're not really good at it, it can blow up in your face. Setting expectations accurately is difficult in any relationship, and misunderstandings can happen all the time. Why further complicate that by abandoning the only template we have?
Is This Your True Rejection?
Imagine polyamory was the "normal" relationship. Is that what you'd want to do? If it still doesn't sound appealing, this must not be your entire reason.
My Response
Monogamy is easier in that sense, but monogamy is not easy. Reliable data is hard to find, but many people (possibly even the majority) fail at it. It's easier to find role models, but scratch the surface on those role models and you might find they're not actually people or relationships you want to emulate.
It's easier to make assumptions in a monogamous relationship, but is that a good thing? Even if you can make assumptions about how your relationship is going to work, I wouldn't recommend it. You and your partner might be making different assumptions without realizing it, or you might be stuck in an inadequate equilibrium that could be avoided by having an explicit conversation. I'm a divorce lawyer, and I can tell you firsthand that many, many people get into relationships with different assumptions about how the relationship is going to work. Having an explicit conversation about it can save a lot of conflict later.
Monogamy is easier in a sense, but easier isn't always better. Sometimes it make sense to put in some work even if it's difficult.
10. MonoPoly Relationships are Unfair
As it says above, there are a million reasons why you, personally, might not want more than one partner, all of which are legitimate. If that's the case, why allow your partner to take other partners? That creates an imbalance where you're completely devoted to them, but they're not completely devoted to you. That just means you're getting taken advantage of, and a person who respects themself wouldn't tolerate that.
Is This Your True Rejection?
Do you insist on fairness in other aspects of your relationship? Is it important that all parties make the same amount of money, have the same amount of leisure time, and do the same amount of housework? If not, fairness may not be your true rejection.
My Response
I want what's best for my partners. To me, loving someone means wanting them to have the things that make them happy. It seems perverse to me to make my partner less happy in the name of some abstract notion of fairness. Relationships are unfair in all kinds of ways, and there is nothing wrong with that. Fairness isn't what matters. Love is what matters. If you and your partner love each other, why seek to deny them what they want, just so they don't have more than you? I want my partners to have more than me. I want them to have everything they want, even if I don't. If you don't want that for your partners, why not?
The common theme on this list is the same one that's reflected in my personal manifesto. I do not wish to limit my partners' choices in any way that's not necessary. If you feel the same, relationship anarchy may be a good choice for you.