That's where you have a fucked up thiking. Love starts with friendship. But romantic love starts with sexual exlusivenes. Don't try to hamster your way out if this. Everything else is polyamorous tumblrina shit.
You think you can have the cake and eat it too? Think again? Something worth having is going to have a prize. Your decision, if you are willing to pay it or not.
Sex is crazy intimate. Sharing that with somebody else than your bf/gf shows that you are immature, have no boundaries, have issues, have HUGE intimacy and bonding issues. Lots of people are like that, so don't worry. I strongly advice you to get over this. It's awkward and cringey af and it will leave you lonely and miserable

>>16833883
>But romantic love starts with sexual exlusivenes

No it doesn't.

>Sharing that with somebody else than your bf/gf shows that you are immature, have no boundaries, have issues, have HUGE intimacy and bonding issues

Uh, how's that? There are still defined and respected boundaries, it only shows you don't have SOCIETY'S boundaries, but since that's exactly what I'm questioning here, that makes this the equivalent of "Because that's what everyone does."

That's not an answer to the question.

Monogamy isn't just cultural, it's very much a part of our biology. 75% of the world's nations today are monogamous. All of them have an array of extremely different cultures and people, but they all chose monogamy.

Most people want monogamy.

>>16833782
Monogamy is the assumed structure because it is the most stable and secure for raising children. Other animals have young that are fully mature after a couple of weeks or months. Humans have larger more developed brains because they are made for more than eating and reproducing, hence we need more rearing because our heads Areso big it takes a full year for us to learn to walk.
Raising a kid alone is absolute hell, it really is a job for two people. And absolute minimum you've got 10 years to really be an effective parent. You think you aregoingto have a harmonious household when mom and dad are fucking around? Hell no. Even if they hate eachother jealousy is a real thing.
Even if your goal is not to have kids, it's not so easy to shut off those biological impulses in your brain.

Because of abstinence only sex education and the debeers diamond ad recycle value.
Glad that's starting to turn around.

>>16833997
>everyone does it because it's biology
>it's biology because everyone does it

People aren't even actually monogamous, we're serial monogamists at best, but that's not really monogamy.

>>16834001
>because it is the most stable and secure for raising children.

Can you look at the last fourty years of human history in the first world and really say that still?

Isn't this precisely the problem?

>>16833883
Dont take baits....

>>16834040
Whether they are good at it or not, people want monogamy. They don't want to share their partners. They see forgoing other options in order to secure one exclusively as a fair trade.

>>16834040

40 years or even 400 of social change won't alter biological imperatives developed over 10s-100s of thousands of years.

>>16834040
Wat? People in the present-day first-world are better off than any humans have ever been in all of history. We aren't devoid of problems, but many of the current problems we are seeing are due to the dissolution of the nuclear family (I.e. Almost half of American children being raised without their father).

>>16834066
clearly they're not that strong though, since there is a shitload of relationship turnover, even with kids.

>>16834059
I guess I'm suggesting that this trade that's being made is a bad one to make (people fail a lot after all, and that causes a lot of problems) and that an alternative assumed norm would be a preferable result for society. Why "should" monogamy be the norm?

>>16834078

That's not due to those functions. That is due to our lifespan more than doubling and our active years tripling.

>>16834078
It doesn't matter, the vast majority of people aren't going to want to share their partners. Mate-gaurding and jealousy are too deeply ingrained within us.

>>16834074
>wat

you said it was stable and secure for raising children. the last forty years have shown it to be easily-broken and ineffective for raising children. The fact that we have easy lives with our technology and wealth doesn't really have much to say about the effectiveness of our child-rearing social structures, kind of a non sequitur imo


>>16834084
there are lots of people out there with a dozen sex partners who wouldn't have died even as cavemen. That's not monogamy.

>>16834089
humans have the power to overcome their base instincts, fear is conquered all the time.

>>16834110
>humans have the power to overcome their base instincts, fear is conquered all the time.

Sure, some things like that, but I don't see us ever overcoming this. And I don't think we should, seeing the "models" of polygamous nations and societies we have today. I'm going to have to see a lot better hard evidence that polygamy would be better than monogamy before I change my position.

>>16834110

You're completely misunderstanding how this works.

>>16834040
You win points for knowing what serial monogamy is, but lose a few for throwing in that "at best." There's a pretty strong body of evidence suggesting that that's exactly what humans are wired for, and that that's what we practiced in the ancestral environment: serial monogamy. Which, I might add, neatly explains why most people strongly value sexual fidelity in their partners while struggling with it themselves.

>>16834084
I'd love to come down strongly on your side here, but you're wrong. When you correct for infant mortality and and violence and so on, the average life expectancy for much of human history (and prehistory) was pretty comparable to the average life expectancy today. It's improved, yes, but nowhere near as much as you're claiming.

>>16834143
It's still a tautological answer. People evolve and change in response to their environment.

The argument for it is this: sex is required for procreation, but procreation is not a consequence of sex anymore. It has been decoupled. The main function of sex now is social bonding, which is required for child-rearing. And what's better than a two-paycheck household? A three-paycheck household. Group size will be bounded on the upper side by the time constraints of maintaining relationships at depth.

The argument that (most) people are naturally jealous only suggests that these people will eventually disappear as they're out-competed. I'd rather set the trend.

Jealousy can be overcome with emotional control pretty easily, by the way.

>>16834198
Then by all means go ahead and be poly. Just don't bother trying to convince people who are monogamous. That's like trying to convince a straight person to turn gay.

>>16834198
Nice try. Our instincts run pretty deep. There's ample anthropological and historical evidence that certain forms of polygamy (i.e. polygyny) are pretty stable, and just as ample evidence that most other forms aren't. You couldn't really call the ones that have been historically successful less rigid than monogamy, either.

As regards your idea that people who practice polygamy/open relationships will eventually out-compete those who don't, I can say that that certainly hasn't been my experience, having watched several open relationships explode over the years. Obviously that's very anecdotal and your experience might well differ, but it's also backed up by the bulk of academic research on the subject. There's a reason that very strong trends emerge when you look at relationship structures cross-culturally. This applies to your last claim too, by the way. Maybe you, personally, are capable of easily overcoming sexual jealousy, but if so you're really not representative of most people at all.

(Why do I always end up in these threads with a girl that will break the rules? Last time I think she called me an uneducated tool or something and signed off.)

>>16834245
I love you anthro-anon. Please be in every poly/mono thread.

>>16834245
>citations needed

I believe your opinion on the biological basis for monogamy is overstated. And these conditions are markedly different than anything else ever experienced in human history, so historical examples are of societal stability are of dubious value.

>>16834198
>Jealousy can be overcome with emotional control pretty easily, by the way.

So can lust. And "multi-paycheck" households seem like a good way to get into tribal societies again. Think about it.

Self control is important in any form of relationship.

>>16834255
I love you too! I swear to god I don't go looking for these threads; they just always seem to pop up around this time of night.

>>16834269
Well, I can actually provide citations. Lots of them. Bear in mind that this is a big topic that people have been scribbling about for a while, so it defies easy summation. I mean, for any citation I offer you'll certainly be able to find one that counters it with enough googling; that's the social sciences for you. So ultimately you'll kinda just have to trust me that this is the dominant view among most anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists (particularly the most respected ones.) But lest you think I'm trying to wiggle out of providing evidence, I'm certainly willing to do that, though you'll have to bear with me while I dig them up.

>Why is monogamy the assumed relationship structure?
Because monogamy is what's normal. If you want to sleep around, do what you want. Just don't be surprised when not a lot of people are into the same thing.

>Love should begin at friendship, not sexual exclusivity.
Something given freely has less value to most people. Quite simply commitment is generally a zero sum concept. The more energy you invest into someone else, it means less energy invested elsewhere.

People generally want to be #1, not #2 or 3.

>>16834245
>Why do I always end up in these threads with a girl that will break the rules? Last time I think she called me an uneducated tool or something and signed off.
The girl has has major daddy/doggy issues, honestly you should take that as a compliment.

>>16834330
>>16834269
All right, here we go.

I'm big into the anthropology of violence, so I tend to look there for evidence of of the strength of sexual jealousy. One of the most important books written on prehistoric violence in the past couple decades was Robert Keeley's War Before Civilization, wherein he noted that one of the most common instigators for violence among primitive societies was sexual jealousy/adultery (I'm not supposed to use the word primitive, but fuck it. You guys are all cool, right?) Much of the research on this subject has been done in New Guinea and the Amazon. Adultery is an especially common instigator for violence among the Yanomami (one of the most thoroughly studied Amazonian societies, and also one of the most violent we know of.)

Now, a lot of the original research (done by Chagnon) on Yanomami violence is controversial; see Brian Ferguson and Neil Whitehead, who allege that their society wouldn't naturally be that violent without exposure to western influence. But that doesn't change the fact that sexual jealousy is certainly potent amongst them. And this is born up by research into New Guinean tribal societies (also aggregated in Keeley's book) which, although that particular chapter doesn't seem to be previewed on Google Books, finds that conflicts over women are responsible for upwards of one fourth of all homicides. Even Douglas P. Fry, who wrote much of his work in direct opposition to Keeley's, acknowledges that disputes over women are responsible for a large share of the violence amongst hunter-gatherers etc. I'm not a huge fan of Jared Diamond, who's not really an anthropologist and he's over-cited, but his stuff is pretty well-researched and he's a very prominent author for whom I was actually able to find a citation available on Google Books. "Among motives for !Kung killings, other than one of revenge for a previous killing, adultery is the one most often mentioned" ... search that.

Data collected from the UN Demographic Yearbooks (the first reference to which I found was from Applied Evolutionary Psychology by S. Craig Roberts, in a chapter on this topic) and Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas (referenced by almost everybody; google "Ethnographic Atlas polygamy", first result) tells us that, worldwide, polygyny is the most common form of marriage, followed by monogamy, and then with a truly vast gap between them, polyandry. Polyandry and cenogamy (group marriage) simply don't seem to naturally occur amongst humans. At least not with any frequency. It's also worth noting that many researchers (Cassidy and Lee in 1989; Silk and Levine in 1997) have noted that polyandry is often correlated with both economic hardship and instability, which kind of undermines your suggestion that sexual jealousy is something people can "just overcome." Group marriage has not been well-studied because it's almost unheard of "in the wild" so to speak.

Lastly, although I'm not particularly well-versed in primatology, the structure of the human body and our closest relatives' suggests a pattern of monogamy. See sexual dimorphism (e.g. male size relative to females) -- bonobos, which are not monogamous to say the least, exhibit less pronounced dimorphism than common chimps. The shape and size of the penis, glans and testes and the composition of our semen suggests some sperm competition (not the "killer sperm" hypothesis that people like Robin Baker has claimed, which is ridiculous, but in a much more low-key way) but not a ton, as one would expect from a pattern of mixed monogamy/polygyny with a fair amount of infidelity. So does the behavioral patterns of our closest relatives, the chimps, who certainly exhibit sexual possessiveness. Not really long-term monogamy -- but male chimps are possessive of their mates and also show evidence of pair-bonding. Like I said, this isn't really my focus, so I can't provide any phenomenal sources, but George Miller is one prominent evo. psychologist who's written a lot about this and I'm sure he's cited many primary sources in his books and papers.

Sorry for the incredible wall-of-text. I realize it took a long time to compile all this (it's been a while since I formally studied it, and it's not like I keep citations for this stuff handy on my nightstand) but even if there's nobody left in this thread to read it, at least it'll be sitting here for the next time this discussion pops up, and I've run my mouth often enough on this topic that I figured it was time I finally provided sources.

(Last post, I swear to god, but the author of War Before Civilization is Lawrence Keeley -- I always fucking confuse him with another dude and transpose their names. OK, done now.)

I'm not convinced that a committed adult relationship can really allow room for non-monogamy.

On a practical level it's just difficult to juggle that kind of thing. You work 50 hours a week, you take care of children, you have your own projects and hobbies, you have house chores, you have to spend time with your dying parents, and you spend intimate time with your wife. Where is there space to spend several hours a week with another woman?

Then when you scratch the surface the questions becomes, why even sleep with other people? It's going to cause upset and jealousy no matter how open minded either of you are. I personally go to huge lengths to ensure my partner feels as happy as possible, I'd need a damn good reason to do something that could really bring her misery.

Is cumming in another vagina really that good of a reason? Or is it more? I couldn't just have sex with someone that I liked and was attracted to. I don't think a lot of people can either. You will start romantically bonding with this other person and then you're going to have favorites and you're going to compare.

It's not a nice or healthy set up. "Oh honey, have fun watching TV with the kids, I'm just going to go to a bar, find a girl that is skinnier and prettier than you then groom her into being my fuck buddy who I will fall in love with and might leave you for if you ever stop giving me what I need. Peace out."

I could see non-monogamy working so long as both you and your partner were involved and it was treated as a kink or a bit of fun. That is swinging or seeing prostitutes. That's about it.

Good luck having your close open relationship where you pretend you have some higher level of communication and respect for each other.

This exact thing happened to me anon.