It's 2019, so why be monogamous?

Humans aren’t meant to be monogamous, or so I’ve been told. Like most Gen Zers I enjoy spending my week nights scrolling through Netflix titles, looking for some motion picture to endulge in. I once came across the Vox series that explored different topics of interest, one of which was monogamous relationships. I generally like to explore ideas that would go against my own longheld beliefs, so I gave it a try. Long story short, monogamy is unnatural and we as humans invented it. Now if we are being honest with ourselves, the “experts” aren’t wrong. Nothing in nature would demand or incentivize us to be monogamous- so I am not going to waste time arguing against that like many religious conservatives would. No, instead I am simply going to offer a defense based in reason, not biology or religion.

I was blessed to have grown up in a two parent household, yet like any blessing it had its flaws. I saw or heard my fair shair of arguments, some so heated I could have very well feared I would have lost that which I was blessed with. Yet through even some of the most emotional and trying of times my parents have always been together- replicating the 70+ years my grandparents have been together. Why is it these parents and grandparents of mine were able and wanted to stick together… for life? Why, like the Vox show argued, didn’t they just casually make babies with new people every now and then? Well the public policy major in me loves to analyze, and so I did.

One of the most obvious reasons to get in a relationship is companionship--a desire to have that close friend and partner to always be there for us. However, going back to my opening paragraph, why do we need one person for lifelong compaionship when we could have 3, 5, or maybe 10? Well there is no biological argument for it, so I look to reason. One thing we do know is humans can only have so many relationships (friends, family, or romance), and only so many of them can be really close- like to the point of knowing exactly when someone is lying from their facial expression. With that being the case, it makes sense that we seek out one person to be our end all be all, the person that we devote the largest percentage of our relationship building capabilities to. With that there is always the one person we can count on to be there for us when times are tough, to listen to our secrets and make us better people. We only have so much time and energy to give, so why not give it to one person you can truly grow intimate with?

We remain stuck in the hole dug by Vox’s anti-monogamy production because my argument for companionship, based on the amount of relationships we can manage, brings up another question- why one for life? Why not date a new person every year, you then get to focus on one at a time and break free from our monogamous chains! Again, looking to reason my defense would be stability, a sense that we humans crave. If the stock market crashes we jump, if we lose our job we break, and if the weather is constantly changing we get moody. While jumping from relationship to relationship every year may seem most in step with our ape cousins, for the very intelligent and complex human it would be mentally draining. Our brains are fragile in an emotional way. One is more likely to achieve stability if you have one person who has been with you for 20 years and who knows you from the inside. On the other hand, it would be difficult to imagine you could achieve the same level of long-term stability throughout the years with multiple-consquitive partenrs who have each only knew you for a short period of time. One person for life that you know you enjoy being around, is better than 50+ different experiences that could put us on a perpetual rollercoaster.

We may be biologically driven to sleep around, to jump from one person to the next, or to never settle. The institution of marriage is very much a creation of the human mind- but just like that mind created the idea of marriage we created monogamous relationships. The “experts” of 2019 may want to tell us that our ways of life are incompatible with our animal instincts- but humans have the innate ability to think, to reason, and to question. It is with those special features that we put a human on the Moon, and it is with them that we developed something that gave us stable companionship that still to this day only proves to be an economic, social, and personal benefit. It may not be perfect, as the “experts” say, but what in life is perfect?

- Benjamin Polony, Public Policy Student