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Unknown knowns: Why did you choose to be monogamous?
Many of us are familiar with Donald Rumsfeld's famous (and surprisingly useful) taxonomy of knowledge:
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.
But this taxonomy (as originally described) omits an important fourth category: unknown knowns, the things we don't know that we know. This category encompasses the knowledge of many of our own personal beliefs, what I call unquestioned defaults. For example, most modern Americans possess the unquestioned default belief that they have some moral responsibility for their own freely-chosen actions. In the twelfth century, most Europeans possessed the unquestioned default belief that the Christian god existed. And so on. These unknown knowns are largely the products of a particular culture; they require homogeneity of belief to remain unknown.
By definition, we are each completely ignorant of our own unknown knowns. So even when our culture gives us a fairly accurate map of the territory, we'll never notice the Mercator projection's effect. Unless it's pointed out to us or we find contradictory evidence, that is. A single observation can be all it takes, if you're paying attention and asking questions. The answers might not change your mind, but you'll still come out of the process with more knowledge than you went in with.
When I was eighteen I went on a date with a girl I'll call Emma, who conscientiously informed me that she already had two boyfriends: she was, she said, polyamorous. I had previously had some vague awareness that there had been a free love movement in the sixties that encouraged "alternative lifestyles", but that awareness was not a sufficient motivation for me to challenge my default belief that romantic relationships could only be conducted one at a time. Acknowledging default settings is not easy.
The chance to date a pretty girl, though, can be sufficient motivation for a great many things (as is also the case with pretty boys). It was certainly a good enough reason to ask myself, "Self, what's so great about this monogamy thing?"
I couldn't come up with any particularly compelling answers, so I called Emma up and we planned a second date.
Since that fateful day, I've been involved in both polyamorous and monogamous relationships, and I've become quite confident that I am happier, more fulfilled, and a better romantic partner when I am polyamorous. This holds even when I'm dating only one person; polyamorous relationships have a kind of freedom to them that is impossible to obtain any other way, as well as a set of similarly unique responsibilities.
In this discussion I am targeting monogamy because its discovery has had an effect on my life that is orders of magnitude greater than that of any other previously-unknown known. Others I've spoken with have had similar experiences. If you haven't had it before, you now have the same opportunity that I lucked into several years ago, if you choose to exploit it.
This, then, is your exercise: spend five minutes thinking about why your choice of monogamy is preferable to all of the other inhabitants of relationship-style-space, for you. Other options that have been explored and documented include:
- Non-consensual non-monogamy, the most popular alternative.
- Swinging, in which couples engage in social, recreational sex, mostly with other couples.
- Polyamory, the practice, desire, or acceptance of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved. This category is extremely broad, but the most common variations include:
- Polyfidelity, in which >2 people form a single committed relationship that does not allow outside partners.
- Hierarchical polyamory, in which each individual has (usually) one primary partner and some number of secondary partners. These labels typically reflect the level of commitment involved, and are not a ranking of preference.
- "Intimate networks", in which each person maintains some number of independent relationships without explicit rankings or descriptions, such that a graph (the data structure) is the best way to describe all the individuals and relationships involved.
These types of polyamory cover many of the available options, but there are others; some are as yet unknown. Some relationship styles are better than others, subject to your ethics, history, and personality. I suspect that monogamy is genuinely the best option for many people, perhaps even most. But it's impossible for you to know that until you know that you have a choice.
If you have a particularly compelling argument for or against a particular relationship style, please share it. But if romantic jealousy is your deciding factor in favor of monogamy, you may want to hold off on forming a belief that will be hard to change; my next post will be about techniques for managing and reducing romantic jealousy.
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Comments (651)
You may wish to rethink your assumption that American population norms apply to readers of Lesswrong. I'm pretty sure that people here are more likely to be "Rah, polyamory!" than to be knee-jerk in favor of monogamy. Also, I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of nillamorous people here who you are completely ignoring, myself included.
I would be astonished if LW's readership conformed to American norms in any sense. But the fraction of Americans who have seriously considered polyamory, even among those who have heard of it, is tiny enough that it seemed worth tossing out there.
As for the nillamorous (google indicates you have coined the word, which is awesome, by the way): no slight was intended. While nillamory isn't a part of relationship-style-space in the same way that atheism is not a religion, I tend to treat it as if it were, for the same reason that I write "atheist" on forms that ask for my religion. Regardless, there's certainly nothing wrong with preferring to stay away from romance.
Edit: The choice of relationship style is definitely relevant for people who are nillamorous due to circumstance. The approach one takes in looking for partners is greatly informed by what you want them to be partners for.
By choice, or by circumstance, or are you asexual? (And which of those would you include in the term "nillamorous"?)
By circumstance. I would include the first two in the term, although being asexual would tend to reduce the likelihood of someone entering into a relationship at all.
Including within the non-amorous (I like this better) those who are so "by circumstance" is nonstandard and pretty confusing. A committed monogamous or polyamorous person defines herself as such whether or not she is currently in a relationship. For the sake of consistency, your status as non-amorous should also be independent of whether or not you are currently seeing someone; that is, you should only call yourself non-amorous if you are so by choice.
Asexuality and nilamorousness (za?) sound like different but overlapping concepts, to me - the latter sounds like it should refer to some other part of this Venn diagram (from here), perhaps the 'none of the above' section.
If one defines a graph with each individual representing a node, and an edge connecting two individuals who have had sexual contact, then the large majority are part of a huge connected cluster. This is why STDs are a problem. If a group of people agreed to limit their sexual contacts to others within the group, and if they were all tested beforehand, they would achieve a high degree of structural protection from STDs.
Here is a paper which observes this in a high school. Here is just the graph. An animated gif of the development over time. One thing that disturbs me about the paper is that they make no mention of asymmetric claims by the students. (ETA: actually, they did, see cupholder)
The relationships in that high school are similar but not necessarily analogous to a polyamorous network. Because the relationships that make up that graph don't overlap temporally at their connecting nodes, an STD that enters the graph can only affect people that form a new connection after its appearance. An STD in a polyamorous network can spread to every member, regardless of when they join the network.
That's kinda bad. Poly folk tend to be very concerned about STDs; common best-practices are to use barriers with new partners (or all partners), get tested for new infections regularly (usually monthly), and to require one's partners to do the same.
This lines up pretty closely with Daniel's recommendation, but even if you take every precaution imaginable, being a part of a large polyamorous network will increase your risk of exposure by at least a little.
Though it may be worth mentioning that that effect may be offset by the generally high level of caution in the poly community and increased certainty about your partner's partners, what with cheating being (almost entirely) out of the equation.
OK, but IMHO there is significant risk from infectious agents for which we do not yet have reliable affordable tests or that we do not yet believe to be sexually transmitted or that we do not yet believe to be particularly harmful.
(The spirochete that causes Lyme disease would be an agent of the second category.)
Well, there is a brief mention tucked away in a footnote:
Not that it's very reassuring; I didn't see any data on how many/what proportion of claimed relationships were asymmetric.
Thanks!
For scale, on that graph are shown relationships between 573 students in a population of ~1000 students, of whom 832 were interviewed.
That is a fascinating paper, and engagingly written. I think the most surprising thing from it was that this weird almost-a-spanning-tree structure arises from two simple, local rules:
People tend to date other people with a similar amount of past sexual experience.
People avoid dating the exes of other people who are close to them in the relationship graph, since this makes them look bad to their friends, exes, and so on. This accounts for the lack of short cycles.
When the authors applied these rules in a computer simulation, they ended up with results almost indistinguishable from the empirically-observed sex-graphs.
Another huge problem is unwanted pregnancy. Contraceptives are generally less reliable than most people like to think, so if you're not OK with abortion as the backup option (and certain that you'll actually be able to exercise it), it is a sword of Damocles hanging over any heterosexual relationship between (fertile) people who aren't ready for a baby to pop up.
Admittedly, if you use contraceptives with great care and protective redundancy, they can be extremely reliable. However, I don't know how many people can actually pull this off in a consistently precise and disciplined manner; probably not too many. (Not to mention how badly such unrelenting discipline tends to kill fun.)
I'm looking forward to your post on reducing jealousy. I've been interested in polyamory for quite a while now, and I'm already quite convinced that it's a good idea in theory (i.e. that if we could globally change human psychology such that we become more naturally inclined to polyamory, or at least more capable of it, the world would probably be happier overall; happier than if we globally changed human psychology such that we become more naturally inclined to real monogamy? I don't know). But I've never actually had a chance to try being in a poly relationship and I'm not quite sure I'd actually succeed in being comfortable with it.
Edit: This post also makes me wonder if there are any (possible, not necessarily already discovered) generalized strategies for detecting unknown knowns, or at least unrecognized default behaviours, other than just going through your daily routine and making a point of frequently wondering why you're doing the things you're doing. (Though even that I don't do enough.)
Edit/add: due to a misread I answered on 'how to detect unknown unknowns'
Maybe not a real strategy. Read what interesting and/or bright people write, That covers a lot and help with uncovering things that some others already know. For daily behavior you might check the quirkology book or more of the writings of Richard Wiseman. To really discover unknown unknowns, like from Eliezers famous question on what strange thing an AI might tell us, I don't see a super general way. Being curious still goes a long way. Thats how I ended up with my current collection of non-standard habits and ideas.
I'm not sure if you switch tack halfway though, but the original read "unknown knowns".
Compare your beliefs and behaviors with those of people who are succeeding at things which you are not. (And which, presumably, most people in your culture also do not succeed at.)
For example, if you (and most people) aren't wealthy, consider the beliefs and behaviors of those who are.
This doesn't always give you a route to change, of course. I have noticed that most people who are standout successes in any sort of internet-marketed, information-products business (or at least, the ones I want to emulate) seem to personally (and quite sincerely) value various forms of philanthropy, and many of them claim it's impossible to be really successful without it, despite the lack of any logical or direct connection between the practice of giving, and their personal getting.
This drove me crazy for years, both because the often-mystical justifications given simply made no sense to me, and because I simply couldn't wrap my head around the idea of personally wanting to give money or time away without a direct return.
However, I changed something else in my personality earlier this week -- a particular incidence of learned helplessness -- and afterward, charity suddenly made sense to me in a way that it simply never had before, and I actually found myself being happy about the idea of e.g. contributing to local libraries, and I actually gave some money (out of pocket and spur of the moment) to my regular hair stylist, upon hearing that she'd just been diagnosed with breast cancer and would be struggling financially in a few weeks, post-surgery.
And I felt good about it.
Anyway, this particular change makes me suspect that philanthropy is actually a shibboleth -- while it is correlated with success, there is actually a separate trait driving both the charity and the success, and that it has something to do with lacking certain types of "victim" mindset (one of which I got rid of this week).
So I'm now curious whether I could actually refrain from charitable acts and donations and become more successful... even though my preference and active interest now, is to contribute to certain causes. (And not on a utilitarian basis -- it's strictly warm fuzzies -- something that, AFAICR, I've never experienced before.)
But I'm not sure whether I want to make that particular sacrifice (holding off on the charity until "wealthy") in the name of science or not, especially since there are so many other potentially confounding variables, and in any case I lack a true control.
Anyway... what was I saying? Oh yeah. Compare your beliefs and thought processes with those of people succeeding at whatever you want to do/be/have, to identify what "non-default" settings they're using. Pay special attention to how they think, in the sense of types of processing steps and what emotional attitudes they seem to hold, rather than merely what they think, which often sounds like the default wisdom if the person has not, themselves, thought deeply about what they do differently.
IOW, it's less about "belief" than about "process". What do they do differently in their heads? That's where the gold is.
I've assumed that part of charity is the feeling that you have more than you need, and this is related to not being panicky-- it means a lower mental noise level.
I don't know about that; it's not like I've suddenly decided I have more than I need, and definitely not more than I want. I'm wary of that explanation, because that's the cached thought that gets circulated around the subject, and it doesn't actually seem to do anything more than be a stop sign for thinking.
Of course, it could simply be that before, I felt like there wasn't really any chance that I could get what I want, and give things away. That sounds like a slightly more accurate description.
The thing that makes me question this reasoning, though, is that what I changed didn't have anything to do with charity or how much I "had" in any explicit way whatsoever. It was simply giving up a pattern of helpless thinking, along the lines of being doomed no matter what I do.
I could just as easily argue that, well, if I'm doomed, then I should give to other people who aren't. But it apparently didn't work that way. So, I feel more confident saying that I really have no idea what the hell is going on in this area, than simply acceding to one of the many memes that circulate about it. I would rather experiment on a bunch of people first and see if I can make them change in the same way, before I claim to actually know anything about the process.
The trap that most self-help falls into is that when somebody identifies the last critical node to change in their own process, they go straight to the man-with-hammer mode, propounding that one change as the Most Important Thing, when in fact it might merely be the first step for someone who still has problems at other nodes in the process.
Can you elaborate on what you changed? I'd love to know how it made sense to you.
I wish I could do this more, but how do you get accurate information on how people think? Even if they self-report honestly, without censoring themselves, they may not know exactly what they're doing and they may be biased in their interpretations.
What I gave up on was a pattern of catastrophizing -- treating setbacks as huge terrible burdens -- and feeling out of control. It's hard to describe, really, because it is now in the "doesn't make any sense to me" category. ;-) It was tied in with family loyalty -- i.e., that if I actually took personal responsibility and didn't consider setbacks permanent, then I would be being disloyal to my father and mother (who each had their own forms of this behavior) and that I would lose my love & connection from them. (Despite them both being long-dead.)
Upon letting go of this thought process, I found that various things in my behavior changed as a side effect. For example, I realized that I could actually make all my decisions not on the basis of their likely negative impacts, but instead on their positive impacts.
Hm, come to think of it, the realizations about charity didn't happen until the day after that subsequent realization, so it's very possible that it's the real key factor. Making a decision about charity under a negative decision regime is an obvious no-go -- the detriments are obvious, compared to the complete lack of apparent detriments to not giving, absent special circumstances. OTOH, under a benefit-oriented decision regime, there are warm-fuzzy benefits to be had, and less obvious benefit to hoarding.
Previously, it had never occurred to me to think of charity in terms of warm fuzzies in the first place, and even if I had, I wouldn't have allowed it to be the basis of an actual decision to act. I just happened to be thinking at one point about going to the library, and I happened to remember what some of my mentors had said about giving was, "give to your source of spiritual renewal", and it occurred to me that of all the things I could think of, libraries would have to qualify as a lifelong source of "spiritual" renewal for me.
And then I went, "wow, I could actually do that... I think I would actually dig hanging out with Friends of the Library, getting involved, donating money..." And I felt a warm-fuzzy of being a part of library-ness, and a sense of ownership -- like, I would be able to walk into a library and feel like I owned it, kind of. Very awesome.
No wonder charitable campaigns based on ownership (e.g. of buildings) and participation (e.g. we'll send you pictures and letters of "your" child) are so successful -- it appears that some of the emotional circuits for giving are wired here.
Anyway... now that I'm thinking about it in this way, it seems like the critical factor is making decisions based on the benefits rather than the detriments of the options, and that seems likely something that would influence wealth acquisition and entrepreneurial behavior as well. It's likely that the specific thing I eliminated (the family loyalty to helplessness) was simply something that kept me from routinely making decisions on a benefit-oriented basis. (Because to do such, requires a non-victim outlook.)
All that having been said, I still would prefer to do some experiments, but now at least I have a much more specific hypothesis to test.
You have to listen to them in the process of thinking, and especially pay attention to how they correct the thinking of others.
These are both things that are best done live, or by observing recordings of them interacting with or coaching other people. A speech or talk or book won't tell you much unless you can read between the lines of a story with enough information.
For example, before I started making lots of self-help products, I had a belief that making a product was a hard and complicated thing that had to be done just so. This, even after I heard Matt Furey talk a lot about how easy it was. However, on a teleseminar where he was giving a talk, he started on a side story about how he was going up to Missouri to see this eye doctor, and while there he was going to stop at this other guy's martial arts studio and give a class, and the guy was going to charge people a bunch to come, and give Matt some of the money, but maybe while he was there he would film it, and charge people to see it live over the internet, and sell the DVDs later... and I just had an epiphany.
That epiphany was, "I'm making this way too hard."
So, Matt saying over and over again that "product creation is easy" and "making money is easy" did little to change my thinking. Sure, now, years later, when I hear somebody successful saying something I don't believe or agree with, I pay close attention and I think hard about it -- which is why that "give to your source of spiritual renewal" was something that had been on my mind for a long time.
But even so, the example or experience (even vicarious) of how your model thinks is much more powerful than the mere description of it. The thing that impressed me in Matt's story was not that he was doing all those things, but that he was doing them on the spur of the moment - it was simply, "well, I'm going to be in town, so I thought maybe I'd do this". It was the first time I'd realized how easy it actually could be to make products, and money.
Shortly thereafter, I went out and made my first audio product, and netted about $7K in the next 3 months from it. That experience got me comfortable with the idea of being able to produce monthly workshops, recordings, etc., and ultimately let me quit my day job.
My financial results plateaued, however, and I have been looking for the next mental breakthrough of that variety. Many of my mentors have suggested that each new order of magnitude in financial success requires a different mental adjustment. The good news, I suppose, is that the benefits of each shift expand polynomially. (Which I think may be the word people really mean when they say "exponentially". ;-) )
That reminds me a lot of the difference between positive motivation and negative motivation... you're focusing on what you want to get, rather than what you want to avoid.
Some people, though, are VERY open about their thought process & beliefs, such as the Buffett & Munger duo; also Winston Churchill - a lot of what he wrote about includes himself as a player on the game board. These people are pretty open and honest, and there are others like them.
If whoever you're trying to learn from is highly private or secretive (Steve Jobs comes to mind) you're stuck with second-hand information, though good journalists are able to collect meaningful data samples on pretty much anyone famous.
Does anyone else feel like this just a weird remake of cached thoughts?
Cached thoughts are default answers to questions. Unquestioned defaults are default answers to questions that you don't know exist.
I find even monogamous relationships burdonsomely complicated, and the pool of people I like enough to consider dating is extremely small. I have no moral objections to polyamory, but it makes me tired just thinking about it.
Personally, I find polyamory simpler, mainly because it avoids the biggest problem in monoamory: is this person "good enough" for me to spend all my time in a relationship with them, or should I hold out and wait for someone better? The prospect of trying to make a decision like that makes me tired just thinking about it. :)
I agree: the simplicity or complexity of monogamy vs. polyamory depends on the intuitions and values of the people involved, and the dimension on which we are measure simplicity and complexity. If a relationship structure creates tension, drama, or conflict between or within the people involved, then it becomes emotionally complex.
A monogamous relationship is like a polyamorous relationship, except it has an additional constraint: you can't see other people (well, actually it's a set of more complex constraints, such as when talking to other people or flirting with other people is acceptable). In a polyamorous relationship, both partners are under less constraints, which potentially makes things simpler.
Even though poly relationships may be subject to less constraints with each individual partner, having multiple partners introduces more complexity.
Perhaps the simplest sort of relationship is a relationship that is polyamorous in principle, but where neither partner is actually seeing another person in practice.
I love those relationships. Where you are not seeing other people because you just don't want to.
I struggle with the same question a lot. People seem to different on their acceptance that relationships they attempt might not last, and that they might get rejected, or that their partners might find someone who is a better match. These attitudes aren't inherently related to monogamy and polyamory, but polyamory is probably more consistent with the recognition of the probable transience of most relationships.
I don't think it does avoid this problem. It's nice to know that if someone cute propositions you, you'll be able to say yes, but If you're always wondering if you could do better, you'll put yourself on a hedonic treadmill that will never make you happy. Sometimes you have to say "this is the person, or these are the people, I love; I'm no longer looking for more".
I'm not understanding this. Suppose that you have numerous friends that you care about: would you have to say "these are my friends; I'm not looking for more"? Would you then not be open to making more friends or meeting more people?
While I can understand the problem of never thinking what you have is good enough, I don't see how being committed to improving your relationships and continuing to find more compatible partners causes this problem.
By and large you don't buy houses with your friends. The sort of commitment you make to a life partner of many years is one you can only make to a few people at most.
I see. You have a few slots available and you'd like to fill them with lengthy stable commitments, so preserving stability requires giving up changing the slots. (I was thinking more of short-term and more casual dating relationships, where I don't think this consideration applies.)
In the spirit of the original post: Why not?
I feel that I am naturally monogamous - or possibly just patterned after my parents, who as far as I know are monogamous with one another. But I think that it would only be moderately difficult to perform the mindhacks to be comfortable with some types of polyamory, if the practical obstacles (e.g. how to deal with eventual children, prevent disease, present to the outside world, etc.) were all taken care of to my satisfaction.
I've been in a heterosexual relationship wherein I (but not the other party) had standing permission to have sex with other women, but I didn't find myself in a position to exercise this option in practice. (I did hit on a girl during that relationship, but she was located out of state.) This did not seem that difficult to adjust to psychologically. Possibly, this is because I attached no particular romantic emotion to hypothetical girls I could sleep with; they would serve as the functional equivalent of boyfriend-approved sex toys (whose needs and preferences would be more salient, because of course they'd be people, but nevertheless, they wouldn't occupy the same central role in my mind as an actual girlfriend would.) It's also possible that I would have freaked out completely if I'd actually had the opportunity to have sex with a woman, but this seems unlikely.
My suspicion is that I could also potentially be happy in a polyfaithful stable triad if all of the sub-relationships were virtually or completely free of drama, but more people than that, or appreciable amounts of romance/sex between triad persons and non-triad persons, or more conflict than "almost none", or any other complications, and I'd want to abandon the entire mess and find myself a nice singular partner.
I suspect that part of this inclination in myself is that I want my relationships to be permanent, reliable fixtures in my life. (I haven't managed this yet, but it is a very stable want.) Polyamories of any kind are necessarily more complicated. There are more practical obstacles, more negotiations, more neologistic rules, more outside perplexity, more spawning points for drama, more ways in which the relationship changes over time, and - if the parties involved are all inclined towards polyamory in the first place - more affordances for dissatisfaction within the established limits of the relationship. All of these things make the relationships less likely to still be around for the long haul in a more or less recognizable form, and that's not a desideratum I could give up nearly as easily as "all of my partner's nookie is for my exclusive use".
Agreed on most if not all points.
This seems like the core point. Monogamy isn't necessarily optimal, but it's a good satisficing solution to a bounded rationality problem.
It seems to not satisfy some people, however.
Does your conception of monogamy extend past the Singularity? When you say you want your relationships to be permanent, does that mean you seek an actual eternal commitment as opposed to just human-level permanent?
Actual eternity sounds pretty swell now. I don't know if it'd still sound swell after 500 years. (After that long, I might have my life sorted out well enough that I'd welcome the introduction of some complications.)
As a relatively new visitor to LessWrong, I find myself moderately disturbed by the fact that that was your first thought upon reading the word "permanent".
It wasn't my first thought, but it was something I had been vaguely meaning to ask Alicorn for a while and this was an appropriate opportunity.
I was surprised no one had brought it up sooner. If we're talking about permanence, let's actually talk about what that would mean.
I don't think that any relationship style is the best for people in general, any more than any food is the best-tasting for people in general. However, I do wish that people were more aware of the possibility of polyamory, as well of the fact that many people do fall in love with others even when they're already in a committed, loving relationship with someone.
I've seen too many times the situation where two people are in a relationship, one of them falls into love with a third person, but the committed couple can't talk the matter through with each other simply because they don't even have the concept of someone in a loving relationship falling into love with a third person. It's just automatically assumed that if that happens then something's horribly wrong with the relationship, and the only alternatives are to kill the new love or to abandon the relationship in favor of the only love.
There is indeed something bizarre with the concept of jealousy and one-person-forever ingrained in the common view of "love." This misconception has probably led to a tremendous amount of misery in the form of needlessly shattered relationships.
I don't think it's bizarre at all. Pair-bonding is stronger if more time is spent with a partner. The strongest love will naturally usually be in monogamous relationships, therefore, and so if romantic love is the goal, monogamy is a straightforward answer. Time strengthening your relationship with partner X is time you cannot spend strengthening your relationship with partner Y, except in the unusual case that you, X, and Y are all mutually in love.
Citation needed.
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v7/n10/full/nn1327.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_bonding#Pair_bonding
http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/oxytocin
Those talk about the presence of the pair bond being determined by the presence of oxytocin, but they don't say that it's zero-sum (unless the first linked page gets to that - I've only read about 1/3 of it, but given the topic I doubt it'll be able to draw that conclusion). The first linked page does say something about the presence of a pair bond being potentially affected by time, in that voles can become pairbonded by spending enough time around another vole even without a traditional bondmaking activity, but that doesn't necessarily imply that time has anything to do with the strength of the bond once it's created.
I think your model isn't complex enough to describe the reality of the situation.
Pair bonding can't occur (and continue, since it clearly falls off with time, in humans) if one of the pair isn't present; even if a specific activity were required for pair bonding, this would still apply. There's only so much time for bonding in any given period.
People are complex; I didn't mean to imply that they aren't, or that no people can thrive in polyamorous relationships. That's not the way I'd bet, though, given a random person. In any case, you appear to be suggesting that pair bonding could be a single event or binary state, which is actually simpler than my model, where continued time spending is necessary to continue and/or deepen the bond.
You're forgetting the (very likely) possibility of hitting diminishing returns at some point. If you want to maximize the amount of romantic love and there are diminishing returns, then it pays off to diversify at some point. Polyamorous people have also reported experiences where having a second relationship actually strengthens their first relationship, even if the three were not all in love.
Furthermore, you are presuming that people can just choose to spend all their time with a single partner, and any time spent with a second partner is gone from the first one. This is not so. For instance, suppose that A lives in San Fransisco where B also lives, but because of their job, A has to take the occasional extended trips to Moscow where C lives. That means A and C can see each other on occasions when it simply wouldn't have been possible for A and B to see.
Or suppose that person A prefers spending nearly all of their free time in the company of other people, while their partner B prefers to spend half of their free time doing things on their own or with other people. In that case, A also dating person C who has the similar preferences as B will maximize everyone's enjoyment and romance.
I would be very suspicious of claims that, in general, the strength of a romance would be a monotonically increasing function of time spent together. Most couples do not want to spend all their timed glued to each other, at least not after the initial NRE has worn off.
Pair bonding is also commonly believed to increase with sexual intercourse.
I have more sex with my partner if she's got another partner as well, variety is the spice and all that.
So even taking your statement as a given (because I have no real dispute with it, it seems pretty consistent with my experience) there are other factors at play.
Some of my relationships are monogamous. The main advantage to them is that they take less time and effort. They can also reduce drama
Unfortunately monogamy involves creating an artificial monopoly on physical and emotional intimacy. The problems with monopolies that you learn in economics class apply to relationships too and constitute or cause a lot of the 'drama' of relationships. The Nash equilibrium in games modelling monopolies are very different from those without a monopoly and human instincts often reflect that difference depending on context.
This is counter-intuitive but I find it reasonably accurate. On a related note studies show that women orgasm more often and more powerfully when their partner has been with an other woman even if they are not consciously aware of this fact.
How in the world do you ethically perform a study that shows this?
Don't know, but the whole "double blind" part sounds kinda fun. :P
Err... Oops. I just went to google to try to find the relevant references. Let's just say that anything you can find on that topic on google would constitute "generalising from fictional evidence".
Take a group of women who are not in monogamous relationships and who are having sex with men who have other partners. Randomly assign half to group A and half to group B. Take one partner for each woman. Instruct the partners of the women in group A to not have sex with any other women for two weeks, and instruct the partners of the women in group B to have sex with their other partners frequently for two weeks. Ask the women to self-report how pleasurable they find the sex, and how often and powerfully they orgasm. Tell everyone participating in the study about this procedure, and get their consent to it.
It seems like finding a statistically useful number of such scientifically-inclined, polyamorous couples would be quite a challenge.
This sounds plausible, though no immediate examples of this leap to mind. Can you give some example?
If you control someone's access to a resource, in this case sex, dating, and romantic interaction, you can set whatever price you want for it.
Real world relationships (and real world commericial monopolies, for that matter) would suggest that this isn't literally true. The literal truth is that you can set a higher price than you could get if you didn't have a monopoly.
There are obviously limitations, humans being what they are and all. From what I can tell people can go to more extreme lengths in real world relationships than real world commercial monopolies. When played well people can be made to give everything they have. It's seriously pathetic, and painful to watch.
Some people seem to find it hilarious (as in the movie "Saving Silverman,") at least in fiction. I wonder if there's a Trope for that.
Speak not Trope's name lest ye summon it.
To be more accurate, you can set whatever price you want, and the other person needs to choose between paying the price and ending the monopoly (by violating the monogamy agreement or ending the relationship). But in the real world people are often very reluctant to end long-standing relationships quickly.
I probably should have said that you can probably get a higher price than you could get in the absence of a monopoly.
The very fact that 'sent to the doghouse' exists as a cliché is the most obvious illustration. I'll add that this kind of thing is often bad for both parties. Our instincts aren't there to make us happy, they are there to gain power, resources and reproductive advantage. Using sex and emotional intimacy to gain power is a common failure mode in relationships and can make both people miserable to a lesser or greater degree but it does work.
(This fact is completely bizarre to me. If anyone tries to punish me to gain control or coerce me in any way they instantly lose any influence they had over me based on goodwill and I automatically feel free to use any or every means available to get what I want. That is, they have absolutely no ethical rights until such time as they are not coercing me. But I learned in primary school that other people are often quite willing to be controlled by punishment.)
I react similarly to attempts at coercion. Is this perhaps an asp thing?
Do you use asp to refer to Aspergers' ?(I sometimes see 'aspie' but haven't encountered asp).
It is certainly in there among the big cluster of correlated traits and labels that includes Aspergers' syndrome and often ADHD. I don't necessarily qualify for an Aspie label although I quite probably would if I had less IQ. I do know that i would never attempt to coerce any of my friends, lovers or enemies that I identify as having Aspergers'. I wouldn't expect it to give good results.
Mind you I don't coerce 'typical' others as much as is optimal either. The work of the mind projection fallacy. I have to remind myself that others are 'spineless pushovers' (my perspective) or 'do not have an attitude problem' (another common perspective).
I use 'asp' to refer to both autism-spectrum and archetypical Serpent qualities, because of the pun and the overlap.
Ahh, I may just have to adopt that name. All too apt!
More like a self-esteem thing. Nearly everyone whom I have ever known and respected (and, as far as I know, everyone whom these people know and respect) reacts in that way, and that group includes a lot of people who are as far from aspies as possible.
People who were sincerely friendly and submissive towards their abusers got called many disrespectful names, depending on the context: sluts, boot-lickers, whipped boys, pet doggies, etc.
For monogamous relationships, the cost of having an additional partner is much higher: you have to forgo your current relationship, and possibly experience drama and a period of being partnerless. Polyamorous relationships mitigate the cost of having an additional partner.
As a result, a monogamist knows that his or her partner is limited to them for the time being, because the costs of ending a monogamous relationship can be so heavy. A monogamous partner gets a lot of leeway to slack off, take their partner for granted, fail to satisfy their partner, or be a jerk, just as long as this behavior doesn't create a cost to the other partner that is heavier than the projected costs of a breakup.
Monogamist partners have the ability to partially shut out their competitors. When you know that your partner isn't able to to sample other potential partners for better matches, you don't have so much of an incentive to fulfill your partner's preferences.
Of course, polyamorous partners may also have leeway in how well they satisfy their partners' preferences, because the partner doesn't expect to be satisfied in every area by them. Yet the polyamorous person who isn't satisfying a certain preference of their partner isn't expecting that their partner stays stuck in that dissatisfaction, because the partner can go elsewhere, at least in principle.
The trick would seem to be trying to get the best of both worlds. In many cases the game (in this case the temptation to slack off and let yourself go) is played unconsciously. Commitment and trust, however, tend to be higher level features. The best lovers are, by hypothesis, able to foster security and trust while at the same time keeping competitive instincts in play. The impulse to satisfy all the partner's desires before they stray. The spark.
del
The Bell System monopolized telephone service in the U.S. because of the enormous cost (stringing wires to every customer) any competitor would incur to start to compete with it. (Later, U.S. regulators guaranteed its monopoly but imposed conditions on it, including if I am not mistaken the rates ("tarriffs") it could charge, so let us restrict our attention to the earlier "unregulated" period.)
IBM monopolized the market for computers in the 1960s and early 1970s because of the largeness of the cost (e.g., retraining the programmers, operators and users employed by the customer) for the customer to switch to a different vendor.
Yes, since a large part of the benefit a man derives from a sexual relationship depends on the parties knowing each other really well, the time it takes for 2 lovers to get to know each other imposes a significant switching cost on the man and a significant cost on any woman who would try to compete with the initial woman, but the costs do not seem high enough (especially if the man already has female friends and coworkers) to warrant the use of the word "monopoly" and more importantly, the woman in the relationship faces costs just as high, so the strategic situation is much more symmetrical than it is between the Bell System and a consumer wanting telephone service.
So, "monopolist" is not a good choice of word, IMHO.
del
The prupose of monogamus marraige is to ensure male productivity.
In a way monomgamus norm is sexual socialism for men. Almost everyone has a wife, almost everyone has a child. It redistributes sexual power away from women and the top 10% of men and gives it to the remaining 90% of men, forcing us into K selection, slowing the pace of evolution and equalizing outcomes.
Whose purpose?
Konkvistador:
That's a good way of putting it -- and it leads us to the fascinating question of why people who express great concern about inequalities in material wealth under economic laissez-faire almost invariably don't show any concern for the even more extreme inequalities in matters of love and sex that inevitably arise under sexual laissez-faire. I think a correct answer to this question would open the way for a tremendous amount of insight about the modern society, and human nature in general.
Michel Houellebecq has an interesting paragraph about this issue in his novel Whatever:
This is a poor comparison. Individual units of money are interchangeable and useful only as means to acquire some desirable end, whereas individual sexual encounters are unique, have many different kinds of value, and are desirable ends in and of themselves. (As a side note, excluding love from any discussion of monogamy and its alternatives is already a substantial deviation from reality; a cursory mention is not sufficient.)
Inequalities of material wealth have killed many millions of people and will kill many millions more. Inequalities in matters of love and sex have not.
Governments can redistribute wealth (via taxation) without causing great suffering to any one person. Redistributing sex would require institutional rape on a massive scale.
Modern society is generally opposed to rape. This should not be a striking or insightful conclusion.
I've actually been thinking that polyamory would be closer to sexual socialism in increasing people's chances of getting a partner. Limiting ourselves exclusively to heterosexual people for a moment, with an uneven amount of men and women, monogamy guarantees that some people will have to remain outside a long-term commitment. In a polyamorous environment, where people can freely choose to form pairs, triads, etc., this is much easier to avoid.
The biggest disadvantage of poly I perceive is that it increases the total drama in your life. If you're monogamous, then so long as things are good between you and your one partner, you're good. If you're poly, drama can come into your life via problems with any of your partners, or if you or they have problems with any of their partners.
On the up side, with poly you can just focus your time on attention on the relationship that isn't dysfunctional at any given time. In that way of looking at it a monogamous relationship constitutes a single point of failure. Of course saying no to 'drama' takes a lot of maturity and strong boundaries to master.
In general I've found that it's the relationship that isn't going right that most needs time and attention. Of course it helps a lot that you can draw strength from other partners during that time, but this is a role that friends can also fulfil.
In my experience, you can say no to drama all you like, but sometimes it comes around anyway, and to care for those you love sometimes you just have to deal with it!
Sometimes. Sometimes time and attention is exactly what it doesn't need.
It depends somewhat on what we mean by 'drama' and on how experienced you are at handling emotional situations in a healthy way.
Edit: What pjeby said.
"Deal with" is not necessarily equal to "get involved in", though. The "saying no" in this case would be saying no to the latter, rather than the former.
Even before reading this, I was going to say that I think that my monogamous partner and I have a strong enough relationship that we could become poly if we wanted without the expectation that our relationship would dissolve. However, we strongly prefer our low-drama relationship to the high-drama situations in which poly friends seem to thrive. The parent just confirms this judgment.
Warning: broad, slightly unfounded generalizations forthcoming. But I think they're insightful nonetheless.
I think that most people's beliefs are largely determined by reward, power, and status. I want to state explicitly that I don't endorse these social standards, but I think they're pretty solidly established.
For virtually all women, sleeping with multiple men is not high-status. Being with a man who is seeing other women is a marker that she can't get him to "commit" to her, and is therefore somehow deficient. For a substantial majority of men, they are not sufficiently attractive enough (overall, not specifically physically) to entice women into such a lifestyle. In other words, because women feel like they take a huge status hit being with a poly man, your average woman will only consider such a relationship with a man who might otherwise be out of her league. Thus, since most men date women roughly within their own league, most men do not have the opportunity to pursue this.
Men at the top, on the other hand, are probably chasing tail more than they're chasing love or romance. Also, at least based on my knowledge of such men, they don't view female infidelity as being OK - having your woman sleep with other men is definitely a status hit for any man - so it's easier for them to engage in non-consensual non-monogamy than polyamory. This is also "efficient" in the sense that it gives them someone to manage their household/come home to, and some thrills on the side. Polyamory may lack those practical benefits, and is difficult to justify in a social setting for most professions, particularly high-paying ones (that are not entertainment). I would imagine showing up with two dates to business functions, or different alternating dates, might negatively influence one's chance of making partner or the like.
Other obvious obstacles include the legal system and some of the practicalities of child rearing, but I really think the status structure explains a lot of people's reticence to consider the lifestyle. That, and, of course, jealousy.
Polyamory is relatively common in science fiction fandom, though I think it's common more by contrast with the mainstream society. [1]
Possible status implications: Fans get status by not being like non-fans-- specifically by pursuing some kinds of pleasure more than they do. Or it might be affiliation with Robert Heinlein, in which case we should see a generational effect.
Null hypothesis: Fans aren't more likely to be polyamorous than non-fans, they're just less discreet about it.
[1]Fandom seems to have a lot of pagans and libertarians. Actually, as far as I can tell, neither are all that common.
This is reminding me of a bit in a Samuel Delany essay. This was written some decades ago-- he mentioned that he was apt to overestimate the proportion of women in a crowd.
It seems to me that seeing how accurately people can estimate the proportion of various easily identified groups in a crowd could be a test of background levels of prejudice.
This is an excellent comment, which gets to the heart of the matter. One point that should be added, however, is that there are some important considerations here in addition to the status structure.
Namely, when people get into relationships -- and especially serious long-term relationships, particularly those that are expected to produce children -- they obviously must use some heuristics to estimate the likely future behavior of their partner. Clearly, people's past behavior provides some powerful rational evidence here -- and like in many other cases, the best possible rules for evaluating this evidence might have the appearance of crude stereotypes with plenty of individual exceptions, but nevertheless, it is entirely rational to stick to them. Moreover, a troublesome fact for dedicated egalitarians is that, from a purely rational point of view, these rules are not symmetrical for men and women (not least because men and women tend to find different behaviors acceptable and desirable, so even the goals of their inferences are not the same).
Of course, these considerations are heavily entangled with the matters of status here. However, the important point is that unlike in those cases where status is assigned to different behaviors in a mostly arbitrary way due to higher-order signaling strategies and locked equilibriums, when it comes to people's history of sex and relationships, low-status markers have a significant overlap with things that predict (in the statistical sense of the word) problematic or undesirable future behavior.
I suspect that polyamory, or monogamy, may be a deeply wired preference for some people, and not something that is easily changed. For someone who is wired to be polyamorous, these status considerations seem less relevant or applicable. There still may be the risk or fear of social disapproval, but someone who is wired to be polyamorous is probably less likely to feel a personal status hit from having their partners sleep with other people.
This seems to miss the point, which is that polyamory is a preference or orientation, not something that women need to be "enticed" into by high status or attractive men. (Compare: a lesbian would probably prefer a woman to a high status man.)
Another thing that happens extremely often: A male who is already sexually active with multiple partners just appears a whole heap more attractive so women end up in a relationship with them more readily. If you have a couple of partners already you have to work hard to stop yourself from getting more.
"Status" as you are using it here is meaningless. There is a polyamorous subculture whose members are largely indifferent to an outsider's perception of their status; as is generally the case with subcultures, status is only relevant within the subculture.
And in the polyamorous subculture, having multiple stable relationships is high status.
Furthermore, not all people are terribly sensitive to status. I find that trait attractive in potential romantic partners, so I'm quite safe in ignoring considerations of status entirely.
As someone who isn't terribly sensitive to status, I often find this site's emphasis on it puzzling. Have you seen this post for further discussions unpacking status?
They're just doing it to show off.
That wasn't just a joke, though to judge by the upvotes, it's a better joke than I thought it was.
Telling people that their motives are less reputable than they thought is a way of lowering their status and raising your own. It's tiresome from Marxists and Freudians, and at least for me, too much of it produces a feeling of intellectual claustrophobia. Motive-mongering can prove anything, involves unproven guesses about what other people are driven by, and leaves out major parts of the world.
In particular, status is about non-rational motives for acceding to people. If everyone was completely run by status considerations, nothing useful would be getting done. (There's that Gladwell essay I can't find which suggests that status competition is especially pernicious when people have nothing useful to do, as in high school, prisons, and the court of Louis XIV.)
Status is an important feature of how people live with each other, and it makes perfect sense to want enough skill at it to live a good life and accomplish what you care about.
However, there's got to be a complex interaction between status (some but not all of which is based on proving that you can afford to waste effort and resources) and accomplishment. I've brought up the subject a few times, but I don't seem to be able to get a grip on it, and no one else seems to have anything to say about it. Is it a non-problem, only interesting to me, or so hard that there's just nothing to say at this point?
A couple of questions about status-- how do you keep from being blinded by other people's high status? How do you notice valuable people who aren't good at status?
You may be thinking of Paul Graham. In "Why Nerds are Unpopular" he says:
NancyLebovitz:
It is a very difficult and complex question, which can't be discussed in its full generality in a single comment. It certainly involves numerous perplexing and counterintuitive phenomena where it's hard to even begin analyzing the situation coherently.
Well, the only honest answers to both questions would be -- sometimes, possibly even often, I don't. But admitting that status is often a key force in shaping our beliefs that we nevertheless see as products of flawless logic and clear moral imperatives is a necessary condition to even begin disentangling our situation.
Blueberry:
Well, that's sort of like saying that you're not terribly sensitive to the issue of eating and drinking -- maybe you really don't think about it much overall, but it's still an essential part of how you function within the human society.
Eating is rarely used as an explanation for anything around here, whereas the word "status" often appears in proposed answers to various questions: why hasn't there been a male counterpart to the feminist movement, why are most women monogamous, and so on.
My experience in the past few months has been that in many cases, such explanations turn out to be vacuous, the statements made in support of them (e.g. "women are institutionally lower status than men") readily debunked, or at best true only if you pick precisely the right one out of the many meanings of "status". (So that, to make an effective argument, you should really use the more precise term in the first place - prestige, reputation, wealth, political power, or what have you.)
The term often masks sloppy thinking of the virtus dormitiva variety: it replaces a question about a puzzling or poorly understood phenomenon with an "answer" that is really just a bit of jargon, and fails to advance our understanding by identifying a regularity relating more primitive objects of our experience. (In the case of the feminist movement, "who has the right to vote" turns out to be that kind of regularity, for instance: it's not even particularly hard to improve on "status" as an explanation.)
I have reached a point where I now suspect the mere appearance of "status" in an argument on LW is a useful heuristic to detect sloppy thinking.
Your dark arts don't work on me. Eating? Why should eating be used as an explanation for everything? It's just not as relevant. In fact, in many conversations using the word status I could instead describe the relevant insights in terms of eating. It would basically involve writing a paragraph or two of detailed explanation and using search and replace on all instances. But I shouldn't do this. We use words to represent higher level constructs because it saves time and allows us to fit a greater amount of understanding into our limited ~7 slots of working memory.
How can I reply to that except with a clear contradiction? "We don't use 'eating' therefore we shouldn't use 'status'" is sloppy thinking. Using the word 'status' to refer to a whole body of strongly correlated behaviours and the interactions thereof in social animals is merely practical.
Morendil has been pressing a "don't say status" agenda here for over a year, often with the claim "you can't make any testable predictions based on 'status'". I have previously made an offhand attempt to humor that implied challenge by reference to body language in humans (as an example of the class social animal). The response to body language signals predictably varies according to objective measures of 'status', such as job, age, connectedness in a social map and even the most primitive metric of popularity. If I recall correctly Morendil's response was to simply deny the data. That is simply not an option for me.
If I didn't understand status, if I extracted the 'status node' from my map because it was sloppy, then I would be ill equipped to survive in the world. The only way you can expect to succeed in the world without understanding status is if you already have a strong unconscious competence in the related practical skills. Without that you can expect to:
No, I will use the word 'status' whenever it applies and I will defy any accusations that to do so is in any way evidence of sloppy thinking.
Indeed. May I note I wasn't the one to drag nutrition into this argument? As far as I can tell you're echoing my objection.
Fact check: I registered around mid-september, and started voicing my skepticism of (some) status-related claims in early March.
But I'll choose to take your observation as flattering - my writings on the topic must have been memorable to loom that large. :)
Still, it's grossly misleading to summarize my views as "don't say status". I am not yet arrogant enough to ban a word that boldly. However I'll have to agree with Eliezer that "concepts are not useful or useless of themselves. Only usages are correct or incorrect."
I'm pretty sure you would agree too.
My "agenda", if I have one, is to better understand how the world works. If the concept "status" can be recruited in this effort, I'll be glad to use it. I went to the trouble of procuring the Johnstone book, of scouring the Net for explanations that I couldn't find here when I asked for them, and of writing up my observations and conclusions.
Are you alluding to the exchange starting here? It's the only one I can recall matching your description, but I don't see what in my response warrants the label "denying the data".
You have a lot more nodes that are more precise and useful in various situations, I have started enumerating them: prestige, reputation, popularity, wealth, social class, political power...
I have been pointing to (what I believe to be) diseased thinking about issues that activate the "status" node, and asking people to raise the quality of their explanations one notch by tabooing the term. I have rarely seen that done satisfactorily, and I have yet to be pointed to an authoritative source on "status theory", showing good reasons to keep a "status" node.
No, if you think that those concepts can be used to compensate for an artificial prohibition against 'status' then you do not understand either the term or a broad aspect of human behavior. If people limit themselves to those nodes because a 'status' node is forbidden to them then they can be expected to:
Things like prestige and wealth are useful concepts in their own right but to limit your thinking to only considering each of them independently is to impair your ability to form critical inferences about general patterns of human behavior.understand They are related concepts and more importantly human intuitions and behavioral instincts are integrally tied up in that relationship. A word to represent that area in a map of reality is critical.
There is a difference between tabooing a broad concept in a specific instance for the purpose of exploring a narrow topic in more detail and just plain tabooing to whatever extent you can. The latter is an epistemic parasite that needs to be crushed mercilessly whenever it appears. The below quote is a representative example:
What you're quoting me as saying is markedly different from saying that I wish for an outright ban on the word "status". (I think you're digging yourself into a hole, and I suggest you ought to stop digging.)
I wish we'd go back to specifics, for instance where I pointed out that "institutional status" was a poor explanation for why there hasn't been a male counterpart of the feminist movement, and offered an alternative that was at least supported by historical facts (women organizing as a movement to seek the right to vote).
Another possible explanation is that a lot of the disproportionate mistreatment of men is by other men, so a simple gender split can't address the problem.
I wouldn't say that you did and even if you did expressing that wish would be counter-productive to the goal of achieving your desired influence. What I am countering, to whatever extent possible, is the introduction of trivial social pressure that impairs the ability of participants to develop a full understanding on how status influences the behavior of social mammals, particularly humans.
I disagree (and mildly object) to your claim, but not to the gist of the suggestion. My goal here is not to persuade you but to present a counter a counter to (what is in my judgment an extremely mild) toxic influence on the generalized conversation. This is not served by extended wrangling in one instance but rather by persistent response whenever such influence surfaces.
I don't recall whether I commented on the topic but I share your objection to that usage. Any given concept should be used when, and only when, it is the most appropriate explanation for the context (that is, it balances brevity, clarity and accuracy).
Misusing the concept of 'status' when it doesn't really help understanding things makes it harder to usefully draw inferences on things that actually rely on human status instincts in much the same way as associating the term in general with Bad Things. In this regard our purposes are mostly in alignment.
A fair reply, and I retract my objection to that argument, agreeing that it is not relevant either way.
Morendil:
Trouble is, often we don't have a more precise term. Some kinds of status that are immensely important in human social relations can't be reduced to any such concrete and readily graspable everyday terms, and insisting on doing so will lead to completely fallacious conclusions -- it is akin to that proverbial drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost.
Of course, far better and more accurate explanations could be formulated if we had a precise technical vocabulary to describe all aspects of human status games. Unfortunately, we don't have it, and we still have no accurate model of significant parts of these interactions either. But a vague-sounding conclusion is still better than a spuriously precise, but ultimately false and misleading one.
A good illustration is the extensive technical vocabulary used in PUA literature. Before this terminology was devised, there was simply no way to speak precisely about numerous aspects of male-female attraction -- and attempts to shoehorn discussions and explanations into what can be precisely described with ordinary everyday words and concepts have misled many people into disastrously naive and wrong conclusions about these issues. Unfortunately, developing a more general technical terminology that would cover all human status considerations is a difficult task waiting to be done.
If you believe that my explanations have been vacuous or based on factual or logical errors, then you're always welcome to point out these problems. I have surely committed a great many intellectual errors in my comments here, but I think that failure to pursue arguments patiently in detail when challenged is not one of them. As for others, well, I don't speak for others, nor do they speak for me.
Pardon me, but I find it somewhat impolite to claim that something I said is "easily debunked" when nobody seems to have debunked or even seriously attacked it in the first place. HughRistik did ask me to clarify what I meant by institutional status, but after I did, nobody challenged that. If you disagree with my response, please reply to that one directly.
ETA: Though I do find it amusing that I'm making a blatantly status-conserving move in a discussion about status. :)
OK, I'll withdraw "debunked" as applied to that particular example, until I've had a chance to look at it more closely.
I stand by the claim that the alternative explanation (feminism as continuation of the women's right to vote movement) sticks closer to the original query, so what was debunked was at least your claim to obviousness of your status-based explanation.
WrongBot:
But how much of the status within the subculture is a reflection of the same traits that enhance one's status in the mainstream society? Honestly, I don't think the answer is zero even for subcultures much more extreme than polyamorists.
Moreover, since subcultures don't function as closed autarkic worlds (except for some religious sects), their members still have to struggle to make a living and maintain their functionality within the mainstream society. Are you really saying that people in polyamourous relationships are largely indifferent to how successful and well-adjusted their partners are in the broader society outside the subculture?
I certainly don't doubt this, but surely the traits and skills that enable one to elicit and maintain attraction from multiple concurrent partners in the polyamorous subculture are not altogether different from those that make one attractive to potential partners for more traditional arrangements in the mainstream society. Or would you really claim the opposite?
That sounds like an extremely strong claim. If you started constantly behaving in ways that would tremendously lower your status among people in the mainstream society, do you think that this wouldn't affect your status and prospects in the polyamorous community at all?
To make this comment a bit more concrete, imagine if you (or those around you) suddenly started picking their noses incessantly, farting a lot, and speaking like rednecks with no conception of how to conjugate english verbs.
Even better: suppose you started behaving in ways that are commonly associated with the epithet "dorky." To make the point especially relevant, focus on those ways that are characteristic of large numbers of people who live peaceful, productive, and honest lives, but suffer from social ineptitude.
"Not terribly sensitive to status" isn't the same thing as completely indifferent to it or committed to lowering one's status.
I think a great many people aren't working to raise their status, even if they're making some efforts to keep it from being lowered.
One of my friends who's in a triad has said she doesn't think that polyamory is consistent with maximum achievement-- intimate relationships with more people simply takes more time and attention than being in a two-person relationship.
NancyLebovitz:
Trouble is, many important status-enhancing behaviors are as natural as breathing air for some people, but mysterious, unnatural, and hard to pull off for others. People of the latter sort have to commit significant thinking and effort if they wish to achieve the same results that others get by simply going with the flow.
When people whose natural behavior is decently good status-wise say that they're "not terribly sensitive to status," it's as if someone with good language skills said he was not terribly sensitive to fluency of speech, without stopping to consider the fate of folks suffering from noticeable speech impediments. The analogy is not perfect, in that many more people suffer from impediments in social behavior than in speech, but the basic point holds: just like generating fluent speech, navigating through human status games is a task of immense complexity, which however some people can handle adequately or even superbly without any conscious effort -- which can make them think that there isn't really anything significant about it, if they haven't stopped to consider the problems of those who aren't as lucky in that regard.
So, yes, lots of people who don't suffer from status-related problems aren't investing effort in raising or maintaining their status, in the same sense that they aren't investing effort in maintaining their language skills. For them, the hard work is done by their brains at subconscious levels, and manifests itself as spontaneous adequate behavior. That, however, doesn't mean that the whole issue is vacuous, no more than the fact that most people speak normally without conscious effort (and some with great eloquence) means that linguistics is a vacuous science.
For the record, I was diagnosed with Asperger's about a decade back; believe me when I say that I'm one of those people who's had to "commit significant thinking and effort if they wish to achieve the same results that others get by simply going with the flow."
If anything, I'd say that having to deal with status in a conscious and deliberate way has caused my status-indifference: I have a very clear picture of how shallow that game is. I only play it when I need to.
I'd agree with Nancy that polyamory isn't consistent with maximum achievement. Devoting resources to intimate relationships always has that effect, even if you only have one at a time; polyamory necessarily requires more of an investment. It's a trade-off that I'm more than happy to make, but your priorities may not agree. It's (potentially) a good reason not to be interested in polyamory.
del
This is a generalization, but men who can stick to their principles are generally more attractive.
Look at it this way: if you can actually "get away with" having relationships that meet your preference, then this is social proof that you are being judged valuable enough ("in the marketplace") to be worth having non-exclusively.
Conversely, if you accede to a request for monogamy, this is evidence that you do not consider yourself that valuable, or that you are unable to get other people to agree with your value assessment.
In short: acceding to a request for monogamy in overt contradiction of your preference is a statement of low self-esteem/confidence, and would be expected to reduce your attractiveness even to the person who made the request for monogamy.
Did the passion in those relationships increase or decrease following your concession? I would guess it decreased, and by more than would have occurred had you not made explicit your preference for polyamory.
If you want polyamory, you'll have to make it a principle, not a preference, and (IMO) state it before someone is even in the position of considering a relationship with you. In this way, merely interacting with you expresses a tacit commitment to at least consider it, and as your perceived attractiveness increases, so will the apparent reasonableness of your principle.
And, your attractiveness increases with your perceived willingness to sacrifice for your principles: this is a highly-valued trait, and a big part of why firefighters, soldiers, doctors, etc. are considered more attractive (than the same person without the role), even though an aspect of their sacrifice is decreased availability to their mates.
Edit: fixed typo of "over" for "overt"
Agree and add that it is also possible to have a 'principle' that commitment to a monogamous relationship is something that you do at times but that it is a big step that really means something in relationships that takes time and a particularly special connection. When things must be earned we experience them as so much more valuable.
A caveat is that principles, particularly more complicated principles, should never be lived (or signalled) in a way that is at all wishy-washy.
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That is a nice sounding story that is no doubt handy to illustrate a principle. But I basically don't buy it at all. Those roles are highly valued because they are high in status, come with power and are an established part of the authority system of the culture. Perceived willingness to sacrifice for your principles is in this case definitely not a (positive) contributing factor to the attractiveness of those high status roles.
I suspect it's not general willingness to sacrifice for principles-- it's willingness to sacrifice for values that the society agrees with.
This is closer to the mark, but I still assert that the sacrifice is not a positive contributor to the appeal.
If you take two roles with equal power, equal authority, equal recognition as 'official' and equal reliance on physical prowess then the one that requires the least sacrifice will be the most attractive. Having to give up resources to get your power is a strict negative in the signal it sends.
This is obviously not related to what those in a given high status role will say or even believe about the appeal of their station (and the dictator at the top says he's only doing things for the greater good too.)
Sacrifice is something that you (the hypothetical aspirant for power and status) convince others is the right thing to do, that you declare sincerely is the way to success but you never actually do yourself if you can avoid it. It is far more efficient and effective to simply declare that you have made sacrifice and implicitly threaten physical or social punishment for anyone who questions your word. Observers will be attracted both to the obvious lack of sacrifice that you have to make and to your ability to have other people go along with your make believe. (This process is best left unconscious. Acknowledging it explicitly is so banal.)
It's not the sacrifice, it's the willingness to sacrifice, that thereby demonstrates commitment - that one is capable of protecting and providing for one's partners.
This is a distinct and separate measure from the amount of resources one has control or influence over. If you have a lot of resources, but are stingy, then you might actually be less suitable than if you had few resources but were willing to risk them all on something you believe in... as long as your potential mate believes they can get you to believe in them.
Are you kidding? What actual power does a firefighter or soldier have, at the bottom rung of the power structure? How about an EMT or a rescue um, tech? (What do they call people who rescue people?) What about lifeguards?
Conflating everything with "status" or "power" isn't useful here. There are occupations that don't give you extra respect or deference in society at large, and yet still have the increased attractiveness due to association with principle. Artists and musicians, for example, can often get this attractiveness bonus even if they lack any power or status in society at large... and in fact, the choice to sacrifice money or power for their creative principles is often a driving factor in that attractiveness.
The power over life and death. Being one of those who enforces the rules rather than the one enforced upon (with all the benefits that entails - see anything by Robin with the keyword 'homo hippocritus').
I don't accept your premises regarding artists either. I think it will be better for us to simply acknowledge that we fundamentally disagree on this particular topic. It has been my observation that many of your presented beliefs are better optimised for being healthy beliefs to instil in people than as raw descriptions of reality. (That too I obviously don't expect you to agree on, although I don't mean it as a slight. It is a valuable role, just not compatible with my thinking.)
Actually, these professions have vastly more rules imposed upon them. And what rules does an EMT enforce? "Power of life and death" doesn't make a lot of sense here, nor does it make sense for artists or musicians.
Your statements don't reflect a consistent model here, as it doesn't have any consistent predictions about what professions should and shouldn't be considered attractive. Instead, you just change your explanations, or avoid giving an explanation entirely. (e.g. "I don't accept your premises regarding artists").
OTOH, I'm making a testable prediction: an observable increase on average in indicators of attraction, admiration, or arousal (facial expression & autonomic responses) among women hearing about men who are in some profession that involves personal sacrifice for others or for a principle, controlled for whether the profession has any actual societal status or power, and provided that the principles or persons sacrificed for are not directly and personally opposed by the listener as a matter of vengeance or personal principles.
For example, I would predict that participation in say, a Big Brother program, or other volunteer activity would make a man be considered more attractive than a person who did not so volunteer, provided that their other attractiveness factors were considered.
I do not predict that power, status, an so on are not attractive; I'm just saying they're orthogonal to the element of ability to effectively precommit, whether it's to sacrifice for others or for one's principles. Either way, evidence of ability to successfully follow through on a precommitment is attractive in a person.
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True - what I said had an implied pre-commitment that they would not be attractive to you (from the initial meeting forward) if they were the kind of person who would make such an ultimatum. So, there's definitely a first-mover advantage from the game theory perspective as well. ;-)
Interesting, really... there are a number of PUA tactics (the entire subject of "qualifying" and "disqualifiying") that could be considered relationship negotiation via precommitment to not be even interested in the first place, unless one's own criteria are met. I don't know if anybody's actually explicitly discussed those things in terms of game theory per se, but that'd be an interesting topic.
Yes - but that's when it's his idea because he's so in love that no other woman will suffice to interest him, not because she gave him an ultimatum to give up pursuing those interests.
Ah. Different subject, then, I suppose.
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'Usually will not'. Identity, affiliation with a subculture can override this consideration at times.
Um, what about all those married guys cheating on their wives? Not all their partners are deceived about the men's marital status, and of those not deceived, surely not all can be dismissed as not being "hot girls" in your rating system, nor can all the men in such situations be dismissed as "super-alpha".
So, your belief has too high a confidence rating, unless your definition of the "hot" set includes a term for "won't date me except exclusively", or your definition of the "super alpha" set is defined so as to exclude yourself. ;-)
(That being said, I'm not arguing that you change your belief or behavior instrumentally -- just pointing out that, epistemically, your map is out of alignment with the territory.)
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Good point. I'd almost forgotten that one. That convenience is a huge benefit.
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Is it about friends with benefits?
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-fart-
Couldn't you have just agreed to always use condoms with other people, but not each other, for roughly the same amount of protection in a non-exclusive relationship? ("Roughly" because condoms aren't perfect.)
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I would guess that poly relationships where one partner prefers monogamy, but is "settling" for polyamory to be with a particular person, are not likely to work well (and vice versa). But this ignores that some people, even "cute" people, may actually prefer polyamory, even if they can get monogamy.
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This sets off my alarm bells. While evidence for such an anti-egalitarian position is possible and may even be correct, your assertion is general enough that it requires a great deal of supporting evidence. And such evidence is not generally acknowledged in the academic literature on the topic, so far as I've read, so I'm doubly skeptical.
You're also equating status with physical attractiveness, which is demonstrably not true, especially in men (in modern American society).
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While this may be an accurate description in general of how people have evolved to behave, it's not "polyamory" as I understand it. Polyamory can be thought of as a conscious, explicit attempt to fight these natural tendencies.
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Polyamory as popularly defined is basically a kick in the teeth to evolution. The reason that I brought it up here in the first place is that it is an attempt to use rationality to overcome perceived deficiencies in how we've evolved to form relationships. More than anything else, poly is seeing a love triangle in a movie and demanding to know why "both" isn't an option.
Polygamy by definition involves relationships in which one man has several wives. Polyamory excludes those relationships as unegalitarian (generally; there are always exceptions). You can continue to argue about evolutionary psychology if you want, but that field can never tell us what we should do, only who we are (and even then it's very easy to get it wrong).
Not necessarily. The fraternal polyandry practiced in Tibet is polygamy, and it would still be polygamy even if it were the only kind of polygamy in the world. You seem to mean "polygyny".
Thank you for the correction; I was indeed speaking of polygyny.
The principle of my point still holds for polygamy, however. Polyandry is no more egalitarian than polygyny; any relationship in which only one person is permitted to have other partners lies outside polyamory's accepted definition.
I wish that people making such sweeping generalizations such as these would remember to note that these are statistical trends, and not necessarily applicable to any two specific individuals.
To clarify the 'degree' relationship I should add that the relationship is not linear. The optimal status for the man to have is slightly higher but not too much. In fact, when the perceptions of status gap between the partners is too great the guy is well served by raising the girl's status or slightly lowering his own. People get insecure when they think they have no bargaining power at all, insecurity is dangerous.
Yes, this is exactly what I meant when I said that "settling" for polyamory was a bad idea. I was thinking of a non-monogamous relationship I was involved in where my partner strongly preferred monogamy, but settled for non-monogamy out of insecurity. It didn't work out very well.
I've seen several relationships like this (both the "poly agreeing to be mono" and "mono agreeing to accept poly" variants) and you're right, that does tend to create more or less tension in the relationship. In some cases the partners do manage to adjust and everyone has a rather happy relationship, in other cases it's just a question of time when this difference will make the relationship fall apart.
Steve Landsburg makes a fairly plausible case that monogamy is essentially a cartel formed by men to prevent them having to work too hard to keep onto their wives:
If true, this would suggest that women have more to gain from polyamory than men on average (although high-status men might well have the most to gain).
In my experience, the polyamorous community generally includes more women than men, and the women are frequently higher status. Most books on polyamory have been written by women, and they're much more involved in high-level activism than women usually are in other communities; this seems to support your hypothesis.
That would depend on whether you include the PUA literature, which uses the term "MLTR" (Multiple Long-Term Relationships) to describe more or less the same concept.
Of course, this still might be relevant to the "high-status men might gain most" hypothesis, since the concept of "MLTR" might be a higher status indicator (because it emphasizes the man's choice to have multiple partners) than an interest in "polyamory" (which emphasizes the options of both partners).
While I'm not terribly familiar with the PUA literature, based on your description I would say that most definitions of polyamory exclude it. There's a great deal of scorn in the poly community for relationships with a "one-penis policy," as well as a general emphasis on egalitarianism.
Actually, PUA discussions of MLTR (at least the few I've seen) seem to completely ignore the question of whether the women involved have other partners or not, although I suppose that is not strong evidence in either direction.
Perhaps the authors assume that "of course" exclusives are the default (and thus don't mention it), or perhaps they assume that "of course" things should be egalitarian by default (and thus don't mention it).
(And of course, there may be discussions I haven't seen, since my limited study of the PUA field is focused mainly on personal development and in-relationship applications, and limited to free materials almost exclusively.)
Polygamy is definitely to women's advantage. Since there's no real limit to the number of children a man can father, women can agree to share the very best male genetic material amongst each other and leave all the other men out in the cold. Think of the private harems that any number of rulers have maintained. In a monogamous culture, any given sub-excellent male has a much better chance of mating.
Polygyny (not necessarily generic polygamy) is to women's genetic advantage insofar as the selection of husbands depends on things that correlate with valuable genes. It is not necessarily to our advantage in other ways or under other circumstances.
See Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist's Wife for an extended example for why there's more to life than reproductive fitness.
The author is from a fringe Mormon sect which pushes families to be one man, seven wives, and as many children as possible.Going on welfare isn't feasible because of fears that the illegal arrangement might be discovered. The result is not only a serious level of poverty, but an emotional mess because of jealousy among the women. They each wanted more time and attention from their husband than he had available.
I feel like I should point out that the official Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has officially repudiated polygamy (except insofar as men can be "sealed" to several wives if it happens that each dies before he marries the next). I've lived in Utah and this repudiation is carried out in everyday social stigma; it's not just on paper. Since "Mormon" is recognized as a nickname for that religion more readily than its spinoffs, calling polygamist sects "Mormon" instead of the distinct "Mormon fundamentalism" is misleading and perpetuates stereotypes. "Fringe" is a nod to this, but it doesn't specify what it's on the fringe of (even standard-issue Mormonism could be considered on the fringe of, say, generic Christianity).
There's a correlation between being a LessWrong contributor and being polyamorous. I've noticed at least eight polyamorists among LessWrong users, including two among the top ten contributors. That's a zillion times the frequency of polyamorists in the general population. The correlation comes, I suppose, from LessWrong-readers being more likely to question social norms.
Or possibly just from LessWrong readers having read more science fiction. While reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is not always sufficient to get people to question the monogamy default, it certainly doesn't hurt.
I found Friday more compelling than The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The scenes of Friday's family were just dripping with idyll (until [spoiler], of course).
I actually haven't read Friday, I was just picking an example from the sci-fi canon more or less at random. There are plenty of other examples, too; I just meant to point out that sci-fi fans get more exposure to these kinds of ideas than most others.
I might reread Friday to check-- it's a book about desperately searching for a home, and I suspect that an alert reader might find something fishy, even in the early descriptions, if only from their sketchiness. IIRC, Friday seems to love the atmosphere of the place rather than the individuals.
While we're on the subject, afaik no human society has anything like line marriages. On the face of it, they seem workable. Any theories about why they don't happen?
Datapoint: I've never read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; I got into poly through meeting poly people at a bisexual convention.
The overlap between bisexuality and polyamory is quite high, that's for sure. As another data point for that correlation, I think it makes a lot of sense that this is so.
I'm nonogamous, and I didn't choose.
Shades of Slavoj Žižek pointing out unknown knowns as the basis of ideology.
Of course, the most appropriate Žižekian point about this post is that ultimate super ego injunction is "Enjoy!" In other words, one of the main forms of conformity today is exactly this pose of throwing off the demands of mainstream society demonstrated in this post. This ideal is the main message of consumerism in advertising - choose for yourself, unlock your deepest desires, express your true identity! If you really want to enjoy yourself fully, you can't just settle for the boring default option - whether in toilet paper, jeans, music or relationship style. You are supposed to consider all your options and find out what generates maximum enjoyment.
This is the main form of authoritarianism today, and the correct response to the demand here that we justify our choice of monogamy is "It's none of your business!"
This sounds very defensive to me; you might wish to examine why that is the case.
To reply to your argument, which is really just guilt (of poly folks) by association (with conspicuous consumption):
(1) Non-monogamous people will experience a high social cost at present for admitting the fact. You can hardly compare them to "rebelling" consumers. Saying you want to choose a polyamorous sexual relationship is not analogous in social cost to buying $2,000 shoes, it's analogous to buying a butt plug in front of your friends and family. It takes genuine mettle.
(2) Just because consumer culture emphasizes enjoying yourself, doesn't mean you shouldn't enjoy yourself (reversed cupidity is not eudaimonia). In the case of consumer goods, it means real reflection on what you actually enjoy, for how long, and what are the ethical implications? For sexuality, it means real reflection on what you want, what you already have, what is practical given human nature, ethical concerns, etc. All WrongBot is asking you to do is reflect on why you choose monogamy - publicly on LW, if the mood strikes you. Clearly it does not.
Well, ceteris paribus, yes! Of course, ceteris are not paribus: there are other people and contingencies to take into account. But your enjoyment is morally considerable in and of itself, as well as in how it impacts others.
I nearly missed this in the middle of that dense paragraph so it is worth a quote!
I'd have upvoted the first paragraph by itself, except that the present application is a bit of a non sequitur. ISTM that one of these things is not like the others:
I'm not sure who's standing to make money off of people switching from monogamy to polygamy, I haven't seen paid advertisements for polygamy, and it seems to be more worth five minutes' thought than does, say, choice of toilet paper.
P.S. Oh, and welcome to Less Wrong! I look forward to hearing your take on a number of other issues, as you appear to have a very different argumentative toolkit from the usual one here.
I asked myself, "Why not be polyamorous?" The answer I got back was "Don't think about that; it will worsen your relationship." I'm listening.
What? Why?
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Actually, I don't know whether the answer was what I said, or "It will worsen your relationship; you are now done thinking about it". My intuition says that since I'm in Michigan while my boyfriend is in North Carolina (which does sound unwise, yes), sex with someone else would invariably lead to us being too far apart.
And it just seems weird.
This is entirely based on intuition, of course, not conscious reasoning, but consciously reasoning about it seems unnecessary somehow.
Okay, I got a glimmer of "polyamory simply means more options; there couldn't possibly be anything wrong with that". Responses coming back: "He would object." and "Focusing on just the two of us will result in that relationship becoming stronger." and "It's more intimate with just two."
And now, on the meta level, I'm thinking that conscious reasoning is unnecessary, as this is entirely about values, not facts.
So, so far, my mind is not changed.
I have no objection to anyone choosing monogamy, or valuing it over other options, but I hate to see anyone refuse to explore an idea out of fear. The message I got from the original post, which applies to many areas of life, is that sometimes we can go along with a consensus without thinking about it, even when doing so doesn't benefit us, because the alternatives don't even occur to us, or we brush them aside as "weird".
It seems like there are facts as well as values involved here, facts such as whether he would object, and what would make your relationship improve. Even when dealing with questions of values, rationality and conscious thought can be useful in helping reach those values. My point is not that you should, or should not, be monogamous, but rather that maybe the times when conscious reasoning seems unnecessary at first are the times when it's most needed.
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What if it is? What if polyamory would save her current long-distance relationship from falling apart?
I don't know that it would, but it might. I've certainly seen polyamory work wonders for couples dealing with the long-distance thing.
Refusing to think about something because you're afraid of what you'll discover is seldom a helpful strategy.
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The vast majority of people in the US perceive monogamy as a moral issue, and believe that Christianity requires monogamy. Many Christian missionaries have struggled to convert the groups they were evangelizing around the world to be monogamous. Yet, the Old Testament condones polygamy; and the New Testament does not forbid polygamy.
The verses Christians cite "against" polygamy are Titus 1:6 (Paul, "An elder must be blameless, the husband of but one wife"), 1 Timothy 3:2 (also by Paul, "Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife..."), and 1 Timothy 3:12 ("A deacon must be the husband of but one wife and must manage his children and his household well.") all say the same thing: Elders of the church (not ordinary church members) should have "but one wife".
Does "but one wife" mean "but one wife at a time", or "should not have remarried after a divorce or death"? These same verses have been used to argue that remarriage after a divorce or a spouse's death are forbidden, because a man would then have had two wives, and not be "the husband of but one wife". Jesus himself said (Matthew 19:5-12) that neither men nor women should remarry after a divorce; is that what Paul meant?
The counsel to have but one wife is in both cases in the middle of a long list of good qualities that various sorts of people should have - be temperate, hospitable, not given to much wine, not a lover of money, not malicious talkers, etc. Yet few have insisted on outlawing wine (at least lately), inhospitableness, greed, or gossip based on these verses, even though those are "commanded" more generally to all believers, while the "but one wife" clause is directed only at church elders. (A "church elder" is not an old church member, but one with special responsibilities.)
Supposing that "but one wife" means "but one wife at a time", should an elder have just one wife because more than one is bad, or because more than one would give him too large a family to pay full attention to church business? Paul doesn't say. The latter interpretation is supported by the arguments used in the 12th+13th centuries to say priests should not marry, and by Jesus' view of families as bad things that distract people from God (Mark 3:31–35/Matthew 12:46–50, Mark 10:29-30/Matthew 19:29, Matthew 8:20, Matthew 10:21). (No "family values" for Jesus!) And Paul is the same person who told the Corinthians that it's better not to marry at all (1 Corinthians 7:29-31), because the world was about to come to an end; so why don't we ban marriage altogether?
Nor do Christians pay much attention to the more-clear teachings surrounding these passages. Shortly after Titus 1:6, Paul goes on to say, "Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them, and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive." The verses in 1 Timothy are preceded by 1 Timothy 2 9-12: "I also want women to dress modestly, ... not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes... A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man; she must be silent." And they are followed by 1 Timothy 6:1: "All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect,so that God's name and our teaching may not be slandered. Those who have believing masters are not to show less respect for them because they are brothers."
In summary: It's not advisable for Christian women to have braided hair, pearls, or expensive clothing, or to teach men. But it is okay for Christians to have slaves and multiple wives.
There may be Christian traditions handed down from the first century, which Catholics would be more likely to know about. I'm not aware of any, though. AFAIK monogamy was just a Roman thing, in which there was no expectation that a married man would have sex only with his wife. Here's a Christian website claiming monogamy is a pagan abomination on that basis.
What I want to know is: What's with all the braided hair today? How can we stamp out this immorality?
That is a moral norm I'm happy to advocate. (I just don't find braids nearly as attractive. ;))
Interesting about the braided hair. In East Europe it is actually seen as a sign of female virginity. Коса - девичья краса (A braid is a maiden's charm - Rus.)
So monogamy became default thanks to the Romans... Doesn't really fit into the whole "Quo Vadis" narrative that well, does it?
The second person pronoun grates throughout this post; it's a "chalk hitting the chalkboard at the wrong angle and making your hair stand on end" kind of feeling, and the snippet quoted is where it's at its most pronounced. (I downvoted it earlier, but it's taken me a while to put words to my feelings.)
So your encounter with Emma led you to discover one of your "unknown knowns", or basic assumptions. But your writing comes across as making a much greater number of unwarranted assumptions about your reader. One of these you have the grace to make explicit: "romantic jealousy is your deciding factor in favor of monogamy". Your Emma-epiphany might possibly grant you some kind of right to lecture a reader who is much like you with the exception of still holding that belief.
But what about your other unknown knowns? Just how many of the features of your own situation are you tacitly assuming also apply to your reader? What compelling arguments in favor of monogamy might you bring up if you put yourself for a moment in the shoes of a 40- or a 60-year old reader of LW? One who lives in a rural area and plans to run a farm for a living? One whose goal is to raise children? And so on. Despite giving lip service to the idea that one's preferred relationship style is a matter of choice, you're giving little value to someone who is facing that choice from a position other than yours, where "romantic jealousy" looms large as a consideration.
The final paragraph more or less gives the game away: this post isn't really a curious and honest inquiry, it's advertisement for a conclusion you have already reached and are planning to expand on. For all I know your conclusion is correct, but your methods to establish it strike me as suspect.
You:
Me:
The only conclusion I've reached is that polyamory is a good choice for some people, and that it might be a good choice for more people if they had some way of dealing with (irrational, unpleasant) feelings of romantic jealousy. Ignoring jealousy entirely, there are still good reasons to be monogamous; a number of them have been pointed out elsewhere in the comments.
My point here is only that you have a choice, and you are better off knowing that you do. Part of knowing about that choice is understanding what the other options are; I'm only proselytizing for polyamory in the sense that I think people are better off when they can make informed choices.
I agree with the OP that people assume monogamy as the default is an interesting relic. I often speak to atheists that hold many distinctly Christian notions without realizing it and having no real justification for them.
I may get downvoted for what I am about to say, but feel the need to disclose since I wish to check for faults in my reasoning as well as any ethical objections (I request you thoroughly explain the reasoning behind such objections from first principles up).
If I only want safe sexual pleasure I am better off financially seeking professional services.
If I want companionship in itself I have many friends both male and female which provide similar psychological benefits.
Bonding can make such exchanges more stable and long lasting, but considering the high divorce rate and turnover rate we see in modern socioeconomic conditions this is probably not something to depend on.
The only reason evolutionary speaking to bond with someone is to increase the odds of our genes spreading.
There is no such thing as a special someone. I could live relatively happy lives with a non trivial fraction of the population either in monogamous or alternative arrangements.
Romantic love is a just a special state of mind not so different from being high on any sort of drug. I shall therefore plan in advance on how to reduce or increase the likleyhood of faling in love so it matches my long term plans. Any drug I take must help me reach my goals according to my values, I despise hedonism.
Repeatedly having sex with the same person increases the likelihood of bonding to them.
Rates of false paternity are overestimated by most popular science claims and urban myths but still a factor to consider (3%).
Psychological differences between men and women. Women are hypergamus. And women on average prefer to be dominated rather than to dominate someone they are sexually attracted to.
For all the above statements I can provide citations and elaborated reasoning on request. I may ask for some patience since I still have a few crucial exams in the upcoming week but I will provide them after this period.
Before proceeding let me first point out I don't consider happiness in itself to be a goal for me. Happiness in some quantity is simply a necessary condition of following my goals optimally.
I have decided that I shall avoid sexual relationships unless I have judged the girl in question to have a sufficiently high IQ and reasonably attractive. One nights stands are an exception to this rule, after analysis I've concluded they feature in like a free prostitute service, so they are accepted when needed but I strictly close of further contact to avoid increasing the odds of paribonding.
I have relationships only with women who I see as potentially good mothers and carrying good genes.
A wild oats strategy unfortunately isn't going to work since I need financial resources to pursue my other goals (living a thuggish baby daddy life may be evolutionary optimal in my country due to the welfare state but I may not have the genes or mems for it) and the state can force me to make payments for children I sire.
I make it clear I will not accept sexual intercourse on her part outside the relationship (any other GFs I have are theoretically part of the relationship but I've never heard any such desires expressed by them).
Also all children will be tested for paternity as policy in order to equalize both our risks (she knows she is the biological mother of her child by default, I without tests do not have that certainty)
I reserve the option to have sexual intercourse outside the relationship and more than one girlfriend/wife. I must however insure minimal risk to STDs and inform the wives/GFs before having sex outside the relationship.
These policies are by most Western standards selfish. However I do lay them bare before beginning the relationships. I see no reason to desist them as they serve me well and women who I date judge my value sufficient to accept them and are fully informed. If they do not consent I politely terminate contact trying to minimize any trauma they experience with the severing of any potential pair bonds or infatuations that may have developed in that short time.
I have not had many relationships since I've implemented this policy. Ironically my relationships have become more LTR and much closer in practice to the monogamous ideal.
In many ways my lifestyle choice and evo strategy is very very conservative and traditional after one reviews how polygamous societies function.
I'd like to consider a related question: why did our society "choose" monogamy as a social norm? One major clue is the high correlation between monogamy and economic development--virtually all modern industrialized societies have adopted monogamy as a social norm, whereas most societies throughout history have practiced polygyny. But what direction does the causal relationship run? (*)
Does it make sense to start tearing down this norm before we get that question sorted out? Several commenters have said that they're not for or against polyamory, but they are for being aware of and considering the possibility of polyamory. But one way to enforce a social norm is to teach people to think in such a way that they do not even consider the possibility of violating it.
* See http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/webfac/bardhan/e271_f05/tertilt.pdf for one attempt to answer the question.