December 1, 2010 • 20 mins
Monogamy is often touted as the cultural ideal for human partners, but are we really cut out for it? Molly and Cristen take a look at social and sexual monogamy in the animal kingdom in an attempt to answer this question.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom never told you?
From house top works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen Kristin. Here's
(00:20):
your day's question for this podcast, Our humans meant to
be monogamous? No? Well, thanks for listening. This has been stuff,
but I've never told you. This is an email if
you've got any thoughts Mom stuff at how stuff works
dot com. Just kidding. Okay, I guess we should probably
discuss how how we came to that conclusion, but how
(00:43):
I reached that pitch perfect note Ye, that was glasses
breaking everywhere. Now I feel kind of bad auto tune
it later, sbjecting ears to that. But let's get down
to business. Molly. Yes, the answer is no. And to
(01:03):
to start our examination of human monogamy, we started with
all the animals. We went first to the wild Kingdom. Yes,
because you know, I mean, what, let's learn from from
other creatures how to do things they seem to They
seem to not have the the fights, the drawn out
divorces that we humans do. Maybe get onto something they
(01:23):
can share a nest, I mean, and that's a small
space and get along. It's like a studio in New York.
So back in the day before we had things like
DNA testing that we could do on animals, we used
to think that a lot of different kinds of animals
were monogamous, such as swans, oh birds, all birds and
(01:45):
lots of birds. They were really held up as these
standards of monogamy in the animal kingdom. But once we
got this DNA tests and we learned that these birds
are flying away from the nest for a little hanky panky,
if you will, especially the ladybirds. Yes, there have even
been studies done where they gave the male birds vasectomies.
Some of the male birds vasectomyes too control the population,
(02:09):
right to control the population, not just for cruel And
they've nested up with their ladybirds. So you got you
got your female bird and then your male bird with
a vasectomy, and lo and behold, the females keep having baby. Yeah,
she somehow magically laying some eggs, and so the researchers went, huh,
something's going on. So now that we've started doing all
(02:31):
of this DNA research in these animal populations come to
find out animals are way less monogamous than we used
to think, and there is a huge distinction between social
monogamy and sexual monogamy. A lot of animals will pair
up in quote unquote pair bonds such as you know,
kind of like the way humans do form pair bonds.
(02:54):
But while they might hang out a lot together and
children together and raised children exactly, the children may not
all belong to the male bird. And that's where the
DNA testing comes in. They come in and they test
these these baby birds and find out that maybe thirty
percent of the of the kids, however many you know,
kids these birds are raising don't belong to the father
(03:17):
who has settled down with this woman. And it kind
of makes me wonder if those um TV shows that
are on during the daytime then I only see when
I'm sick, Kristen, like the Morey's and the Jerry Springers
where they do the paternity testing. I wonder if it
will become more widespread because now it's like we're DNA
testing every bird to see who its father is. I
wonder what would happen if we did the same to humans.
(03:39):
I don't even know if I'd want to know the
results of that, and I don't think we do. I
think maybe in our in our conscious places, we know
that humans might be stepping out as much as these birds.
But there are still a couple of monogamous examples in
the animal kingdom. A lot of times we hear about
prairie vowals. They are known for their bogamy. Apparently, when
(04:02):
a little boy pray bowl and a little girl prairie
prairie bowl meet up, they will make prairie voll love
for days. Yeah, for hours and hours and hours on end,
and that's all it takes for them to be in
love forever. And we are using these terms lightly. I
know that we were anthropomorphizing these prairie bowls, but still
(04:23):
they're they're studied specifically because of their monogamous habits, and
scientists have compared their habits to a cousin of theirs
called the mead oval, who is far more promiscuous than
the prairie Yes, the dondre Per bowls excellent. And they've
(04:43):
compared their brain structures and found that prairie bowls have
far more vasopressin receptors and their brains and vaso presson
is associated with pair bonding and feeling of attachment and
romantic attachment, I should say. And scientists went in and
stimulated vasopressin receptor growth in meadow vole brains, and all
(05:07):
of a sudden, these don drapers started settling down. Yeah,
like instantaneously, the scientists said, I mean, it was just
you know, as soon as that that vaso pressing kicked in,
it was like, hello, love of my life, who I
will be with? And this is all linked up to
the brain's reward system because we've gone over this territory
many times and stuff I've never told you, but when
(05:30):
you have sex with someone, there are certain chemicals that
are released in your brain that stimulate your dopamine reward system,
which is why noted anthropologists Helen Fisher compares love and
attraction to cocaine addictions, because it does set off this
this really strong reaction in your brain, and the vasopress
and receptors are associated with that. So it's possible, I mean,
(05:53):
this is only one aspect of the question our humans
meant to be monogamous. It's possible that some humans just
don't have that brain wiring that allows them to be monogamous.
But for anyone out there contemplating an affair, I don't
think brain chemistry is going to be in valid excuse
should your partner not want not be wanting you to
have an affair. Sort of those prominent ideas about monogamy
(06:15):
today from an academic perspective is that it's more of
a cultural construct rather than a biological imperative. Scientists have
even gone back and studied Lucy, the famous auster Lepipocus
hominid to try to trace back monogamy in human societies.
(06:35):
And while originally they used to think that monogamy went
way way back, you know, this pair bonding was happening,
so of course we were. We were shacking up with
just one other hominid. But indeed no new newer studies
show that when they compare the sizes of male and
female hominids, the difference in sizes indicate that the men
(06:57):
were certainly not monogamous. And how do they know that.
It's because if the man is substantially larger than the woman,
they figured that is not a monogamous society, because the
man has to be strong enough to fight off other
predators who might be after his lady and his lady
might be interested in these, so the menu are are bigger,
(07:20):
so that they can save their save their women. And
when you're reading all of this research only I don't
know about you, but I have yet to come across
one study concluding that absolutely, you know, like monogamy is
something that humans are born with. We talked about on
the podcast um De Men and women cheat for different reasons. Cheating,
(07:42):
an adultery, and infidelity, all those different words for the
same thing. Goes back eons in human history. We've always
had a wandering eye for someone else. Now this is
also again where the important distinction comes up between social
monogamy and sexual monogamy. Seems like we have we've definitely
(08:04):
smashed the two together. In human culture, we shack up
with someone and so socially we want the child rearing support,
we keep house together. We get all these social benefits
from being monogamous with someone else. But at the same time,
it's really hard for a lot of people to be
sexually monogamous for the long haul. So that's that's sort
(08:28):
of what those birds were doing. They would pick their
one bird friend and they would maintain social monogamy raising
those children. You know, protecting the nest, etcetera. The sexual
monogamy was up for debate, and what we found where
a lot of articles in which human couples were trying
to negotiate this own distinction between the two for themselves
and maybe realizing that requiring absolute monogamy from a partner
(08:52):
isn't the most realistic way to go right. Chris Ryan,
who wrote Sex at Dawn, has been a big proponent
of this idea, a that monogamy isn't really the natural
human way, and he is a fan of more of
this quote unquote new monogamy and then um recently in July,
(09:13):
there was an article written by Tammy Nelson, who is
a relationship psychologists, and she outlined different couples process of
establishing these new monogamous types of relationships. All these couples
were married and in some cases one or the other
person had cheated and sexually sexually, Yeah, they still they
(09:36):
wanted to keep the relationship intact if at all possible. Yeah.
I think they need to clarify here between this new
monogamy and something like polyamory. Polyamory is the belief that
you can emotionally love, emotionally love more than one person,
and when we're talking about sexual monogamy, we're talking strictly
about the physical act. And what these couples in Nelson's
(09:56):
article found was that if it was just sex, if
there was no emotion tied to it, they could live
with it. They would still maintain that social monogamy having
the emotional support and fidelity of a partner, but they
didn't require the sexual support and absolute fidelity of a partner. Right.
So with this concept of new monogamy, it's more thinking
(10:18):
of monogamy in terms of strictly the social and establishing
kind of a monogamy contract with the other person. Obviously,
different people and different couples will have different boundaries. Some
people could not imagine their their partner being sexually unfaithful
to them and then being able to carry out a
day to day social relationship with them. Some people are
(10:41):
fine with it. You know, some of these new monogamous
couples have both of them have a lover, and yet
they still carry on a household together. And in our
mon noormative yes, it's a new word that I learned
this week, mono noormative society, where obviously monogamy is upheld
as cultural ideal. This seems like a pretty radical idea. Well,
(11:05):
let's talk specifically about some of the couples that were
presented in Nelson's article, because that might help some people understand.
She talks about one couple she sees who were in
their fifties. They both got married. I mean they got
married to each other when they were very young. Uh
they were you know, each other's high school sweethearts. They've
never been with anyone else, and they both you know,
had that itch to explore, but they didn't want to
(11:25):
break up the marriage. You know, they'd raised kids together,
they had invested and made this life together, and they
didn't want to destroy that it was solely a physical thing,
and they came to the realization that, you know, this
marriage is never going to fall apart no matter you know,
who else I have sex with. At the end of
the day, I'm gonna want to come home to this person.
So I give this other person permission to explore that
(11:46):
physical side of themselves. But I think with this couple,
they were only allowed to have sex with someone else
if they were traveling, and then when they came home,
they had to disclose the little sexual interlude with the
husband or wife. It seems you know that honesty and
upfront communication is essential, and a lot of confidence in
(12:08):
the strength of that social monogamy. Well in one rule
that another couple had that I thought was kind of
interesting was that, um, if if one of the partners
had sex with someone else, it could only have sex
with someone else once, and that they thought that that
was sort of the way that they could prevent that
emotional bond from being formed. Because again, it's not about
(12:29):
falling in love with multiple people, um, which you know
can sometimes be okay if you've got a polyamorous situation
or an open marriage. It's strictly about what you're doing
with your lady parts and your male parts right kind
of satisfying those chemical quote unquote needs inside of you.
And again, Molly and I aren't sitting here advocating the
(12:51):
new monogami saying that this is how it should be.
But Nelson was making the point that you know, we
live longer than ever before couples, when couples A I do,
it's for longer than ever before. So maybe it's time
for us to broaden our definition of monogamy and maybe
take a cue from the Animal Kingdom all of those
(13:12):
birds that are happily socially monogamous, whereas uh might not
be hanging out the same chickadee every night. Well, you know,
we've I think we've talked about bore on this podcast
a few times about how you can expect too much
from one person. The new ideal that we've been raised
with thanks to movies and songs and all this, is
that one person is going to be your everything. It's
(13:34):
going to fulfill you sexually, emotionally, give you children, and
take out the garbage. And uh, you know I've talked
about is that too much to expect from marriage? Marriage
used to be a financial contract between two people. Um
or you used to get married because you know, you
wanted to have kids, but now you don't have to
necessarily get married to do that. So they're saying that
(13:55):
these couples who do choose to uh undertake the ideal
of marriage to participate in that system, want to maintain
all the you know, social trappings of it, but you know,
they don't put all that pressure on the one person.
For example, another one of the couples from the Nelson
article I thought was kind of interesting was this woman
(14:16):
who had affairs. She was still in love with her husband,
but she would have never divorced her husband over these
affairs because she knew it hurt his career because he
worked at a very conservative law firm. So she was
happy to maintain that facade of you know, the wife,
the kids in the white picket fence as long as
she and the husband had the agreement about who could
(14:37):
do what. And some people might argue that this idea
of new monogamy is just threatening the very institution of marriage.
What are we doing this? You need to downfall of families.
But I will sit and play devil's advocate for a
minute and point to the most recent survey statistics that
show that between um fifteen, around of wives and of
(15:00):
husbands will sleep with someone who is not their spouse
or have a full blown affair at some point. And
then you can pile up the divorce statistics on top
of that, and I think that maybe, you know, maybe
there is room for some people, if if it's right
for the couple. Again, this is going to be on
a per couple basis, but maybe it's time for us
(15:21):
to perhaps stopped kidding ourselves about monogamy being this innate
natural thing that we have. I mean, it sounds very romantic,
but maybe it's not all that realistic. But then again,
I mean, I know there are probably gonna be people
out there who think that people who are practicing new
monogamy are trying to have their cake and eat it too.
They get all the benefits of that great home life
(15:42):
with the perfect spouse, and they get to have sex
with whoever they want as long as they figured out
the rules, you know, with that person. And and I
think that you know, that's that's a valid point of
view to have to because you know, jealousy can take
over in ways that you didn't expect. And the key
to all of these couples that Nelson worked with was
(16:03):
acknowledging the fact that there might be jealousy, there might
be complex but making that commitment to negotiate it with
each other and figure out if it was this was
a system that worked for them, because it's like she said,
it isn't for everyone. So there you have it. As
as animals, humans are certainly not a monogamous species. We
(16:23):
attempt it, but maybe maybe we're confusing social and sexual monogamy.
That's not a question that Molly and I can answer,
and I don't think that that's a question that anyone
can answer for and make a blanket answer for, because,
like we said at the beginning, different people have different
brain structures that will determine how monogamous they might or
might not be. So at this time, I think it's
(16:46):
it's time to hear from you guys. Let us know
your thoughts mom stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or share your thoughts with everyone over on our Facebook page.
And now we shall read some listener mail. This one
is from Damon It's about the home at podcast and
Damon Rights. I'm a thirty nine year old man who
(17:08):
grew up in Detroit, Michigan. I took home economics when
I was in the seventh eighth grade, and I can
say it was one of the most valuable classes I
ever took. I learned how to sew and I learned
a little bit of cooking. I didn't mind taking the
class at the time. I had no clue that I
would use with things I learned to help me survive
in college. I had a roommate who had problems making
teeny dinners while I was cooking full meals. I am
(17:28):
married now and I of what my wife and I
eat while I'm not making my own clothes. I don't
have a problem if I get a hole or need
to make minor adjustments. My wife and I both think
home economics and mom of course for teaching me these skills.
I think everyone male and female should be required to
take this class. Well, I've got another home at email
here and it is from Ada, and Adora writes. I
(17:49):
went to co ed Roman Catholic High School in Hong
Kong that was originally built as an all boys school.
We did not have the facilities for home at classes. Instead,
we had design and Technology, which is learned to shop
class in the US. We made useless stuff such as
plastic letter openers, and it sound too useless. In an
average secondary school in Hong Kong, girls go to home
at classes while boys go to shop class. I was
(18:11):
proud that we had shop class instead of home mat
because I could already cook and knit at home, and
I'd rather learn how to use a drill. It comes
in handy or it came in handy later, when I
worked at a theater scene shop in college and built
wood models for my architecture podcast. After listening to your podcast.
So I wish we had home Mack, but I wouldn't
give up shop class. Both Homemech and shop class should
(18:33):
be taught to both boys and girls. Every time I
get food poisoning, it's from a friend's cooking rather than
restaurant food. In denth grade, we had to close theater
very early due to undercook chicken at the pot. Look.
Oh no, Over Christmas, I ate a pasta my friend
prepared that got me very sick. She added the milk
before adding the uncooked meat. The boiling point of milk
is much lower than the temperature required for cooking meat.
(18:56):
Oh my god, I had a fever of thirty nine
degrees celsius and threw up a munch at. A bit
of my brain came out. Everyone has to eat, you know.
You need to know how to prepare food safely. Oh
and by the way, Molly, this is this is a
little bit for you, Dora Rice. I was buying a
Molly bolt at home Depot and thought about how Molly
would probably love that. There is an awesome bold with
(19:17):
her name. It's the best bolt for hanging wall shelves
on drywall. There you go at that email I might
have done a little Google image search for the Molly
board for the holidays, I'm buying someone a bag of
molly bolts. Wonder who it is? So if you have
an email, you can send it to us at mom
Stuff at how stuff works dot com. We would also
love you to take advantage of our Facebook page and
(19:38):
share your thoughts there. You can also follow us on
Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast. And lastly, you can head
over to our blog during the week, It is stuff
Mom Never Told You at how stuff works dot com
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(19:58):
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reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, Are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom never told you?
From house top works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen Kristin. Here's
(00:20):
your day's question for this podcast, Our humans meant to
be monogamous? No? Well, thanks for listening. This has been stuff,
but I've never told you. This is an email if
you've got any thoughts Mom stuff at how stuff works
dot com. Just kidding. Okay, I guess we should probably
discuss how how we came to that conclusion, but how
(00:43):
I reached that pitch perfect note Ye, that was glasses
breaking everywhere. Now I feel kind of bad auto tune
it later, sbjecting ears to that. But let's get down
to business. Molly. Yes, the answer is no. And to
(01:03):
to start our examination of human monogamy, we started with
all the animals. We went first to the wild Kingdom. Yes,
because you know, I mean, what, let's learn from from
other creatures how to do things they seem to They
seem to not have the the fights, the drawn out
divorces that we humans do. Maybe get onto something they
(01:23):
can share a nest, I mean, and that's a small
space and get along. It's like a studio in New York.
So back in the day before we had things like
DNA testing that we could do on animals, we used
to think that a lot of different kinds of animals
were monogamous, such as swans, oh birds, all birds and
(01:45):
lots of birds. They were really held up as these
standards of monogamy in the animal kingdom. But once we
got this DNA tests and we learned that these birds
are flying away from the nest for a little hanky panky,
if you will, especially the ladybirds. Yes, there have even
been studies done where they gave the male birds vasectomies.
Some of the male birds vasectomyes too control the population,
(02:09):
right to control the population, not just for cruel And
they've nested up with their ladybirds. So you got you
got your female bird and then your male bird with
a vasectomy, and lo and behold, the females keep having baby. Yeah,
she somehow magically laying some eggs, and so the researchers went, huh,
something's going on. So now that we've started doing all
(02:31):
of this DNA research in these animal populations come to
find out animals are way less monogamous than we used
to think, and there is a huge distinction between social
monogamy and sexual monogamy. A lot of animals will pair
up in quote unquote pair bonds such as you know,
kind of like the way humans do form pair bonds.
(02:54):
But while they might hang out a lot together and
children together and raised children exactly, the children may not
all belong to the male bird. And that's where the
DNA testing comes in. They come in and they test
these these baby birds and find out that maybe thirty
percent of the of the kids, however many you know,
kids these birds are raising don't belong to the father
(03:17):
who has settled down with this woman. And it kind
of makes me wonder if those um TV shows that
are on during the daytime then I only see when
I'm sick, Kristen, like the Morey's and the Jerry Springers
where they do the paternity testing. I wonder if it
will become more widespread because now it's like we're DNA
testing every bird to see who its father is. I
wonder what would happen if we did the same to humans.
(03:39):
I don't even know if I'd want to know the
results of that, and I don't think we do. I
think maybe in our in our conscious places, we know
that humans might be stepping out as much as these birds.
But there are still a couple of monogamous examples in
the animal kingdom. A lot of times we hear about
prairie vowals. They are known for their bogamy. Apparently, when
(04:02):
a little boy pray bowl and a little girl prairie
prairie bowl meet up, they will make prairie voll love
for days. Yeah, for hours and hours and hours on end,
and that's all it takes for them to be in
love forever. And we are using these terms lightly. I
know that we were anthropomorphizing these prairie bowls, but still
(04:23):
they're they're studied specifically because of their monogamous habits, and
scientists have compared their habits to a cousin of theirs
called the mead oval, who is far more promiscuous than
the prairie Yes, the dondre Per bowls excellent. And they've
(04:43):
compared their brain structures and found that prairie bowls have
far more vasopressin receptors and their brains and vaso presson
is associated with pair bonding and feeling of attachment and
romantic attachment, I should say. And scientists went in and
stimulated vasopressin receptor growth in meadow vole brains, and all
(05:07):
of a sudden, these don drapers started settling down. Yeah,
like instantaneously, the scientists said, I mean, it was just
you know, as soon as that that vaso pressing kicked in,
it was like, hello, love of my life, who I
will be with? And this is all linked up to
the brain's reward system because we've gone over this territory
many times and stuff I've never told you, but when
(05:30):
you have sex with someone, there are certain chemicals that
are released in your brain that stimulate your dopamine reward system,
which is why noted anthropologists Helen Fisher compares love and
attraction to cocaine addictions, because it does set off this
this really strong reaction in your brain, and the vasopress
and receptors are associated with that. So it's possible, I mean,
(05:53):
this is only one aspect of the question our humans
meant to be monogamous. It's possible that some humans just
don't have that brain wiring that allows them to be monogamous.
But for anyone out there contemplating an affair, I don't
think brain chemistry is going to be in valid excuse
should your partner not want not be wanting you to
have an affair. Sort of those prominent ideas about monogamy
(06:15):
today from an academic perspective is that it's more of
a cultural construct rather than a biological imperative. Scientists have
even gone back and studied Lucy, the famous auster Lepipocus
hominid to try to trace back monogamy in human societies.
(06:35):
And while originally they used to think that monogamy went
way way back, you know, this pair bonding was happening,
so of course we were. We were shacking up with
just one other hominid. But indeed no new newer studies
show that when they compare the sizes of male and
female hominids, the difference in sizes indicate that the men
(06:57):
were certainly not monogamous. And how do they know that.
It's because if the man is substantially larger than the woman,
they figured that is not a monogamous society, because the
man has to be strong enough to fight off other
predators who might be after his lady and his lady
might be interested in these, so the menu are are bigger,
(07:20):
so that they can save their save their women. And
when you're reading all of this research only I don't
know about you, but I have yet to come across
one study concluding that absolutely, you know, like monogamy is
something that humans are born with. We talked about on
the podcast um De Men and women cheat for different reasons. Cheating,
(07:42):
an adultery, and infidelity, all those different words for the
same thing. Goes back eons in human history. We've always
had a wandering eye for someone else. Now this is
also again where the important distinction comes up between social
monogamy and sexual monogamy. Seems like we have we've definitely
(08:04):
smashed the two together. In human culture, we shack up
with someone and so socially we want the child rearing support,
we keep house together. We get all these social benefits
from being monogamous with someone else. But at the same time,
it's really hard for a lot of people to be
sexually monogamous for the long haul. So that's that's sort
(08:28):
of what those birds were doing. They would pick their
one bird friend and they would maintain social monogamy raising
those children. You know, protecting the nest, etcetera. The sexual
monogamy was up for debate, and what we found where
a lot of articles in which human couples were trying
to negotiate this own distinction between the two for themselves
and maybe realizing that requiring absolute monogamy from a partner
(08:52):
isn't the most realistic way to go right. Chris Ryan,
who wrote Sex at Dawn, has been a big proponent
of this idea, a that monogamy isn't really the natural
human way, and he is a fan of more of
this quote unquote new monogamy and then um recently in July,
(09:13):
there was an article written by Tammy Nelson, who is
a relationship psychologists, and she outlined different couples process of
establishing these new monogamous types of relationships. All these couples
were married and in some cases one or the other
person had cheated and sexually sexually, Yeah, they still they
(09:36):
wanted to keep the relationship intact if at all possible. Yeah.
I think they need to clarify here between this new
monogamy and something like polyamory. Polyamory is the belief that
you can emotionally love, emotionally love more than one person,
and when we're talking about sexual monogamy, we're talking strictly
about the physical act. And what these couples in Nelson's
(09:56):
article found was that if it was just sex, if
there was no emotion tied to it, they could live
with it. They would still maintain that social monogamy having
the emotional support and fidelity of a partner, but they
didn't require the sexual support and absolute fidelity of a partner. Right.
So with this concept of new monogamy, it's more thinking
(10:18):
of monogamy in terms of strictly the social and establishing
kind of a monogamy contract with the other person. Obviously,
different people and different couples will have different boundaries. Some
people could not imagine their their partner being sexually unfaithful
to them and then being able to carry out a
day to day social relationship with them. Some people are
(10:41):
fine with it. You know, some of these new monogamous
couples have both of them have a lover, and yet
they still carry on a household together. And in our
mon noormative yes, it's a new word that I learned
this week, mono noormative society, where obviously monogamy is upheld
as cultural ideal. This seems like a pretty radical idea. Well,
(11:05):
let's talk specifically about some of the couples that were
presented in Nelson's article, because that might help some people understand.
She talks about one couple she sees who were in
their fifties. They both got married. I mean they got
married to each other when they were very young. Uh
they were you know, each other's high school sweethearts. They've
never been with anyone else, and they both you know,
had that itch to explore, but they didn't want to
(11:25):
break up the marriage. You know, they'd raised kids together,
they had invested and made this life together, and they
didn't want to destroy that it was solely a physical thing,
and they came to the realization that, you know, this
marriage is never going to fall apart no matter you know,
who else I have sex with. At the end of
the day, I'm gonna want to come home to this person.
So I give this other person permission to explore that
(11:46):
physical side of themselves. But I think with this couple,
they were only allowed to have sex with someone else
if they were traveling, and then when they came home,
they had to disclose the little sexual interlude with the
husband or wife. It seems you know that honesty and
upfront communication is essential, and a lot of confidence in
(12:08):
the strength of that social monogamy. Well in one rule
that another couple had that I thought was kind of
interesting was that, um, if if one of the partners
had sex with someone else, it could only have sex
with someone else once, and that they thought that that
was sort of the way that they could prevent that
emotional bond from being formed. Because again, it's not about
(12:29):
falling in love with multiple people, um, which you know
can sometimes be okay if you've got a polyamorous situation
or an open marriage. It's strictly about what you're doing
with your lady parts and your male parts right kind
of satisfying those chemical quote unquote needs inside of you.
And again, Molly and I aren't sitting here advocating the
(12:51):
new monogami saying that this is how it should be.
But Nelson was making the point that you know, we
live longer than ever before couples, when couples A I do,
it's for longer than ever before. So maybe it's time
for us to broaden our definition of monogamy and maybe
take a cue from the Animal Kingdom all of those
(13:12):
birds that are happily socially monogamous, whereas uh might not
be hanging out the same chickadee every night. Well, you know,
we've I think we've talked about bore on this podcast
a few times about how you can expect too much
from one person. The new ideal that we've been raised
with thanks to movies and songs and all this, is
that one person is going to be your everything. It's
(13:34):
going to fulfill you sexually, emotionally, give you children, and
take out the garbage. And uh, you know I've talked
about is that too much to expect from marriage? Marriage
used to be a financial contract between two people. Um
or you used to get married because you know, you
wanted to have kids, but now you don't have to
necessarily get married to do that. So they're saying that
(13:55):
these couples who do choose to uh undertake the ideal
of marriage to participate in that system, want to maintain
all the you know, social trappings of it, but you know,
they don't put all that pressure on the one person.
For example, another one of the couples from the Nelson
article I thought was kind of interesting was this woman
(14:16):
who had affairs. She was still in love with her husband,
but she would have never divorced her husband over these
affairs because she knew it hurt his career because he
worked at a very conservative law firm. So she was
happy to maintain that facade of you know, the wife,
the kids in the white picket fence as long as
she and the husband had the agreement about who could
(14:37):
do what. And some people might argue that this idea
of new monogamy is just threatening the very institution of marriage.
What are we doing this? You need to downfall of families.
But I will sit and play devil's advocate for a
minute and point to the most recent survey statistics that
show that between um fifteen, around of wives and of
(15:00):
husbands will sleep with someone who is not their spouse
or have a full blown affair at some point. And
then you can pile up the divorce statistics on top
of that, and I think that maybe, you know, maybe
there is room for some people, if if it's right
for the couple. Again, this is going to be on
a per couple basis, but maybe it's time for us
(15:21):
to perhaps stopped kidding ourselves about monogamy being this innate
natural thing that we have. I mean, it sounds very romantic,
but maybe it's not all that realistic. But then again,
I mean, I know there are probably gonna be people
out there who think that people who are practicing new
monogamy are trying to have their cake and eat it too.
They get all the benefits of that great home life
(15:42):
with the perfect spouse, and they get to have sex
with whoever they want as long as they figured out
the rules, you know, with that person. And and I
think that you know, that's that's a valid point of
view to have to because you know, jealousy can take
over in ways that you didn't expect. And the key
to all of these couples that Nelson worked with was
(16:03):
acknowledging the fact that there might be jealousy, there might
be complex but making that commitment to negotiate it with
each other and figure out if it was this was
a system that worked for them, because it's like she said,
it isn't for everyone. So there you have it. As
as animals, humans are certainly not a monogamous species. We
(16:23):
attempt it, but maybe maybe we're confusing social and sexual monogamy.
That's not a question that Molly and I can answer,
and I don't think that that's a question that anyone
can answer for and make a blanket answer for, because,
like we said at the beginning, different people have different
brain structures that will determine how monogamous they might or
might not be. So at this time, I think it's
(16:46):
it's time to hear from you guys. Let us know
your thoughts mom stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or share your thoughts with everyone over on our Facebook page.
And now we shall read some listener mail. This one
is from Damon It's about the home at podcast and
Damon Rights. I'm a thirty nine year old man who
(17:08):
grew up in Detroit, Michigan. I took home economics when
I was in the seventh eighth grade, and I can
say it was one of the most valuable classes I
ever took. I learned how to sew and I learned
a little bit of cooking. I didn't mind taking the
class at the time. I had no clue that I
would use with things I learned to help me survive
in college. I had a roommate who had problems making
teeny dinners while I was cooking full meals. I am
(17:28):
married now and I of what my wife and I
eat while I'm not making my own clothes. I don't
have a problem if I get a hole or need
to make minor adjustments. My wife and I both think
home economics and mom of course for teaching me these skills.
I think everyone male and female should be required to
take this class. Well, I've got another home at email
here and it is from Ada, and Adora writes. I
(17:49):
went to co ed Roman Catholic High School in Hong
Kong that was originally built as an all boys school.
We did not have the facilities for home at classes. Instead,
we had design and Technology, which is learned to shop
class in the US. We made useless stuff such as
plastic letter openers, and it sound too useless. In an
average secondary school in Hong Kong, girls go to home
at classes while boys go to shop class. I was
(18:11):
proud that we had shop class instead of home mat
because I could already cook and knit at home, and
I'd rather learn how to use a drill. It comes
in handy or it came in handy later, when I
worked at a theater scene shop in college and built
wood models for my architecture podcast. After listening to your podcast.
So I wish we had home Mack, but I wouldn't
give up shop class. Both Homemech and shop class should
(18:33):
be taught to both boys and girls. Every time I
get food poisoning, it's from a friend's cooking rather than
restaurant food. In denth grade, we had to close theater
very early due to undercook chicken at the pot. Look.
Oh no, Over Christmas, I ate a pasta my friend
prepared that got me very sick. She added the milk
before adding the uncooked meat. The boiling point of milk
is much lower than the temperature required for cooking meat.
(18:56):
Oh my god, I had a fever of thirty nine
degrees celsius and threw up a munch at. A bit
of my brain came out. Everyone has to eat, you know.
You need to know how to prepare food safely. Oh
and by the way, Molly, this is this is a
little bit for you, Dora Rice. I was buying a
Molly bolt at home Depot and thought about how Molly
would probably love that. There is an awesome bold with
(19:17):
her name. It's the best bolt for hanging wall shelves
on drywall. There you go at that email I might
have done a little Google image search for the Molly
board for the holidays, I'm buying someone a bag of
molly bolts. Wonder who it is? So if you have
an email, you can send it to us at mom
Stuff at how stuff works dot com. We would also
love you to take advantage of our Facebook page and
(19:38):
share your thoughts there. You can also follow us on
Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast. And lastly, you can head
over to our blog during the week, It is stuff
Mom Never Told You at how stuff works dot com
for moral this and thousands of other topics. This is
how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast,
(19:58):
click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner
of our homepage. The House dipp Works iPhone app has arrived.
Download it today on iTunes, brought to you by the
reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, Are you
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