Episode 16 - Monogamy

Transcript

Ellie: 0:07

Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,

David: 0:09

And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:12

The podcast where two friends,

David: 0:14

who who are also professors,

Ellie: 0:16

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

David: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. Hi everyone. Welcome to the second episode in our four-part series on intimate relationships.

Ellie: 0:43

David did you know that I love The Bachelor franchise, like The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, or Bachelor in Paradise, the TV shows.

David: 0:50

Honestly, it surprised me initially, but now it makes perfect sense.

Ellie: 0:54

Oh my God. What does that mean?

David: 0:56

I think it combines your appreciation for trash TV that you can love-hate on a personal level, as well as destroy from an intellectual standpoint.

Ellie: 1:08

Oh, for sure. I just like, love it and critique it at the same time. I guess that's like how I am with everything. Maybe you too.

David: 1:15

I just hate, I never love.

Ellie: 1:18

Well, yeah, I started watching it a number of years ago with our fellow philosopher, Lauren Guilmette, and we would watch it and critique it, as scholars of feminist theory. But then, I just got sucked in and I started to actually enjoy it. Part of the weird thing about The Bachelor the fact that it's so cringy, and yet it, actually elicits your real human emotions as a viewer, or at least mine.

David: 1:43

Yes, and I don't really know anything about it. All I know is that the show is about a bunch of typically cis-gendered straight people who come together-

Ellie: 1:52

Oh, always cis-gendered straight people. Okay, there have been like one or two bi women.

David: 1:56

Okay. And so it's about all these people who are competing for the affections of The One.

Ellie: 2:03

Yes. I mean, it's about as heteronormative as it gets. It's also super white, although they've really been trying to change that recently by having a black Bachelorette followed by a black Bachelor right now. Matt James' season, really enjoying it so far. But I think one of the things that also strikes me is how it enforces scripts of monogamy. Basically, The Bachelor or Bachelorette narrows down a pool of candidates and ends up choosing one person at the end. So it peddles all the typical tropes of romantic love, where you find your person among many possible contenders. But here's why I'm so obsessed with it in practice. The Bachelor or Bachelorette is dating a bunch of people, so it's not actually monogamous at all. It's literally polyamory in monogamous clothing.

David: 2:50

Yes, it's just like dating a bunch of people and testing the waters.

Ellie: 2:53

Exactly.

David: 2:54

And the show makes it clear that, as a society, we have a strong investment in the ideology of monogamy, even when we don't actually practice that ideology in the every day.

Ellie: 3:06

Yeah, American society has never been as monogamous as it purports to be.

David: 3:11

All you have to do is consider the statistics for adultery. So 20% of married men and 13% of married women in the US report having had sex with somebody other than their spouse. And again, that's just the people who reported it.

Ellie: 3:27

A question for me here is why are we so invested in monogamy as a culture? Many assume that humans have evolved to be monogamous and others will say, "Oh, you know, even if monogamy is not natural, it's necessary in order for an intimate relationship to be sustainable." and then we have philosophers, the majority of whom for centuries have argued that monogamy is built into the structure of love itself.

David: 3:53

In this episode, we discuss monogamy.

Ellie: 3:56

Is monogamy natural for humans? More importantly, is it moral?

David: 4:01

And how are our current norms surrounding monogamy rooted in the medieval Christian ideal of courtly love.

Ellie: 4:13

Okay. So here's the weird thing. Monogamy technically means single marriage. It comes from the ancient Greek mano, one. And gamos, marriage. But the word gets used much more broadly than this. It's not necessarily tied to marriage. So I think when we usually talk about monogamy, we're using it to describe practices of having just one intimate partner, usually romantic and/or sexual, at a time.

David: 4:36

I think that's right. And the ideology of monogamy is so deeply rooted in American culture that we barely notice how deep those roots actually go. Scholars talk about mono-normativity, which is the assumption that everybody seeks and flourishes in the same type of dyadic, romantic, sexual, love relationship. So the norm is the norm of one for every other one.

Ellie: 5:05

Exactly. And I think mono-normativity is naming something that is so important because the assumption that romantic and/or sexual love, intimate love, we might call it broadly speaking, takes the form of a couple, I can only love one other person in that type of way, seems really intuitive to a lot of people, but is that really just because we've been raised in a culture where it is taken as the norm? Mono-normativity is by no means new. You can see it going back at least to one of the most famous ancient texts on love, which is Plato's Symposium. And the Symposium is a really fun text because it's basically about all of these ancient Greek dudes who get together for an after-dinner party and they're all really hung over and they're like, "What should we do instead of drinking more? Because we all feel like crap and we really don't want to drink." And they decid that the perfect alternative to getting drunk is giving speeches on love. And it's really fun because like some of them are lusting after each other, or they're in relationships with each other. And so it's a bunch of just these horny dudes who are talking about love. And one of the most famous speeches in it is given by the ancient Greek comedian Aristophanes, who is a real person, but who Plato dramatizes in this dialogue and Aristophanes comes up with what's known as the Myth of the Circle People.

David: 6:25

You might be familiar with this myth if you've ever watched the movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch, because there's a very famous song called the "Origin of Love" in which Hedwig, tells this story and there are wonderful little graphics that appear on the screen.

Ellie: 6:41

Okay. So I'm not going to be doing as great a job as Hedwig, perhaps, but let me describe this myth. So in this myth, humans were originally completely round. We had four hands and legs, we had two faces, we had four ears, and we got around by cartwheeling, which is just like so fun. There were three kinds of original human beings, according to their different sex organs. There were male and male, female and female, and male and female. So you can see here that the original Myth of the Circle People is not heteronormative. The humans became too ambitious and so they made an attempt to seize power from the gods and they were punished by Zeus by being cut into two. And Zeus basically said, "Okay, we've got these humans who are now cut in half and bleeding out. Apollo, go do my dirty work for me, turn their heads around so they're facing the front and seal up their wound, the place where they were cut, with a draw string." And this became the belly button. These humans who were cut in half were devastated. They longed for their other half and they wanted to reunite. Basically they started dying off because of this. They were so distracted by their grief that they weren't living very long. And so Zeus was like, "Oh, okay, I'll give you a temporary fix." Zeus moved our genitals from our backs to our fronts and invented sexual intercourse to be a temporary moment of union that would satisfy them. Also keep in mind here that there are male-male, female-female, and male-female humans. And so the ancient Greek myth accepts same-sex coupledom.

David: 8:17

Yeah. And so in this myth, what we see are two things. The first one is is that the possibility for sex, or romantic love, emerges only in the aftermath of a deep trauma. And the second one is that in the moment of a sexual unity between two individuals, you achieve something akin to cosmic unity, where you become one, not just with yourself, but with all of existence, because a primitive primeval unity is restored. And in some ways this is how Freud will talk about sex later in the 20th century.

Ellie: 8:55

Yeah. So this myth really gets at the ideal of finding your other half, this person whom you're destined to be with, maybe were even originally united with, and that you have to seek out and reunite with, by being a couple.

David: 9:09

And another version of this is the ideal of The One, which has maybe how we talk about this, nowadays, more so than the other half.

Ellie: 9:17

Do you hear that a lot? I hear it all the time, especially from my parents or parent's generation, like, "Is so and so the one?"

David: 9:24

Yeah, and it taps into these narratives about destiny and about predestination and the idea that once you meet the one, somehow you will have an intuition that this is the one and you will know right away, because you will have, you know, love at first sight. This is exactly what you get in that MTV series called Are You the One where people compete, hoping to find their match, except that unlike The Bachelor, here, people are not competing for one individual person. They're actually fighting to find their match amongst each other. So they will put, like, let's say 24 people in the same house, and there are 12 ideal couples and their challenge is to find their match.

Ellie: 10:09

Oh, and are they all straight?

David: 10:10

So the first seven seasons I think were all straight and then season eight dropped, uh, and it was like, an amazing season. It included gender queer people, bi people, trans people. And as far as I know, it was the first televised orgy on reality TV, at least the first one that I've seen.

Ellie: 10:31

Oh my God. So it sounds like in that show, even though it's called Are You the One, suddenly all of these elements go against the mono-normative narrative, and it actually, like The Bachelor, might be kind of polyamory in practice, but monogamy in theory.

David: 10:46

Except that the ideal is that everybody will couple up with the one that is the right choice. So the participants make money the more that, as a group, they discover the matches that have been determined ahead of time by means of a questionnaire. Yeah. So like they all answer a questionnaire, and then there's a professional matchmaker that says, "Oh, these two go together. These two go together." But they don't know that. They don't know who their perfect match is. And so the task in the show is to find that person.

Ellie: 11:16

And I liked the way you put it in terms of a task, because in all of these shows, the goal is monogamy, to go back to something that you said earlier, you know, these shows permit you to date multiple people temporarily, but ultimately you're expected, at some point, to settle down with just one person. That's how mono-normativity operates, not by excluding polyamorous activities, but by positing monogamy as the end goal.

David: 11:43

Yeah. And, you know, spoiler alert, I wonder how many of these reality TV couples and matches that are made actually last in- in real life?

Ellie: 11:53

Yeah. And I want to go back to The Bachelor here for a moment. Sorry. I warned you I'm very into it.

David: 11:57

You cannot help yourself, can you?

Ellie: 12:00

But, the show has a bunch of norms that enforce monogamy as the end goal and, in practice, hide its polyamorous dimensions. For instance, there's this progression where first you say, "I'm falling in love with you," then you say, "I'm in love with you." And then you say, "I love you." Or usually in Bachelor parlance, it's, "I do love you," which I really don't get because I find "I do love you" way less romantic than "I love you," but that's neither here nor there. In any case, for almost all of the seasons of the show, it was standard for the lead, the Bachelor/Bachelorette, only to tell the person they chose at the end, "I love you."

David: 12:39

Oh, they can't say it before.

Ellie: 12:41

No, this norm was blown up a few years ago though, by Ben Higgins, a very cute Bachelor.

David: 12:47

Oh my God. I love that you would know their names and know what season. You have complete knowledge.

Ellie: 12:52

Yes. I am not only a scholar of 20th century French philosophy, I'm also a scholar of The Bachelor. Ben famously said, "I love you" to the top two candidates.

David: 13:01

Ooh.

Ellie: 13:02

And that led to a huge amount of confusion for them because they both thought that they were going to get picked. So his runner up, JoJo, was devastated and confused because she was like, "Look, you told me the night before you propose to somebody else, I love you. And according to Bachelor social norms, that indicated to me that you were going to pick me." What's interesting about this? And sorry, I know I'm on a Bachelor rant.

David: 13:23

I'm enjoying watching you unravel live. You go girl.

Ellie: 13:30

What's interesting about this though, is that in every subsequent season of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, the lead has followed Ben's new norm and said, "I love you" to more than one person. And in fact, the most recent two Bachelors, not only said, "I love you," to the top two candidates, but actually ended up changing their minds after proposing to one woman and then saying, "Actually, I want to be with another woman." Now, when I watched the last episodes of every Bachelor, Bachelorette season. I'm just an agony because I'm thinking to myself, these people are torn between multiple people. They love multiple people. Why can't they just be with multiple people? Why does the norm of monogamy enter in and screw everything up? And so the candidates are always looking to judge relationships in comparison to one another, to see whether they can spend a life with just one of them. Even though the moment you propose to that one person, your feelings for the other person or people don't go away.

David: 14:31

Well, and it seems like this highlights an important point about our ideal of monogamy, which is that your love for the one only becomes special, it only becomes meaningful, it only becomes true, through the elimination of other possibilities. So it's an essentially negative phenomenon. It's because you don't love anybody, I know you love me.

Ellie: 14:54

Yes, the specialness comes through it's restrictivity..

David: 14:57

Exactly, exactly.

Ellie: 14:59

And understandably when people enter a show like The Bachelor, which vaunts these norms of monogamy, they find themselves in hot water, given the tension between their practices and their ideology. And so a lot of times candidates express confusion when somebody doesn't pick them, suggesting that there's something unintelligible about non-monogamous love. Because the social scripts we have don't allow for loving two women at once, it just doesn't make any sense.

David: 15:28

I think underneath this refusal to entertain the possibility of polyamory is a fear that loving two women at the same time goes against the order of nature itself. And I think this point about unintelligibility really is fundamental because one of the ways in which we render ourselves legible to ourselves, as well as to others, is by playing into certain scripts that are socially recognizable. And so when those scripts don't exist to match the experience or the feelings or the situations that we find ourselves in, it creates an identity collapse, where you don't know who you are or what you are, so all you can say is "I'm confused." And this captures attention in how we think about monogamy: Is it natural, as some social scientists argue, or is it a social and historical construct that has evolved over time?

Ellie: 16:32

Some scholars in the social sciences, especially anthropologists, have suggested that monogamy emerges out of evolution. Specifically, they're talking about the evolution of pair bonding, which is basically the idea that two humans are needed in order to raise a baby.

David: 16:48

So the basic idea is that humans need a lot more care during the early stages of development after birth, because we are born with a brain that is not fully developed in order to pass through the cervical canal. And so when we are born, we require a ton of resources, a ton of attention, a lot of energy.

Ellie: 17:09

Like years and years, as opposed to just a baby giraffe who like pops out and walks around.

David: 17:14

Exactly. And so in order to give us everything that we need to mature, we need two committed parents to focus our wellbeing.

Ellie: 17:23

And so according to this theory, this is where monogamy emerges. A lot of anthropologists will also talk about a gender difference here, where women need to sort of lock down a man to help find food while they caretake for the baby, and men are just like trying to go out and spread their seed, but are allowing themselves to be held down by women in order to ensure that they have a legitimate child whom they can pass down their property to.

David: 17:46

Yes. And as a philosopher of science, I want to point out that there are major problems with this anthropological account of monogamy. On the one hand, it traffics on sexist, patriarchal images and narratives about woman, the gatherer, man, the hunter that have been problematized, but-

Ellie: 18:05

Or woman, the mother, who's just at home, like trying to lock down the man.

David: 18:09

Yes exactly, that are increasingly coming under attack in anthropology, but on top of that, there is a competing theory that because our ancestors already lived in communal societies with a relatively extended network of care, they would not have needed to quote unquote lock down a partner in order to take care of the child, because they would have already had plenty of help to do so.

Ellie: 18:36

Yes. Like I just think this original theory from anthropologists that pair bonding emerged because lone women were birthing children in the wilderness and they were like, "Oh my gosh, that had sex with nine months ago, please come back and help take care of this child for me," is just like the biggest bullshit. It's just like a bunch of male anthropologists sitting around in a room and being like, "I wonder how I can justify the fact that I want to go out and have sex with a bunch of women, but like my wife is at home taking care of the child and tries to get me to stay in." I mean, for one thing, when you think about it, the idea that a woman would even have known who the father of her child was requires pretty complex scientific knowledge about the way that paternity works and humans didn't actually have that until relatively recently.

David: 19:27

I don't know. I heard that they were tracking their cycle pretty closely with- like the idea that they would have the anatomical knowledge understand how sex turns into a child nine months later.

Ellie: 19:42

So I think a much more plausible anthropological narrative has to take into account the fact that humans have often lived in large communities and also not had this anatomical, scientific knowledge about paternity. So that already undercuts a lot of the narratives about monogamy that come out of the social sciences.

David: 20:00

Yeah. And it's important to note that it's not only the social sciences that pedal this narrative. I have also seen a lot of people in the natural sciences, especially in the life sciences, so here, I'm thinking about biologists, for example, who biologize monogamy by pointing to animal examples to prove that somehow monogamy is the rule of nature. So typically they will point to, for example, swans, which are culturally the embodiment of the ideal of monogamy, and also voles, which are these kind-

Ellie: 20:33

Oh, yeah. Prairie voles at LA zoo,

David: 20:37

voles meadow.

Ellie: 20:38

the Prairie voles were always my favorite as a kid.

David: 20:42

Surprise surprise, even swans and voles turn out to be cheaters, according to our human conception of monogamy. So I- this appeal to nature is just wrong. A couple of years ago, Louise Crane, who is a correspondent for BBC news, published a story enitled "The Truth About Swans."

Ellie: 21:03

God, the drama.

David: 21:06

And it turns out that lady swans, especially, get their fix on the side. So, you know, the, the natural spokesanimal for a monogamy is just as monogamous as the monogamous humans claimed to be.

Ellie: 21:22

And a similar point has been made about monogamy among prairie voles too. There is a big research center in Atlanta, at Emory, actually, where you and I went to grad school, that researches the monogamy of prairie voles in order to figure out pro-social behavior and gender theorist angela Willey went into this lab and talked with the researchers about how they were considering monogamy. And she found that what they were defining as monogamy for the prairie voles was actually really loose, sort of inchoate and definitely different from what the average person thinks of when they think of monogamy as being sexual fidelity.

David: 21:58

And the Belgian philosopher, Vinciane Despret, recently wrote a book in which she talks about this vole research.

Ellie: 22:05

Yes, you and I both wrote reviews of this book.

David: 22:08

Without knowing that we were both working on this particular text. And she makes the argument that when people make this appeal on the right of the political spectrum, as a way of justifying something like monogamy or traditional marriage, what you really see is an ideological strategy to try to justify an existing social order on the basis of animal behavior. But what she says is that the same thing happens also on the left. So for example, when gay marriage proponents point to, like, the penguins in whatever zoo that are having a same-sex relationship, therefore gay marriage should be legalized. She says what's happening with this appeal to nature as a way of trying to make sense of human social conventions?

Ellie: 22:55

I was so guilty of that as an undergrad. It's like female Bonobos have sex with each other, therefore homosexuality is natural. Therefore it is right. And this move, I think, is really interesting because it's really hard for us to tell whether humans are naturally monogamous or not. It's also hard for us to tell whether non-human animals are naturally monogamous or not, but-

David: 23:21

Yeah, because what does that even mean? What's a monogamous vole?

Ellie: 23:25

Think the key is that it may not actually matter whether humans are naturally monogamous or not, because to say that something is a certain way in nature, doesn't necessarily imply that it should be that way in human society. This is what philosophers call the natural or naturalistic fallacy. And it's something that David Hume back in the 18th century described as deriving an ought from an is. So this idea that just because something is the case, it should be the case. That, Hume argues, is a logical error. There's simply a difference between facts and ethics, and that's okay, not to mention human society has in many ways gone beyond nature and we think that's better, right? Like, it's good that humans aren't going around murdering each other.

David: 24:15

Well, and, uh, part of the problem here is that the naturalistic fallacy, especially when applied to monogamy and marriage, requires a bunch of cherry picking, right? So yes, you can point to voles, which traditionally pair bond in some ways though not absolutely. But in order to make the argument that voles are the only animals that matter in thinking about human monogamy, you have to exclude all the animals that do not fit the monogamous framework at all, right? Like there are animals with very, very different reproductive strategies and parenting strategies. And in order to appeal to biology, you really have to just like turn a blind eye to that.

Ellie: 24:54

Absolutely. I want to talk in depth about the should of monogamy, whether it's moral or not. Before we do that, let me say something about the way that monogamy rises in human culture more recently. The Middle Ages are very important period for understanding monogamy as we know it in the quote West. During this time period and ideal developed called courtly love, and this was in the 11th to 13th centuries. This idea was vaunted by musicians called troubadours, who sang about love in medieval courts, which is why it's called courtly love. And what's interesting about courtly love is that it pairs divine love with earthly love. Previously in Christian society, erotic love or earthly love was seen as acceptable only when it expressed a higher love of God. But in courtly love, erotic and divine love become fused. So it becomes possible to love another person on their own terms, rather than as an instrument for the love of God. So this I think is where part of the ideology of monogamy as we know it, and sort of retroactively place it back on human nature, emerges.

David: 26:03

Yeah. And so when you think about the archetypes of courtly love in the Middle Ages, so you have your Tristan and Iseult, you have your Eloise and Abelard, you have your, little later, Romeo and Juliet. And it seems to me that in order to sustain the ideal of this kind of romantic love between two, where two become one, you have to do as much cherry picking about those cases as you have to do about the cases of animals in order to generate an ideal out of them. So, let's be clear about the fact that in Tristan and Iseult, Tristan actually drugs Iseult as a way of getting her to fall in love with him, so how romantic and how ideal.

Ellie: 26:47

Wait, wait, wait back up. For those of our listeners who might not know about the Tristan and Iseult myth, this is one of the classic stories that comes out of the courtly love myth. And it basically shows two star crossed lovers who find shelter in a cave and passionately explore their love in private before meeting their tragic deaths. So it's a perfect example of a love that is both physical and spiritual. What's with the drugging part?

David: 27:11

Well, I mean, if you read the original poem from the 12th century, Tristan receives a love potion that makes those who drink it fall in love, and then he sneaks it into, uh, Iseult's. So they're- they don't just like fall in love. They fall in love through his intervention.

Ellie: 27:31

My goodness.

David: 27:32

In order for you to get to a romantic ideal, you have to really overlook a lot of MeToo complaints about what's happening with the men's behavior.

Ellie: 27:44

An important element of this courtly love ideal, which I think is more or less the way we still see love today, is that this love is all-consuming. And if this is our view of love, it makes sense that you would promote monogamy. How could you have an all-consuming love for more than one person? For instance, if you have multiple lovers and both need you at the same time, who would you choose between?

David: 28:06

Yeah, but I think we need to ask the question of what exactly is being consumed in this all-consuming love. Obviously it's not the bodies of the lover or even their souls; rather, it's I think it's their individuality, right? It's going back to that Aristophanes myth that love restores that unity that was preexisting and primeval. And I find that kind of unity a little bit scary. Although, I kind of do like the idea of thinking about monogamy as this like mad or rushed Freudian death drive, where we're just trying to like burn each other to a pulp through this all-consuming intensity that we share for one another.

Ellie: 28:49

Oh, my God. Well, the norm of monogamy develops in different ways over human history and courtly love is just one of a number of examples, but I think it is a particularly illuminating one, because it continues to be so influential in our social scripts in contemporary America.

David: 29:04

Independently of whether monogamy is something natural that is rooted in our biology, or whether it's historical and has evolved over time through a series of social conventions, I think the real question here is, should we engage in monogamy? What reasons might we have to be monogamous?

Ellie: 29:28

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David: 29:47

So one of the main arguments in favor of monogamy is that it makes a relationship between two individuals special. So by choosing just one other person, we are able to create a unique bond with them that we don't want to share with anybody else. So it creates something akin to a private space or a private universe in which we are everything to one another.

Ellie: 30:10

That feels so good, right? The idea that somebody would choose you above all others gives us this form of social recognition that creates a bunch of warm fuzzies. When you picture falling in love, you picture falling in love with just one other person who's focused completely on you.

David: 30:27

Yes. And I think the phenomenology, if we want to use that term, of falling in love, the experience of falling in love, does seem to suggest that it's this thing that you experience in relation to another person who experiences it also in relation to you? So there is this reciprocity that goes on that we tend to assume must happen only between two people, or at least that it's easier to comprehend as happening between two individuals.

Ellie: 30:56

And at the same time, the specialness claim unravels a little bit once you think about it more, because we don't make it about other kinds of relationships. Philosopher Harry Chalmers talks about this in an essay called "Is Monogamy Morally Permissible?" and he describes as a number of other thinkers have also drawn attention to, the fact that I can have multiple friends or I can have multiple children and those friends aren't going to be jealous of each other, those children aren't going to be like, "You must have a favorite." I mean, come on. When I was growing up, I like was convinced that my sister was my parents' favorite, but they're like, "No, we do love you both equally." And so there's something specific to intimate relationships where we presume that exclusivity is required for specialness.

David: 31:42

Yeah. And I think the metaphysics behind the special-ness claim are really bizarre because it requires you to treat love almost as if it were a non-renewable resource that runs out like, "Oh, somebody already ate the cake. So there is none left for the other people," um, or, or something like an object that wears away with time. And so like, a really precious photograph that if you just let anybody handle it, is going to be all wrinkly afterwards, you know, it's going to be passed around.

Ellie: 32:12

And I think that metaphor is so apt David, because I have a really hard time understanding the specialness claim outside of a patriarchal expectation that women are sort of pure virgins until they get married and then they have to be faithful to a single man, right. And so this idea of the sort of like impure, what was, what-

David: 32:33

The wearing away, like a wrinkly-

Ellie: 32:36

Yes. So this idea that you would wear away or become, y'know, disgusting with use, I think is only intelligible from the standpoint of a purity narrative that's wrapped up in patriarchy.

David: 32:48

Yeah. And I think the analogy that Chalmers makes between romance and friendship is convincing because when we try to project the norms of monogamy onto friendship, we immediately see how they break down and how incoherent they are. And so for our listeners who are millennials who were alive back in the day, when MySpace was a thing, I mean, do you remember all the drama that MySpace created with the top eight? Where it's like, I chose you as my top one, so you must choose me as your top one, but you know, if you have a circle of friends where three people are best friends, it becomes impossible to satisfy that demand. And a lot of friendships kind of suffered, because suddenly people started approaching relationships based on friendship as if they were expressions of courtly love, where some unity is restored between two.

Ellie: 33:44

Definitely, and I think MySpace trying to force us to put our friends into different hierarchies felt really weird, but it wouldn't feel weird for a lot of people to do that with romantic relationships, because you would presumably only have one partner at a time, right. And so why do we accept this hierarchizing and exclusivity with romantic relationships, but not of other forms of relationship?

David: 34:05

Well and the case of love is even more intense because at least with MySpace, you had a top eight and then like a top 16 and then a top 24, and then you would hierarchize them. In the case of monogamy, you just have a top one and nothing else. Nobody wants you to have a top number two or a number three, right? That's the whole point about monogamy, that there can be nobody else in that category.

Ellie: 34:30

I think most people recognize that you can have feelings, whether it's sexual desire or romantic feelings, emotions, for more than one person at a time. You start to think of friends kind of cute, but you think, "Oh no, I'm in a relationship. I can't pursue that." So another argument for monogamy is that it doesn't have to do with your own desires because you can desire a lot of different people, but it has to do with protecting your partner. People are monogamous because they want to protect their partners from jealousy and pain. And I think this is a relatively compelling argument, right? The idea that I might have to restrain acting on my desires in order to protect another person, because I love that person.

David: 35:12

Well, the virtue of that account is that at least it's other centered, right? So it puts the needs of the other above the needs of the self. But I actually think that this argument gets things exactly backwards, because on my view, monogamy is what creates the conditions for jealousy and for a pain associated with breaching the monogamy contract. By forcing expectations of love and of intimacy effectively into a straight jacket, and by promulgating this myth that if your partner goes outside of this dyad for anything whatsoever, it's a sign that you're not enough. And when the bar is set there, it means that you will always be never enough.

Ellie: 35:58

Yes. I think that's one really interesting feature of monogamy, is that it tends to be sort of all or nothing, right? Either you're somebody's everything or you're not enough and feeling like not enough feels like nothing at all. It makes you feel insignificant. It makes you feel like the other person never really cared for you to begin with if they cheat on you. And you know, that's just not the case. I definitely don't want to justify cheating here, but I think it's very possible for somebody to love a person and still cheat on them, right. And that doesn't mean that the person who was cheated on should like forgive them or be like, "Oh, whatever, no big deal," but there is something that, from the perspective of the cheater, it's not necessarily that the other person isn't enough. Sorry. It sounds like I'm a cheater or something.

David: 36:47

Ellie, it sounds like you're definitely a cheater.

Ellie: 36:49

My God. No! Actually haven't cheated on anyone.

David: 36:53

But I think you're making a very important point, which is that somebody can act outside of the norms of monogamy and nonetheless still have a relatively good claim to embodying the ideal of love that underpins that. So the fact that you cheat on somebody may have nothing to do with them. It might have something to do with you instead, and again, not to condone cheating, but simply to say that human existence and human relationships are much more complicated and anybody who has ever had to work through infidelity probably knows that.

Ellie: 37:27

Yeah, Chalmers conclude that monogamy is immoral because sexual and romantic relationships are important human goods, and preventing your partner from having these human goods is wrong. What are your thoughts on this, David?

David: 37:43

I am inclined to agree. I do think that monogamy not only prevents people from having richer emotional, sexual, romantic lives than they could outside of a monogamous framework, but it also forces people to constantly police each other's desire, right? You constantly have to think about what your partner is doing, what your partner is fantasizing about, what your partner might be thinking. Do they have feelings for you? And how do you know other than by interrogating them? So it introduces this element of doubt into every relationship. It's almost as if the very conditions that make a monogamous relationship possible also plant the seed for its dissolution.

Ellie: 38:31

But I think a defender of monogamy might argue the opposite, which is that by committing to monogamy, even if that commitment isn't always upheld in practice, you get to avoid all of the messiness and interrogation and questioning because you don't have to be wondering what your partner is doing when they're at the office late, you trust them. And so making a monogamous commitment might free you from wondering, worrying, doubting.

David: 38:59

Yeah. And I respect that argument except that I think it presupposes too much compartmentalization of our lives. So the point is that people do wonder what their partners are doing in the office. Or if they get a text from a coworker, maybe outside of office hours, it starts raising questions. And so, because the bar is so high, a lot of things that maybe shouldn't be threats, suddenly register as threats, and they eventually maybe become threats.

Ellie: 39:31

Yeah. And I think that's related to an assumption in mono-normativity, which is that the presence of other partners would somehow corrupt the relationship that you have with your lover. And we just don't have that same feeling when it comes to friendships or relationships with children or parents. So philosopher Kyle York wrote a response to Chalmer's essay, arguing that monogamy is morally permissible. And one of his reasons for this is the idea that a monogamous relationship permits an intimate sphere of privacy, where you can trust the other person, completely share everything with them, et cetera. And if I know that my partner is also in relationships with other people, I might worry about my privacy being breached.

David: 40:13

Yeah, but if that's your worry, then what are the assumptions that you're making about your partner in the first place? Because it means that from the beginning, you have to see them as untrustworthy people who will betray your secrets with somebody else. And we already don't do that with friends, so why would we do it with lovers?

Ellie: 40:31

Well, not necessarily untrustworthy. I think the idea would be that we tend to conceptualize romantic relationships as involving telling the other person everything. And so, say if I'm in a romantic relationship, I should assume that my partner is going to tell me what they talk about with their friends or things that are important to them. Maybe they're sharing things that they wouldn't share with other people and I'm doing the same. And so I don't even know that it's a matter of trustworthiness. For instance with friends, it- it often does create problems in friendships where you tell your best friend, another friend's secret, because you're like, "Oh, well I'm closer to you." And maybe that's not a good thing.

David: 41:07

Yeah. And so I can be open to that argument and it's probably becoming clear by now that, in general, I am a critic of monogamy.

Ellie: 41:15

I mean, me too. I work on feminist philosophy of love, I can't not be, but I'm trying to give it a fair shake and we gotta be balanced.

David: 41:22

Yeah, me too. And one way to think about this particular point about having your privacy breached by your partner, if you're not operating within the balance of monogamy, is in terms of the ideal of full transparency within a relationship, the idea that you see everything and they see everything about you, and I find that disturbing. So forget about the case of your partner breaching your privacy to a third party, to another person. I'm here thinking about what the Martiniquan philosopher douard Glissant calls the right to opacity. He argues that all of us have this fundamental right to not be legible all the time, to not be necessarily understood by those around us, to have an element of privacy from even our loved ones.

Ellie: 42:14

Hmm.

David: 42:15

I think the challenge that people face when they are in a monogamous relationship is how to share everything with one another without suddenly losing themselves in that dyad and no longer being opaque.

Ellie: 42:29

Absolutely. this idea of losing yourself in another person, which according to feminist philosophers has traditionally been expected especially of women, causes all kinds of psychological distress. So our norms today expect monogamy for both men and women, at least on the surface, right.

David: 42:58

On the surface being operative term.

Ellie: 43:00

Exactly. But historically, monogamy has really only been expected of women. And so for instance, there've been lots of laws in a lot of different societies over the course of human history that have penalized women for adultery, but they have not done so for men. They literally haven't even had laws sometimes for prosecuting men for adultery. Then what happens in the 19th century is there's a rise of what's known as the bourgeois love match, which David and I talk a little bit about in the marriage episode from last week, and here, this idea arises that love is the most important ingredient for marriage and that marriage should be among equals. So what happens there is that the norm of monogamy gets extended from being an expectation for women to also being an expectation for men and suddenly, especially in the 20th century, it comes to be seen as problematic for men to cheat. But I wonder whether this is a good thing, right? I mean, when we think about the statistics for adultery that you mentioned earlier, David, it doesn't seem like monogamy is working for a significant number of people and that's the only the sex part, right? The statistics you referred to are about married people who have sex with somebody other than their spouses. But what about feelings? What about a make-out session, right? What about a summer romance on a trip?

David: 44:16

Yeah. What about an orgy on national TV? Is that cheating? I don't know.

Ellie: 44:22

#AreYouTheOne?

David: 44:25

Turns out no, you are the five.

Ellie: 44:28

Right? Because it seems like by extending the expectation of monogamy to men too, we might actually just be constraining both parties. Like, is this a good thing?

David: 44:39

Two things come to mind for me about this. The first one is in relation to your question, Ellie, about whether it's fair or right to extend this same unreasonable expectation to men, my answer is, "Oh my God, absolutely." Uh, because there is nothing worse than an unfair law except an unfair law that is designed in such a way that it privileges an already privileged social actor. So if the rule is going to apply to women, then yes, it should also be expected of men, at least for the principle of fairness. And the second thing is that there is a lot of ambiguity about the content of the concept of monogamy. Now, typically most of us, because we live in a culture that inculcates a mono-normativity from a very young age, we assume that we know what monogamy means. But in reality, the concept holds a lot more ambiguity than even people who identify as monogamous would admit or recognize. And so I think your comments, for example, about where feelings, or about where a make-out session, fit into this picture are really interesting because it raises the question of how people are defining a breach of the norm. So for example, we can probably agree that's certain behaviors clearly violate monogamous expectations. So if you have sex with your neighbor, chances are that's going to count as cheating, indeed.

Ellie: 46:04

Why the neighbor, can it be like anybody? If you have sex with anybody besides your spouse, that's cheating.

David: 46:10

Well, yes, just like any other person outside of the marriage. Presumably, that's almost universally agreed upon to be cheating, but then when you start getting into some gray areas, the answer is not so clear. What about fantasizing about the neighbor without actually acting on it? I think people would feel very differently about that depending on who you're talking to.

Ellie: 46:32

Well, yeah, because it might not be considered cheating, but if a monogamous partner found out that their loved one was fantasizing, it would probably trigger jealousy and triggering jealousy is usually what cheating does.

David: 46:44

Yeah. Oh my God. Have you seen that movie 50 Years?

Ellie: 46:47

No. What is it?

David: 46:48

So it's a movie about a couple that's been married for 50 years and it's their 50th anniversary of marriage.

Ellie: 46:55

This sounds French. Is it French?

David: 46:57

Uh, no, I don't think it's French, um, but in it, the whole story turns on the wife, finding out on the eve of her 50th anniversary that her husband has been in love with another woman that died when both of them were teenagers this whole time.

Ellie: 47:15

Oh, so it was even before they got married.

David: 47:17

Yes, it was from before her time, but 50 years later, he still has a little kind of a shrine to her in the attic and the woman finds it.

Ellie: 47:28

Whoa. So, yeah, is that cheating?

David: 47:30

Yeah. Yes, exactly. And so the woman feels very conflicted about how to make sense of the fact that this love relationship that she's been in for 50 years has this incongruity that she cannot reconcile. And that it's so deep that it goes to the very foundation of who her husband is. And, you know, we can talk about the behavior and we can talk about the fantasizing, but when you start putting feelings into the equation, it gets even more messy and more complicated, because we don't have control over our feelings presumably in the same way that we have control over our behaviors and maybe fantasizing, that's a little-

Ellie: 48:08

Yeah.

David: 48:09

Of an in-between.

Ellie: 48:10

Totally. But at the same time, it strikes me that being in love with another woman for 50 years, even if she's dead, seems way more extreme than having sex with your neighbor one time.

David: 48:22

It depends on whom you ask because I know certain people who will say physical acts of cheating don't mean anything if there are no emotions. So, you know, people come up with all kinds of narratives to make sense of the situations that they're thrown into. At the same time, I know people who would take the exact opposite view, which is that you can think whatever you want, you can fantasize whatever you want, but the moment that your flesh touches another flesh, you've violated a sacred oath.

Ellie: 48:51

So even if we consider the 80% of married men who have not cheated on their spouses

David: 48:57

Or reported-

Ellie: 48:58

To- Touch. Thank you. Thank you. Um, by having sex with another person, many of them have probably done things that would horrify their spouse or trigger intense feelings of jealousy if they found out about them.

David: 49:09

Yeah. I mean, think about the case, which is very common, of the wife finding out that the husband masturbates to porn without telling her. There is a kind of sense that something has been lost, that something is not communicated, and that there's already something akin to an instinct of cheating that is finding an outlet through porn. But again, it's this middle ground where it's not really behavioral cheating, because there is no real other person, but it's not just thinking either because there is an act involved. So where does that fit?

Ellie: 49:40

And one thing that strikes me in all of these rich examples you're giving, David, is the fact that not only is monogamy not particularly straightforward, but it also doesn't actually seem to be practiced by a lot of people who consider themselves monogamous.

David: 49:54

Yeah, that's right.

Ellie: 49:55

The two become one myth still compels many of us, and there's a beautiful side to that. And there's also a dark side. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

David: 50:13

You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at dearoverthink@gmail.com.

Ellie: 50:21

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and trevor Ames for our logo.

David: 50:34

Thanks so much for joining us today.