Valentine's Day Post - The Math of Monogamy

I've noticed the Huffington Post has lately been posting a lot of news stories championing the virtues of a polygamous lifestyle (this one and this one, for instance). The latest one reads:

Just imagine it. A younger lover to fulfil all your physical desires and another, more mature and settled partner to share your domestic bliss, even take delight in running the home and in raising your offspring. Doesn't that sound ideal?...

Human beings are remarkable for their diversity, and that includes the vast range of relationships we can create and maintain. And the most important ingredient in any relationship is a good matching of needs. That is, the sum total of everyone's needs must be met within the relationship. This is a rarity within any relationship - almost never does one person meet all the needs of their partner. Most of us either simply accept that some of our needs will go unmet, or we fulfil them - usually, the less controversial ones - outside our primary relationship.

But another way to resolve this mismatch is to fulfil some of your desires with one person, and the rest with someone else, ensuring that all parties are aware of, and happy with, this arrangement...And speaking of jealousy, it has no place in a happy tripartite relationship. Jealousy is about possession, and not wanting to share.

Sounds pretty reasonable, right?

The problem is in the math. There's approximately the same number of straight women and straight men in the world. So suppose Woman A has concurrent relationships with Man A and Man B. Then Man B is going to find that Woman A doesn't fulfill his needs (as she spends half her time with Man A), so Man B will need to establish his own second relationship with Woman C. Woman C, in turn, will need Man C, and so on down the line. Concurrent relationships therefore have a tendency to spread.

Now somewhere down that line, one of these men or women is undoubtedly going to get jealous and split up with his or her lover. Which leaves that person also in the lurch, and (s)he must either find a replacement second lover or break it off with his or her own two-timing partner and find an exclusive partner. And so on down the line, until the whole thing unravels, leaving a lot of bitterness, jealousy, shame, inadequacy, and sometimes broken families in its wake.

Of course this wouldn't happen if no one got jealous anywhere at any time. But people do get jealous, and for a variety of reasons. When your lover has another lover, you naturally tend to wonder if you're good enough, sexy enough, or fun enough. And people like the feeling of being special and unique in the eyes of another human being. Are these emotions selfish and wrong? Some lifestyle columnists might say yes, but I would say no - and even if they are selfish, these desires are not going away, until we become something other than human.

Monogamy, therefore, may be the worst of all possible relationship situations, except for all those others which have been tried from time to time. Small wonder, then, that stories of concurrent and "open" relationships nearly always end with messy breakups.

Until humanity evolves into something else, then, polygamy is only really feasible for a handful of rich, famous, and/or extremely attractive people, who can have multiple relationships at the implicit expense of all the frustrated chumps out there sitting at home watching reruns in their sweatpants on Valentine's Day. And come to think of it, lots of those rich, famous, and/or extremely attractive people happen to live in Hollywood, and form the core readership of the Huffington Post.

For the rest of us, a more democratic version of love will have to do. Happy Valentine's Day, folks.