Pair Bonding Is Ancient; Sexual Exclusivity Is Modern

For many humans, being married was never about just one sex partner

The western world largely supports and normalizes monogamy as the correct and natural way for humans to mate and spend their lives. So much so that in the year 2000, roughly 95 percent of respondents in a statistically representative sample of cohabiting and married American adults said that they expected monogamy of their partners and believed that their partners expected it of them. But it turns out that in the larger world social monogamy and sexual monogamy are often two different things. Humans have been pair-bonding since ancient times, but that doesn’t mean that sexual fidelity was an expected component of that until relatively recently.

Besides the fact that many people who ostensibly believe in monogamy engage in extramarital sex (somewhere between 20–60% of Americans, depending on who you ask), many other cultures don’t view sexual exclusivity as normal or necessary even though they have some form of marriage. “Quite apart from promiscuous individuals, there are plenty of societies for which monogamy is not the norm — some estimates place the figure as high as 83%.” Source

This suggests that the value we place on monogamy is more cultural than biological and that it is not the timeless, natural state of affairs that we may have been led to believe. “In the animal kingdom, monogamy in the strictest sense of sexual exclusivity is largely a myth.” Source Why should it be any different for humans?

For example, an estimated 90% of bird species are socially monogamous but scientists have begun to discover using genetic and behavioral studies that in some species up to 75% of the offspring may come from “extra-pair copulations.” In other words, mama bird had some other sexual partners other than just the one she was tending the nest with.

“A female who mates with several different males will have more genetically diverse offspring, boosting the chances that at least some of them will thrive.” Source This goes for human females as well as other non-human animals and it is confirmed in our anatomy. The coronal ridge of the human penis is specifically designed to displace semen left there by another man or men. In addition, animals that engage in mate competition prior to copulation (like gorillas) tend to have small testes and penises. Animals that instead engage in sperm competition are more well endowed relative to body size (like chimpanzees and humans) because they need to have a large supply of semen on hand to inseminate multiple partners.

You may have been taught that women select one best mate based on external factors such as size and strength, but it turns out that those characteristics are no real indication of health or genetic compatibility. The female reproductive tract actually assesses who is a good genetic partner after copulation. “Think of it as a chemical ‘sorting hat’— dictated by a female’s reproductive secretions — that help sperm who are most likely to give her offspring a genetic boost in survival.” Source

“The human mating system is extremely flexible,” Bernard Chapais of the University of Montreal wrote in a recent review in Evolutionary Anthropology. Only 17 percent of human cultures are strictly monogamous. The vast majority of human societies embrace a mix of marriage types, with some people practicing monogamy and others polygamy. (Most people in these cultures are in monogamous marriages, though.) Source

But a socially monogamous marriage does not necessarily come with the expectation of sexual fidelity. The Warao of Brazil periodically suspend marriages and have ritual relations called mamuse. During this time, adults are free to have sex with whom they please. These relationships are considered to be honorable and thought to have a positive effect upon any children that might result. Source

The Na (Mosuo) of China have what are euphemistically called “walking marriages” but that means that the “marriage” lasts for the night or the part of the night that a suitor visits a woman’s room. Although some partners do have long-term and on-going relationships each individual’s autonomy is considered to be almost a sacred thing, with jealousy or possessiveness an unacceptable affront to that. If it is displayed, it is met with ridicule and scorn. Source

Our Paleolithic ancestors seem to have understood the social implications of mating with people from other tribes as well as the importance of preventing inbreeding. “Small family bands are likely to have interconnected with larger networks, facilitating the exchange of people between groups in order to maintain diversity,” Professor Martin Sikora, from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, said.” Source This appears to have been done purposely and with the understanding that genetic diversity was desirable. It was a cooperative strategy undertaken by a highly social species.

Indeed, marriage as an elementary principle of human kinship systems has long been considered a central aspect of between-group alliances. The exchange of mates among kin groups (reciprocal exogamy) and accompanying networks of economic exchange (e.g., brideservice and brideprice) are widespread and arguably create the foundation of human social organization. Source

In other words, pair-bonding serves a purpose well beyond the nuclear family and so it is no surprise that it has been around since Paleolithic times. But, as we saw above with birds, nesting together doesn’t necessarily indicate sexual exclusivity. In a band of 20–50 individuals who shared all resources, and had a vested interest in the well-being of the entire group as a primary survival strategy as was the case with our Paleolithic ancestors, pair-bonding hardly precludes multiple mating.

Partible paternity, where several men have sex with a woman and are considered the father of her child is a long-standing practice in some parts of the world and a far from rare dynamic even today. Spreading fatherly feelings throughout the group helps to maintain solidarity and cohesion as well as promotes the well-being of a greater number of children.

It is only with the rise of agriculture and the patriarchal social systems that eventually accompanied it that women’s sexuality was curtailed and monitored in some parts of the world. This was the only way that “true heirs” of land and property could be determined. Prior societies had few personal possessions and since fathers could not be definitively determined, lineage went through the mothers. This only changed 6–9 thousand years ago with the advent of patriarchy. Current cultures that are very community-oriented tend to care less about paternity also.

But even with patriarchy, it was really only women who were expected to stay sexually monogamous. Infidelity for men never carried the stigma or the sanctions that it did for women until the mid-Victorian age. Prior to this time, prostitution was seen as just a fact of life, a necessary thing in keeping with the early Victorian jingle, ‘Hogamus higamus, men are polygamous/Higamus hogamus, women are monogamous’, with the added detail that ‘the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally.’ Source

But by the 1870s and 1880s men were admonished to transcend their “animal instincts” and “considerate” husbands were the ones who did not make too many sexual demands on their wives. Private male homosexual acts were not explicitly or severely legislated against until 1885, when gay sex even behind closed doors was made a criminal offense for the first time and moral panic over prostitution became a topic of increasing focus. The hogamus higamus days were over and both men and women were expected to be “sexually continent” outside of marriage.

Today most couples when they marry never discuss what their expectations are for sexual fidelity. It seems to be assumed that nesting together means “forsaking all others” but this wasn’t always the case, and in many parts of the world, it still isn’t. Although presumed social and sexual monogamy is still the default in the West and in some other cultures, more and more people are beginning to explore “monogamish” lifestyles which include a variety of consensual breaks from strict sexual fidelity.

These may be anywhere from relatively rare trysts with someone else — the kind that advice columnist Dan Savage describes having within his marriage — to full on swinging, where couples maintain their emotional and nesting monogamy but sexually engage with others. Polyamory entails intimate relationships of various kinds with multiple people and may or may not quite fit this “monogamish” description, because some polyamorous people do not have a primary or nesting partner and polyamorous connections do not necessarily have to be sexual.

Although polygyny (one man with multiple wives) is a relationship system that has existed in the past and still does take place in some cultures, it was not a prevalent part of our ancient ancestry. By contrast, both courtship and arranged marriages of one man and one woman do have a long history.

It is conceivable that marriage involved some level of arrangement, regulation, and reciprocal relationships from the very earliest inception of marriage-like cultural institutions. The presence of brideprice or brideservice as the ancestral human state may be interpreted as early critical components of regulated mate exchange. The very act of a male moving away from his kin and community (e.g., brideservice) is a tremendous leap from the insular patterns in other apes. It is an indication of negotiation between kin groups and the recognition of a continued set of obligations and reciprocal transactions (alliance) between the families. This, combined with the low prevalence of polygyny as the ancestral human state, suggests that there was a reasonable level of evenness to mate exchanges (low reproductive skew). Source

Based on what we can conclude from this, pair-bonding is an ancient human practice, but the expectation of sexual fidelity is a comparatively recent one. Naturally, couples who want to maintain sexual exclusivity have every right to choose that, but it is a cultural construct — one that is infrequently challenged to determine if it is indeed what serves the relationship best. It’s just what is culturally expected and some couples even view jealousy and possessiveness as appropriate signs of real love.

Marriage is on the decline in the US and rates of infidelity and divorce remain high. Dr. Meredith Chivers, the director of the Queen’s University Sexuality and Gender Laboratory in Ontario, Canada has this professional opinion:

She understands that plenty of people want to work to stay in monogamous relationships, and she wants to see them supported, too, by a culture-wide acknowledgment that it’s not easy or necessarily “natural” to stay sexually exclusive over time. “The very idea that people could form long-term pair bonds and be equally sexually exciting to each other from day one to day seven thousand makes no sense. It doesn’t fit any psychological model we have of how people habituate over time,” she observed with a shake of her head.

Martin, Wednesday. Untrue (p. 47). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

Our culture values both social and sexual monogamy but then at the same time doesn’t do a very good job of maintaining either. Other modern cultures and many ancient ones do not have these same expectations and increasingly, modern Americans are rejecting traditional ways of dating and mating. “A survey of some 8,700 US single adults in 2017 found that more than one in five engaged in consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lives.”

Increasingly, middle-aged and older women who are widowed or divorced are not interested in getting married again. After being told their whole lives that they are only complete people if they become wives and mothers, many women are discovering that they are just fine as singletons — some of them as never-married people and some of them as never-again divorcees or widows. The trend seems to be related to a desire for greater independence and autonomy and to have the kinds of love relationships that do not inhibit that. Source

Pair-bonding of some kind will probably never go out of style, but the way that it looks is increasingly changing as modern people grapple with the discrepancies between our stories about marriage and the realities of it. Somewhere down the line we may well discover that true sexual exclusivity was an experiment of a few hundred years taking place in only particular parts of the world — one that ultimately didn’t pan out for most people even as pairing up continues to be common.

Meanwhile in Brazil, In a traditional Canela marriage ceremony, the bride and groom lie down on a mat, arms under each other’s heads, legs entwined. The brother of each partner’s mother then comes forward. He admonishes the bride and her new husband to stay together until the last child is grown, specifically reminding them not to be jealous of each other’s lovers. Source

Note: This story is about heterosexual pair-bonding and sexuality since that has been more widely studied across time and across cultures than homosexual relationships although it is my understanding that many gay marriages and relationships do not have an expectation of sexual fidelity.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.