The Myth of Marriage: Where the Quest for Exclusivity Goes Wrong

The institution of marriage is a curious thing in the United States. Perhaps no other institution holds as much social esteem as holy matrimony. It's praised in our culture as being the highest type of relationship we can aspire to.

The question is always "When are you getting engaged?" and then "When are you getting married?"

We are always expected to ride the relationship escalator, continually progressing in seriousness until we reach the "final stage": marriage.

At the heart of modern marriage founded on exclusivity is the idea that one person and one person only is going to fulfill all of our physical, sexual, and emotional needs for the rest of our lives no matter how much either one of us changes as a person.

Is it any wonder that the divorce rate is so high? When you phrase it bluntly like that it sounds insane right?

When two high school sweethearts decide to get married they are praised as being the epitome of romance. But is it really realistic to expect that the person you happened to meet in high school is going to make you happy for the rest of your life?

The history of marriage shows that marriage was traditionally an economic institution. Marriages served a pragmatic function: they allowed for families to come together and exchange economic goods. It was never about love or romance or being happy forever. Marriage was an institution for economic exchange between families. And usually it was just for families in the upper classes. Everyone else was ruled largely by "common law marriage".

Only fairly recently in human history has the romanticized notion of eternal love become a socially sanctioned purpose of marriage. We stand up there and say our vows, meaning every word about how we'll always been there, in good times and bad, etc., etc.

But push comes to serve the harsh statistical reality is that marriage does little to make or break any relationship: a marriage can fail just as easily as any other type of relationship.

There are certainly social benefits that come with marriage e.g. being able to take care of adopted children in the case of a spouse who dies, being able to make medical decisions in the event the spouse cannot, etc.

But there is also a cost: divorce can be messy and difficult especially if your lives and finances are intertwined. If marriages were easy to get out of they wouldn't be marriages.

I also think that some marriages would last longer if they had a healthy mechanism for exploring poly. And of course many poly people do get married or are married. But poly marriage is not based on the myth of exclusivity.

Part of the reason I call it a myth is because even marital commitment doesn't stop people from having extra-marital affairs. In over 40% of marriages one or more spouse admits to having an emotional or physical affair.

That statistic suggests that people are cheating for a reason. My suspicion is that they are cheating is because strict monogamy is in some sense not natural. We as a species are not readily disposed to long term exclusivity. But somehow we've convinced ourselves that if someone has physical or emotional intimacy with more than one person the relationship is unhealthy.

But "cheating" is only unhealthy when there isn't total communication and honest. If all parties are aware and have consented and there is detailed, intimate conversation about the boundaries, etc., then it's perfectly possible to have your cake and eat it too.

But poly can also end in heartache and misery and drama. Not everyone is suited for poly and some people find that out the hard way.

For some people jealousy will always be too powerful of an emotion for them to handle poly. But for others who aren't as controlled by their jealousy poly can be a radical alternative to traditional relationship exclusivity.

The purpose of this post was not to say that monogamy is all bad or that nobody can be happy in a monogamous relationship. Some people really work well doing monogamy.

The purpose was to argue that it can be perfectly rational to love more than one person given the realities of modern expectations concerning relationships. There are good reasons to be suspicious of the traditional myth of exclusivity i.e. the myth that relationships have to be exclusive otherwise there's something wrong with the relationship.