I've been thinking about this for some time, years even, and I've come to the conclusion that human beings are not by nature monogamous. Now before you start yelling "Don't be stupid, we're not all polygamists, so we MUST be monogamous!" allow me to clarify.
While human society has, for the major part, been more or less monogamous - in that people tend to settle down with one partner for extended periods, in some cases for life - the exceptions tend to disprove the rule. Depending on which statistics you read, the rate of infidelity is between 20% and 60%, which means that at the very least a significant portion of the population are out there getting some on the side. If you add in the divorce statistics which show that about 40% of marriages end in divorce after about 12 years (source: Australian Bureau of Statistics), it begins to look as though the idea of staying committed to one, and only one, significant other for life is a bit of an exception rather than the rule.
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4:29 am Wednesday, 13th November, 2013
Less than about 3% of mammals mate for life, so why should humans be monogamous? The very fact that just about everyone in a relationship is tempted to stray at least at some point (unless they are are honest with themselves) would suggest that humans always have a propensity to flit between partners. Despite the best efforts of religion and social pressure, people have been having it away with partners other than their own for millennia, so yes monogamy is indeed a myth and (in my opinion) not the natural situation. |
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9:50 am Wednesday, 13th November, 2013
Just adding to Nigels comment: I can remember reading an article that said that marriages last about the same length of time now as they did in Victorian times, however that was because a man living to a good age had three wives. they were the one that died having one of his children, the one that died of an untreatable ailment and the one that buried him. |
