As a general rule I try not to make my posts too esoteric. If, like the word esoteric, they only make sense to a small number of people with the right background knowledge, only my gran tends to like them (and the compliment feels disingenuous). Well, that’s not going to happen this week! At the behest of my girlfriend, we’re going to tackle sex, relationships, love, multiple partners, and the joy of promiscuity – things we can all weigh in on. And I won’t be sharing a link with my gran!
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Monogamy. Let’s start there. Historically speaking, couples in life-long, exclusive relationships have been a great benefit to society. When a civilisation is organised by family groups sharing the same roof and raising little ones together, unruly individuals churning out illegitimate babies with anyone they please becomes a recipe for disaster. The kids lose, the families lose, the players lose when their kin get played. By committing people to own up and support their own offspring, monogamy helped early societies to thrive.
The problem is, for as long as we’ve been mammals, people have had instinctual promiscuous desires. Any culture that we’re born into is likely to tell us we’re wrong for having these feelings. Only bad, sinful, sick, or flawed people could harbor such shameful thoughts! Despite the global ubiquity of this feature of human psychology, every citizen is expected to live out their entire life pretending not to have such impure thoughts. Billions of people, throughout history, beating themselves up internally over biological urges that they can’t control. Isn’t that romantic!
Romanticism may be a little out-dated today, although its myths have become so ingrained we rarely notice them (an idea I explored in ‘Tripping on butterflies’). Just because “bonding hormones” like oxytocin are released when two people have sex, doesn’t mean that couple are meant to be together; soulmates, made for each other, drawn together by destiny! Hormones that promote fidelity seem to me like the embers of the romantic movement. Just as humans have evolved to find sweet and fatty foods pleasurable – there was an advantage to pursuing these calorific treats in our hunter-gatherer past – we may have a heap of old drives and instincts kicking around in our brains that actually act against us in modern society. It’s possible that times have changed enough for us to ignore certain ancient inclinations today. Maybe, just maybe, its okay for us to enjoy sex beyond partnership the way we enjoy food for reasons other than survival?
“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.”
– Richard Feinman
Celibacy until marriage made a lot of sense in a time before contraception. When STDs ran wild and education was the privilege of men, it was wise for a woman to make her sexual encounters count! Although it seems archaic to us now, in the not-so-distant past women couldn’t support themselves without a man. To improve your prospects of getting married – which would secure you money, food, safety, and all the basic necessities of life – it was smart to withhold the one sought-after thing you possessed! This basic social strategy, born out of the misogyny of yesterday’s world, normalised our current view of monogamy. But should it persist? And can we finally divorce sex from the rest of our relationship commitments in modernity?
Consider this; removed from the risk of procreation and other communicable diseases, doesn’t sex become morally equivalent to any other social recreation? When playing squash, meeting someone for a coffee, or taking a hike, it would be unreasonable for one partner to demand life-long exclusivity from the other. If any of these pastimes could result in pregnancy, contagion, or desertion, a partners’ possessiveness might be understandable – But they don’t! Contraception has freed sex from its enduring association with trust. Like so many of our advanced social emotions, humanity’s monogamous mentality comes pre-programmed by natural selection. This makes it highly resistant to cultural change – Our mindset is slow to catch up with technological progress. As long as betrayal can be taken off the cards – with a couples perceived commitment to each other’s future left intact – there’s no reason to think that physical intimacy couldn’t be enjoyed casually, with multiple partners, as a normal part of human life.
“Monogamy is virtually mandated when a woman spends her entire adult life with young children underfoot, because continuous financial support cannot otherwise be ensured. But when it is customary for those of both sexes to be financially independent, this logic collapses”
– Aubrey de Grey, The Overdue Demise of Monogamy
Closing ourselves off to options and personal freedoms seems outdated in so many ways. Our thinking needs to be as open and flexible as possible given how rapidly culture evolves. Still, there’s a different four-letter word policing our sexual adventures; society insists that sex be an expression of ‘love’. Now I know what you’re thinking, “What’s love got to do, got to do with it?” It “is like oxygen”, it “lifts us up where we belong”, and “it’s the only thing that there’s just too little of”, but “what is love?” I’ll tell you; love is a very convincing bluff. Imagine that everyone carried a rating – a score out of ten – that signified how good a mate choice they’d be. Why might any animal settle for less than a ten?
If I’m currently shacked-up with an 8, it’s perfectly possible that someone better might come along, so I shouldn’t invest too heavily in the relationship – Especially if I’m only a 3 and likely to lose my partner to the nearest milkman! Such a brutally honest rating system would make unconditional parental cooperation impossible. At some point, it must be sensible to stick with the best catch you’ve found so far. In order to do that, our devotion must be believable and very difficult to fake. This way, even when a more desirable option does limp by, neither partner will be seduced to pull the plug. Thus imprinting, pair bonding, and a “burning love” evolved to tie monogamous species together.
One lesson here is to be highly suspicious of a partner who chooses you for purely rational reasons; There’s a good chance they’ll abandon you for equally rational reasons somewhere down the line. Another is to put a cap on your investment until you can be sure that “love is in the air”. Only a full-bodied, totally immersive, multi-sensory wonder drug like love can override someone’s intellect enough for them to commit to another for life. True love should not be triggered by any sensible evaluation of an individual – their wealth, power, physical fitness, or other objective merits. It’s a ruse our minds play on us to prevent partners backing out of promises.
“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
That explains the ‘why’ of animalistic love. To know what to do with it, we need to take a look under the bonnet. Like so many aspects of human personalities our unique impulse, intuitions, and attractions are built on early childhood experiences. The child is father to the man, and that. As kiddies we are showered with love in concert with all the horrors of growing up. We are let down, humiliated, punished, and emotionally manipulated in kaleidoscopic ways that obscure underlying acts of love until they become indistinguishable. The Pixar movie ‘Inside Out’ is a beautiful illustration of this. As self-respecting adults we like to think we’re pursuing partners who will make us happy. Little do we know that what makes us happy is often simply ‘familiarity’. Those people who subject us to just the right flavour and intensity of suffering we considered ‘loving’ as children, are most likely to convince us that their love is genuine.
Here we hit an important distinction; between loving someone and feeling loved. All social animals have a basic biological need to feel loved (or some equivalent emotion). If feeling loved is about being looked after and protected, loving someone ought to be the same in reverse, right? Not so. Many people try to build adult relationships on this assumption, and end up being as possessive and overbearing as a parent! Instead, ‘loving someone’ has more in common with looking past their… um… disagreeable behaviour, to see well-meaning intentions beneath. Anyone we happen to fall for will likely embody a blend of good and bad traits. The madness of love is what’s needed to interpret a person’s actions favourably, allowing coexistence to continue.
“All you need is love. All you need is love. All you need is love, love. Love is all you need.”
– The Beatles
It’s healthy to have a few non-negotiable traits in mind when assessing someone as potential ‘relationship material’. It’s also healthy, and reasonable, to love and hate someone simultaneously. For a partnership to work, we must do more than just bask in awe of our partner’s strengths; we must accept that we, ourselves, are fatally vulnerable to getting attached. This laughs in the face of every defensive impulse we have, as well as society’s celebration of strong, independent personalities. In light of this weakness, the thought that our partner might be “tempted by the fruit of another” is bound to sit uncomfortably. It also saddles us with another complication; we must be wary of those characters who either want us too badly or too early on. When love takes the form of desperation or whimsy we ought to run a mile! Both are signs that we should return to swiping post haste! The flip-side of this is that, to appear maximally desirable, we must unambiguously announce our desires while playing fiendishly hard to get.
Again, ‘love’ gallops in to resolve the catch-22. It puts minimum standards in place for shortlisting candidates, then dramatically commits us to one of them! How compatible two people turn out to be hardly enters the equation. None of us are perfect. All of us are unpredictable and changeable in the long-term. For these reasons, a relationship is an ongoing, daily negotiation. Love acts as a mediator, helping to accommodate all our sparring incompatibilities. What we must stay acutely aware of is whether we’re acting voluntarily or feeling pressured. Feelings of obligation, or entitlement, sit at the core of every toxic relationship.
There’s a simple test; ask yourself, “If I said ‘no’, how would my partner respond?” Similarly, if your partner refused a request, how might your relationship change? If either scenario promises to descend into argument, tantrum, hurt feelings, betrayal, outrage, or any kind of drama, the love you share appears to be conditional. The stability of a relationship depends on unconditional acceptance of each other, complete with all accompanying personal problems and opinions. When superficial benefits, given and received, knit partners together, any questioning of the status quo is going to seem like sacrilege!
In my experience, the most secure and lasting relationships have each shared a common understanding; that it’s impossible to fulfill every single need that your partner has, all of the time. That’s not what a partner is for! Given that couples unavoidably hurt each other’s feelings on occasion, the important thing is to support each other as you grow – both as individuals, and as a team. Healthy relationships should be more concerned with enabling a partner to overcome their own difficulties, not tempering another’s emotions. Once we’ve found a ‘good enough’ partner to warrant investing in, and learned to interpret their hurtful behaviour with artful generosity, we’re free to define exactly where our personal boundaries lie. There is nobility, not shame, in compromise.
“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone, and finding that that’s ok with them”
– Alain de botton
Sweeping sexuality under a rug of shame creates its own problems. Sponging up podcasts, I found it interesting to learn that the more unaccepting a culture is of overt sexuality, the less its pornography reflects reality. The West’s general attitude, that lust is a sin to be resisted, plays out in it’s pornography. Casting actors with the most exaggerated anatomy, and over acting a scene beyond belief, makes it easier to distance ourselves from what’s being portrayed on our screens. The only way to enjoy sex with someone other than your partner – even as a fantasy – seem to lie in keeping the action as cartoonish as possible! This creates an artificially narrow spectrum of sexual behaviours that people aspire toward. Normalising such distortion is bound to leave an impression on anyone’s psychology! Disfunction, isolation, and feelings of inadequacy are exactly what we might predict.
And this is where we return to the idea of rescuing sex from love. Now that we’re awash with reliable forms of contraception, monogamy is off the hook as a practical cultural imperative. Our technological advancements have built a world where people don’t need to repress this aspect of themselves. Even so, through convention, the mechanism of love, and our hard-wired insecurities, it will take more than a mere technological leap to harmonise biological drives with agreed cultural norms. By definition, ‘cheating’ is seen as a betrayal of trust. There’s no mystery why sexual exclusivity and trust have always walked hand-in-hand! But today, they no longer need to. Sex has grown up. There’s no reason why couples can’t define their own boundaries, rationalise their emotions, untangle bad behaviour from its trailing historic baggage, and flip the ‘V’s at a society that claims they can’t.
Whatever we choose to do, at the very least we owe ourselves these kinds of conversations. If we don’t scrutinize the norms we’re operating in, we risk living in a society that is far more oppressive than is strictly healthy or necessary. If my girlfriend can walk in while I’m sitting on the toilet, just to hand me a cup of coffee, then really nothing is sacred. But that’s probably a conversation for another time.
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