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Monogamy Is a Mismatch Disease
It represents a fundamental disconnect between nature and culture
Are we built for lifelong monogamy?
Such is, after all, the bedrock of marriage, possibly humanity’s oldest institution — except, perhaps, for patriarchy. Hold the phone for a second while I unpack that. Marriage and patriarchy go together like pyramids and pharaohs. Both go way back, and one depends upon the other. Once we had a pharaoh, he felt he needed a pyramid because, well, one can only assume he was a little insecure. Humongous masonry structures — temples, citadels, walls, etc. — tend to fool people into believing in your divinity.
A quick note on terms before we get in to this. Marriage, I agree, is not synonymous with monogamy, or visa versa. What I am really discussing here is not the legal arrangement which is perhaps the core of marriage, but the cultural underpinning of that arrangement which is sexually-exclusive monogamy. For efficiency’s sake I will usually refer here to “marriage,” to refer to life-long monogamy.
Perhaps the first disconnect to highlight is the fact that while many of us today would argue that marriage is a core human characteristic, only chauvinistic ideologues would claim that patriarchy is baked into our genome.
