If Charles Darwin was right, human love and sex are rooted in the same reproductive imperative that makes animals mate. We want to send our genetic material into subsequent generations. Mind you, cats, dogs, Tasmanian devils, insects, fish, birds, and even Big Foot may not be thinking “Babies!” when they have sex. Gay men and lesbians aren’t trying to reproduce. Heterosexual people buying birth control supplies at drug stores aren’t. Regardless, the healthy, animalistic instinct to create progeny may be what makes most of them — most of us — suckers for sex and fools for love. It’s health and wellness in action.
And it’s all fun. But does biology dictate that mating has to be a forever kinda thing? Darwin never expressed an opinion. As it turns out, most animals who seem to be monogamous aren’t. Even so, some big religions dictate monogamy for humans. Many marriage and divorce laws do, too.
For large mammals, anyway, monogamy doesn’t add to the probability that a species will survive. The opposite may be the case. In 2003, biologist Justin Brashares of the University of British Columbia examined 30 years of data for 41 mammal species on six separate preserves. Publishing in the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Biology, he reported that loyal mating ranked second as the cause of death for populations of primates. (Of course, humans are primates.)
New human sexology research from two groups of researchers has produced results not quite as dire. Even so, their data suggest that long-term monogamy may not always be ideal.
Wellness and Consensual Non-Monogamy
“The Vices and Virtues of Consensual Non-Monogamy: A Relational Dimension Investigation” is the dissertation of graduate student Thomas R. Brooks III. Published by the peer-reviewed journal Psychology and Sexuality and written by Brooks* in partial fulfillment of his Ph.D. from the Department of Psychology and Special Education at Texas A&M University-Commerce, it compared various measures of relationship quality, conflict resolution style, and individual well-being as self-reported by 555 heterosexual participants. Some of the participants were in monogamous relationships and some were in consensually non-monogamous (CNM) relationships. (CNM means an open relationship with full disclosure. The non-monogamous encounters can range from casual and low-stakes to intimacy that is both emotionally and sexually long-term and loving.)
Thomas R. Brooks III. Photo used with permission.
Photo credit: Texas A&M University
The study participants completed standard questionnaires about well-being and conflict resolution. They also numerically rated the satisfaction, commitment, intimacy, passion, and love that they experience in their romantic relationships. They generally scored as psychologically healthier and more content. In the rated measures of satisfaction in sex and love, people in CNM relationships generally outscored people in monogamous relationships. Perhaps not incidentally, people practicing CNM reported using positive problem-solving with their intimate partners, while those practicing monogamy more often reported that they emotionally withdraw from conflict with their relationship partner.
Was it the multiplicity of partners that made people in CNM relationships the high scorers on measures of well-being and happiness? Perhaps not. Brooks surmised that the increased satisfaction and psychological health measures may have been due to consensually non-monogamous people having negotiated “ways to keep sexual and romantic variety a priority in the relationship.” This is to say that it may not be sexual or romantic variety that’s the spice of life. It may be the value that people place on keeping honesty and intimacy alive.
CNM and Polyamory in History
One month before Brooks’ paper was published, the peer-reviewed journal Archives of Sexual Behavior published a paper by archivist-historian Brian M. Watson and Oxford University historian Sarah Stein Lubrano. In their study the two researchers investigated the passionate CNM attachments of a large handful of historical figures. “‘Storming Then Performing’: Historical Non-Monogamy and Metamour Collaboration” peeked at the love lives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists and intellectuals. (“Metamours” = “partner(s) of partner(s).”)
Brian M. Watson.
Photo credit: Brian M. Watson. Used with permission.
In the paper, details of the intimate heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual lives of novelist Virginia Woolf, painter Frida Kahlo, poet/essayist/dramatist Victor Hugo, physicist Erwin Schrödinger, poet/playwright/suffragist Edna St. Vincent Millay, sociologist/historian Maximilian Karl Emil Weber, and Wonder Woman comic book author William Moulton Marston and all of their metamours were revealed. The paper’s view of love lives gone by showed that positive problem-solving of the sort described in Brooks’ Psychology and Sexuality paper can extend beyond the relationship among sexually and romantically intimate partners into throughout their entire metamour network.
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Photo credit Melissa Barber. Used with permission
Watson and Lubrano use the term “polycule” (“polyamorous” + “molecule”) to describe a network of partners and metamours. Frida Kahlo is the only black- or brown-skinned person whose polycules their paper examined. Volunteering that information, Lubrano quipped in a group Zoom call, “In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rich white people did a really good job of saving their correspondence and leaving it to be found.”
With access to such correspondence and with the help of other archival material and secondary sources like biographies, Watson and Lubrano reframed non-monogamous behaviors that might once have been described as immoral and sketched portraits of polycules that were deeply caring in important material, social, and psychological ways.
That being said, matters weren’t always tranquil in historical CNM polycules, certainly not during a polycule’s early days.
- Virginia Woolfe was lucky enough to enjoy a long, largely peaceful polycule with her husband, journalist and publisher Leonard Woolfe, and author/garden designer Vita Sackville-West. However, that may be because Sackville-West’s explosive and dishonest behavior within a previous polycule had been a momentous learning experience for her.
- Max Weber’s CNM relationship with his lover Else Jaffe erupted early on when he learned that his metamour was his own brother. After he got over that surprise, things settled down. Another of Weber’s partners was his wife, the feminist scholar and activist Marrianne Weber. She and Else together took care of Weber as he succumbed to pneumonia in 1914, leaving Marianne with her dead sister Lili’s four children, which she and Weber had intended to raise. Else stepped in and raised the children with Marianne. According to Watson and Lubrano, when Marianne died in Heidelburg in 1954, it was in Else’s arms.
- When Erwin Schrödinger’s partner Hilde March had a little girl by him and developed post-partum depression, Schrödinger wife, Anny, took care of the baby until Hilde recovered. Later, Anny cared for Schrödinger’s baby by another partner. Schrödinger, meanwhile, relied on a metamour — Anny’s partner Peter Weyl — both emotionally and academically.
And so on. Watson and Lubrano’s paper featured several more polycules of the rich and famous.
Why Study CNM Satisfaction?
The polycules profiled by Watson and Lubrano give social context and history to a way of living that is still stigmatized in America. As the two researchers said in the Zoom call, they wrote the paper to normalize CNM, and also to make clear that the idea that healthy, non-competitive relationships among metamours constitute a potentially emancipatory way of loving and living. Watson said, “We want people contemplating or already in CNM relationships to know that they’re not the first ones to want this. They are not alone in history. There are good role models. We hope that looking at the past can make people confident about structuring their lives in a way that’s fulfilling.”
Indeed. The wide variance in the current estimates on how many adult Americans have participated in CNM in their lifetime (anywhere between 4% (2013) and 22% (2016)) suggests that CNM remains so stigmatized that some people are too ashamed to admit the truth of their romantic and sexual selves even to an anonymous survey. Data collected and reported in 2016 by researchers at the Kinsey Institute reflect the high estimate (22% lifetime incidence). The Kinsey researchers also noted that men as well as people who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual were more likely to testify to previous engagement in CNM.
If indeed the Kinsey researchers' estimate is correct, CNM may not be the “new normal.” It may, however, be one of the several new normals, and it may be one that marital law and communities should prepare to accommodate.
*Brooks’ co-authors for “The Vices and Virtues of Consensual Non-Monogamy: A Relational Dimension Investigation” were Jennifer Shaw, Stephen Reysen, and Tracy B. Henley, all of the Department of Psychology and Special Education at Texas A&M University-Commerce.
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