Many theories explore how humans developed monogamy and formed pair bonds. Mammals are generally not monogamous, with fewer than ten percent of mammalian species forming exclusive bonds. Among primates, while the percentage is marginally higher in favour of forming couples, few commit to monogamy as humans know it—an exclusive sexual partnership between two individuals. What is more widely agreed upon is that, along with adopting a bipedal posture (freeing their arms to carry food), the formation of pair bonds helped early humans (hominins) gain a reproductive edge over apes by creating complex social networks that increased cooperation within their groups.  

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A prevailing theory of the evolution of human sexuality posits that it begins with the structure of hunter-gatherer societies. The success of these small roaming groups depended on community and collective support. Sharing and working together were essential for survival, resulting in enforced social equality that crossed over into sexual practices. The overlapping, intersecting sexual relationships of polyamory helped foster strong networks and strengthened group cohesion, especially as it became everyone’s responsibility to look after children. Such practices are still prevalent in today’s hunter-gatherer societies. To be clear, lest this give the impression of nightly orgiastic coupling, pair bonds would have existed within the group. However, people in these societies forged fluid bonds that shifted, since ceremonies did not bind any man to any woman.

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Agriculture changed not only the way people lived but also the structure of society. The development of civilization required a more extensive system of laws aimed at maintaining peace among a growing number of people confined within a small area. Marriage exemplified that control, devised as a secular arrangement, but which religious authorities claimed as their power grew. To ensure the paternity of a man’s offspring, marriage ended the previous freedoms of polyamory, taking away an individual’s right to choose a mate and to engage in sexual intercourse with more than one member of the clan.

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In ancient Egypt, where women had legal control over their property and freedom of movement, it was not required that a woman be a virgin on her wedding night. A woman’s sexual experience before marriage was not a matter of concern. The only restrictions on female sexuality had to do with women who tempted men away from their wives. This was because a stable marriage contributed to a stable community, so it was in the best interest of all for a couple to remain together. Reliefs, paintings, and inscriptions depict husbands and wives eating together, dancing, drinking, and working the fields with one another. Despite the idealized nature of Egyptian art, some argue that it suggests people were content in their marriages and remained together throughout their lives. Love poems were very popular in Egypt, praising the beauty and goodness of one’s lover or wife, and swearing eternal love in phrases similar to those found in modern love songs.

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The equality experienced by women in Sumer and Egypt was being eroded in nearby civilizations, where patriarchy was flourishing. Women became little more than property, first of their fathers, then of the men to whom they were bound in marriage. Laws governing adultery, which in essence meant the violation of another man’s property, were harsher for women, who bore the burden of ensuring paternity. While a Mesopotamian woman could initiate a divorce, she had to prove her husband’s abuse or adultery, and if found guilty, the husband’s only punishment was a financial one. If a woman committed adultery, the punishment was death.

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As religions became more formalized, religious tracts adapted civilian laws within the framework of religious dogma. By taking basic rules of civility and adopting them as the word of God, some religions upheld the superiority of men over women, emphasizing that in organized societies, women must submit themselves to their fathers and husbands in the name of the one Lord God.

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I Want it All

The shift in the power balance continued to grow. Men, dissatisfied with the restrictions that monogamy placed upon their sexuality, gave themselves leave to visit prostitutes or take concubines. As prostitutes were not under contract as in a legal marriage, sex with a prostitute was not in violation of the social codes. But this had its drawbacks, as the personal risk of “sleeping” around was that of contracting an STD, which thrived more widely in larger communities than it ever did in contained hunter-gatherer societies. Infections of syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhea caused infertility at best and death at worst in both men and women.

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Some speculate that early egalitarian civilizations, like Sumer and Egypt, encouraged monogamy to protect against STDs. Patriarchal societies, however, devised a solution to minimize infection by practicing polygamy, a license for men to have multiple wives, minimizing the need to seek prostitutes and placing themselves at risk of contracting STDs. Another theory is that the attrition in the male population due to warfare, resulting in more women than men, was a further need to practice polygamy. For women, however, polygamy only served to further undermine their role in society by not only denying them the sexual freedoms they once enjoyed but also insisting that they share their man and household with other women.

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Polygamy, as it turns out, was cleverly designed to be class-based. The best-known example of polygamy that exists today is that practiced within Islam, which restricts the number of wives to no more than four and maintains that each wife must have the same standard of living. Large numbers of practicing Muslims live in regions where being able to keep a roof over one woman’s head is a struggle enough, far less for four. In practice, polygamy favoured the moneyed classes, a ritual confined to kings, chiefs, and the wealthy men of the community. For those at the very top, the number of paramours often escalated by a factor of ten or even one hundred, as there was no restriction on how many concubines a man could have. And so the infamous harems of the East were born, maintaining wives and paramours under one palatial roof, ensuring that all enjoyed a similar standard of living. But even polygamy sometimes veered toward monogamy because the first wife usually held a higher position than subsequent wives, and if there was a line of succession, her firstborn son was the de facto heir.

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Polygamy became the norm across most ancient civilizations. However, as civilizations expanded, warfare intensified, and leaders became increasingly invested in the business of war. Some scholars speculate that with a growing need for larger societies to maintain large, well-funded armies, monogamy provided a more equitable distribution of women, giving more men, as opposed to a select few, easier access to wives without being forced to leave the community to search for women elsewhere. Maintaining a larger, stable community provided more men to fight and fund Greco-Roman wars. Thus, imposed monogamy slowly prevailed.

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Christianity’s upholding of the sanctity of marriage to one person ensured its spread throughout the Western world. However, the acceptance of monogamy was not without resistance. A protracted battle raged for centuries between the Catholic Church and the old nobility and kings, who fought for the right to have more than one wife. The Church eventually prevailed, and by the ninth century, monogamy became central to the notion of Christian marriage, righting the imbalance of polygamy so that men, along with women, were once more tied to a single partner until death do they part.

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As if restricting a woman’s movements and freedoms was not enough, female circumcision, or genital mutilation, became an accepted practice in some cultures. A medical procedure practised in Ancient Egypt and Greece to reduce the size of enlarged clitorises (congenital adrenal hyperplasia) was adopted by slavers to guarantee the chastity of their female slaves. Some societies, for unknown reasons, began applying this procedure to all women, believing it would suppress their sexual pleasure and guarantee their purity and fidelity. In many societies around the world, matriarchs still perform this practice on girls from age seven to puberty. Some may find it surprising that Britain and America practiced female circumcision from the mid-1800s to as late as the 1950s in the US as a medical treatment for hysteria and nymphomania, and to reduce the practice of masturbation, considered in the Victorian era as a grievous sin and vice to be stamped out in both sexes.

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Modern Love

In the 21st century, while 58 out of 200 sovereign nations recognize polygamous marriages, predominantly Muslim-majority countries, monogamy remains the norm in Westernized and Christian-based societies. The reasons for marriage are many and varied, including love, companionship, the desire to start a family, financial stability, social status, and spiritual fulfilment. In many Western countries, virginity has long ceased to be a requirement for marriage. Renewed access to birth control not only gives women back control over their sexuality without the looming spectre of pregnancy but also allows couples to live together before they take the next step toward the binding ritual of matrimony. Couples are marrying as much as a decade later than they did a generation ago, allowing women to establish a career before beginning their childbearing years, with a growing trend of not having children at all.

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Female liberation, personified by the characters Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte in the comedy-drama Sex and the City, appears to support the theory that humans are serial monogamists at best. Unlike the polyandry of hunter-gatherer societies to encourage cooperative group dynamics, the polygamy of patriarchal societies, or the strict monogamy of Christian ideology, equality of the sexes seems to suggest that while men and women are still willing to pair up to share the responsibilities of raising a family, the many pressures we face in our modern world makes the vows of “until death do us part” unrealistic.

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To begin with, the definition of childhood has undergone a shift, leading to increased investment in child-rearing. Historically, children were part of the labour force on a farm, but the First Industrial Revolution saw child labour split between farms and factories. In contrast, the Second Industrial Revolution saw the flourishing of mass education. This meant that, for the first time in recent history, people sent children from all walks of life to school, initially for three or four years, then to the ages of twelve, sixteen, eighteen and beyond. Effectively, the time commitment toward child rearing, already higher for Homo sapiens than any other species, has increased over the last two hundred years.

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Another reality of our modern world is that the edict of “until death do us part” has a different meaning because of increasing life spans. Across the globe, life expectancy has increased from an average of 45 years in men and 48 years in women in 1950 to 71 years in men and 76 years in women in 2023, with projections climbing to 83 years in men and 88 years in women in more affluent countries. Thus, while unions in past generations lasted twenty to thirty years at best due to attrition from wars, epidemics, and childbirth, marriages can now last twice as long as they did a generation or two ago. Perhaps this longevity places unrealistic expectations of how long a couple can continue to cohabit, as time can change outlooks and expectations from those of two or three decades prior.

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When you factor in the rising levels of anxiety and depression induced by our fast-paced and fast-changing world, it’s no surprise that the vow to stay together “until death do us part” can become suffocating, compelling many to confront the messy spectre of divorce as the only way out.

It’s no secret that divorce rates in Westernized countries have surged in recent decades. This is in part because the social stigma around divorce has decreased due to more lenient “no-fault” divorces, which require less proof of adultery or abuse than in the past. Higher levels of education for women have also played a part, reducing a woman’s dependency on a man for financial support.

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Along with the heartache, betrayal, and hostilities whipped up during divorce proceedings, divorce exposes the painful reality that societies reinforce the culture of coupledom. When a couple separates, they discover they are no longer as readily accepted by society. It’s as if their only contribution to the group was preserving a union, rather than anything more tangible they may have brought as individuals. A mad dash to find another partner often ensues, with little time to rediscover themselves, lost after decades of compromise. The opportunity to embrace the freedom of calling the shots, to live the single life where friendships and hookups are enough to fill a dance card, is unrealized. Driven by societal pressures, people spend countless hours on dating apps, rushing to find a partner to re-enter a relationship.

 

One wonders how much more realistic it would be for societies to recognize and accept the serial monogamous reality of modern relationships. To put aside the pressure of “until death do us part,” no matter if the ties that bind fray and break, in favour of a shorter, renewable contractual arrangement with a commitment to prioritize the children. Perhaps entering such a relationship, understanding that it need not last forever, would reduce the mental and financial anguish of separation and divorce. When a relationship ceases to function for both partners, they can amicably end the union and pursue their own paths, rather than being tied to a death-binding vow, which results in perpetual unhappiness.

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The upcoming and final essay focuses on the harsh reality that, though the rights and freedoms of Westernized women are greater today than they have been in almost three millennia, the fight for full female empowerment continues.

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