The Omnigamist's Dilemma
Should there be some wiggle room in monogamy?
(This is a re-post of an essay I posted a couple of years ago. Since sexual desire is an evergreen topic — which kind of proves the point I make in this essay — I thought a repost may be in order.)
I was a vegetarian for a few years during the 80s.
Or maybe I wasn’t.
It all comes down to whether you’re willing to overlook an occasional pepperoni pizza and a few slices of bacon every now and then. From my perspective, the occasional lapse into cured meats empowered my well-intentioned if imperfect vegetarianism. When you’re going up against ravenous appetites that evolved over millions of years, compromise may be the only alternative to abject failure.
Even fanatical vegetarianism will never make you an herbivore; it will only make you an omnivore hell-bent on not eating meat.
Sexual monogamy is a lot like vegetarianism. Nobody’s denying that for some people, an all-veggie diet can be an excellent approach to life for many reasons, ranging from ethical to environmental to emotional. But evidence ranging from the shape of our teeth, jaw strength, the particulars of our digestive system, the diets of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers, comparisons to closely-related primates, and so on quite clearly indicates that our ancestors evolved as omnivores — and omnivores we remain.
That doesn’t mean living as an omnivore in today’s world is inherently any better than choosing to avoid meat. But let’s be clear: Even the strictest vegetarianism will not make you an herbivore; it will only make you an omnivore determined not to eat meat.
That’s a different animal entirely—one likely to face constant cravings and frustrations. It would be foolish to commit to a lifetime of vegetarianism thinking it’s going to be easy, just because you love animals. Instinct doesn’t work that way.
Similarly, it’s cruel and deceitful to teach people that our ancestors evolved as happy vegetarians, so any rumblings in your stomach as you walk by the barbecue must be due to your weak character, poor cognitive development, emotional immaturity, a “fear of commitment” to vegetarianism, or some other scoldy nonsense. No, your stomach growls because yours is the body of an animal that evolved eating meat whenever possible, and it remembers.
Simple as that.
Similarly, love for your partner, no matter how profound and sincere, will not eliminate the utterly natural innate human yearning for erotic novelty. Just as our teeth and intestines tell us that our ancestors ate plenty of meat, the evolved design of our reproductive organs, our orgasmic capacities, and our species-wide penchant for frequent non-reproductive sex, our appetite for porn … all tell us that our ancestors evolved as sexual omnivores — and omnivores we remain.
The German philosopher Schopenhauer wrote, “People can do what they want but they cannot want what they want.” Given the realities of human sexual evolution, you can choose whether or not to live monogamously, but you cannot choose whether or not it will come naturally and easily. It probably won’t.
Vegetarians who forgive themselves for salivating at the smell of sizzling bacon will probably be more successful at sticking to their chosen dietary regime than those who beat themselves up over what is an evolved, involuntary response.
Maybe I was never really a vegetarian—just vegetarian-ish. I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure that without the flexibility to get a pepperoni pizza every once in a while, I’d have abandoned the tofu and sprouts long before I did.
Maybe that’s just me, but I don’t think so.
One problem I have with monogamy is not that there are temptations to have sex with other people (that could easily be dealt with-imagination and tasteful porn). The problem is that it also seems to isolate sensitive males from having other people to connect with emotionally than their partners. The problem is statistical-in our culture, or perhaps in some areas more than others and some subcultures more than others, there are very few emotionally available males, so if one is such a male and wants other people to connect to emotionally than one's partner, other females are the most likely option. But one's partner then may become jealous of emotional intimacy between their parter and other females, even if there is no sex. And this also has an ironic side effect on one's sexual appetite for one's partner...I think this problem has been largely invisible to most modern monogamous females.
Another problem is that monogamy seems to have evolved in cultures that also are warlike and conquering, such as Christianity and Islam. It evolved because it gave advantages to those cultures (better warfare and more material productivity), allowing those cultures to outcompete non-monogamous cultures.
Thanks for articulating this clearly in a short piece Chris.
I agree, and I've taken the same approach with my own mostly-vegetarianism — and also with alcohol. For many years I mostly drank alcohol, and then, since 2018, I switched to only rarely drinking it. Ha, well, I did also drink other things, but I did drink a lot, and more the point is that when I "stopped" I didn't stop 100.00% with a deadly fear that if I ever touched a drop again that I'd somehow relapse into a 'meat-eater', i.e. daily drinker. Having the flexibility to operate within own boundaries—and with my cognition and intuition, responding to the present moment, which sometimes takes me up to and even over the boundary is much more interesting than trying to super-strictly adhere to an arbitrary rule, regardless of the circumstances.
I also think strict adherence to a rule tends to put the focus too much on the rule and too little on the person. I just read a short book called The Abstinence Myth about how the focus on abstinence often gets in the way of folks changing their relationships with alcohol, by distracting from the real reasons someone might be drinking more than they want to.
(Not to drone on about alcohol... y'all can drink however much you want! Same here. It's just that now how much I want is a lot less.)
I think this because in real life, boundaries are not hard lines. I've appreciated coming to think about how traditional American monogamy makes the assumption that the closure of the relationship, the barrier, the hard line between "us" and the rest of the world is what makes the relationship strong and "safe," and yet, we know that closure, like building a literal wall across a border, is not what makes any dynamic system strong or safe. That's a false, fragile security (see, of course, Taleb's great book Antifragile). Real strength comes from the ability to thrive and grow as a dynamic system within a larger dynamic system, to flex and adapt and interact with the rest of the world. Even in a voluntarily monogamous relationship, the boundary can be more open and fluid, a zone, let's say, in which "we" interact with others, as opposed to a closure that supposedly guarantees safety.
Safety. Bleh. There's often so much falsehood there. That's something else to write and talk about... In the meantime, I've been writing and thinking about some of this lately in "Someone Else's Discipline is just... Bullshit" →
https://decidenothing.substack.com/p/someone-elses-discipline-is-just
Congrats again on the house!