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What does it mean to have a monogamous relationship? What is monogamy? Here are some definitions: The practice or state of being married to one person at a time; the practice or state of having a sexual relationship with only one partner; the habit of having only one mate at a time.
Cool. Nothing hard about that, right? Until I read the following somewhere:
“Only 3 percent to 5 percent of the roughly 5,000 species of mammals, including humans) are known to form lifelong, monogamous bonds.”
Then I realized how screwed we are. No pun intended.
Are We Naturally Non-monogamous?
Look, I am a simple girl. I try to understand things from a simple perspective. I try not to complicate things.
I don’t know if we are by nature as human beings naturally monogamous, but to me that is neither here nor there. You could probably say that there are other areas of our being where we are predisposed to things that are really not healthy for us.
So even if one can make the argument given the evidence that we by nature are non-monogamous, that is not the issue. The issue to me is what serves us best as intelligent human beings who live in an emotional environment.
Some may argue about this from a moral point of view. For me, morality has to be what serves us to live at our highest state, and not just an obedience to rules and laws.
What Serves Us Best – Being Monogamous or Being Non-monogamous?
At a personal level we all have to ask ourselves – what serves us best. When are we at our best? What are the ingredients to a life of real joy and contentment? Of course we know the pain that comes with cheating and infidelity.
Each person needs to navigate these questions honestly and I for am not comfortable being judgmental about things like these. But I know this much – a monogamous relationship brings out the best in me as a human being. On the contrary, the evidence is a non-monogamous relationship seems to require so little of us that one has to wonder why are we so inclined to be non-monogamous as a specie.
But as I have said before, there are other areas of our lives where we have tendencies to be what is not good for us and for what do not serve us in a healthy manner. We work at those. We probably just have to work at having more monogamous tendencies.
