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The Psychology and Philosophy of Polyamory

Nietzsche, Salomé, and Rée
Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, and Paul Rée in Lucerne, 1882.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, and Paul Rée had themselves photographed in a studio in Lucerne. Salomé stands behind a small cart, brandishing a whip, while the two philosophers are harnessed in front of her. It is the most famous photograph in all philosophy.

The photograph arose out of an extraordinary love triangle. Nietzsche and Rée had both proposed marriage to the 21-year-old Salomé, who rejected them both. Instead, she suggested that the three form a platonic ‘intellectual trinity’ and wander in search of a place in which to establish a commune of free spirits.

It did not end well. Within months, Salomé and Rée had vanished from Nietzsche’s life, leaving him devastated. But perhaps the most interesting thing about their failed experiment is not that it failed. It is that the arrangement Salomé proposed still strikes us as so strange.

We readily accept that a person can love several friends, several siblings, and several children. Why, when it comes to romantic love, must there be only one?

Why Romantic Love Is Exclusive

The answer has much more to do with paternity than with love. A man who wished to pass his name, status, and property to his own children needed some assurance that those children were indeed his. This created a powerful incentive to control female sexuality, and helps to explain two things: why polygamy is almost always polygyny, and why, historically, adultery and promiscuity have been judged much more severely in women than in men.

Romantic love, when it eventually arrived, became entangled in an older system of marriage and monogamy established to regulate sex and reproduction. This chronology raises the intriguing possibility that we have confused a precondition of marriage, exclusivity, with a precondition of love.

Can Love Be Divided?

To love more than one person is not necessarily to love each person less, just as to love two children is not necessarily to love each child less. ‘True love’, wrote PB Shelley (d. 1822), ‘in this differs from gold and clay / That to divide is not to take away.’ Love is not finite like money or time, or gold and clay, but grows in the giving.

If having a second child is not to betray the first, and taking on a new friendship is not to diminish our old friendships, why should romantic love alone obey a different arithmetic?

Love may not be finite, but time and attention are. Having a second child need not diminish our love for the first child, but it inevitably changes the distribution of our time and attention. And, you know what, maybe it does diminish our love for the first child. Maybe taking on a new friendship does diminish our old friendships. After all, firstborns and old friends often feel this way. Maybe things are more complicated than the binary truths we tell ourselves to simplify our lives.

Polyamory as an Experiment in Love

In 2006, the term polyamory (‘many loves’) made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Polyamory is the philosophy or state of being romantically involved with more than one person at a time, with the knowledge and consent of all parties involved. The focus of polyamory is more on intimacy than on sex, and polyamorous relationships, while being romantic, need not be sexual.

Polyamory is not the same as polygamy, which, unlike polyamory, is culturally sanctioned and codified. And it is not the same as cheating, swinging, or free loving, since the focus is on intimacy and relationship building, with the knowledge and consent of all parties involved. While some people see their polyamory as an identity or orientation, others see it more in terms of an ethical alternative to infidelity.

Despite its ethical dimensions, polyamory is more heavily stigmatised than cheating: cheating may threaten the system, but at least operates from within it, whereas polyamory outright does away with it. Like a lie, which is defined in relation to the truth, cheating accepts the principle of romantic exclusivity even as it violates it.

Polyamory in Practice

Polyamory has long been recognised as an alternative lifestyle in gay subculture, and is becoming more and more mainstream, driven, among others, by feminism, gay emancipation, and the fragmentation of families and communities.

Polyamorous relationships can take many forms. They are often triads, or quads—maybe one couple with another. ‘Polyfidelity’ refers to a closed polyamorous relationship in which the parties agree to restrict themselves to one another, rather than take outside lovers. In some cases there may be a primary couple with one or more ‘secondary’ partners who are perhaps more distant or occasional. In other cases, one partner may have, or wish for, outside relationships, while the other may be content with just the primary relationship.

The partners of one partner, who are not also one’s partners, are referred to in the jargon as ‘metamours’, and it is in the spirit of polyamory that one treats them with courtesy and respect, as potential friends rather than rivals.

For some people, polyamory is experienced less as a lifestyle choice than as an orientation, leading to demands for legal recognition and protection for at least some forms of polyamorous relationships.

The Burden of the One

The modern romantic couple, closed as it is on itself, carries an extraordinary burden. One quite unqualified person may be expected to be lover, best friend, confidant, amanuensis, domestic partner, financial partner, co-parent… for decades and into old age. And when it transpires that this person is unable to meet all our needs, we may come to regard this as a failure of love. 

Polyamory acknowledges that some people’s relational needs are best met by more than one person, and, conversely, relieves the pressure of having to meet all of another person’s needs. By creating more space around a tired, claustrophobic relationship, it can breathe new love and new life into the relationship.

Because polyamory is non-exclusive, existing relationships and friendships are less likely to be abandoned or neglected in favour of ‘the one’, leading to a larger and stronger social network with more resources, skills, and perspectives to draw upon.

Unlike with serial monogamy, there is less incentive to write off an older relationship—and, by extension, a part of our history and who we are—simply because a more exciting or practical one has come along.

Indeed, there is something particularly brutal, even unnatural, about how someone with whom we have shared the best years of our life can suddenly become not merely a stranger but persona non grata. Surely, we can be better than this.

Love, Jealousy, and Possession

Of course, polyamory, too, has drawbacks. From a young age, we are taught that true love is the love of just one person, and that that person will be able to meet all our needs. The princess awaits her prince, and, when he finds her, they live happily ever after. There is no question of another prince, and still less of a squire or lady-in-waiting. Given this state of affairs, and the stigma of polyamory, it may be hard to find people, or enough people, with whom to conduct polyamorous relationships. But this is more a criticism of society than of polyamory proper.

People are naturally prone to possessiveness and jealousy, even when they insist they aren’t. The princess does not await some prince, but her prince. A new relationship is full of enthusiasm and excitement, or, to give it its proper name, ‘New Relationship Energy’—which can be tough on an existing partner. Jealousy can be even more of an issue if half of a couple is polyamorous, while the other half merely tolerates, rather than embraces, it. Having someone else’s smell on your partner’s skin and in your bedsheets is more than just a little confusing.

Jealousy is often treated as childish possessiveness. But it is more complicated than that. It may express fear of abandonment, helplessness, inadequacy, threatened status, or the perfectly rational recognition that our partner is committing precious time and attention to another and, all the while, comparing us.

Constraints do not always impoverish us. Sometimes, by closing off possibilities, they enable other possibilities to develop more fully. Romantic exclusivity may constrain love, but it may also preserve and concentrate it.

Triangles Needing to Be Squared

Polyamory demands time, energy, security, self-knowledge, emotional intelligence, and communication skills. Things can get pretty complicated, which can undermine the quality of the relationships and the very viability of the enterprise. Many people may not have the time, energy, or skills to manage much more than one relationship, and, of course, may not feel a need for more than one partner, if even that. For many people, the ideal number of partners is not one or two, but one-third or half.

This brings us back to Nietzsche, Salomé, and Rée. Their difficulty was not simply that three people were involved, but that the three did not want the same thing. Salomé envisaged an intellectual trinity; Nietzsche wanted Salomé; Rée had also proposed to her. While Nietzsche and Rée had been friends, neither had a romantic interest in the other, but merely tolerated the arrangement for the sake of Salomé. Although in a love triangle, their desires were not triangular.

The Measure of Love

Polyamory is neither the solution to love nor the end of monogamy. If anything, thinking seriously about polyamory reveals why monogamy has proved so enduring. Love may not be finite, but we are; jealousy is not simply a social convention to be unlearnt; and constraints, far from merely constraining us, can preserve and concentrate what we value most.

But polyamory also reveals how much unnecessary baggage we have loaded onto monogamy. To love one person need not mean possessing that person, expecting them to meet our every need, neglecting our other relationships, or banishing former lovers from our lives. Nor need we mistake exclusivity, inherited from the institution of marriage, for the essence or measure of love.

There may be a time in our lives for polyamory. But even if we decide to outright reject it, there is much to be gained from adopting a more fluid, flexible, and forbearing approach to relationships—and stealing a bit more life from the closing jaws of death.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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A Philosophical and Feminist Critique

Standing before the altar
Something borrowed, something blue.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Why an ancient institution may be outdated.

Human societies tend to various degrees of patriarchy, in which men hold primary power. Most anthropologists agree that, on the evidence, there have been no known unambiguously matriarchal societies. In the state of nature, man subjugated woman by being stronger, while woman was habitually handicapped by childbearing and childrearing.

With technological advances such as mechanisation, birth control, and long-range warfare, the male advantage has, like the peacock’s tail, become largely redundant. But still the patriarchy perdures, upheld by hoary ideology and vested interests. This ideology is manifest, among others, in the socialisation of children, which emphasises man as breadwinner and decision-taker, and woman as mother and homemaker. Boys are encouraged to be brave and strong, while girls are expected to be passive and pretty, through, among others, fairy tales, dolls, pastimes such as dressing up and baking, and, above all, the examples and attitudes of role models, including historical ones.

Marriage did not create patriarchy, but has long been one of its central instruments, regulating sex and reproduction, transmitting property and legitimacy, and reconfirming the respective roles of men and women.

The Marriage Market

From a young age, girls in particular are indoctrinated into the virtues of marriage, which itself contributes to maintaining and perpetuating traditional gender roles. Beyond a certain age, a man who remains unmarried is thought of as independent or intelligent, whereas a woman who remains unmarried is assumed to be desperate, at once a figure of pity and scorn. An unmarried man is called a bachelor, and you might even find him on a list of eligible bachelors, but aside from the vetust ‘maiden’ or ‘spinster’, there is, despite the renowned richness of the English language, no polite term for an unmarried woman.

A woman who is strong-minded enough to forgo marriage and live out her own life is constantly made to doubt her resolve:

  • Never say never…
  • You just need to find the right man…
  • There’s this great guy I’d like you to meet…
  • Maybe you ought to lower your standards…
  • Have you tried one of those dating apps?

On the marriage market, women are made to feel like low-value, perishable goods. To find a taker, whether for marriage or just for sex, they need, much more than men, to conform to sexist, ageist, and racist stereotypes, and do constraining things such as wear makeup and high heels, which become the visible symbols of their oppression—like the burqa made sexy. As they are encouraged to marry a man who is older, more educated, and better connected than they are, they often begin married life in a doubly subordinate position—which, of course, suits the man just fine.

Pop Culture

These double standards are all too evident in popular culture. Even seemingly innocuous pop songs, which on the surface are all about romantic love, are in fact inherently sexist, revealing love as little more than a tool of patriarchal oppression.

Here, picked almost at random, are the opening lyrics of You Can’t Hurry Love by the Supremes:

I need love, love to ease my mind/ I need to find, find someone to call mine/ But mama said you can’t hurry love/ No you just have to wait.

It would be hard to imagine these lines in the mouth of a man.

And here are the opening lyrics of Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler:

Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit lonely/ And you’re never coming round/ Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit tired/ Of listening to the sound of my tears…

Now consider these lyrics from Chris Brown’s Fine China:

It’s alright/ I’m not dangerous/ When you’re mine/ I’ll be generous/ You’re irreplaceable, a collectible/ Just like fine china.

‘Her Day’

The marriage ceremony itself is sexist beyond parody. The bride appears in a fussy dress that symbolises her virtue and virginity, and everyone keeps on remarking on how thin and beautiful she looks after she has spent three months starving herself. Her father walks her down the aisle to ‘give her away’, and she passes, like property, from one man to another. The minister, who is traditionally and still usually a man, gives the man permission to kiss the woman, as if that is in the minister’s authority and the woman has none of her own. The man kisses, the woman is kissed. At the reception, only men are given to speak, while the bride remains silent and seated, fluttering her eyelids and holding back the tears that threaten to ruin her makeup. Henceforth, the woman will adopt the man’s name, as will their eventual offspring.

Despite all this, the wedding day is said to belong to the woman. This, would you believe, is ‘her day’.

By now, you’ve probably crossed me off the guest list and saved me a lot of trouble.

In Bed with the Church and State

Why should two people who want to celebrate their love and live together put themselves through a wedding, or even get married at all? Or to turn the question round, what is the state, arm in arm with the Church, doing by sanctioning the private relationships of citizens?

By legitimising a particular kind of relationship and denying others, the state is entrenching monogamy and patriarchy while devaluing and disenfranchising other forms of life and the people who choose or are forced into them, including single people, people in open or polyamorous relationships, and groups such as African Americans and the poor who, for various reasons, are less likely to marry.

Two people may love one another, sleep together, live together, raise children together, and grow old together without the state taking much interest. But the moment they marry, their private relationship becomes a public and legal institution.

Anti-miscegenation laws that criminalised inter-racial marriages, and sometimes even inter-racial sex, remained in force in many US states until as late as 1967. Is this not the state telling us who is and isn’t fit to raise a family, and what that family ought to look like? Marital status is not merely a matter of social prestige, but is attached to myriad benefits in areas as diverse as immigration, healthcare, banking, taxation, and inheritance.

In addition, marriage benefits the economy by producing new workers and consumers, largely through the unpaid work of women, and by making it difficult for workers with families to support to withdraw their labour. A wedding generates spending equivalent to an annual income, and probably that again on the gift list and the travel and other expenses of the guests. And even that pales into insignificance compared to the cost of raising a child, let alone two or three. When people point out how much I spend on fine wine, I point out that it’s still much cheaper than having children. Plus I can sleep at night.

The laws that govern marriage are drafted by the state rather than the couple that has to abide by them, and while marriage is deceptively simple and straightforward to enter, it is, like the Hotel California, much more difficult to leave—and in two-thirds of cases, it is the woman who files for divorce. Divorce is a personal tragedy unnecessarily inflicted by the state on almost half of the marriages it sanctions. When a couple divorces, people ask what went wrong with their marriage, without ever questioning whether there is anything wrong with marriage itself.

Collusion

To partake in the institution of marriage today is also to condone the historical abuses perpetrated in its name.

Until recently, women faced a ‘choice’ between marriage and a life of poverty and stigma. In many parts of the world, they still do. In Marriage and Morals (1929), the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘marriage is for woman the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.’ Once married, a woman’s legal rights were subsumed under those of her husband, and the so-called marriage bar restricted her ability to work outside the home. Her husband could rape her with impunity, yet contraception, abortion, and divorce were all denied to her.

The rape of an unmarried woman was construed as a property crime against her father, robbing him of his daughter’s precious virginity—with, in some cases, the woman forced to marry her rapist. Rape of a married woman by a man other than her husband was construed as a crime against the husband, with little concern or regard for the woman herself. Only from the middle of the twentieth century did evolving social norms lead to the criminalisation of marital rape, but there are still many jurisdictions in which it remains a private matter, or in which the law is not enforced.

Forced marriage is still practised all over the world, including, albeit illegally, in the UK and US; and if marriage does not require consent, then, following that logic, neither does any subsequent sexual intercourse. Many married women cannot even leave the home without their husband’s permission. Women who protest or try to escape, or so much as talk to another man, risk being beaten or murdered in an ‘honour killing’. In 2010, a twelve-year-old Yemeni girl, Elham al-Assi, died from internal bleeding three days after being made to marry a man twice her age; according to her mother, her husband had tied her up and raped her.

Marriage Today

When I was a child, it was customary for a woman to sit in the passenger seat when there was a man in the car, or in a back seat if there were two men, because everyone assumed that men ought to be in charge, do most of the talking, and enjoy the better view. Things have improved since then: women have much more economic and political clout than they did just thirty or forty years ago, and men are much more egalitarian in their approach to matrimony.

But women still shoulder the bulk of the housekeeping and childrearing, even when working full-time. A married man is likely to pursue his career as though he were still single, while a married woman is expected to forfeit her public life to follow her husband and care for the young, the old, and the infirm of the family.

In the workplace, employers look favourably upon married men, who are deemed to be more mature and responsible, while married women may be passed over for fear that they will go off to have babies or, worse, refuse to collude with the patriarchy. A vicious circle sets in. Because the man brings in more money, his time is prized and prioritised, while the woman’s unpaid contributions, which she fits around the man, remain largely invisible. The more the man earns, the more the woman can afford to slip into subordination, with the middle classes leveraging their privilege to entrench the old gender stereotypes.

Marriage has undoubtedly changed for the better. But this raises an awkward question. If marriage has been stripped of so many of its traditional assumptions—female obedience and dependence, division of labour, indissolubility, compulsory heterosexuality—what is it that we are still clinging on to?

Is It Really Love?

The hard truth is that a lot of people tie the knot because they are terrified of loneliness, or buckle under the social and psychological pressure that bears upon the unmarried state. But in the longer term, marriage might be even lonelier than its alternatives, and that’s before it breaks up. ‘The trouble,’ mused the writer Charlotte Brontë (d. 1855), ‘is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.’

There is also an argument that marriage is detrimental to community, undermining ties with neighbours, friends, and relatives. ‘Families, I hate you!’ wrote André Gide in Fruits of the Earth (1897), ‘bolted homes, shut doors, jealous repositories of happiness.’ There is of course the intimate relationship with the spouse, but, like eating the same meal every day, sex can quickly lose its appeal when it becomes a habit, or when it is taken for granted, or when the man, being married, lets himself go—wherefore the proliferation of sex manuals aimed at married women.

In the spring of its rapture, romantic love seems to enclose the germs of freedom and fulfilment, but, with the turning of the seasons, yields nothing but failure and frustration—and it is worth remembering that man had no time for romantic love back in the day when woman was his possession. Romance took the form of ‘What’s for dinner?’ followed by a grump and a stiff drink.

Equality Is Not Liberation

The gay rights movement fought long and hard for gay marriage, and still carries on the fight. But ironically, this obscured the feminist message by making marriage seem like the crowning glory of love and a fundamental human right. David Cameron as Pater Patriae (a Roman honorific meaning ‘Father of the Fatherland’) declared that he supported gay marriage because he was a conservative, not in spite of it: and marriage, even gay marriage, or especially gay marriage, is a profoundly conservative institution.

Equality in marriage as in everything is of course to be welcome, but equality in this case should not be confused with liberation. To have the right to do something because others have it is one thing, to exercise that right is quite another.

In The Second Sex (1949), the feminist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote that ‘marriage is obscene in principle insofar as it transforms into rights and duties those mutual relations which should be founded on a spontaneous urge’.

At a time of such unparalleled social freedom, why, say many feminists, should we limit ourselves to an inauthentic, monotonous, and potentially calamitous life of state-enforced monogamy?

Are we really so brainwashed, and so cowered, that we cannot rise up to a freer way of living? And could the state please stop penalising those who do?

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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The Pros and Cons of Polygamy

An apples between two pears

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In the state of nature, people were generally polygamous, as are most animals. With many animals, the male leaves the female soon after copulating and long before any offspring are born. A male bear is liable to kill and eat any bear cub that it encounters, even if the cub happens to be its own.

On the other hand, over 90 per cent of avian species are socially monogamous, as are the emperor penguin, the prairie vole, and the red-backed salamander. The flatworm Schistosoma mansoni, one of the major agents of the parasitic disease schistosomiasis (bilharzia), is monogamous in its male-female pairings within the human body—challenging the common prejudice that monogamy is more sophisticated, or ‘higher order’, than polygamy. There may be quite a bit of romance going on in the restaurant of your gut.

According to genetic studies, it is only relatively recently, around 10,000 years ago, that monogamy began to prevail over polygamy in human populations. A rise in monogamous unions may have been tied to the development of sedentary agriculture, helping to maintain land and property within the same narrow kin group.

Polygamy may enable a male to sire more offspring, but monogamy can, in certain circumstances, represent a more successful overall reproductive strategy. By sticking with the same female, a male can be more or less sure that the female’s offspring are also his, and protect them from being killed by male rivals intent on returning the female to fertility (breastfeeding being a natural contraceptive).

Historically, most cultures that permitted polygamy permitted polygyny (a man taking two or more wives) rather than polyandry (a woman taking two or more husbands). In his first-hand account of the Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar says that, among ancient Britons, ‘ten and even twelve men have wives in common’, particularly brothers, or fathers and sons—which sounds more like group marriage than polyandry proper.

Polyandry is typically tied to scarcity of land and resources, as, for example, in certain parts of the Himalayas, and serves to restrain population growth. If it involves several brothers married to the same wife (fraternal polyandry), it also protects the family’s land and assets from division.

In Europe, this preservation of patrimony was generally achieved through the feudal rule of primogeniture (‘first born’), still practised today among the British aristocracy, by which the eldest legitimate son inherits the entire estate (or almost) of both parents. Primogeniture has antecedents in the Bible, with Esau selling his ‘birthright’ to his younger brother Jacob. Being a firstborn, I’m all for it.

Polygamy Today

Today, most countries that permit polygamy—almost invariably in the form of polygyny—are countries with a Muslim majority or sizeable Muslim minority. In some countries, such as India, polygamy is legal only for Muslims. In others, such as Russia, it is illegal but not criminalised.

Under Islamic marital jurisprudence, a man can take up to four wives, so long as he treats them all equally. But while it is true that Islam permits polygyny, it does not require or impose it: in principle, marriage can only occur by mutual consent, and a bride is able to stipulate that her husband-to-be is not to take a second wife. Monogamy is by far the norm in Muslim societies, as most men cannot afford to maintain more than one family, and of those who can many would rather not. Still, polygyny remains common across much of West Africa, rooted in part in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which, for a long time, led to important gender imbalances in those regions.

Polygamy is criminalised across Europe and the Americas, as well as in China, Australia, and other countries. Even so, there are many instances of polygamy in the West, especially within immigrant communities and religious groups such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS Church) and other Mormon fundamentalists.

But why would a man want more than one wife in the first place, when many men wouldn’t want even one?

The Pros of Polygamy

A man who takes more than one wife satisfies more of his sexual appetites, signals high social status, and generally feels better about himself. His many children supply him with a ready source of labour, and the means, through arranged marriages, to create multiple, reliable, and durable economic, social, and political alliances. Polygyny may be costly, but in the long term it can make a rich man richer still.

Even in monogamous societies, powerful men often establish long-term sexual relationships with women other than their wives (called concubinage), although in this case the junior partners and the children born to them do not enjoy the same legal protections as the formal or ‘legitimate’ wife and children. The Sun King, Louis XIV of France, had several official and unofficial mistresses. His chief mistress at any one time carried the title of maîtresse-en-titre (‘official mistress’), and the most notorious one, Françoise-Athénaïs, Marquise de Montespan, bore him no fewer than seven children.

In some cases, a man—most famously Henry VIII of England—might get divorced to marry a much younger woman (serial monogamy), thereby monopolising the reproductive lifespan of more than one woman without suffering the social sanctions of polygamy.

If divorce has become so common, it is in part because people are living for much longer, whereas in the past death would have done the job of divorce. ‘Till death do us part’ means a great deal more today than it ever has.

Polygyny might even benefit the women involved, who may come to enjoy one another’s company, and share the burdens of housekeeping and childrearing. Younger wives may add to the status and standing of the first wife, while subtracting from her duties.

In times of war, with high male absenteeism and mortality, polygyny supports population growth and replenishment by ensuring that every female can find a mate.

So far, polygyny may seem an attractive proposition: more offspring and status for the husband; companionship and shared labour for the wives; and, under certain circumstances, demographic advantages for society. But things, of course, are not so simple.

The Cons of Polygyny

First and foremost, polygyny sanctions and perpetuates gender inequality, with co-wives officially and patently subordinated to their husband.

Women in polygynous unions tend to marry at a younger age, into a setup that is bound to foster jealousy, competition, and conflict, with instances of co-wives poisoning one another’s offspring in a bid to advance their own.

Although the husband ought in principle to treat his co-wives equitably, in practice he will almost invariably favour one over the others—typically the youngest, most recent one. Tensions may be reduced by establishing a clear hierarchy among the co-wives, or if the co-wives are sisters (sororal polygyny), or if they each keep a separate household (hut polygyny).

While polygyny may benefit the men involved, it denies wives to other men, especially young, low-status men, who, like all men, tend to measure their success by their manhood, that is, by the twin parameters of social status and fertility. With so little to lose or look forward to, these frustrated men are much more likely to turn to crime and violence, including sexual violence and warmongering—and it is perhaps telling that polygamy is practised in almost all of the twenty most unstable countries on the Fragile States Index.

These social inequalities are only aggravated by the brideprice, a payment from the groom to the bride’s family. Brideprice is a frequent feature of polygynous unions, and intended to compensate the bride’s family for the loss of a pair of hands. Divorce typically requires that the brideprice be returned, leaving many women with no choice but to remain in miserable or abusive marriages. If polygynous unions are common enough, a resulting shortage of brides inflates the brideprice, raising the age at which young men can afford to marry while incentivising families to hive off their daughters at the earliest opportunity, even at the cost of interrupting their education. Brideprice is often paid in cows, leading some young men to resort to cattle raids and other forms of crime. Gang leaders and warlords attract new recruits with the promise of a bride or an offer to cover their brideprice.

Polygyny also tends to disadvantage the offspring. On the one hand, children in polygynous families share in the genes of an alpha male (or, at least, an upper-class male) and stand to benefit from his protection, resources, influence, outlook, and expertise. On the other hand, their mothers are younger and less educated, and they are set to receive a divided share of their father’s attention, which may instead be directed at his latest wife, or at amassing resources for the next one. Children in polygynous families are also at greater risk of violence from their kin group, especially the extended family. Overall, infant mortality in polygynous families is significantly higher than in monogamous families.

The same arithmetic keeps returning. However wealthy or powerful the husband, some things cannot be multiplied: his time, his attention, his presence, his love… For the exceptional man with wealth, power, and desire, polygyny may offer advantages—but even for him, those advantages come at a price. The evolutionary appeal of having several mates is easy enough to understand. But several mates is not the same as several wives, hence what actually goes on.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Relationships essays