Monogamy is not our natural state

For most of us we are raised to believe that monogamy is our natural state. That to find and be with one person sexually, and only one person, is the right and correct thing to do. That is what we are taught by books, television and often our parents as well. The reality is that this is simply not the case. The rise of adult dating and the de-stigmatisation of having a fuck buddy or a friends with benefits is a sign that as a society we are changing and coming to a new way of understanding our relationships. There is a massive push towards being more open about non-monogamous relationships, and the more we talk about these things, the better. The two questions here are around whether monogamy is fundamentally flawed, and how easy is it to maintain long term relationships outside of monogamy?

There has always been a problem between intimacy and desire. If you want to be intimate with someone, you want to be having regular sex. The contact needs to be high to breed familiarity and with lots of repetition. However, these are the enemy of attraction. Desire thrives on novelty and the thrill of the unknown. It is tough to have both of these coexist. For a long time, in a monogamous setting, you were forced to accept that you had the thrill of attraction at the start, then later you lost that but gained intimacy. In today's world, is it possible to have both through a non-monogamous relationship? The simple answer is yes if done correctly.

For a long time, monogamy was about knowing if a baby was yours or not. If a woman had sex with multiple people, how do you know who the father is? In today's world of contraception, this is no longer an issue. Careful use of contraception means you can sleep with multiple people and always know that there is not going to be a pregnancy. This opens the door to having more than one partner.

The key is openness. Talking to your partner about what you want and why you want it is key to forging the life that you desire. People are often surprised to find that there are other ways to do it. If you want to sleep with someone else and so do they, threesomes are a surprisingly good solution if one of you wishes to explore someone of the same sex as them. Open relationships do not mean the end of a long term thing if it is good. People have fuck buddies on the side and that can work as long as everyone knows where they stand. There is always a danger of course… but I think that danger is always present for someone who desires more than just the one person that they are sleeping with.

So be open, talk to the people that you are sleeping with about how you feel and what you are looking for, and see if you can find the sexual life that you want.