Will this one-by-one system forever be our main thing or do you think we will break monogamy and maybe “team up” as groups or something?
And yeah polygamy is a thing but do you think it will catch on to “the upper class”?
Well, here’s the Wikipedia. To be clear, I’m counting a society where elite men might have multiple wives as still monogamous, since that’s not representative of an average member of the population and the wives themselves are still bound to a single partner. Maybe that’s a terminology error but for the sake of this question I think it’s clearest.
And yeah, as someone pointed out there’s an amount of infidelity in every human society, but it’s generally neither endorsed by the legitimate partner or society at large, at least not as an actual relationship.
The wiki says out of ~1200 societies studied only ~180 were monogamous. And that 16% of the monogamous were not strictly monogamous. I don’t know why the wiki would help your case.
If you didn’t read the rest of the paragraph, you should. It was comparing against variants of polygamy, plus 2 cultures that had polyandry, which I discussed elsewhere. Western-style polyamory didn’t even make the rankings. I can only think of one other culture (the Mosuo) that might count.
Like I said, it might be an abuse of terminology to call this all monogamy, but natural language is inherently imprecise and this isn’t an academic audience that can digest heavy jargon.
