Relationships run into the danger of co-dependency if young people have baggage while transitioning into adulthood. In a lot of ways, the baggage can be multi generational and gets heavier.

I don’t know the answer but monogamous relationship is suitable when children enter the picture. It’s a whole different ball game now.

Digressing a bit, I am fond of beckoning the monogamous nature of our bird friends. It is very expensive for them to gather resources to raise their young(aka perpetuate their species) and monogamous bonded pairs have a better chance of a surviving brood. Perhaps in times of restricted resources or hard to access survivability resources, monogamy is the best answer.

Consider apes and big cats, they have completely different social structures. They conserve energy when the alpha leads the pack for food. The alpha also gets the pick of his ‘harem’, as it were..And they are not monogamous. So there’s that.

I think that while we like to believe that we have access to free choice as human beings, we are not that far removed from our mammalian cousins. Having said that, we are also finding ourselves in a situation where resources are becoming scarce(exponentially increasing population) and mating choices are restricted due to individual’s place on the economic and social hierarchy.

I am compelled to pick serial monogamy over poly or true monogamy. Our biology compels us to obey the brain chemicals. To disregard that is an enormous act of will against nature. Unless we deal with the pesky problem of religion, values and morals along with our resource constrained hierarchical world, hypocritical forced monogamy is here to stay.

In a lot of ways religious morality induced monogamy has paved the way for pair bonding and successful child survivorship statistics....so from the gene POV, monogamy must be winning in some way.

I have read several books that would argue that our biology specifically predisposes us to not be monogamous, especially when it comes to child rearing. Sex at Dawn and Sapiens are two examples. The latter makes a weaker case for it, but it equally rejects that we are biologically monogamous. The author there argues that best we can tell, when we were still evolving to be what we are today, there were tribes that practices essentially polyamory and group parenting, and there were more monogamy-centered ones, leading to the conclusion that we do have a choice in the matter. Bonobos, great apes closer to us than Chimps, are non-monogamous to a fault. I have two children that are a result of a non-monogamous relationship, and yes, it was definitely easier to have the extra hands and extra resources during their first few years.

While anecdata, I will also bring up the example of my 80 year old grandfather. When he was in his 60s, my grandmother suddenly died. A few years later he reconnected with an old friend, and they developed a romantic relationship, and are married and still together. They are some of the most co-dependent people I know. Happy, it seems, but co-dependent. I think co-dependence doesn't just afflict young people.

Multi generational families had multiple hands and shared resources to raise children. It’s the grandmother effect. I was raised in such a family. All my grandmothers children and grandchildren lived under the same roof. The women went to work, were able to pursue education and were financially independent. Everyone participated in child rearing with the grandmother at the helm and contributed to the common pot. It was based on kinship bond and a product of a strong matrilineal lineage. It comes from kinship/communalism and not individualism. But all the world is individual now as most societies around the world become westernized.

I think religious morality and wealth inequality greatly affects the hypothesis in both the books you mentioned.

No doubt, there will be a small percentage of world population that will play out that hypothesis but majority will not.

The chances that the human species will adopt poly lifestyle is small to nil, imo.

However, I think marriage as well as polyamorous or just about any relationship should come with reevaluations and time limit. It is a human universal to want to have an ownership stake in any relationship. It’s higher during reproductive age(due to the cost of rearing young).

If the concept of marriage(because it does carry a respectable heft of societal approval and reflects religious morality) is abolished AND if women are truly independent..especially financially, then I think it would become more prevalent and acceptable.

In one of my imaginary worlds, communal child rearing will also likely allow people to embrace free love, as it were...I believe that love has the propensity to include many people and at the same time, but only if external pressures that cause relationship insecurities and vulnerabilities are alleviated.

I am trying to remember the book where I read the different kinds of love...courtly love, romantic love etc etc. it was fascinating because ‘love’ through the various centuries was entirely a function of religion and society and economics. But love is what happens between our eye brows and inside our skulls powdered by brain chemicals. We are resistant to accept it.

I find myself happy to accept love when I recognize it, hold it in the now and then release it. On the flip side, I realize that I have enormous capacity to hate. It surprised me but I don’t deny it either. I dislike as many people as I love. It’s like curses and hexes kind of hate. I guess it is my unintegrated shadow inching towards my self.

I agree with a lot of this. I do think that as we replace extended family structures with free market alternatives (you can replace your grandmother with a hired babysitter, etc.), we will see alternative relationship structures become more common. Also, let’s not forget that religion is slowly losing hold of our collective minds. More people identify today as atheists than a generation ago. And of course while unrelated, marriage equality has shown that messing with the institution of marriage in now way destroys society. And speaking of marriage, in the US at least it is such an expensive proposition, that a long of millennials simply don’t do it (along with not buying cars or houses). Imagine a society where the majority of the people grew up with Tinder and never want to get married. That’s the reality we live in now. In fact, a majority of millennials report having participated in a non-monogamous relationship at some point. I doubt it will become the norm any time soon, but it could certainly become a norm.

If you remember the name of that book, I would love to read it!

I hear you. But first thoughts: 1. Replacing family structures with free market alternatives means that one must be comfortably wealthy to be able to buy into it. 2. Perhaps this would mean that poly lifestyle is only suitable to a certain sector of the population 3. Perhaps this is why religion found its most viral vectors amongst the poor and disadvantaged as it offered a sort of moral support and hope towards ‘something better’ than strained existence (promise of heaven)in return for their faith in whatever organized religion. 4. That most people now identify as atheists makes me believe that we ahve indeed conquered most of the crushing poverty that was prevalent only half a century ago. I would ascribe it to capitalism. It seems to be a better route than communism which started with atheism but didn’t succeed as an economic system. 5. That marriage is not an attractive proposition in the USA is likely because there are more ‘empowered women these days than before. I don’t think it’s a tinder effect. Most women simply don’t want to be married and pop out kids. They are likely subscribing to serial monogamy than polyamory.

As mentioned, the above enumerated points are ‘first thoughts’...i want to ponder further to see if any of them contradict each other.

Re: the book. I can’t remember!! Somehow I feel like it is probably one by Leonard Shlain. I found his book Alphabet and the Goddess enthralling at one point and then binged on everything he wrote.

From his wiki page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Shlain

[..]His books include Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light (1991),[3] The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image (1998),[4] and Sex, Time and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution (2003).[5][..]

I want to say it’s one of his for sure. It was beautifully written and I loved the words as much as the content. So I want to say that I am 90% sure it’s one of Shlain’s books!

> love is just brain chemistry

A great read about that is “a complete idiot’s guide to chemistry of love”, which gave some solid peer-reviewed confirmations to some of the trends I thought I was spotting.

Quite much agree with the rest, not a lot to add :) - life is most beautiful in its diversity.