Most People Still Choose Exclusive Pair Bonds Under Looser Sexual Norms

An unnamed speaker relays a paper’s conditional argument for polygyny: some women may prefer to marry a wealthy, high-status man who already has a wife rather than have no partner or marry someone “further down the totem pole.” A monogamous rule removes that option.

Chris Williamson puts the logic in deliberately extreme terms: it would stop someone like Elon Musk from having “a thousand wives.” The actual trade-off is less exaggerated. Monogamy offers exclusive commitment; polygyny may offer access to a more desirable partner, provided a woman is willing to share him.

That possibility complicates the argument that one-to-one marriage distributes relationships more evenly by preventing a small group of high-status men from accumulating multiple women. An unnamed speaker says a recent paper called marriage “affirmative action for sexual redistribution,” and describes the same idea, tongue in cheek, as “DEI for men” or “sexual socialism.” If most men are not in the top 10% or 20% of the dating market, a norm that pairs men and women one-to-one can give more men access to partnership.

But redistribution does not, on this account, make monogamy the preferred arrangement for every woman. The argument for polygyny rests on some women valuing a share of a particularly desirable man more than exclusivity with a less desirable one. The counterargument rests on exclusivity itself being valuable enough that women would rather have one partner to themselves than share a higher-status partner.

Williamson asks whether monogamous marriage has historically functioned as “affirmative action for men,” particularly if online dating directs a large bucket of attention toward a small number of men—a pattern he associates with Scott Galloway’s phrase “Porsche polygamy.”

He suggests that women’s resistance to renewed monogamous norms may have more than one source. Such norms can evoke pre-1960s restrictions, gender stereotypes, and diminished independence. He also wonders whether a less regulated casual-sex market gives women more opportunities to attract partners through traits that are not immediately visible in a conventional one-to-one match. Because women are generally choosier, he speculates, men may have more to gain from a system that reliably pairs people off.

An unnamed speaker challenges that inference. If monogamy chiefly benefited men, they argue, women would not so often want one man to themselves rather than a partner who also has other women. That preference for exclusivity is the central counterweight to the status-access case for polygyny.

The exchange treats the loosening of sexual norms as a kind of deregulation, arguably beginning in the 1960s. Some voices on the political right have called for a return to traditional norms. At the same time, Williamson points to people voluntarily adopting stricter personal boundaries around sex rather than accepting casual encounters with strangers. The relevant question is not simply whether formal norms return, but whether people rebuild constraints privately when shared norms weaken.

An unnamed speaker places the disagreement within a contested question in evolutionary social science. One view holds that humans are constrained polygynists: males would naturally accumulate multiple female partners, while cultural institutions restrain them. The competing view accepts that humans can adopt several mating systems but maintains that, insofar as humans have a default, it is more clearly monogamous.

The speaker considers the monogamy case stronger. Their reasoning is that contemporary sexual norms permit an attractive—or even merely good-looking—man to pursue effectively unlimited partners with relatively little judgment. Yet, they say, the data do not show most people doing that. “Most of what people do is still just do the boring thing and mate monogamously,” the speaker says.

That does not mean most people form one lifelong union. Another unnamed speaker asks whether humans are better described as serial monogamists, citing ethnographic accounts of hunter-gatherer societies in which people pair bond, may have one or two children, and sometimes form new relationships after romantic feelings dissipate.

The response is that this pattern is common. Serial monogamy is probably more prevalent than lifelong monogamy, the speaker says, because most people fall in love more than once. Still, in some such societies, a small but non-trivial share of first marriages—about 5%, according to the speaker—last for life.

With few strict rules, the speaker’s picture is mixed: most relationships remain largely exclusive pair bonds; some polygyny and lifelong mating persist; and partner switching is not unusual. Removing formal constraints has not, in this account, led most people to abandon exclusive pair-bonding.