It’s True: All Ethical Non-Monogamous People Are Lacking Something In Their Relationships
But How About Monogamous Couples?
Is there something lacking in all ethical non-monogamous relationships?
Yes.
But that’s ok because we’re all lacking something in our relationships. It’s a myth to expect any one person to be everything for one person. It doesn't matter if that relationship is a monogamous relationship, an ethical non-monogamous relationship, or even a friendship.
Humans are complex, and one person cannot possibly be the answer to all that you need. I’m not arguing that all couples need to romantically open their relationships to others, but I am saying as human beings are that it's essential we have other relationships with others, either platonic or romantic.
Would you ever expect your best friend to be your only friend? Why because we understand conceptually that one person cannot possibly be our end-all-be-all. We understand that, as humans, we have complicated and diverse interests, hobbies, and things that bring us happiness and that we can’t be 100% compatible with one person.
Hence why socially-healthy humans have diverse friendships so that they can form different relationships that scratch all those different itches. Your relationship with your best friend may answer 90% of your personal needs, but the last 10% of needs is where all your other friendships come in to fulfill you.
My question for you is: if you don’t ask your best friend to completely fulfill all your needs, then why would you ask your romantic partner that?
Just like you can have an amazing best friend that you would want to stay friends with for the rest of your life and need other friendships to supplement that, you can have an amazing romantic partner that fulfills 90% of your needs, but you may need a couple of other romantic or sexual relationships to supplement the other 10%. For many people, ethical non-monogamy allows them to satisfy those needs.
Supporters of monogamy will agree that one person may not answer all your needs as an individual but would argue the other 10% of needs should be answered through a combination of relationships with friends and family. I agree that no matter if you are monogamous or ethical non-monogamous, it’s healthy to have an ethical non-romantic and sexual relationship. However, there are some itches that can’t be relieved through platonic relationships.
Some of those needs may be the desire to experience the rush of flirting and going on a first date or having a more adventurous sex life, some of which require more than one person on hand at a time. Again that doesn’t mean that relationships in ethical non-monogamous couples are any less compatible than in monogamous couples but I think ethical non-monogamous couples are more realistic about the limitations of one person.
We know the limitations of monogamy because a lot of monogamous couples aren’t so monogamous.
Cheating is a form of non-monogamy, just without the ethical part. We know that many “monogamous” couples scratch the itches that aren’t being satisfied in their lives by unethical involving another person or persons in their relationships.
Nicholas Wolfinger, a professor of family and consumer studies at the University of Utah, estimates that between a quarter to half of all “monogamous” married relationships experienced either one or both partners cheating. This is only accounting for married couples, imagine all the unmarried “monogamous” relationships that have suffered from cheating. Not to mention all the partners that desired to cheat or did other non-monogamous behaviors that they personally didn’t define as cheating.
Again a typical response would be that those couples were unhappy in their current situation and the cheating wasn’t a call for ethical non-monogamy but a cry to get away from their current partner.
Relationship researched and practicing couples therapist Dr. Robert Weiss would disagree:
After nearly three decades of treating individuals who’ve cheated on a loving partner, I can tell you with absolute certainty that infidelity is not always the result of a bad primary relationship. In fact, much of the time, the cheaters I work with tell me that they love their partner, find their partner attractive, value their relationship, and do not want to damage the life that they and their significant other have created together.
A 2017 study by the University of Maryland and Dylan Selterman replicates Dr. Weiss’s experiences. People don’t cheat because they hate their partners; they cheat because they have a need that isn’t being met with the one exception being revenge cheating. Selterman walked away from his study with this opinion:
We often hear that infidelity is a symptom, not a cause, of a damaged relationship.
Our research suggests it’s not that simple: People cheat for a variety of reasons, many of which are not a direct reflection of a relationship’s health.
Selterman and Dr. Weiss are saying that people in happy relationships can want other romantic and sexual relationships with other people and that does not mean they are unhappy with their relationship. Which runs in direct conflict with the narrative around monogamy that one person should be enough to fulfill all your needs.
You can lack something in your relationship and still be in a happy relationship. Just like you can have a really great friendship and still need other friends.
The ironic thing is many people in monogamous relationships understand that they would be happier in an ethical non-monogamous dynamic. A 2020 anonymous study found that only about half of Americans truly want a completely monogamous relationship. Many people in monogamous relationships don’t want to be monogamous; hence the cheating statistic.
The issue is America is a hyper-religious and monogamous-dominated culture, so other factors are holding a lot of people back from being in a relationship that truly reflects their desires. They don’t know what ethical non-monogamy looks like or how to communicate with a partner about their desires. Not to mention the stigmatization that comes with breaking the dominant cultural traditions and narratives around sex and love.
This is why it is important to have articles and conversations like this that normalized the desires and experiences to practice ethical non-monogamy.
The reason why there are more ethical non-monogamous couples now than ever before isn’t that older generations felt any less compelled toward relationship freedom but because they felt more restrained by the shackles of tradition.
