Luke Brunning - Does Monogamy Work?

Luke Brunning (PhD) is a philosopher whose research focuses on relationships, love, sexuality and emotions like jealousy and grief. He is currently a Lecturer in Ethics at the University of Birmingham, Department of Philosophy, and previously held a British Academy junior research fellowship at the University of Oxford. He has written widely for academic journals and trade publications, including the Independent and the Times Literary Supplement.

Matthew Taylor is Chief Executive of the RSA, a 250-year old British institution devoted to enriching society through ideas and action to deliver a 21st-century enlightenment. A writer, public speaker and broadcaster, he has written widely on policy, politics, public service reform and cultural theory, and frequently appears on Newsnight, The Daily Politics, and Radio 4s Today and The Moral Maze. He was previously General Secretary and Chief Executive of the Institute for Public Policy Research, Britains leading think tank.

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A For many people, monogamous marriage is the ideal form of relationship; the ultimate expression of love and commitment, and the best context in which to raise a family.

Does monogamy work?

Doubtless we have asked this question of our own relationships or of those of people we know. On the one hand, the ideal of monogamy promises love, intimacy and lifelong companionship. On the other, monogamy requires us to forego all other sex and romance. For some, this is an easy choice; for others, a cause of ambivalence. In this book, we take this ambivalence seriously by exploring monogamys origins, the contemporary pressures experienced by monogamous people and some responses to those pressures, including the adoption of nonmonogamy.

Although we may wish it were otherwise, monogamy is a contingent form of romantic life rather than an evidently natural way to love and raise families. Monogamy is predominantly a social ideal, so it is vulnerable to social change. We will learn, for example, what Roman slavery, social inequality and early Christianity have to do with monogamy, and how the monogamy ideal was shaped by successive social upheavals, from industrialization to inflation, farming to feminism.

Monogamous wedlock has been under siege since the golden age of marriage in the 1950s, with rising divorce rates, increasing cohabitation, sexual liberation and new visions of romantic life. In Britain, for example, divorce rates rapidly increased in the 1970s after the introduction of the Divorce Reform Act of 1969. They peaked in the 1990s, with around 14 divorces per 1,000 marriages. Since then, rates of divorce have fallen slightly, but only because the overall marriage rate has plummeted, dropping by 50% between the 1960s and 1970s alone. According to the Office for National Statistics in the UK, in 2016, 243,000 opposite-sex couples married, compared to 471,000 in 1940; 88% of couples were cohabiting before marriage; only 24% of marriages were religious and the average age of men getting married for the first time was 37.9 years and for women 35.5 years. By 2018, the average length of a marriage that ended in divorce was a mere 12.5 years.

The golden age of marriage occurred in western cultures during the 1950s and 1960s. This was the heyday of marriage and the nuclear family, when fathers provided the main income, and mothers stayed at home. Despite the widespread myth, this form of apparently traditional marriage has been rare throughout history.

The UK Divorce Reform Act of 1969 introduced new legislation that meant spouses no longer had to evidence significant fault in order to end a marriage, irretrievable breakdown became sufficient. William Wilson (19132010), the MP who introduced the legislation, noted that though marriages are made in heaven, they dont always stay there.

B A woman cuts into the cake at her divorce party. Today many couples divorce out a diffuse sense that they are no long compatible, or that their desires pull in different directions: evidence of how marital ideals have changed dramatically in recent decades.

Responses to these facts could include making greater efforts to make a marriage work, modifying our expectations of monogamy or exploring other options, such as open relationships or polyamory . Could changing marriage institutions so that monogamous couples are not privileged actually make it easier to be monogamous? Might adopting polyamory enable people to flourish romantically, and raise families, without conflict and jealousy?

Polyamory means many loves, and is is a neologism which blends Greek (poly-) and Latin (amor) to describe people who can romantically love several people at once.