Ryan: Conventional relationships leave students wanting more
By Jordan Ryan (Contact)
Friday, February 15th, 2008
When my alarm sounds in the mornings, I wake and slide my boots on my sheets-softened feet and walk two inches taller to class. I return to my sheets where that extra two inches of confidence is sloughed off; a time when one becomes susceptible to the loneliness that comes when naked feet obtain warmth from sheets and not other naked feet.
This is the stuff of lonesome times so easily arising in our hungry, adolescent soul searching, when we want the comfort of a partner or miss the presence of a long-distance lover. Being in a committed relationship is something that most of us want to experience in our time here, and monogamy is something that has been placed on a pedestal since the beginning of religiously sanctioned unions. But now we must deny the whole idea of “finding true love” and “soul mates” and question if humans truly are inherently monogamous.
David Barash and Judith Eve Lipton co-wrote the book “The Monogamy Myth: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People.” They argue, “Monogamists are going against some of the deepest-seated evolutionary inclinations with which biology has endowed most creatures, Homo sapiens included.” Through study of monogamy in the animal kingdom (which is very rare, according to Barash and Lipton) and patterns in which men and women wander from monogamous relationships, we are obligated to give attention to the idea that monogamy is our own creation, and this is why it concerns us so greatly.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the last reported divorce rate for a calendar year is 38 percent in 2005. We are all aware of this high rate, exemplified in some cases by the genuine interest and intrigue exhibited when one says that their parents are still together. Is this evidence in defense of the idea that we are not meant to be monogamous? “Hooking up” is not a new term, and author Laura Sessions Stepp (author of “Unhooked”) suggests that women “hook up,” or engage in some sort of non-emotional, sexual act, because women are increasingly goal-oriented in their professional lives and believe that a non-committed “hook up” would not obstruct their ambitions.
When a good friend of mine, an insightful English major, was asked to give a definition of monogamy, he wrote: monogamy-1) a state of being, not unlike marriage, resulting from idiot religiosity; 2) two lovers lacking imagination, curable by direct application of grain alcohol at an office party.”
Essentially everyone dreams of soul mate or perfect match, but now is the time for us to tell those standard images of monogamy like beach weddings and Hawaii honeymoons to screw off. Thanks to my spirited friend for personifying my point, which comes to: monogamy stems from historically held social norms that, in the end, create a path that we end up believing is the only one to true happiness. Monogamy is not something built into our DNA, but rather a convention of comfort that we turn to because we all want to be loved, and because it is so ingrained in us that we cannot imagine a life of happiness without a mate.
I believe that monogamous relationships are successful for people because they believe in them, and that they can work for the young adult who accepts their benefits as truths. Do not cheapen the importance of your own happiness by assuming that you can only find it only in another pair of arms. Not all “hook-ups” must be without emotion, not all relationships must imply long-term commitment and self-sacrifice, and self-love is the most important variety of love.
I am not encouraging rampant bed-hopping, but rather for you to be open to something other than “settling down” once you find who you think is that solitary special someone. Grab hold of those lonely thoughts and take them for something more than “nobody loves me” dribble. Love is not just another pair of feet in your bed, and life can still be pretty good with all of that extra mattress space.
Ryan is a Salina junior in art history.
Discussion
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I think you're quite wrong about monogamy not being ingrained into our DNA. Your analysis of the animal kingdom and our own species was short-lived and gave no actual examples nor an explanation for why your argument might be true. When it comes to sex (or evolution period,) reproduction is obviously the key to analysis. An animal that can survive to reproduce does not pass on its genes to its long-term progeny if its offspring do not survive long enough to reproduce due to bad parenting.
Human beings have one of the longest periods of child-raising (maybe the longest, I haven't checked my statistics) of any animal species due to the long period of time required for us to grow and develop our massive brains and other complex structures. A human child is quite defenseless in the wilderness until about the age of 17, and must be raised under the support of adults. The most stable relationship for raising healthy children is clearly one in which there are two caring parents because the competition in a group that was any larger (say, 3 people) would promote infanticide of a child that is biologically not one's own in order to guarantee resources for one's own progeny.
Our DNA is ingrained with a selective bias for monogamous relationships because they allow us to A) procreate and B) have children that successfully procreate.
And here are some examples of species that are consistently (not necessarily always) monogamous: Beavers, otters, wolves, some bats, foxes, some ungulates, gibbons, swans, vultures, and voles. I'm sure there are others, and I'm sure there are remarkable exceptions.
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