Men love to write off their many love affairs - the polygamous nature of "nature." Women - calling for marital fidelity insisting that a man should be monogamous, period. But how is it really?
So, we live, enter into sexual relations, fall in love, get married, have children and dedicate our entire life to the created family. After all, everything is as it should be? Or not?
In fact, nature has not written to create a family for a man or, on the contrary, to have many sexual partners. This is a problem that psychologists and anthropologists around the world solve. But, it would seem, in this, at first glance, simple question, there is still no consensus.
Natural human monogamy or polygamy is a myth that has evolved over several decades. This phenomenon in the human world is exclusively social in nature. Like many stereotypes, the stereotype that a person naturally needs many partners or one is a conditioned reflex developed over several centuries. The fact that most of us seek to get married or marry, in a word, to start a family is the norm that society has adopted for itself.
How did marriage come about? According to the most common theory, marriage originated in ancient times exclusively as what we currently call a “bargain”. Now such marriages are usually called marriages of convenience. A father living in one tribe gave his daughter for a young man living in another tribe, only to expand his territory. Incest in the modern sense in ancient society did not exist. It is now we know that closely related crossbreeding leads to mutations at the gene level and degeneration. In ancient times, the marriage of brothers and sisters was just unprofitable, because they did not give any new opportunities to the older generation. Now we condemn the marriage of convenience. For us, the only true marriage of love. At the same time, it was just the opposite: marriage and love were in no way connected.
At the present time, it is inherent to many people to separate the concepts of "love" and "sex", explaining that to the polygamous nature of man. This is an erroneous judgment, since our sexual addictions are not inherited, at the gene level, they are instilled in us by society from infancy. Just like other processes in our mind and subconscious that affect our personality, external factors act on our sexuality. If you simplify all this, then each person is free to choose to be his monogamous and live with only one partner or polygamous.
When the personal unconscious (Z. Freud) is confronted with the collective unconscious (C. Jung), phenomena occur that a person is often unable to cope with. For example, religion refers to the collective unconscious. We can not imagine humanity without different beliefs, that is, it seems that they appeared on earth immediately with the advent of man. The same can be said about marriage. Most of us are strangers to the idea that humanity can live without marriage and family. Although a lot of mammals and birds lead a family lifestyle, creating flocks, prides, etc. But there is no scientific evidence that man naturally needs to have a family, as well as evidence of the opposite. It has become our common collective unconscious. For example, when a Westerner, faithful to his polygamous "nature", decides to marry, he begins to consider betrayal the norm. But how to call such a relationship? Mono-polygamous? There is no such thing.
Why does a person who is confident in polygamy until the end of his life remain independent? Because he is confronted with what has already become unconscious for people: "I want many sexual partners, but social foundations require me to create a family that presumes loyalty to one person." Unfortunately, such situations occur more and more often, just because people do not know how to distinguish between the very concepts of polygamy and monogamy. Polygamy means "I do not start a permanent relationship, I lead a free sex life" (which does not exclude the possibility of procreation), monogamy means "I choose one partner and want to live with him all my life, engaging in sexual relations only with him."
Most often, studying these issues, researchers turn to the animal world, because a person is, in fact, also an animal. The controversy is due to the fact that, trying to find in this natural beginning, anthropologists and in the animal world see different types of both polygamous and monogamous animals. Practically all members of the dog family are monogamous (wolves, foxes, raccoon dogs, coyotes, dingos, arctic foxes, etc.), while a domestic dog is more likely a polygamous representative. The vast majority of primates are polygamous. Gibbons are knocked out of this number: they choose their partners once and for all their lives. As we can see, comparisons with wildlife have no scientific background under them.
There are scientific treatises of some well-known anthropologists, in which evidence is given in favor of the fact that the signs of monogamy in man began even long before the tools of labor appeared.
In modern society, pseudoscientific journalistic works often appear that a man as a male has polygamy, and a woman has monogamy. These are works filled with various erroneous judgments. There is not a single species on Earth where a representative of one sex would be monogamous, and another - polygamous. Nature could not create different priorities for females and males of the same species, because a priori these species would be doomed to death. How would the life of people result if monogamy of a woman would require for her one partner of the opposite sex, and polygamy of a man - different? Polygamous marriages in eastern countries are also a social decision.
Scientists have proven that it is the monogamous way of life of a person who was able to ensure such development for him. But each of us is free to choose for himself what kind of life to lead him. The main thing is that this choice does not destroy the integrity and balance, either personally or socially.
