Diary
Monogamy Is a Daily Choice
On J, open relationships, the history of marriage, and why I still want monogamy.
The first person I dated after moving to the Bay Area is someone I'll call J. Our first date was coffee and bubble tea on a Saturday afternoon at Santana Row, the kind of idle chatting where neither of you checks the time. The second time, dinner. The third time, I cooked for him at my place. Then movies, the kind where you stop watching halfway through. Then a hike at a national park, then tennis, then all the small ordinary things couples do without ever announcing it.
This went on for about a month and a half. I never asked what we were, but in my head we were already there, and I was getting ready to ask whether he wanted to be exclusive.
Then his replies started slowing down. Every message on Instagram took half a day. I told myself he was busy. I have since learned a simpler rule: if someone likes you or cares about you, this rarely happens, no matter what his texting style is, so never make excuses for him. But back then I told myself a lot of things. Eventually the anxiety won, and I did what anxious people do: I went back on Hinge.
And matched with his ex.
One conversation later, I knew everything. J already had a boyfriend. The two of them had become an open partnership (that was the word used) roughly a week or two after J met me, which meant that for almost the entire time we were dating, I was the other man, and nobody had told me.
His ex told me something else, too. J had once said he might never be able to love just one person for his whole life. And J's father had divorced his mother over cheating, something J claims to despise him for. I have thought about that for a long time, and I cannot find the difference. His father kept his mother in the dark; J kept me in the dark. One did it in secret, the other under a progressive label. The person waiting for a text back gets the same deal either way.
In the end my pride made the decision for me: I blocked him. He apologized afterward and said he had let it drag on for too long and should have told me earlier. We never spoke again.
Here is the thing about me: my pride moves faster than my heart. However much I love someone, if he doesn't love me back, or loves me less than I love him, I can move on. The process is never easy. The decision is always quick.
But J left behind a question I couldn't block.
Why is it always us?
Here is an observation I can't unsee: open relationships are everywhere among gay men, and rare among straight couples. Straight people seem to face this question rarely, if at all. What causes the difference?
Four guesses probably stack.
First, male sexuality, doubled. Men, on average, want sexual variety more than women do. Put two men together and the tendency multiplies; put two women together and it halves. Lesbians really do open up at much lower rates, which suggests that gender explains more here than orientation does.
Second, no pregnancy. When sex is fully decoupled from reproduction, one natural constraint disappears, and whatever rules remain have to be built from scratch.
Third, no script. A straight couple inherits a ready-made template from society and can simply move into it. A gay couple has to negotiate every rule from zero, and once you start negotiating, "must love equal exclusivity?" turns from a default setting into a live question.
Fourth, history. Excluded from the institution of marriage for so long, gay men internalized less of its norms; and from the liberation years through the Grindr era, community culture made frankness about non-exclusivity far less shameful than it is outside.
And maybe the gap is smaller than it looks. Straight people have plenty of non-exclusivity; it's just filed under "affair" instead of "arrangement." One culture hides it; the other negotiates it. I am no longer sure which one produces less damage. J did negotiate, with his boyfriend. He just forgot to negotiate it with me.
But the question underneath is older and bigger than any of us: why did humans invent exclusive marriage in the first place? And is monogamy against human nature?
Why does marriage exist at all?
The short answer is that marriage was never about love. It was about property, kinship alliances, and inheritance. Under patriarchy it was also about paternity certainty: a man who passes land to his sons needs to know the sons are his, which historically meant controlling women's sexuality. Where resources concentrated in few hands, the result was often one husband and many wives; the reverse, one wife and many husbands, survives only in a few places of extreme scarcity. Love, as the supposed foundation of marriage, is a very recent renovation on a very old building.
So why did one husband and one wife become the global default? The explanation I find most convincing comes from Joseph Henrich and his colleagues: socially imposed monogamy pacifies societies. It takes a large population of young men who would otherwise compete, sometimes violently, for wives, and gives almost every one of them a chance at a household of his own. Less competition, less crime, more fathers invested in their children. Add the Christian church, which spent a thousand years enforcing the rule in the West, plus inheritance systems that split land among sons, and monogamy starts to look less like romance and more like infrastructure: the price a civilization pays for stability.
Is it against human nature, then? I think humans are the worst animal to ask, because the honest answer is both. We have the neurochemistry of attachment: oxytocin, vasopressin, the genuine warmth of pair bonding. And we have the divorce rate, the affair rate, and the long human tradition of serial monogamy: one great love at a time, several times in a row. We look like many bird species, socially monogamous and sexually flexible: build the nest in pairs, cheat on the side. We seem built for both attachment and novelty, which is exactly why the whole arrangement hurts.
Four days in Iowa
No film states this tension better than The Bridges of Madison County.
Francesca is an Italian war bride who has spent twenty years in an Iowa farmhouse. Her husband and two kids leave for the Illinois State Fair. A National Geographic photographer named Robert Kincaid stops to ask for directions to Roseman Bridge, and stays for four days. She chooses, in the end, to stay with her family. Decades later, her children read her diaries and learn that her last wish was to have her ashes scattered off that bridge.
The standard reading is duty versus passion, and it is mostly right: she chose responsibility, and the ashes confess what the choice cost. Here is my problem: four days is not enough to know anyone. What Francesca felt in those four days was not knowledge — it was projection. When you barely know someone, you finish them in your own head, and what you fill in is always better than reality. Add novelty, add secrecy, add the most romantic lighting Iowa has ever had, and of course it feels like the love of a lifetime. A middle-aged woman would know this. The film cheats by treating the fantasy as the truth.
I know this cheat because I have run it myself. Every online romance of mine follows the same curve: over text, each conversation surfaces another thing in common, and the person on the screen gets better every day, until we meet and the feeling evaporates within an hour. The real person cannot hide certain things. Francesca and I made the same cognitive error: falling for someone we had completed in our own heads.
But the film gets one thing right, and it is the thing that scares me. A person can stay loyal to their choice and still grieve the road they didn't take, for the rest of their life. The ashes on the bridge are not proof that four days beat twenty years. They are proof that faithfulness can leave you with a ghost. That, I suspect, is the real fear underneath every monogamy debate: not that you will cheat, but that choosing one life means mourning all the others.
What I actually want
After J, the history books, and the film, I can say plainly: I want monogamy. Here is the version I want, and what it took me to learn it.
J taught me that desire has two ingredients, and I need both. My earlier dates almost always had the first: soul-level resonance, topics that never ran out. J was the first to give me the second: a visceral, chemical attraction I had only read about. Every time I saw him, I wanted him. I am grateful for the education; the tuition was just higher than advertised.
He also taught me, by accident, what the second ingredient is made of. A person who is entirely wholesome (kind, reliable, perfectly good) becomes, in my experience, a friend. A lover needs something else on top: tension, in the form of distance, mystery, unpredictability, a side that isn't entirely polished. Esther Perel's line explains it best: love seeks closeness, but desire needs distance. This is precisely what makes long-term monogamy hard, because domestic life erodes distance by design. A couple that wants to stay lovers rather than just roommates with history has to keep manufacturing novelty, deliberately, forever, to counter the boredom written into human nature. Or, failing that, they can settle honestly into family, which is equally fine and takes just as much work.
And here is my real thesis, the thing I believe most strongly in this entire essay: the beauty of sex comes precisely from exclusiveness. "Making love" says it exactly: with love, then act. Trust is what lets me be invested, enjoy myself, and relax. I want to show my most vulnerable and private self only to the most intimate person in my life, the one I love most, not to strangers and not to an audience. Desire scattered everywhere is just appetite. Desire kept for one person is what gives it meaning.
Finally, J changed where I sit. I used to sit in the judged seat, and every bad date ended with an audit of myself: what did I do wrong? I have stopped. A relationship is an equal exchange, and now I keep a scorebook: when someone does something off-putting, I deduct points instead of deducting from myself. I do the same thing at work, where I spent years assuming that if I didn't understand someone, it was my fault, never considering that they might just have expressed themselves badly. Monogamy, in this frame, is not finding a flawless person. It is two people who keep passing each other's scorebook, day after day.
A daily choice
J and I never spoke again. I don't hate him; I moved on quickly, as I do, and kept the lesson.
So is monogamy against human nature? Maybe partly yes. Part of us is built for novelty, and that part will always knock. But I still want monogamy — not because I think it is natural, but because it is a choice. A vow you make once is a performance. A choice you remake every morning is the whole thing: keep choosing the same person, and keep being someone worth choosing. Exclusiveness is not a cage. It is a daily decision to stay in the same room.