Quote of the Day
Why does monogamy work for some people but not for others? Research suggests that it might have something to do with the way our brains are ‘wired.’
Consider a study in which 20 heterosexual men underwent brain scans while looking at different types of images. Some of the images were sexual, depicting couples engaged in penile-vaginal intercourse. Others were romantic, showing clothed men and women engaged in non-sexual intimacy. Yet others were neutral, depicting nature scenes or imagery of people engaged in non-romantic and non-sexual activities.
Half of the men were “highly monogamous.” They’d never had a sexually open relationship, nor had they committed infidelity. They also reported having a lower than average number of lifetime sexual partners and said they rarely fantasized about anyone other than their relationship partner.
The other half were “highly non-monogamous.” These men reported having had experience with both sexually open relationships and infidelity. They reported a greater than average number of sex partners in their lifetime and said they had a preference for having multiple partners at the same time.
The results showed that, regardless of relationship orientation, men showed substantial activation of the brain’s reward pathways when exposed to sexual images. Put another way, and not surprisingly, pretty much everyone found the sexual images to be rewarding.
By contrast, monogamous men (relative to non-monogamous men) showed substantially greater activation of the brain’s reward system in response to romantic images. The areas of the brain that were active while monogamous men were viewing romantic images were largely the same as the ones activated when they viewed sexual images.
Put another way, monogamous men processed romantic and sexual images in a similar way—and found both types to be very rewarding.
For non-monogamous men, however, they seemed to be processing romantic images in a somewhat different way. Unlike the monogamous men who just showed a general reward response to the romantic images, non-monogamous men had brain regions active that were involved in higher-order cognitive processing, suggesting that they were studying and thinking about those images.
These findings suggest the possibility that different people might be predisposed to different styles of mating based on the way their brains are ‘wired.’ In other words, perhaps tendencies toward monogamy vs. non-monogamy are rooted in brain structure.
Justin Lehmiller
August 11, 2026
Are Our Brains ‘Wired’ For Monogamy Or Non-Monogamy? – Sex and Psychology
Later in the article Lehmiller ponders whether similar findings will be discovered in women.
I don’t know about the brain activity, but I have talked to enough women to know that some have absolutely no interest in nonmonogamy and others have absolutely no interest in monogamy. One woman told me that after being married for about two years she could not stand being monogamous and divorced “a really nice guy”. She discovered sex clubs and felt “at home” for the first time. After a few years she married and tried to be monogamous again. Again, she divorced after a couple years and was back at the sex clubs. The last I heard from her, when she was in her late 50’s, she was trying monogamy again. I had to roll my eyes. How many times did she need to learn that lesson?
One woman I knew from work many years ago, wanted me to take some nude pictures of her (I knew her from working on the company newsletter together when I did most of the photography). My wife was fine with it and I took the pictures. I asked what the pictures were for. One of her boyfriends wanted them. She wanted me to keep it quiet though. Here husband didn’t know. She volunteered that she had enough boyfriends on the side for her on basketball them. She tried to get her husband into swinging (this was in the early 1980’s). She was his one and only sex partner and had zero interest in anyone else.
Both of these are very sad cases. I blame social expectations creating these tragedies. Had non-monogamous marriage options been socially acceptable, people could have figured out how they were wired before getting into a mismatched relationship.
The question that people don’t want to wrestle with much related to this is not just “what works for that specific person?” (which is a valuable and good-to-know thing), but also “what works best for the children and continuation of a successful society at large?”
Only considering “what gives you the tingles?” and not also looking at “what’s the overall cost of these behaviors if we let everyone just do their own thing because tingles?” is what happens at the end of empires just before the collapse.
Please explain how couples who agree to ethical non monogamy (ENM) contribute to the collapse of society or empires.
“Please explain how couples who agree to ethical non monogamy (ENM) contribute to the collapse of society or empires.”
1) this is not and will never be any significant portion of society or even “non-monogamous” people
2) Even answering anyway, looking at history, anything short of full support for monogamous marriage as the default structure for society (at least for the “average” person) is weakness in actual practice
But it would also be nice if you would engage with Rolf’s actual point. There are a great many things that could be handled better by society in the short term that result in society degradation and destruction in the long term, but boy, they *feel so nice* right now, eh?
Of course, I suppose you could make a claim that those things don’t actually have any significant level of CAUSE of societal collapse, that they are both caused by something else to bring about the correlation… but I would point out that, much like, say, homeownership isn’t actually the cause of achieving middle-class status but one of the side effects from doing “things that make you middle class”, the hard work of keeping that stuff out of the mainstream of society (it’s always available in the shadows, fringes, pick word) sure SEEMS to have the effects we are after.
1) Citation needed. Please define “significant” in this context.
2) Citation needed.
In answer to Rolf’s question… It keeps more families together. No breakups over cheating. People “wired differently” are much happier and don’t feel “trapped.” This reduces depression and people become more productive.
Both the women I described above and others talked about the sadness and emptiness when they were in monogamous relationships for any significant time. Read about or listen to podcasts of people in ENM relationships for years or decades and how it enhanced their relationships. Or even find a “lifestyle” club near you and talk directly with people. It is a bizarre alternative reality. But, I find it difficult to say they are wrong in claiming it works for them. Especially when they have apparently happy healthy children and they have been living that lifestyle for two, three, and four or more decades.
Clarifying questions:
To the best of your knowledge, what sort of women in terms of socio-economic status and attractiveness are into poly, and the same for men? (either citable stats or anecdotal is fine, noted accordingly)
How often do poly-interested women want to bang low and mid socioeconomic men or average to ugly men?
On average, to the best of your knowledge, how many kids do the average poly person have?
Citation needed:
All of human history.
Since in “ENM” “ethical” is stipulated but not defined when for many “ENM” is an oxymoron, for the purposes of this reply I’ll call it “consensual promiscuousness dressed up in polite linguistic attire.”
Trying to keep this short, and ignoring religious aspects, because to fully explain all the details and caveats would be 10k+ words.
An example, exaggerated for effect/clarity: If there are a small percentage of gay people at the margins in society who act gay but are kept away from the kids, it may be socially uncomfortable at times but things continue on generally well. Families form, kids happen, the next generation grows and does the same. If 90% are gay and they are grooming kids to be gay, it’s no longer uncomfortable, but it is totally dysfunctional and few new families form, and soon there is no next generation to raise up. The elderly and those in retirement demand an ever-larger percent of the youth’s current productivity, so the young can afford even fewer kids, and the population falls and your culture is conquered/enslaved by the immigrant labor it imports who still form families, or the conquering hordes crossing the border, or disappears entirely.
So, it is absolutely clear beyond any doubt that there are some things that are tolerable / manageable at the margins at low rates, but extremely destructive at some higher rate. Unfortunately, some things allowed unsanctioned at a lower rate tend to lead to higher rates; drug use is a classic example of this.
Secondly, a prerequisite for any stable or progressing society is that a large majority of its most capable and productive people (that means most men) must have a vested interest in being socially stable, economically productive, and supportive of the major social institutions; and on the other side, a high percentage of the right side of the bell-curve smart and reasonably genetically / psychologically fit females have at least replacement-value fertility and are invested in successful child-rearing. Slaves and people who see no chance of significant social or economic advancement or basic family benefits like getting laid and legacy via kids, will generally do the absolute bare minimum to survive. Why should they do more, take more risks, if they get no benefit from it? This is observable across history and cultures.
Thirdly, according to all the data I’ve seen, the best household arrangement by far for child-rearing is stable male-female long-term committed / married relationship. So if a woman has a child, she has an obligation to that child and to wider society to the best job she can for that child, even it’s it isn’t what she thinks is best for her in the short term, and holding things stable until the kid is old enough to move out or make his own choices if they split up. Part of that obligation is having a consistent male supporting presence in their lives to share chores and role-model proper male behavior for the boys (which women can rarely do).
Fourth, most men generally have very little interest in raising another man’s child, absent some unusual circumstances.
In other words, the social contract must have reciprocal benefits of similar net value to the obligations and duties it imposes to the vast majority of the productive class of people within it, or people will see they are getting a bad deal and stop participating, and/or the children get screwed over and grow up messed up. This leads to collapse. This is also about where many countries are heading right now.
The problem is in part summarized nicely in this vid, queued up to the appropriate timestamp:
https://youtu.be/mbQOUJDOi_0?si=kd-qJW0GJaCYfwO3&t=883
As HoeMath has so eloquently said many times, women date across and up, while men date across and down. As ArmageddonRex said below, sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive. So, the typical psychology WRT sex and romantic involvement are not the same between men and women. The cost-benefit analysis for sex and marriage and children for men and women are asymmetric. Both need to make sacrifices to make it work. Far too often, neither are taught this.
We are at the point where a large majority of young women can easily sleep with any number of “high-value men” (for some definition of value), but not ones who will ever commit to them. So a large percentage of men in the middle and lower part of the “quality curve” (not as rich / not as good looking / not high-status / whatever) are effectively locked out of the marriage market, or even the dating market, and they are not willing to risk marrying a worn-out OF girl or 34 year-old “gotta-get-married and have kids NOW!” hook-up artist or single mom who will divorce him at the drop of an emotional hat or will sleep with other men and not guarantee the kids they must pay for are their own. So they are, quite rationally, walking away. Doing the bare minimum. Because the laws do not support them, only asset-strip them. The young men are taking on ALL the risks and obligations, and are getting nothing of significant value in return. In other words, the social contract of reciprocal value has been trashed, especially for young men.
Allowing “ENM” makes this problem worse….
If you go the way of the harem, then you get a similar result as Ottoman Empire, Muslim Arab, and other similar dysfunctional old-time failures of culture. Oh, sure, they may stagger on for a while, but the problems run deep and wide and life totally sucks for the vast majority.
I’m a teacher, I see what’s out there. Most young women are not wife material because of sexual-escapade side-effects (pair-bonding ability is greatly reduce and expectations are sky-high), and many men see there isn’t any reason to even try becoming husband material; why bother if you are surrounded by whores and porn is freely available all over the place? I see the very different experience my daughter and my son are having in the dating world of today. To say that it’s an uneven playing field because so many woman are willing to monkey-branch as high as they can go, and they get stuck on their “highest setting,” is an understatement. ( https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Monkey+Branch ). Add to that the welfare state making women unafraid of leaving the father of their children while still asset-mining the hapless former husband while she can still get hook-up nookie from poly or single men (that is, the welfare state disincentivizes marital commitment and long-term thinking), and it’s a toxic, hopeless mess for the average guy, upon which society depends for so many routine things. So many of them are essentially walking away from the society that has turned its back on them. Female promiscuity without sanction is making this much worse.
The women have voted for The State to be the supporter and daddy to fund them, and few men can compete with that (while also being forced via taxation to pay for it). Family formation rates fall. We are now well below population replacement birth-rates, because men no longer can find a women worth committing to and being productive for, and fear being on the hook for another man’s spawn (but asking for a pre-nup is a deal-breaker). Research shows that giving more money via pay increase to men increases the chance of marriage and number of kids because they are more “financially attractive” to women and they tend to spend their money on family; increasing women’s pay lower fertility because they spend it on themselves and ‘don’t need a man.’
A relatively small number of older, or quiet and closed-group poly/ENM people is likely tolerable (if still obviously forbidden by most religions), because it doesn’t poison the marriage-pool for most average younger people of family-formation age, and therefore crater rates of family formation and fertility and good child-rearing which is essential for a functional society. Some people can be high-functioning socially and economically productive people and also practiced ENM… just like some people can use heroine or meth and not become burned-out junkies. That doesn’t mean it’s the way to bet and you should allow it willy-nilly. Since there wasn’t a reply to my clarifying questions at the time I posted this, I’d guess that nearly all the men in the “ENM” community are high status, high-income, good looking, or have great game (or “desirable attribute”), and the number of kids is relatively few (or grown adults); allowing those men to not commit and “spoil” lots of young women destroys the marriage-market for a lot of young men, and has wide and deep negative social impact.
Or, of course, I could just point to the skyrocketing rates of promiscuous women in therapy, on prescription psych meds, single, divorced, and unhappy, along with the cratering fertility rate, and point out the obvious: “what we are doing now WRT letting women girl-boss and be as promiscuous as they want when young without criticism is seriously not working out for them, or society at large, well at all. Instead of nearly all women having kids (the historical norm), we’ll soon be at 50%, the lowest rate in all of recorded history, and it’s the ‘smartest’ ones who are having the fewest kids. Idiocracy, here we come!”
Reasonable hypothesis/guess, but wrong. The answer turned into a long post. I spent the weekend in Kentucky visiting my daughter and that combine with the travel I didn’t get it done until last night. Just before posting it you posted this comment which requires I add a lot more to the draft post. Tonight some friends are coming over for Mahjong, and I probably will not have time to finish it tonight either. Probably Wednesday night before the response is complete.
The short version is I have not had contact many poly people. Other forms of ENM do not show good support for your hypotheses.
There was an excellent book written some years ago called THE SELFISH GENE that provided some pretty good information on why humans are biologically driven to do the things they do. In order to ensure survival of an individual’s DNA, men’s best survival strategy is to spread the billions of seeds they produce as far and wide as possible. Alll other things being equal, it’s rather low risk and low time investment for the man.
For the woman, the proposition is VERY different. The act of reproduction carries a significant survival risk and time investment. High risk of death during or immediately after childbirth. Followed by two or more years of breast feeding which risks starvation and malnutrition because she’s eating for two, And, 5+ years of high intensity mothering taking away from time that could be spent gathering food and other resources. Because of the high risk and enormous investment it makes sense to choose the best possible mate. Partly this means strong, aggressive in order to provide protection, but humans are social and have been for perhaps a million years so a “high status” man is a prime choice as a mate since they have access to resources that should allow their offspring to survive at a higher rate this the average schlub. Thus, hypergamy.
It’s been successful civilization’s / culture’s job to curb these “animal” urges in order to maximize societal productivity and increase the survival rate for all members of the tribe / race / nation. There’s a reason all known advanced societies are Patriarchal and have an arrangement of one husband and one wife for the vast majority of its population.
There’s a reason all known advanced societies are Patriarchal and have an arrangement of one husband and one wife for the vast majority of its population.
There are several, actually. Besides the one you provided, suppose the “top 10%” of males collectively produce 80-90% of the offspring in a community. Not only does this create a large sub-population of male “incels” (involuntary celibates) — which itself fosters other social problems within the community — the likelihood of inbreeding within the next generation rises dramatically.
That said, back to the original post, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if — biologically speaking — men were more commonly “wired” for polyamory than women. But it also wouldn’t surprise me if a substantial subset of women were also “wired” that way, either. I’d be very interested in seeing a similar study done with women.
(I would also like to see both studies repeated and cross-referenced with the desire and willingness to produce and raise children. I hypothesize that being “wired” for monogamy correlates more strongly with being “wired” for children than not.)
But at the end of the day, I’m still firmly of the belief that what happens within one’s own bedroom — provided the “safe, sane, and consensual” standard is upheld — is one’s own business. But for relationships’ sake, “consensual” should include any/all spouses.
Studies that involve sex and especially that involve questions about a persons sexual history are ALWAYS unreliable. Because you simply cannot rely on the accuracy of self reported sexual history. Some people will exaggerate their past. Others will conveniently “forget” many things to make themselves appear less perverse, less “loose”. Some are simply too self conscious to be honest…even to themselves. So take such studies with an ENORMOUS ‘grain of salt’.
An enormous grain of salt.
And a slice of lime.
And a shot of tequila.
Of course, one can take every single bit of that as truth, completely at face value, and still not get to where you are going with it.
The brain, in significant ways, does not come already “wired”. Cue “nature vs nurture” and such. Sexual desires and behaviours have been the subject of HUGE levels of effort to “prove” things (generally regarding homosexuality, but some other things), and the best they can do (with twin studies) is to show that there is likely SOME level of genetic influence, but it is definitely not remotely the only factor. (Birth order also seems to have some noticeable influence, actually, at least on the homosexuality front.)
There is a LONG way to go from what you just posted to “these people are born this way”, much less to get to “society would be better off if those kinds of things were catered to”.
Considering how the homosexuality stuff is turning out for society, the wisdom of the ancients on any topic of sexual ‘deviancy’ (“don’t let us find out about it”) seems better and better all the time, despite the built in hypocrisy (which the upper class always seems to build in anywhere they can manage it).