Emotional monogamy is a different beast from sexual monogamy. They have two different motivators, and two different places in our lives.
I will say up front that I am not monogamous, and have never been monogamous. I have chafed under the thumb of previous lovers who swore they would "try" monogamy for my sake, but who then turned around and hit me with the jealousy-hammer as soon as we were in a relationship. I loathe jealousy itself quite a lot. It has no place in a loving relationship whether you're monogamous, poly, or anywhere in between.
Having expressed my bias, I can say that sexual monogamy makes little sense evolutionarily. It makes little sense for women as well as men; what if the 'one man' she chose to nurture her and her babies turns out to be infertile? What if he runs away? Better to have sex with many males and have them all stick around because they all believe it could be their kid you've dropped. I believe the evolutionary reasons for men to be non-monogamous have been well-explored and I probably don't need to go into them.
However, we've certainly broken sensible evolutionary logic before, and it's possible we have broken them again. However, as the article mentioned, the prevalence of egalitarianism in pre-agrarian societies makes that unlikely. Just like we study fossils to get a sense of our physical evolution, a lot can be learned about cultural evolution from societies that have not 'progressed' as much.
Emotional monogamy is very different. We are capable of having sex without feeling, and vice versa. Why would we need to make multiple deeply emotional connections with others? If you look at evolution it makes sense: the more numerous your family is, the better-able they are to care for you during illness or infirmary or old age. This makes evolutionary sense, even to the point of explaining lesbian or gay relationships. I think it also comes down to our capacity to love. It is finite, but it is not as limited as we are led to believe. If people can have six or eight or twelve siblings, about all of whom they care deeply, why can we not have just as many lovers? Why can't three lovers have an enduring, everlasting love such as the one you describe? It's possibly a matter of passion. "We only have so much passion", I've been told. But we don't feel passion for one person all the time. We feel other emotions: anger, hurt, disappointment. We feel those pretty deeply when it involves our siblings or parents or close friends, too. It seems, to me, to be a matter of cultivation. You're
used to the idea of being angry with more than one person at once, so the idea doesn't seem strange to you. You don't run into a barrier. If you were also used to loving, passionately and fully, more than one person at once, I'm positive that you would find yourself barrier-free in that, also.
Kurz, if you haven't yet read The Ethical Slut, I think you would find it enlightening.
This is the version I have, though
this one comes up first on Amazon. I'm honestly not sure if the second one is a reprint, an update, an expansion or what.
Either way, that's my take.
