Thinking through polyamory, 2: Prehistoric promiscuity

This post harks back to one of my early posts from 2008, "Thinking through polyamory." Back then I was trying to understand my marriage in light of my Wife's serial infidelities. Today, times have changed: I no longer care whom Wife fucks (although I do believe her when she says she hasn't had anybody for a long time), I myself am carrying on an affair with D, and quite recently I have been reading Christopher Ryan's and Cacilda Jethá's book Sex at Dawn. So if I am honest with myself, there is a lot that I need to re-evaluate.

The developments in my marriage, and the affair with D, have gotten a lot of discussion here over the last couple of years. But the book is new, and it has been a while since I have done any re-thinking about what it would be natural to expect in the abstract (rather than just moping about what I feel here and now). So that is where I want to focus today.

Two years ago, when I wrote about polyamory, I concluded as follows:

The problem is this: it is very easy to fall in love with multiple people;
but for most of us, it is very, very hard to have our partners fall in love with
multiple people! The whole point of monogamy turns out not to be about us at
all. The whole point of monogamy is that we forego some desires that call to us
profoundly and insistently – and we swallow the pain that this causes us – in
order to avoid hurting other people.

But now, after reading Ryan and Jethá, I have to wonder if it was always so. Did prehistoric man get jealous the way modern man often does -- the way I used to, back when I gave a shit -- or is sexual jealousy something new, a recent development?

Of course there is no way to travel back in time to answer the question for sure, so I began to think about the only data I could lay my hands on: how did I feel about Wife's infidelities? The exercise has made me think that Ryan's and Jethá's theory could be at least plausible.

In the first place, a minor consideration: I argued in this essay ...

that the meaning of sex is couplehood: fucking creates a couple
where there was none before; and ... this means a couple in which each
partner puts the other one first, in which each partner is a home or refuge for
the other from the storms of the world....

Only ... how do you feel when you come back to your home at long last,
after a day that has beaten and bruised you, and you find a total stranger at
ease in your living room, relaxing with his feet up, drinking your
beer, eating your chips, and watching your television?

Disoriented? Shocked? Violated? Betrayed?

Exactly.

This may be fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't really speak to Ryan's and Jethá's picture. In the social organization they describe, both partners will likely have other partners as well. So while neither partner may be able to rely on coming back to a single "home" for refuge from troubles, the odds are very high that at least one partner will be available. What is lost in exclusivity is made up in redundancy.

There is a second point, which is more interesting. We have all read stories where one guy (usually it's the guy) tells how hard it is to hear his girl in the other room, moaning in the arms of another lover. And it makes him crazy. What about this part? Wasn't this an issue back in the Stone Age, too? It's all very well to say that you have someone else too. But at a fundamental level shouldn't it have made guys crazy back then, too, when their girls were carrying on with somebody else? Heaven knows that attitude isn't even limited to guys, as the lyrical Marianne once wrote here.

Not only do Ryan and Jethá answer this question No, but they make it more pointed. They argue that the reason women have the capacity for multiple orgasm is to keep them in the mood, because back then they could very well have routinely had sex with several men one right after the other. They argue that the reason women moan in orgasm was to announce to other men in the area that sex was going on, so that they could come join the fun. Ryan and Jethá argue, in other words, that orgies involving one woman and many men could well have been the norm back in the Old Stone Age. (I won't give the genetic argument here, but it has to do with Darwinian selection through sperm competition.) The consequence is that not only would the typical caveman know that his woman was fucking the guy in the cave next door, but he would hear her and see her -- and even be there when it happened. And if anything, you would think this would be worse than merely knowing it in the abstract.

You would think so, but you'd be wrong. Or well, ... your mileage may vary. But here, too, I went back to some of what I had written before and found that this very case isn't quite so clear as it seems. Linking the tail-end of this essay with the beginning of its sequel, I wrote: ...

I don’t care if Wife takes a friend for an afternoon of shopping for shoes
(so long as the bill isn’t too high); in fact, if she invited me, I would
actively look for an excuse not to go. Why do I care if she takes a friend for
an afternoon of rapturous sex? It’s not the same, but why not?

At the most immediate emotional level, the answer is that I don’t want to
be left out. If there is rapturous sex going on some afternoon – at any rate, if
it involves Wife – I want to be part of it.

And this was true. But notice that this is exactly what Ryan and Jethá say: that paleolithic promiscuity, so far from being hidden, was out in the open where many suitors could join. If Wife and I had lived back then, I doubtless would have been right there participating any time she was fucking one of her other boyfriends.

The punchline is that this would have been OK with me. It happened a few times, long ago with Boyfriend 1 and then more recently with Boyfriend 4, that all three of us would end up in bed together. I never had the slightest interest in her boyfriends themselves -- sorry, but no! -- but I was perfectly willing to collaborate with them in bringing Wife to as many orgasms as she could manage. And yes, sometimes two guys can just do more for one girl than one guy can. It can work out.

And I never resented those encounters. I got plenty angry at Wife for her infidelities: jealous, despairing, crazy. But never for the nights (only a few of them) when we were all together. Those I always saw as an exception. And that is part of why later I decided that what had made me so upset was not the sex itself but her skulking behind my back, her lying, and her shutting me out in the cold. In other words, her cheating.

In other words, the same things she did in the non-sexual parts of our marriage that made me so crazy.

I can't say that Ryan and Jethá have proven their thesis. But when I look at it long enough, I can see how it avoids some of the big objections I used to have years ago to promiscuous sex as a lifestyle. So it is at any rate not obviously wrong. And it is certainly interesting.