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Jared, I think you are becoming an old fuddy-duddy . . .

Most young men of my youth had a saying . . . "So many women, so little time . . . " :'(

I actually think Monogamy was invented by woman. I have nothing against it since I have been Monogamous for well over forty years now.

I once worked a case where a man had been married to three different women at the same time.

True story.

I became involved in the case when he died of a heart attack at 33 years old.

Based on that experience, and the fact that I would like to live a very long life . . . I think I will vote for Monogamy . . . B)

Brain wiring varies from person to person. Some people probably are, others aren't. Although I wonder how much of it is genetic and how much is cultural programming…

Monogamy invented by woman, huh? We want our girlfriends/wives to stay completely loyal to us though as well.

It's all cultural programming. It's like those children who have seen one of their parents cheat on the other. That affects them and will affect their judgment in that area for the rest of their life.

It is all personal choice, it is whatever choice we make. Just because your parents cheated doesn't mean that you will – IT IS YOUR OWN PERSONAL CHOICE!

However, if you want to go around all your life letting other people dictate as to how your going to live your personal life, then that is just your problem . . .

Anthropologically, no. Much of it is culturally determined through signaling or status games. A lot of that is determined by the nature of how we raise children in a society, as dispersed and scarce resources make more polygamy or polyandry necessary and/or possible. In a modern society with globally connected resources, this is less true or necessary. But also more possible. Appropriate response of the state/public might be to frown upon open flaunting of such established norms but to permit people to design their own contractual or non-contractual relationships to their (mutual) satisfaction. If some people don't want to be monogamous, either from biological or social cause, we should not seek to compel this behavior from them by legal force.

What would ultimately compel such behavior is the responses of their (sexual) partners, not our dispersed social disapproval and condemnation.

*chuckle*

So you would force your ideas upon those who do not wish to experience the disastrous results of you own personal behavior all the while couching it in an excuse that what you want to do is what everyone else should applaud and condone?

Methinks you made a Freudian slip there . . . :p

That's not how I interpreted his statement at all. I thought he was suggesting that social pressure is a much more effective means of dissuading promiscuity than legal restrictions and that he thinks sexual norms are more informed by societal conditions than anything else. He also stated that he is personally opposed to legal barriers to non-monogamous relationships.

I'm not saying I agree with him (In fact I think he's wrong and society should legally restrict polyamorous relationships) but that's how I interpreted what he said.

That's what I read, too. Also, I agree with Sun Tzu. The (American, at least) government cannot restrict polygamous or otherwise "strange" relationships because they are not allowed to under the Constitution.

Well the federal government can't but the states can (Constitutionally speaking.) The question then becomes, should they?

Let me know when you actually start reading anything I write. I made no implications about my own preferences, current/future/past behavior, or intentions.

In effect, I said I cannot condemn the behavior of other people when they engage in a consensual action or design their own contractual arrangements that can be held in good standing legally (ie, an adult cannot have a contract relating to sexual contact with a minor or with a goat or whatever they want). If enough people want to do so, I might accept that we should socially condemn or use social force to coerce people into avoiding such relationships as we might find disapproving, but so long as it conforms to a legal consent arrangement, I don't see how we can or should stop people from executing polyamorous arrangements through private means.

Ultimately the best force against such things is from any other people involved. And not our external expressions of disapproval.

There are some "strange" arrangements that can be restricted because of issues of consent or harm reduction (for example child abuse is to be avoided), but I'd agree they're not usually at the federal level.

I think my opposition to legal barriers is more that they don't appear to work in the intended way of essentially preventing "adulterous" behavior. What seem to happen instead is people run around and have affairs illicitly instead of openly, which creates additional trouble and harm (disease for instance). In an ideal sense perhaps they would do neither, but the least harmful position I could conceive of is to allow people (who want to) to have open arrangements regarding their private sexual contacts under the assumption that transparency and consent is to be preferred to deception and non-consensual arrangements. Particularly in an environment including often serious sexually transmitted diseases that could be carried back upon innocent parties.

Social pressure is probably a sufficient norm. For example, you can look at interracial marriage patterns in the Deep South since it was legalized. While I find that a much more abhorrent restriction on private parties that they may not choose particular consensual parties for their own private enjoyment and companionship on the basis of ethnicity, social pressures do in fact suppress such things pretty well. Unlike this restriction, which is largely though not entirely enforced by external barriers, I suspect that a restriction limiting almost all relationships to monogamy could be effectively carried out more or less indefinitely.

I'm not sure that it's entirely a societal condition, though it is informed by such things. But I imagine that most people would not take too kindly to having to share and this friction would be too damaging for most people to sustain functional relationships within, even within an open and transparent arrangement where mutual discussion and consent could be attained. In other words, yes I don't think it's a genetic effect, but no I don't think it would go away if we took away the magical legal wall. I think a large part of the reason we don't practice it is how our (Western-ish) societies are presently organized and how individuals (especially women) can assert themselves and that this effect would be pretty powerfully against it.

Exactly.

I'm sort of curious, what is the argument that states should do so? Prevailing (and well beyond super-majority) public opinion?

What if that shifts, as prevailing moral and public opinions have in many states and nations, for the most part, on homosexuals and their unions? Upon what foundation are we opposed to this practice legally?

I'm a pretty big believer that the state should honor private contracts (with the probable exception of any enslavement). Private polygamous (and/or polyandrous) contracts are almost certainly difficult to imagine or construct for people who do not desire them or would not consent to their terms, but if they are executed and the parties involved want it that way and mutually consent, I don't see what the problem is that we must intervene in the unlikely event that many people carry them out. Seems like we have enough trouble carrying out the terms of a normal marriage as it is to worry about enforcing that as the normative behavior.

I'm also not saying that polygamy is typically carried out in any morally idealized fashions. I'm pretty sure it usually violates consent issues or treats people (usually women) as a form of property. In those more common and flagrant circumstances, I don't see how we can condone it either.

I'm sort of curious, what is the argument that states should do so? Prevailing (and well beyond super-majority) public opinion?

What if that shifts, as prevailing moral and public opinions have in many states and nations, for the most part, on homosexuals and their unions? Upon what foundation are we opposed to this practice legally?

I'm a pretty big believer that the state should honor private contracts (with the exception of any enslavement). Private polygamous (and/or polyandrous) contracts are almost certainly difficult to imagine or construct for people who do not desire them or would not consent to their terms, but if they are executed and the parties involved want it that way and mutually consent, I don't see what the problem is that we must intervene in the unlikely event that many people carry them out. Seems like we have enough trouble carrying out the terms of a normal marriage as it is to worry about enforcing that as the normative behavior.

I'm also not saying that polygamy is typically carried out in any morally idealized fashions. I'm pretty sure it usually violates consent issues or treats people (usually women) as a form of property. In those more common and flagrant circumstances, I don't see how we can condone it either.

I'm sort of curious, what is the argument that states should do so? Prevailing (and well beyond super-majority) public opinion?

What if that shifts, as prevailing moral and public opinions have in many states and nations, for the most part, on homosexuals and their unions? Upon what foundation are we opposed to this practice legally?

I'm a pretty big believer that the state should honor private contracts (with the exception of any enslavement, which is not only illegal but seems a flagrant violation of moral individual liberties). Private polygamous (and/or polyandrous) contracts are almost certainly difficult to imagine or construct for people who do not desire them or would not consent to their terms, but if they are executed and the parties involved want it that way and mutually consent, I don't see what the problem is that we must intervene in the unlikely event that many people carry them out. Seems like we have enough trouble carrying out the terms of a normal marriage as it is to worry about enforcing that as the normative behavior.

I'm also not saying that polygamy is typically carried out in any morally idealized fashions. I'm pretty sure it usually violates consent issues or treats people (usually women) as a form of property. In those more common and flagrant circumstances, I don't see how we can condone it either.

I have two reasons for opposing polyamorous relationships:

1) There's nothing stopping people form living that way without the support of legalized marriage. If you want to by polyamorous, then why require a law to do so?

2) In practical application polyamorous relationships are notoriously a means of subjugating women.

#2 is the big one here. Though in principle I support freedom, this principle is based on (first and foremost) a belief in facing reality as it is. I therefore tend to support government actions that I feel actually do more to promote freedom than to suppress it (even when that seems counter-intuitive as in this example.)

#2 I agree with completely. In practice the practice is indeed abominable. I think there's an idealized moral position where it is okay and perhaps even entirely sensible (for instance in our anthropological past where polygamy and occasionally even polyandry were practiced more routinely), but that's not typically what people are doing.

#1 I think is correct to a point. Privately people can forgive or make arrangements to absolve each other of consensual sexual acts outside of their marriage (or other exclusive relationships). This is even true of illicit and non-consented sexual affairs.

I suppose this could mean that people who want to have polyamorous relationships wouldn't get "married" in that sense by agreeing to the default state of having only one partner. But I'm more of the mind that we should let people set up their own contracts here rather than have a default requirement of what a marriage is set by the state and imposed on all such arrangements without exception and let the state step in only where there is a question of consent or abusive harms.

I think also the original question is vague enough that sexual infidelities of the type occasionally practiced, (ie, not bigamy but simply having a mistress or hooker on the side), still more or less covers the question of whether we are monogamous in nature without getting into contracts.

Well I'm also of the opinion that marriage is an established construct to promote a good environment for child rearing. Marriage has nothing to do with love. I love my fiancée, but we don't need to get married to be in love, or to live with one another, or to write wills that declare each other as our beneficiaries, or to establish each other as having power of attorney if something happened.

Marriage simply exists as a shortcut simplified means of doing a lot of legal work because conventional wisdom (now backed by research) points to a child being better off with two parents. Though it may be okay with more than two parents, I am hesitant to change such an important institution without at least some preliminary studies.

Correct you don't need to be married to recognize each other in legal documents. That, so far as I am concerned, is a strong argument against requiring people to follow state sanctioned legal contracts regarding their private relationships though.

I'm pretty sure it supports having two parents, but it also supports things like having two moms (a lesbian couple for example). And there are models of societies that do the "it takes a village" model of raising children. There are of course vast differences in societal goals and even ethics in such a system but it doesn't seem necessary to impose the strict two parent out of concern that lacking it is harmful or that those goals are automatically fruitless in our society. Particularly when we don't already impose it by requiring parents to remain married legally when they have underage children for example (or require people who sign marriage contracts to provide any evidence that they will raise a child together at all).

I agree completely that's a fine sentiment and basis for people to get married: that they would want to start a family together. But I hardly think it's the best reason to support it with state sanctions on the problem that we extend the same benefits regardless of the status of the relationship vis a vis child raising and that people seem to have plenty of selfish incentives to have children already (and that any economic assistance the state provides is usually trivial relative to the economic cost of children).

Seems to me the appropriate definition is to allow people to marry, contractually, and by extension to amend or to nullify that contract, for more or less any reason they wanted: private enjoyment (including sex), companionship, child rearing, etc. Otherwise people might just lie and say they were getting married to raise children together if that is the sole reason to recognize it, and then privately and cynically violate the default requirement.