source: Playing Monogamy, by Simon(e) van Saarloos

Foreward (Leni Zumas)

Most of us recognize the couple as the primary unit of society

Married couples get legal, financial and cultural advantages

  • This causes many problems of single parenthood

People who point out the problems with monogamy are perceived as the problem

Polyamory is often associated with individual gratification

“Family Values” is a concept that’s often used to undermine:

  • gender inequality
  • civil rights
  • public health

There’s a relationship between romance and captialism

  • both trade in scarcity and exclusivity
  • both center around ownership - you belong to another person

When people couple up, they usually withdraw from communal life

  • dependency isolation often accompany coupledom

We could have a community where each person has enough space for their own idiosyncrasies

  • power imposes conformity
  • nonconformity opposes power

Non-monogamy is an example of this. It departs from the nuclear family

Preface

This book is written against monogamy and for multi-love because Van Saarloos wants to write about doing love differently

She thinks that she’s done a poor job explaining why non-monogamous living isn’t just about sex

  • it’s easy to dismiss it when you think of it that way
  • it’s difficult not to view it through the lens of adultery and cheating

non-monogamy has political implications

  • It proposes redistribution of care and emotional labor
  • there’s a normative system that dictates what real love is

normative monogamous relationships are like escalators

  • there’s a cultural conception of age and beauty, pressure to settle down

non-monogamous lives have been tested since the 1960s

  • that generally failed, and people focus on the sexual promiscuity of that era
  • there’s not focus on the attempt to give up on the current social hierarchy

Anyone who doesn’t want the nuclear family is individualistic

Ideal world:

  • nation-states wouldn’t hold attributive power, so citizenship being tied to marriage wouldn’t even be an issue
  • wealth wouldn’t accumulate through inheritance, so parenting wouldn’t be a nuclear responsibility
  • universal basic income would exist, so our concepts of gendered time and equal pay would shift

I: The Single as Pariah

people don’t seem to understand when good people aren’t in relationships

Starting from your teenage years and ending when you find someone, everyone you meet is a potential partner

The status “in a relationship” is more important than the other person in the relationship

  • the other person becomes a means to an end
  • Kant wrote that we shouldn’t use other people as a means to an end
  • therefor: it’s unethical to make a monogamous relationship a cornerstone of social success

People seems to think that relationships happen to them

  • breakups are calamities

Every social relationship is a game based on rules, and monogamy isn’t an exception

Economically, couples are predictable

  • they’re receptive to commercial lure, and they copy others
  • Love (like death) is an industry
  • the world is organized around couples because they’re more predictable than single people
  • predictable people are good consumers

However, your partner convinces you that you’re unique

II: The Other as Muse or Monster

We put our crushes on a pedastal

  • they become an external entity that drives our will
  • This is perceived as noble in our culture, but it absolves us of responsibility

During breakups or fights, the opposite happens

  • we perceive negatives feelings as externally generated

We even view ex’s as external entities that helped us grow, instead of individual people with feelings

  • serial monogamy makes us think that life consists of a series of relationships that become consecutively better

We also view it as the other person’s fault if we feel unfulfilled in a relationship

We expect our partner to be exellent on all axes (sexually, emotionally, intellectually…)

  • it’s noble to strive to be a complete person, but it means that faults are not tolerated
  • this is part of the constant evaluation that happens in our culture

Why Love Hurts: a Sociological Explaination (Eva Illous, 2011) - love is always linked to economic considerations

  • you marry within your class
  • or for an increased status
  • or for financial security

Historically, marriage was explicitly tied to economics

  • for keeping capital intact
  • adultery was considered

Nowadays, infidelity damages our self-esteem. In some ways, it’s worse than it used to be

  • This is because we view partners as uniquely chosen and irreplacable