So, for now anyway, I’m not buying the “marital-monogamy-ideal-is-crumbling” story line. Sure, it bears monitoring, but the pillar of marital monogamy appears to be made of solid stuff, given how strongly people still hold to this ideal. Despite the big changes to the meaning of modern marriage, monogamy is alive and well.

The rumors of monogamy’s death are greatly exaggerated.

The pillar of marital monogamy is made of solid stuff, given how strongly people still hold to this ideal.

Non-monogamy seems to be coming out of the closet. A study published in the prestigious Journal of Marriage and Family claims that contemporary marriage is undergoing a process of detraditionalization, which includes an openness to nonmonogamy. The study, which was co-authored by three Canadian sociologists, Adam Isiah Green, Jenna Valleriani, and Barry Adam,¹ may capture media attention, but a closer look reveals that the evidence is shaky and their conclusions are premature, especially when we look at a broader set of studies. This leads me to conclude that the rumors of monogamy’s death are greatly exaggerated.

In their study, the Canadian researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 90 heterosexual and same-sex married Canadians. They found considerable openness to nonmonogamy, but this openness was evident mostly in abstract ideas of tolerance rather than in real life. In other words, most people supported nonmonogamy in theory, but not in practice. Gay married men were more open to nonmonogamy in both ideal and personal practice. Lesbian spouses mostly decided to be monogamous, but they often had conversations about this issue and based their decisions to be sexually exclusive on pragmatic reasons. But for heterosexual couples, personal monogamy held strong in the study, even when attitudes about others’ choices were more lenient. Despite these variations, the Canadian researchers interpret their findings to mean that another pillar of institutional marriage—the marital norm of monogamy— is showing serious cracks.

Certainly, there are social science scholars these days who are questioning the accepted superiority of monogamy. For instance, one group of researchers led by Dr. Terri Conley at the University of Michigan reviewed research on the potential benefits of monogamy to family life and society, and boldly concluded that “there is no definitive evidence to suggest that monogamy is the superior relational state for humans” in contemporary societies.² They called for empirical research to “reexamine cultural assumptions about monogamy.”

More recently, this same team of scholars claimed to have found that there are few differences in relationship quality—satisfaction, commitment, love, and trust—between traditional monogamous relationships and most types of consensual nonmonogamous relationships.3 Although this recent study (which was critiqued in a recent IFS blog⁴) has had widespread media attention,⁵ it contains serious weaknesses that limit confidence in its findings. For one, the sample is questionable: Nearly 90 percent of survey participants were recruited from Internet sites such as Craigslist.org; the remaining participants were recruited by undergraduate students who posted information on their social media sites. This sampling procedure would not yield a representative sample of all individuals in romantic relationships or even those in CNM relationships. Moreover, even though the average length of relationships in the sample was 10 years, the researchers do not inform the reader what proportion of the sample were married or in a committed relationship. Nor do they break down their findings by marital status. It’s reasonable to wonder whether among married participants, there were significant differences between monogamous and CNM individuals in terms of relationship quality. Even with these shortcomings, the authors boldly assert that further research on the quality of CNM relationships is “not imperative.”⁶ (I confess that in more than 30 years of reading empirical studies I have never seen a researcher write that a research question has been studied sufficiently, even in areas of research with hundreds of published studies!)

Read More