Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both praised the concept of polygamy. I believe this was mostly driven by spite of Christian-derived morality, and I cannot say if this is a legitimate belief or just a way to prod morality. My beliefs are quite anti-religious as theirs, and I see that Christianity in particular has imposed unnatural constraints on our beliefs about sexuality. However, I believe that monogamy is the natural approach to sexuality and romance, and conversely, polygamous institutions or polyamory can only be sustained with unnatural efforts.
There are some places where we see polyamorous relations in society: the first is in the institutions of Islam, secondly in the fringe sectors of Western society, such as in the polyamorous relationship, and in sexual outlier cultures of swinging and cuckoldry, and thirdly in the nonmutual exceptions of marriage we call cheating.
Islam permits a man to take multiple wives, given that he is capable of providing for each of them in financial and emotional matters. Of course, this may be the word of the Quran, but practically the latter part of the agreement would be optional in the highly patriarchal Islamic societies, and the needs of women are ignored as in all the Abrahamic religions. It’s difficult to imagine a woman with any emotional attachment to her husband as being happy with being one among many, and would be prone to envy the other wives. This is not merely a womans nature, for under a matriarchal rule, could any man be happy being one of many husbands to a wife? Would he not also become jealous? Unsure of his position according to his wife? But they must insist on being happy with this situation, declared by the rule of the holy text as righteous.
Cuckoldry is not really an equivalent structure in my eyes. I see the practice as the fetishisation of abandonment of social norm, playing on the negative emotions induced by the scenario, like envy and shame, thereby admitting their necessary presence. I suspect the widespread use of pornography has encouraged this. For one who watches porn, normative sexual activity in the form of masturbation becomes isolated from the act itself, the natural form takes the outline of passive observation. Thus, cuckold relationships are based on extending the characteristics of a male’s normative sexual activity into their relationship. As for swingers and the newer polyamorous relationships, I will deal with these in a moment.
The primary reason that I believe monogamy is natural comes from the observation that marriage is an institution seen in every culture, even in primitive pre-agricultural societies. This alone does not lend credence, as magical beliefs are also seen in every culture too. We must look back to the small-group dynamics of the tribe, which our social nature was suited for. To begin with, if one man were to dominate in reproduction, the problem of inbreeding would quickly wreck havoc; it stands to reason that to overcome this, humans would pair for diversity than for the absolute best fit. Then we come to two points. One, that we become naturally jealous in nonmonogamous situations, leading to inner tension in an individual that can become emotions acted upon, that pose a threat to the wider tribe. Say that another caveman had sex with the cavewoman you love, and in a rage you end his life; the entire tribe is practically affected by having one less human resource, and the whole social order becomes disrupted, endangering everyone’s tribal cooperation. Of course, one cannot imagine the primitive humans would abide by these, and exceptions would occur regardless. Perhaps this is where the state of pathetic denialism we see in some comes from, a primordial instinct to keep quiet to keep the tribe socially stable. The other point is that it makes sense to retain ones pair, even if not the best fit, so to ensure the diversity of the tribe and to keep intratribe social competition (read: friction) low. It’s not clear to me the order which these arrived in the social impulses of the human, perhaps the former is the mechanism of the latter, or the truth is altogether different. Yet it remains true that we are motivated towards monogamous relations, for whatsoever reason, and we see this sentiment expressed by the fact that every culture creates an institution to keep couples strictly together.
Of course, few people today live in a social environment like the small tribe whatsoever. The modern age of the city has simultaneously created intense isolation and access to an extreme quantity of people, to such a degree that one could walk the city street every day and not recognize a single face in the crowd from day to day. These are the necessary conditions to create both modern polyamory and swinger culture, which rely on both elements. Isolation is necessary to anonymously participate in these alternative lifestyles, and access to other people is necessary to find others who want to be part of this. They are attractive because, despite a tendency to monogamy on the social level, humans are still seeking sexual opportunities. The social instinct is extraordinarily powerful and can override our actions in ways that embarrass us, but when men feel free of their social bonds, there is no impedence for their latent sexual desires. Hence why covert relations begin in the geographically and socially distant workplace, why men travel abroad to have casual sexual relations they won’t need answer to, and why far too often war becomes an opportunity for rape. I must touch on concubinage, which I’ve so far ignored so that I can make this point about it. Concubinage was a historical practice allowing multiple semi-marriages mostly for sexual reasons within cultures that practiced monogamy, mostly done by social elites across the world. These people viewed themselves as socially supreme beings, and often had an unnaturally selfish streak to their personality; they had the unnatural social indifference and dominance by their position to create this auxilliary social institution for their own benefit. As far as I know, concubinage was not widespread among the lower classes of people.
Even when all parties are at first agreeable to such a situation, it can be unexpectedly strenuous for ones emotions. Once fine relationships are burdened with a trouble that no consolance can overcome. I could not make a moral argument in favour of monogamy, but it is not necessary. It is enough to understand that the human social orientation is most fit for monogamy, allowing some exceptions of people with a social and sexual orientation outside the norm of normal human experience. Much discontent with our lives now come from our unnatural condition imposing on us, thus the only way forward is to reflect, even if it’s all conjectural, on the way of primitive life, most of all how it pertains to the social environment.