Monogamy Was Never a Choice You Made

This post accompanies Episode 1 of the Untamed Ember podcast, “You Didn’t Choose This: Compulsory Monogamy as Conditioning.”

You were probably taught monogamy before anyone told you it had a name.

Nobody sat you down at age seven with a relationship menu and said, “Okay, here are several ways adults can organize love, sex, commitment, family, money, caregiving, and partnership. Some people choose exclusivity. Some don’t. Some build one central romantic partnership. Some build several. Some don’t organize their lives around romantic partnership at all. You’ll figure out what works for you later.”

That would have been refreshingly weird.

Instead, most of us got a story.

Two people meet. They fall in love. Eventually, they become exclusive. If the relationship is serious enough, they move in together. Then perhaps marriage. Maybe children. They combine holidays, bank accounts, furniture, social circles, insurance policies, and approximately nine thousand opinions about where the good scissors went.

And if the story goes well?

They choose each other forever.

Singular.

Exclusive.

The end.

Except that isn’t simply a description of one possible way to have a relationship. It’s the relationship structure our culture overwhelmingly treats as the default.

That distinction matters.

Because there is a difference between choosing monogamy and living inside compulsory monogamy, where monogamy is treated as so normal and inevitable that you may never realize there was anything to choose in the first place.

And that conditioning doesn’t live only in your opinions.

You can question the script intellectually and still notice your shoulders tighten when a partner mentions finding someone else attractive. Your stomach can drop before your conscious brain has even finished saying, I don’t actually believe attraction to another person means anything is wrong.

That gap between what you believe and what your body expects is where a lot of the real work begins.

You Were Given a Script Before You Were Given a Choice

Long before most of us had our first romantic relationship, we had already absorbed thousands of tiny lessons about what relationships were supposed to look like.

They were in Disney movies and sitcoms. Family stories and wedding ceremonies. Religious teachings and school dances. Love songs, celebrity gossip, Valentine’s Day cards, insurance forms, tax law, and every relative who eventually asks whether you’ve “met someone.”

Notice the wording there.

Someone.

Not someones.

The script is so culturally ordinary that it can become almost invisible.

Sociologists and relationship scholars use terms such as mononormativity to describe the way monogamous couplehood becomes socially positioned as normal, expected, and preferable, while other relationship structures are treated as deviations requiring explanation.

Compulsory monogamy describes a closely related problem: not simply that monogamy exists or that many people genuinely prefer it, but that it is treated as the expected destination before people have meaningfully considered other possibilities.

Nobody has to explicitly announce:

Monogamy is the only legitimate relationship structure.

The message can arrive much more quietly.

You notice which relationships get weddings.

Which partners are invited to family events.

Which relationships qualify for legal recognition.

Which breakup is treated as tragic.

Which relationship gets called “serious.”

Which person is described as someone’s “real partner.”

Which kinds of jealousy get romanticized as proof somebody cares.

Which relationships are treated as stable before anyone knows a damn thing about how the people inside them actually treat each other.

And which relationships require a vocabulary lesson before people will even acknowledge them.

That is what cultural conditioning often looks like.

It doesn’t always arrive as a command.

Sometimes it arrives as an assumption.

Monogamy Gets a Halo. Everything Else Gets an Interview.

Researchers have actually documented what might be called a monogamy halo.

In a series of studies, Terri Conley and colleagues found that people evaluated monogamous relationships more positively than consensually non-monogamous relationships across a striking range of characteristics.

The preference wasn’t limited to obvious relationship questions like trust or commitment. Monogamous people were sometimes rated more favorably on characteristics that had very little to do with relationship structure at all.

The researchers found a consistent pattern: monogamy was given the benefit of the doubt while consensual non-monogamy was treated with suspicion.

More recent research continues to document stigma toward people practicing consensual non-monogamy, including relationship devaluation, character judgments, anticipated stigma, and internalized negativity.

That social backdrop matters when we talk about “choice.”

Because choices do not happen in a vacuum.

Imagine being offered two doors.

Above Door A:

NORMAL RELATIONSHIP

Behind it are legal recognition, cultural scripts, movies explaining exactly how this is supposed to work, family approval, greeting cards, wedding registries, tax categories, songs, books, therapists trained around the model, and approximately six billion examples of people trying it.

Above Door B:

WELL, THIS IS COMPLICATED

Behind it are fewer scripts, less legal protection, possible family judgment, potential workplace concerns, people assuming you’re afraid of commitment, people assuming your relationship is failing, people assuming you’re having an elaborate amount of sex, and Aunt Carol asking invasive questions over mashed potatoes.

Technically, there are two doors.

But let’s not pretend the architecture around them is neutral.

Legal scholar Elizabeth Emens used the language of compulsory monogamy to examine the ways law and social norms encourage people toward monogamous couplehood while making other relational possibilities less visible and less supported.

This doesn’t mean everyone secretly wants polyamory.

It means the starting conditions are wildly uneven.

And Yet, Non-Monogamy Isn’t Nearly as Rare as We Pretend It Is

One reason monogamy can feel inevitable is that consensual non-monogamy is often imagined as something practiced by a tiny fringe population somewhere involving a suspicious number of hammocks.

The numbers tell a different story.

In two large U.S. samples of single adults, researchers found that more than one in five participants had engaged in consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lives.

Later reviews of the research have estimated that around 5% of North Americans may be currently involved in some form of consensual non-monogamy, while also finding little evidence of broad differences in relationship quality simply based on whether a relationship is monogamous or consensually non-monogamous.

That doesn’t prove non-monogamy is better.

It proves something much less dramatic and much more useful:

Humans are already building intimate relationships in more than one way.

And no single relationship structure gets exclusive ownership of commitment, love, stability, attachment, or relational competence.

Monogamy can be loving.

Polyamory can be loving.

Either can also be an absolute dumpster fire.

Relationship structure is not a character reference.

The Relationship Escalator Starts Moving Before You Notice You’re On It

Another piece of this conditioning is what people often call the relationship escalator.

You meet.

You date.

You stop dating other people.

You become an official couple.

You increase your time together.

You meet the family.

You move in.

You combine resources.

You marry.

Perhaps you have children.

Your lives become progressively more merged, and each step is treated as evidence that the relationship is becoming more legitimate.

Even ordinary romantic language can carry expectations about increasing commitment, exclusivity, cohabitation, marriage, and life merging.

None of those things are inherently problematic.

The problem comes when sequence gets mistaken for success.

A relationship that keeps climbing is considered healthy.

A relationship that stops climbing raises questions.

A relationship that intentionally moves backward is often described as failing.

A relationship that never wanted the escalator in the first place gets treated as unserious.

So people can make enormous relational decisions without ever stopping to ask whether they actually want them.

Do I want exclusivity?

Do I want cohabitation?

Do I want shared finances?

Do I want marriage?

Do I want romantic partnership to be the organizing center of my adult life?

Do I want sexual fidelity?

Do I want emotional exclusivity?

Do I even know what I mean when I say “commitment”?

Those are separate questions.

Culture often hands them to us as a package deal.

Your Brain Can Change Its Mind Faster Than Your Body Changes Its Expectations

This is where things get more interesting than learning a new vocabulary word and announcing that you have successfully deconstructed monogamy.

You can intellectually believe that multiple relationships are ethical and still feel your stomach drop when someone you love goes on a date.

You can believe jealousy isn’t proof of love and still feel a flash of panic when you aren’t the center of someone’s attention.

You can understand that one person cannot possibly meet every human need and still hear an old internal voice whisper:

If they need somebody else, I must not be enough.

You can consciously reject the idea that exclusivity equals commitment and still feel safer when exclusivity is offered.

That contradiction does not mean your intellectual beliefs are fake.

It means your relationship expectations have been shaped through years of repetition, cultural learning, attachment experiences, and relational history.

Your nervous system is not sitting around reading your latest position statement on relationship philosophy.

It is tracking cues.

Who is available?

Who is leaving?

What has historically meant rejection?

What predicts connection?

What happens when attention shifts?

What feels familiar?

What feels uncertain?

Polyamorous adults can also form distinct attachment relationships with different partners, which matters because people do not necessarily experience safety, anxiety, closeness, or insecurity identically across every relationship.

This is one reason conversations about “unlearning monogamy” often stop too early.

People read books.

Listen to podcasts.

Learn words like compersion, metamour, and relationship anarchy.

They decide jealousy is socially constructed.

Then their partner gets a text from somebody hot and suddenly their entire nervous system would like to file an objection.

Information matters.

But information alone does not necessarily change what your body has learned to associate with safety, belonging, abandonment, desirability, or commitment.

That part takes practice.

Unlearning Does Not Mean Forcing Yourself Into Polyamory

This distinction matters enormously.

Questioning monogamy does not mean deciding that monogamy is oppressive and therefore everyone should immediately acquire three partners and a shared Google Calendar.

Please don’t.

The calendar alone will finish us.

Critically examining compulsory monogamy is not the same thing as rejecting monogamy.

It means taking monogamy out of the category of obvious default and putting it into the category of possible choice.

And once you do that, you may discover that monogamy is exactly what you want.

Great.

But now it can be yours.

Not because you were told jealousy proves love.

Not because exclusivity is supposedly what mature adults eventually do.

Not because your family recognizes only one model of commitment.

Not because you think needing another person would make your relationship deficient.

Not because you have never imagined anything else.

You may simply decide:

I understand that other ethical structures exist, and sexual and romantic exclusivity genuinely works best for me.

That is very different from:

This is what relationships are.

One is preference.

The other is conditioning wearing a name tag that says COMMON SENSE.

Discomfort Isn’t Automatically Evidence That You Need to “Do More Work”

This is another place where non-monogamous communities can accidentally recreate the exact rigidity they were trying to escape.

Sometimes people encounter discomfort around non-monogamy and immediately decide that the discomfort must represent jealousy, insecurity, possessiveness, trauma, capitalism, patriarchy, attachment wounds, or insufficient personal evolution.

Maybe.

Or maybe you don’t want non-monogamy.

Your body’s reaction is information, not a verdict.

The goal is not to train yourself to tolerate every possible relationship structure.

It is to become better at telling the difference between:

This scares me because it challenges something I was taught

and

This does not fit what I actually want.

Those are not the same experience.

And you may not know immediately which one you’re having.

Sometimes fear decreases with more information, predictability, communication, practice, and support.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes exploring another model feels expansive.

Sometimes it feels exhausting.

Sometimes jealousy points toward an old abandonment wound.

Sometimes it points toward an agreement that genuinely isn’t working.

Sometimes discomfort is conditioning.

Sometimes discomfort is incompatibility.

Sometimes it’s Tuesday and everyone needs to eat something before having a six-person relationship summit.

The work is curiosity, not self-coercion.

So How Do You Find Out What You Actually Chose?

Start by separating what you want from what you were taught to want.

If nobody judged your answer, what relationship structure would you be curious about?

Not what would you definitely choose forever.

Just what would you be curious enough to explore.

What do you believe exclusivity proves?

For some people, exclusivity becomes emotionally linked with love, safety, loyalty, desirability, importance, or commitment.

Instead of immediately deciding those associations are wrong, notice them.

Then ask where they came from.

Which parts of monogamy do you actually value?

Maybe sexual exclusivity matters deeply to you.

Maybe romantic exclusivity does.

Maybe what you really value is predictability, and monogamy has been the main structure you’ve seen used to create it.

Those are different things.

What are you afraid would happen if exclusivity disappeared?

Try making this specific rather than leaving it as a vague sense of threat.

Maybe you fear abandonment or replacement. Maybe the larger concern is social judgment, sexual health, scheduling, family rejection, loss of predictability, or losing a form of commitment you genuinely value.

Fear gets easier to understand when it has a sentence attached to it.

What assumptions do you carry about people who practice non-monogamy?

Maybe some part of you assumes they are less committed, unusually sexual, afraid of intimacy, bad at boundaries, emotionally chaotic, or incapable of settling down.

Or perhaps you have absorbed the opposite mythology and imagine non-monogamous people as unusually enlightened beings who have transcended jealousy entirely.

Neither version leaves much room for ordinary humans.

Research consistently shows that consensually non-monogamous people encounter stigma and can internalize negative beliefs about their own relationships.

What would monogamy look like if you built it from scratch?

This may be the most interesting question of all.

Maybe your version of monogamy would include much more autonomy.

Separate bedrooms.

Separate finances.

Close friendships that aren’t automatically demoted beneath romance.

Less expectation that one partner meet every emotional need.

Intentional conversations about attraction to other people.

A commitment to sexual exclusivity without pretending attraction itself disappears.

Maybe the relationship you actually want is monogamous, but significantly less governed by mononormative assumptions about what partnership is supposed to consume.

There is room for that too.

Choice Requires More Than One Imaginable Option

That is ultimately the point.

This isn’t an argument against monogamy.

It’s an argument against automatic monogamy.

Against treating one relationship model as human factory settings and everything else as an aftermarket modification.

Against assuming that the structure most familiar to you must therefore be the structure most natural to you.

And against confusing cultural approval with relational health.

Research does not support the simple idea that monogamy is inherently superior to consensual non-monogamy.

At the same time, consensual non-monogamy is not a magic route to greater emotional maturity.

People bring their attachment patterns, communication habits, fears, desires, histories, inequalities, nervous systems, and spectacular capacity for awkwardness into every relationship structure available.

The interesting question is not:

Is monogamy good or bad?

The interesting question is:

Did you ever get to decide?

Because there is something important about examining the structure you inherited and realizing that you are allowed to keep it.

Change it.

Rebuild parts of it.

Or choose something else entirely.

You don’t have to become non-monogamous to question compulsory monogamy.

You only have to become curious enough to recognize that default and desire are not the same thing.

And once there is more than one imaginable path, you can finally begin figuring out which one is actually yours.

Listen to Episode 1

This article accompanies Episode 1 of the Untamed Ember podcast, “You Didn’t Choose This: Compulsory Monogamy as Conditioning.”

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References

Conley, T. D., Moors, A. C., Matsick, J. L., & Ziegler, A. (2013). The fewer the merrier? Assessing stigma surrounding consensually non-monogamous romantic relationships. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 13, 1–30.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1530-2415.2012.01286.x

Conley, T. D., Ziegler, A., Moors, A. C., Matsick, J. L., & Valentine, B. (2013). A critical examination of popular assumptions about the benefits and outcomes of monogamous relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 17(2), 124–141.https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868312467087

Emens, E. F. (2004). Monogamy’s law: Compulsory monogamy and polyamorous existence. New York University Review of Law & Social Change, 29, 277–376.

Haupert, M. L., Gesselman, A. N., Moors, A. C., Fisher, H. E., & Garcia, J. R. (2017). Prevalence of experiences with consensual nonmonogamous relationships: Findings from two national samples of single Americans. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 43(5), 424–440.https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2016.1178675

Mahar, E. A., Irving, L. H., Derovanesian, A., Masterson, A., & Webster, G. D. (2024). Stigma toward consensual non-monogamy: Thematic analysis and minority stress. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 50(4), 571–586.https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221139086

Moors, A. C., Ryan, W., & Chopik, W. J. (2019). Multiple loves: The effects of attachment with multiple concurrent romantic partners on relational functioning. Personality and Individual Differences, 147, 102–110.

Moors, A. C., Schechinger, H. A., Balzarini, R., & Flicker, S. (2021). Internalized consensual non-monogamy negativity and relationship quality among people engaged in polyamory, swinging, and open relationships. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 50, 1389–1400.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01885-7

Scoats, R., & Campbell, C. (2022). What do we know about consensual non-monogamy? Current Opinion in Psychology, 48, 101468.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101468

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