Does Marriage Imply Monogamy?
February 21st, 2009 by blake

By Lanz Lowen & Blake Spears
Published August 21, 2008
Bay Area Reporter
Guest Opinion

We’re a long-term gay male couple with a certain ambivalence about gay marriage.  First off, it wasn’t something to which we aspired and after 33 years together, it seems rather  ‘after-the-fact’ and superfluous.  Secondly, given we have an open relationship, we wonder about the assumptions friends, family and colleagues would make about our relationship if we were to get married.  If they don’t know us well, would they assume our relationship is traditionally bounded?  If they do know us well, would they think we were hypocritical to get married, given our history of non-monogamy? More


Comment  
Rod V. Newman writes:
June 16th, 2013 at 3:06 pm

It is useful to question the value of monogamy in a marriage. The usual suspects are ever present: paternal certainty and other evolu­tionary theories try to explain our current faith in monog­amous marriage. But perhaps infi­delity, in spite of all the biological and anthro­po­logical evidence that monogamy is unnatural, is unac­ceptable because of our psychology. Infi­delity may in fact have nothing to do with the threat to paternal certainty or access to resources, but rather is an emotional and social concern. After all, marriage is not an evolu­tionary imper­ative but a social construct.

   

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