I've been thinking about this a lot, so I thought I'd ask. There is (and has for a long time been) an expectation among most people that you find the one person you love and then never ever ever have sex with anyone else ever again. This notion seems completely absurd to me. I just can't understand how you can claim to love someone and limit their options for happiness at the same time.

I used to be a believer in monogamy in my younger days, so I'll share a little bit of my personal journey to where my beliefs currently are. You grow up kind of just being taught by media, movies, TV, parents, and whatnot that monogamy is just the way things work. Therefore, I believed that, too. Committed relationships without the sexual exclusivity clause didn't cross my mind for a very long time. I got into a pretty serious relationship when I was around 20 years old. She was a lot older than me and had many sexual experiences under her belt. She was my first. As things got serious, it caused a lot of anxiety for me. At the time, being young and not very self aware, I thought I was upset with her for having been so sexually promiscuous. Now I realize that quite the opposite was the case. I was upset that if I stayed with her and got married and the things I felt one did when they loved someone that I would never get to have those sorts of sexual experiences myself. I felt trapped by the prospect of the relationship actually going well and leaving me only allowed to have sex with her forever. As it turns out the relationship did not last forever (it lasted about 2 years) but what if it had? What if it had turned out that we were actually perfect for each other and should be together forever? Then I would not have been allowed to ever have sex with anyone else for the whole rest of my life? What a terrible outcome of a situation that should be happy, finding a person you want to spend your life with!

Later in college, I became good friends with a woman who was very non-monogamous. That was really my first realization that such a life is possible. She is bi-sexual and had sex equally with men and women. When she got married, it was not a sexually monogamous marriage and both of them were allowed to have sex outside the marriage. I thought that was pretty cool. However, as far as my plans for my life were concerned, my brain was still stuck in the sexual monogamy rut. I got married and stayed married for six years without cheating very much. There was this one time during the marriage where another woman and I performed oral sex on each other... and I did have sex with another woman while geographically separated from my wife for a few months. Even on these two occasions, however, I felt that it was something I shouldn't be doing. That it was something that was bad and that I should be sexually monogamous but that there was just something wrong with me.

After my divorce, however, I felt like my eyes started to open. I stopped being able to come up with reasons why sexual monogamy should be expected or is even desirable. Nowadays, it seems to me that expecting sexual monogamy in a relationship is completely selfish and silly. While I used to think that having a woman "cheat" on me would be like the worst thing to happen ever, I now can't imagine demanding that a woman I am involved with restrict her sexual activity only to me, and I wouldn't want to be with anyone who would try to do that to me either. I do want to end up in a committed relationship with one woman, and I do want a sexual relationship with that woman. In fact, that's a pretty big requirement for me. However, I don't see why we shouldn't be permitted to have sex with other people sometimes, too.

Sexual monogamy no longer makes any sense to me. I see now, looking back, that my belief in sexual monogamy for so many years was a major source of stress in my life. Now that I recognize the absurdity of that world view, I'm much more at ease with sexuality and much more mature in my thoughts about relationships.

Sexual monogamy is not a natural state for humans. Just look at the statistics for how often "cheating" happens in relationships. Now realize that those statistics are even lower than reality because they only include people who admit to it or got caught. There's lots of extra-marital sex out there that never comes to light because people are smart enough not to get caught. Also, while it was previously believed that men were the primary culprits, recent studies have indicated that women have extra-marital sex a lot more than was once believed. Women just tend to be much better at planning it and hiding it, therefore not getting caught as often. It has been estimated that as many as 5% of fathers in the US are not actually the biological father of at least one of their children, unbeknownst to them.

"Cheating" happens not because someone in the relationship is a bad person. It happens because monogamy is not natural. It doesn't make sense. Wouldn't it be better if we all just accepted this and did away with unnecessary stress in our lives?

I know a lot of people on this forum are firm believers in monogamy, so I thought I would present the topic to get your thoughts.