Explained (2018–…): Season 1, Episode 3 - Monogamy - full transcript

From virtually the moment we're born,

there's a story that's preached across
cultures and continents.

It's a familiar fairy tale.

[narrator] She was even more beautiful
than he had thought.

That finding one true love is the key
to a fulfilled and happy life.

I've been doing a lot of thinking,
and the thing is...

-I love you.
-I love you.

Ditto.

As an adult, we're forced to reconcile
the messaging on monogamy

with one simple fact.

Humans are terrible at it.



It's kept Jerry Springer on the air
for 25 years.

[crowd booing]

I've been sleeping with Eddie.

-You cheated on me with her?
-I have your name tattooed on me!

-Why would you sleep with him?
-How many girls did you take?

In 2016, 2.2 million U.S. couples
got married,

but over 800,000 called it quits.

Our quest for and failure at monogamy
has caused so much pain and heartbreak.

If it's so hard for humans
to be monogamous,

why do most of us all around the world

make it one of the most central goals
of our lives?

[woman] I start asking myself,
"Is he right for me?"

[reporter] Belgium's King Baudouin
married Doña Fabiola...

I think I am a very lucky man.



[reporter] A beautiful shot
of the new royal couple.

[reporter] Wonderful.

The Prince of Wales has admitted publicly
that he was unfaithful.

I'm announcing my resignation.

[reporters] The crime was to have
conceived a child with a married neighbor.

Nelson Mandela... a broken marriage.

I did not have sexual relations
with that woman.

If you ask couples
why they chose monogamy,

you'll hear one answer again and again.

They fell in love.

We met, in a candy store.

1946.

We went to college together.

We were both in a relationship.

And... we didn't cheat.

You look so guilty
every time we talk about this.

I am bad at talking about this.

It's arranged marriage.

Whatever they selected for me,
it was good.

And I'm very happy with that.

We had a study date one night

and that study break
turned into anatomy, I guess.

I never felt this way
about anybody before.

I feel God has blessed us.

We found true love.

Of course we did. We're still here
70 years, what do you expect?

25 years, I would have got out
on good behavior.

I would like to think
that soulmates are real, but...

She's my soulmate.

Well, you're mine too.

But monogamy and love
aren't the same thing.

We are so psychotically welded
to this idea...

that monogamy means love
and love means monogamy.

In the absence of monogamy,
there is not love.

Love is a feeling. Monogamy is a rule.

You'll only have sex with this one person.
And most people live in a culture

where they're expected at some point

to make that rule a legal contract,
called marriage.

In many countries,
breaking that rule is a crime.

In the U.S., adultery is illegal
in at least 20 states,

and although they're rarely enforced,

punishments can range from a $10 fine
to three years in prison.

If you are in a monogamous relationship
for 50 years

and you fell down once, you cheated once,

the whole relationship was a lie
and a failure.

Most human beings have ambivalent impulses

that it's nice to have someone
you can rely on

but there's also the temptation
of novelty.

Why would humans
all around the world invent a rule

that's so difficult to follow

and treat breaking it
as such an enormous betrayal?

[narrator] Should a male have on his
clothing so much as a strand of hair

from a female not his wife,
a serious crisis may result.

For more than a century, there's been
a culturally accepted explanation.

Sound check.

One. One. One. One. One. One. One.

The standard narrative
is the story that everybody knows. That men want to be free sexually and
spread their seed around the world

and women want to be very exclusive
and particular and choose a provider,

because they're vulnerable and
the children need to be taken care of.

Women trade sexual fidelity to men

in exchange for goods and services,
essentially.

In this narrative,

there's another reason why men
wouldn't want women to sleep around.

If a baby comes out of a woman's body,

there's no question but that she is
genetically related to that baby.

The male has to take
the woman's word for it.

Biologists have known
for a very long time that...

men are far more inclined
to seek multiple sexual partners.

And the reason for that
is really quite clear.

[educator] Now in the first place,
remember that the male sperm cells

are being produced all the time,

while only one egg cell
is produced each month.

There's very good, and I don't mean
ethically good, but very understandable

evolutionary payoff
for males as being randy bastards.

[inaudible]

But there's one big issue
with that explanation

of promiscuous, possessive men
and demure women.

At lots of points in time, in places
in the world, people didn't follow it.

Anatomically modern human beings

have existed for at least 300,000 years.

And for more than 90 percent of that time,
we lived as hunter-gatherers.

Anthropologists refer to them
as fiercely egalitarian.

There's no reason to think that
our ancestors shared everything

except sexual partners.

Of course, we can't go back
and interview our foraging ancestors,

but we have the accounts
of explorers and Europeans

who first developed
and saw these societies

before they'd been
much touched by outsiders.

And they are surprised and shocked
at the difference in sexual mores.

There's a wonderful story that a Jesuit

who lived with the Naskapi Indians
for some time, and he would ask,

"If you let your wives
have this much freedom,

how do you know that the child
she bears will belong to you?"

And he recorded the answer
of the Indian:

If a child is crying and the adult
nearest to that child picks it up,

nobody says,
"Hey, hey. Your kid's crying."

No, it's...

there's a commonality to parenthood
among hunter-gatherers.

One of those groups
are the Bari of Venezuela,

where every man who sleeps
with a woman while she's pregnant

is considered a father of the child
and helps provide for it.

Now in our society,
that would probably not work very well.

I'm not recommending it.

But in that society,

the child who had several fathers named
because she'd slept with several fathers

actually had a much better chance
of surviving to adulthood

because those men contributed.

Did you ever think of going with somebody
else after you married me?

What, are you crazy?

We don't like to say we're open.
We like to say we're slightly ajar.

Exactly.

That's not good in my way.

In our language, also, they say,
"Pati parmeshwar."

That means "Husband is like God".

-This is our culture.
-Our culture.

We actually kind of met through
the non-monogamy "community".

I define this relationship as
this is my cohabitating partner

-and we call each other otters.
-Yeah.

We are primary partners and
our other partners are secondary partners.

I find it really fascinating.

I think about it a lot, like if I could
ever do that, but I don't know if I could.

I had a threesome with, like,
two friends of mine that I initiated.

I decided that it would be cool
to experiment with multiple people

with somebody I really loved
and cared about.

The queer community is berated with
the idea that our relationships are lesser

and that they're actually not up to par
in the hetero-normative standard.

And all of that is bull.

We shouldn't be surprised that some
cultures practice non-monogamy.

Because in the animal world, true sexual
monogamy is virtually unheard of.

The most romantic creature
might be the Diplozoon paradoxum,

a parasitic tapeworm that literally fuses
together with its partner for life.

But humans aren't tapeworms or apes,

and our closest relatives in the animal
world are chimps and bonobos.

[Christopher Ryan] We're closer related
to chimps and bonobos

than the Indian elephant is
to the African elephant.

[narrator] The close comparison exists
in bone and muscle structure,

and in the capability of responding
to stimuli and solving problems.

Clearly, chimps and bonobos
are anything but monogamous.

Bonobos have sex at the drop of a hat.

[song] I know... that I just met you...

They have sex to say hello,
they have sex to say goodbye.

They have sex when they're stressed out.

For both male and female bonobos,

that free love philosophy
makes evolutionary sense.

The males get to spread their seed

and the females get to take in the seed
of multiple males,

which then compete against each other
to fertilize her egg.

It's survival of the fittest, for sperm.

There are aspects of bonobo anatomy
that seem adapted to promiscuity,

and intriguingly, you can also find
a lot of them in humans,

suggesting we may have evolved
to be non-monogamous, too.

There's body dimorphism.

In species that are more promiscuous,

the males tend to be 15 to 25 percent
larger than the females.

And in theory, if there are males
battling to impregnate women,

testicles would be bigger and stronger.

[Christopher Ryan] Human testicles are
intermediate between very large testicles

in bonobos and chimpanzees, and very small
testicles in gorillas, for example.

There's the human penis,

tied for the biggest among all primates,
which has a unique shape.

We have this much thicker penis
with the flared head.

This shape creates a vacuum
in the female's reproductive tract

that tends to pull any sperm already there
and pulls it down away from the ovum,

thereby giving an advantage to the sperm
of the man who's having sex at the moment.

There's also female copulatory
vocalization,

a phenomenon so well-known and accepted,

it's a standard feature
of movie sex scenes.

[groaning and screaming]

What we see is that female copulatory
vocalization is common

among primates
that engage in sperm competition.

Then there's the fact that humans
and bonobos have sex to bond.

And not just to have children.

Which might explain the way
we face each other during intercourse.

You see humans and bonobos are the only
two that face each other while having sex.

And why we have a lot more of it
than most mammals.

So, clearly when people say

so-and-so had sex like an animal,
they're getting it backwards.

And there's now a lot of evidence that
monogamy is a more recent invention

than most of us would expect.

Around 12,000 years ago,

when most humans stopped
being hunter-gatherers

and figured out how to farm.

You get a very overpowering concern
with property rights.

As the Greeks put it, you don't want
a foreign seed introduced into your soil.

For thousands of years, marriage was the
way to increase your family labor force.

You made peace treaties,
business alliances...

The more I've studied, the more I became
convinced that marriage was invented

not to do with the individual
relationship with a man and a woman

but to get in-laws.

You know, and it's amusing because
today we see in-laws as the big threat

to the solidarity
of the man and the woman.

But that's what marriage was about.

You look back at Anthony and Cleopatra,
that was not a love story at all.

That was two people from the most
powerful empires in the world

trying to figure out how they could get
together and rule both of those empires.

The idea of marrying someone for love,

Coontz says Western societies only started
doing that a few hundred years ago.

As we made a transition to the idea that
marriage should be on the basis of love,

it scared people.

Defenders of traditional marriage said,
"Oh, my gosh.

How will we get a woman to marry at all
if she says, 'Eww, I don't love him.'

How will we stop people
from getting divorced?"

So a new idea took hold.

Men and women needed to find love
and marry

because they were two parts of a whole.

Men were aggressive and protective,

women were nurturing and demure.

They were opposites
who completed each other.

The field of evolutionary biology
also developed around this time,

pioneered by male scientists

who used theories on sexual selection
to explain Victorian gender roles.

As Charles Darwin wrote
in The Descent of Man:

And it's possible his ideas
became so popular

and survived so long
because it made sense to us

in the societies we were living in.

But if monogamy
is all a made-up construct,

a way to enforce gender roles
and social order,

how do we explain that visceral,
deep-rooted feeling we get

when our loved ones stray?

Tell me something.
Are you the jealous type?

I feel like we don't really
deal too much with jealousy.

I... I don't know why that is.

-What it is...
-It's because we're sluts.

-To be honest.
-I don't get, like, jealous like that.

It's important to understand why you're
feeling jealous because jealousy is not--

It's not a feeling, it's usually
rooted in some other sort of thing.

It's not a descending guillotine.
It's like jealousy is an event.

What's the best way
to deal with that event?

Who were you really with? That little
blonde secretary from the office?

I don't think you'll ever find any society
where there was no sexual jealousy,

but we also have these other
kinds of impulses of generosity

and of a sense that maybe
there are other parts of the person

that are more important
than the sexual person.

And these coexist and they battle
and I think they will always battle.

I say monogam-ish to describe
my relationship with my husband.

We've been together for 24 years, and
not monogamous for 20 of those years.

And I've had people look at me and say,
"I could never do what you guys do

because I value commitment too highly.

All three of my marriages
were monogamous."

This person was committed to monogamy,
not to any of the people they married,

they were committed to monogamy.

Non-monogamy is getting more
mainstream attention.

-Define polyamorous.
-Without monogamy.

-Polyamory...
-Polyamory...

-Polyamorous.
-It's called polyamory.

-Polyamorous people.
-Threeple.

-Non-monogamous, okay?
-You couldn't be.

A 2016 study found one in five Americans

have been in a non-monogamous
relationship at some point.

And in another survey, a third of
Americans said their ideal relationship

would be non-monogamous.

Monogamy as we know it
has been through many incarnations.

It's been forced.

It's been useful.

It's been beautiful.

It's been subverted.

As human society evolves,

so will human sexuality.

As we enter what I think of
as uncharted territory,

for the first time in human history,

we're trying to develop relationships
that are not based on coercion.

Coercion of women by their economic
and legal dependence,

coercion of women by their bodies,

coercion of men by the social
and economic structures.

We're trying, I think, to find
maybe a new balance.

Monogamy isn't natural.

It means we have to recognize
that, because it's not natural,

it's something that we're going to have
to work for if we want it.

One of the things that I think makes
human beings particularly interesting,

and maybe even unique in the animal world,

is that we're capable of doing things
that are unnatural.

Monogamy is like vegetarianism.

You can choose to be a vegetarian
and that can be healthy.

It can be ethical,
it can be a wonderful decision,

but because you've chosen
to be a vegetarian

doesn't mean
that bacon stops smelling good.

If we're lucky,

it's no longer about what kinds
of relationships we should have

in the modern world.

It's about designing the kinds
of relationships we want to have.

Humans may not have evolved
to be sexually monogamous,