The Poor Can’t Afford the Benefits of Monogamy, and the Rich Don’t Need Them

Non-monogamy is generally cringe not because multiple people are consensually involved, but rather because relatively privileged people have dumped their neuroses and misguided aspirations for a “free” or authentic life

The people documented in our study kept households together, raised each other’s children, stayed together for lifetimes, aided each other’s work and stayed by each other during war, illness, death and grief. Much of this is the sort of relationship style I get to experience daily, too, living with my partners and my cats and I am both grateful and hardly special for it. There are lots of people like me. We are, of course, also doing a social reproduction, making the world over and over again, just slightly differently. We are generally using different relationship style and thus socio-cultural technology in a way that is responsive to the precarity of neoliberalism—not liberated from it, because we have of course not escaped material and historical trends. But though we cannot escape these trends we can counter some of their isolating or libertarian effects, and so live in a less individualist, more communal and fairly committed way.

ask: if two parents good, perhaps three parents better? Perhaps motherhood communes better? Perhaps parenting with friends better?