Justthefacts

U2 performed in Arizona couple days ago and Bono changed the lyrics to the song "Pride" from Free at last, they took your life. They could not take your pride to They could not take away your gay pride.

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adidasss

Maybe. But maybe it also has something to do with our inherent possesiveness and egotism and insecurity. I have a much bigger problem with the idea of my partner sleeping around than with my own of course.

Our choice to remain monogamous was made because at this moment in time, we simply can't manage the many emotional implications sleeping with other people would bring and the questions that would raise (if he wants to sleep with other people, of course! that means I'm not good enough for him!) etc.

Plus, for me, the choice was made because I like the fact that we "belong" just to each other, I like the familiarity of my partner's body. I like the safety of knowing we are exclusive and the fun that condomless sex brings. And most importaint of all, our sex life is simply good and experimental enough that I don't need to look elsewhere for anything. Good sex takes pratice and I feel like our sex life just keeps on improving, the more you get to know your partner and his needs, the better it gets. Random sex with random people can be exciting, I guess, for a minute, but mostly it was (for me) underwhelming and clumsy.

Anyways, congratulations Ireland, proud day for all!

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Guybrush

Evolution is sometimes like knitting with gloves. Or something. It's not always precise.

Man may have evolved feelings of jealousy to prevent his lady getting pregged by someone else and leaving him to rear a kid he thinks is his own, but who isn't really. But with evolution not being very precise, that evolved jealousy would probably bleed over into homosexual relationships too, even if pregnancy wasn't an issue.

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Xurtio

Tore, there's also some evidence that (for fruit flies) sperm of past partners can affect development of the fetus from the partner that did the impregnation. I don'T know if this happens in mammals or not but it would give an incentive for female promiscuity.

I don't know how much of this is cultural/learned vs. Intrinsic. Possessiveness seems, mostly, a male trait (personal anecdote: within the polyamorous community, it's the males who generally have issues, women's issues tend to be more about insecurity than possessiveness). Monogamy was popularized (but not invented) first by Roman military leaders as an incentive for poor men to join the military (they outlawed high ranking men from taking more than one wife). They also found monogamous relationships to grow a population faster than polygyny. So monogamy was important to wartime society. Orgies and sleeping around were still acceptable, though. The Abrahamic religions later made it a moral imperative to be monogamous and (maybe due to possessive men taking authoritative positions) even went as far as to label sex with other people as sinful and wrong and you'll burn in hell, get stoned to death, or beheaded. To some extent, I think a lot of this is just the cultural result of having a patriarch.

It's interesting because our two closest relatives are bonobos and chimps and they represent these two extremes: chimps are territorial, possessive, and aggressive. Bonobos are more like free loving hippies, matriarchal, bisexual, and polyamorous (which reminds me a lot of my clique in the poly community). The Congo separated bonobos and chimps early in their evolutionary story, so there's some speculation that the chimps environment south of the Congo (which was much more competitive and resource-strained) was conducive to territorialism whereas the environment north of the Congo (no gorillas to compete with, plentiful resources) led to a more of a hedonist matriarch.

This is kind of reflected in humans too. It's in first world countries where we are, for lack of a better term, bored and not so resource strained, that polyamorous communities emerge. You rarely see that in unstable, high stress places like the middle east (where possessiveness of women is codified in law). So it appears that there are large environmental influences on how people go about mate selection and exclusivity. But I also accept that there's an intrinsic/biological side that makes some people more prone to jealousy and possessiveness (it is, after all, an effective mating strategy).

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