Can men really be monogamous? And should they?

All right, gentlemen, welcome back to the Man Talk Show. I'm Connor Beaton and today we're gonna be diving into the question of whether or not men can really be monogamous. Is that something that you want, desire? Is it something that men are really capable of? And the reason why I'm diving into this question is many. Well, there's many reasons why I'm diving into this question. One is because this is a very common question that guys have. Can I actually be happy? Can I actually be faithful? Can I actually be in a long term committed relationship and enjoy it? Can that work? And there's a lot of evidence that shows that men are incredibly happy in monogamous relationships. But there's also a ton of women who question whether or not men can be monogamous. And a lot of guys that I've worked with over the years have had the internal questioning of should I really commit? Should I really enter into a long term relationship? Maybe you fell down some Reddit sub forum and have heard some advice of like, just go your own way, don't worry about relationships. They're a waste of time. There's too much energy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we're gonna div this question. We're going to look at some evolutionary psychology. But the other reason why I'm diving into this is because I have noticed a trend and maybe you've noticed this trend too. And the trend is as follows. You have a man who is very promiscuous. You have a man who maybe talks about how to pick up women. You have a man who is surrounded by a plethora of women, constantly a sort of female entourage that he's purported to be sleeping with. You have guys like Tucker Max and Neil Strauss and Dan Bilzerian and, and Andrew Tate and all these different men from sort of like different forms of masculinity or different pockets of masculinity who either embody and represent a man who has a lot of women around him constantly that he's sleeping with, or that's helping men to learn how to pick up women on a regular basis. And these guys never really sort of hold down a long term relationship. And the trend is that every single one of them eventually comes to a place that of entering into a monogamous relationship and advocating for monogamy. It's very interesting trend. There's not many guys that I know about, even somebody like the godfather of the, of the red pill is married, right? Rolo Tomasi, who's written all These books that a lot of guys sort of revere and look up to. That guy's been married for a very long time and advocates for being married and advocates for having a family. So can men really be monogamous? Let's dive in. I'm going to share this little clip from Mr. Dan Bilzerian, who was on a podcast recently and talked about sleeping with thousands and thousands of women and has come to the place where he believes that monogamy is better than sleeping with tons of women all the time. Now, we could debate why he's doing that. It could be part of the brand, right? He's a very counterculture person and all of a sudden, you know, it's more mainstream to be a quote unquote, high value man that sleeps with a lot of women and isn't in a committed relationship. And so maybe he's just moving with the counterculture sort space because that's what his brand is all about. But let's listen to what he says.

I think it's like, better to have a monogamous relationship, strange as that is going for me, because I think if I. You got two choices. You could just, like, do whatever you want and, you know, be free and like, allow the women to be free and just use condoms with all the girls and not care about if they hook up with other guys and it's just like purely sexual and whatever. Or I think you can find a girl that you enjoy spending time with and that you actually trust each other.

So. So here it is, right? He goes on to talk about some other stuff, but the. The core of what he's talking about. And he goes on to talk about his attempts to be in monogamous relationship and what that's been like for him and how, you know, enjoyable that's been. And this is something that I've seen play out time and time again, that men who have access to sleeping with as many women as they want, or a lot of women, or get very good at getting women's attention, they inevitably, almost always get into a space where eventually they want to be in a monogamous relationship. So let's talk about how we have evolved as human beings. Now, for the most part of human history, human beings have been both monogamous and polygamous, right? If. And the evidence for that is pretty undeniable. If you were a Martian zoologist that came to this planet and came to this Earth, you would find, and you would sort of conclude that Homo sapiens, the species of the human beings, are somewhat polygamous meaning that they partake in a mating system and strategy where a man or a male has more than one female partner or is mating with, having sex with more than one female partner. And at the same time, that Martian would also see that paradoxically, you would find a system where men are monogamous, where couples, men and women are monogamous. And so the question is, why have both of these strategies developed? Now, the notion that men can't be monogamous is a very interesting one because there's a good amount of data that shows that, that men are very happy in monogamous relationships, to the point where there's actually been studies and research, including the studies with the GSS or the General Social Survey that found that men who are married and have kids, or men that are married and don't have kids, either one, are almost two times happier than men who are not married. Right. And that's between the ages of 18 to 55. So we've developed these strategies of either being in a polygamous relationship or in a monogamous relationship for various reasons. But I want to talk about where the notion that men can't be monogamous actually came from. Why this narrative or this belief has sort of embedded itself both into our society, our culture, but also into the brains and the heads of both men and women. So number one is that we have historically had countless polygamous societies and tribes. This has been a very common way of looking at it. In fact, some anthropologists and historians have said that up to 80% of tribes and societies over time, before the industrial, you know, pre industrial Society, up to 80% were operating on a polygamous society and a polygamous mating strategy. So that's number one. This has been sort of a common theme throughout human evolution and human history. And there's a number of reasons for that that we could get into. But let's talk about modern society. So number two is that the top 5 to 10% of men are the most sought after and the hardest to lock into monogamous relationships. And things like social media have made this.

Very, not even, not even apparent, but this has made it very obvious that the top 5 to 10% not only have the widest selection, not only do they have the most amount of women going after them.

Right.

If you look at Tinder as an example, you have, you know, if you took 50 men and 50 women, you have the majority of those women, like 45 of those women out of the 50 that will go after the top 5% of the men or 5 out of the 50 men. So you have this large group of women going after a very small subset of men. And these men that all of those women want or desire or want to be with, they realize that they have a massive level of selection. And what ends up happening is that they have no real reason or prerogative to settle down. They will be much more promiscuous and sort of find themselves in relationships or situationships where it's very ambiguous or vague as to whether or not they are dating. They're likelier to have open relationships with multiple women at once. And for those women, it feels like maybe they are in a relationship or they're much more likely to go along with a man that has status that, you know, maybe is sort of at the top of the masculine or male hierarchy. And they are much more likely to not engage in pushing a monogamous relationship because they realize that they're competing with a lot of other women. And so the top five, 10% of men, especially with the rise of social media, especially with the rise of dating apps, these guys have their sort of pick. And so they're harder to lock into a monogamous relationship. And this continues to.

Really caused the notion that men can't be monogamous to gain momentum. So that's the second reason, number three is that when men are caught cheating, and this is a very interesting one, when men are caught cheating, the more female oriented behavioral correction mechanism of using shame is used. So for example, when a man is caught, it's much more common that a woman is going to have large public displays to show that he was unfaithful. It's much, much more common that a woman is going to use public shaming. She's going to talk about past relationships where you know, she was cheated on and that you know, the man couldn't, or that she was cheated on multiple times or whatever it is. And it's going to follow sometimes with reputational attacks and creating the illusion that men cheat more than women, which again, the data and the research on this is a little shaky. So. But for the most part, men and women cheat around the same amount. But my theory, theory is that women are better at cheating. We as men sometimes are not the best at hiding, hiding things and keeping secrets. But women have a, generally speaking, a higher level of emotional, social intelligence and keeping those things under wraps is much more common. And so when men are caught cheating, it's much more vocalized, right? And men, generally speaking, when they catch their partner cheating, they don't want everybody to know about it. There's a lot of shame. There's a lot of perspective of like, you know, was I not, quote, unquote, man enough in order to keep her happy and satisfied, that she needed to go outside of the relationship in order to get her needs met? So there's a. There's a different. And I'm not saying that women don't experience shame when they've caught their partner cheating. It's simply that it's a different type of shame where, for the most part, women are willing to share that shame and disperse it socially and talk about what's happened, whereas men are less likely to talk about those things. They're certainly less likely to plaster it all over social media. And that is one of the things that seems to happen, that when a woman. Again, this is a general statement. It's not an every single time. But when women catch men cheating, they're much more likely to share that on social media, talk about it on social media, put it out. Reputation attack. You know, perpetuate the idea that men are cheaters and that once they've cheated, they will always be a cheater. And that narrative is very strong within our current culture. Number four, and this is specifically for you guys, is that countless men choose partners where there is not a good alignment of sexual compatibility. Okay? Countless men choose partners where there is not good sexual compatibility. And so what ends up happening over time is that as that monogamous relationship goes on, that man becomes less and less satisfied sexually. He and his partner grow apart. And eventually he, you know, maybe he doesn't address it in the relationship. Maybe he doesn't know how to talk about it. Maybe he tries and it doesn't go anywhere. And so eventually he steps out of the relationship and usually is stepping out because he's trying to maintain the relationship, because we as men are oftentimes very logical. So it's like, well, the rest of the relationship's working well, this one part isn't, so I'll go get my needs met somewhere else. So a lot of men end up stepping out of the relationship because the sexual compatibility that they want, crave, desire, feel like they need is not there. That's number four. Number five. And I just have two more. Number five and six. Number five is what I call the Madonna whore complex. And I'm going to be talking about this more in an upcoming video. But essentially, the Madonna whore complex is when a man psychologically splits women into two buckets unconsciously. And what will happen is that as he falls in love with a woman, the more he falls in love with her, the more he ends up pedestaling her and the less he brings his more sort of primal sexual desires and his more primal sexual way of being into relationship with her. And as he does that, over time, that primal sexual urge and desire will start to split off and he will eventually find a woman or a woman in his life, whether it's at work or in his friend group or whatever it is. However that comes about on social media, there will come a woman who represents this archetype of the quote unquote whore, where that becomes an avenue for him to express those more primal urges and sexual desires and fantasies that are not being brought into his relationship. And that is generally an attachment issue. I'll talk about more on this on a very specific video about this topic. Last but not least, non monogamous relationships are largely taboo in western culture and they're seen as mostly dysfunctional, both the people in them and any children that are a part of it. And so whether or not this is true, what I can say is that I haven't seen many poly relationships that really stand the test of time. I haven't seen many open relationships that really work long term as an effective strategy.

Specifically for child rearing and raising kids can be very challenging, but also for the people that are in them, it can be very hard to maintain. And so not that, you know, monogamy has a great track record either, considering that, you know, still divorce rates are quite high. But what this brings me to. So those are all the reasons why where this notion that men can't be monogamous came from. But what this brings me to is mating strategies. And the reality is that men have very flexible mating strategies and, and what that looks like is very heavily influenced on social structures, on cultural norms. Those things play a big role in terms of whether you are going to be monogamous or not. And being monogamous can actually for men bring a very large social advantage and offer a wider range of opportunities and access to long term mating to men, specifically in finding a long term partner, a life partner, being able to rear children. Because in more polygamous societies, not all men have access to mating opportunities, not all men have access to sexual relationships in a long term way with women, because there are a group of men who have largely the most access to multiple women. So monogamous societies and cultures benefit in some ways. Social stability reduced male to male competition can happen where men aren't sort of competing in this really intense way for female attention. But however, when you look at our modern culture, this has begun to break down significantly because of things like social media where it has made it very easy for women to gain mass amounts of attention and validation from men. And more specifically through dating apps that are pushing this sort of unintentional result of a more sort of not polygamist, but this more higher emphasis on the top 5 to 10% of men gaining access to a volume, a quantity of women that nobody in human history has ever had access to. Right. I mean, I've worked with and talked to some men that have been on dating apps where they could line up a date with a different woman every night for months and the likelihood that they're going to have sex with the majority of them is quite high. And so if you're one of those men, you're sort of disincentivized towards settling down. Monogamy becomes disincentivized because of the quantity and the quality that you have in the women that you're dating. So, however, the last thing that I'll add in is that the persistence of infidelity and non monogamous behaviors that are on the rise. Right. These non monogamous behaviors, where you have a sort of multi partner strategy as a man, especially if you're in the top 5 to 10%, can really make it look like men are not interested in monogamous relationships. But the reality is, is that the majority of men want a monogamous relationship. They just might not be in that place in their life yet where the urge and the desire has hit them. And what evolutionary psychology really suggests is that again, there's not just one mating strategy that men have. However, where a lot of men are, whether it's socially inclined or culturally pressured, where a lot of men are inclined to go eventually is towards some type of a monogamous relationship. And there are benefits to this. Men that are in long term monogamous relationships, men that are married and that are monogamous over their lifetime generally will live longer, have happier lives, they'll report deeper levels of fulfillment and satisfaction, sometimes even more than their female counterparts. And so in summary, men are certainly capable of being monogamous. And this behavior can actually be advantageous to you as a man and to the culture and the society that you live in. In many, many ways, however, the sort of propensity and tendency towards monogamy is influenced by this really complex interplay of biological predispositions within you. Right. So maybe you're a man who has A much higher sex drive, a much higher levels of testosterone. Maybe it's harder for you to sort of want to be with one woman and you are in a stage of your life. Like, you know, I was in my, in my 20s where monogamy didn't really work for me. I actually questioned whether or not monogamy was going to be possible for me because I had a very high sex drive and because I really enjoyed dating and I had access to, to a lot of women. And this is, you know, sort of thankfully pre dating apps. I don't know what that would have been like. That may have been a mess, but the, the propensity and the desire for monogamy is, is affected and impacted by biological predispositions within a man. Cultural norms, depending on the, you know, the society and the culture that you grow up in and individual circumstances like, you know, can you afford to have multiple women that you are dating? Is that even something that's a viable option for you? I know that there was times in my, in my life where I was dating multiple women, but I mean, I didn't have a lot of money. So it's not like, you know, we were going out on these big elaborate dates. It was like, come over to my house, you know, Netflix and chill. Although there was no Netflix at the time. So all of these things can impact it. What I will say again is a couple things. One, men can be much happier in monogamous relationships. Two, monogamy can actually be quite beneficial and advantageous for you as a man. Of course, this is predicated on you finding the right woman, the right partner that is actually going to bring satisfaction into your life and happiness and somebody that you can share life with and, you know, somebody that on, on the whole isn't going to make your life more miserable or more hard or more challenging, which there's a conversation about that and, you know, mating and dating behaviors, depending on where you are and the type of man that you are and what you have access to and what's available to you are going to be different. So as an example, men who have less access to women and men that have less access to finances and money and status are going to likely benefit from significantly and much more from a monogamous relationship because it's going to provide some level of security, some level of comfort, some level of companionship. It's going to provide hopefully a family system that they can build and create. And then there's the guys that are, that have access to a lot. And this is where I'm going to sort of wrap up men that have access, you know, on a level that most of us just don't have access to because of status, because of money, because of looks, because of whatever it is. Right. Maybe it's Maybelline, who knows? Those guys, again, they're less likely to enter into a monogamous relationship for a period of time. And what I have noticed is that even those men, the majority of them, will eventually come around to a place where they want to be in a committed, long term monogamous relationship. So yes, absolutely, men can be monogamous. However, that not every man will be in a season of his life where he wants to choose monogamy. And I think that's where you as a man have to determine and start to question and understand where you really are. Are you in the season of your life where you want to choose monogamy, or are you in the season of your life where that is not a priority to you? Where building your career, building, building your business, you know, focusing on your health or some goals or some adventure that you have or your artistry, like whatever it is, maybe a monogamous relationship is just not. Doesn't fit into the season of life that you're in. And for the women that might be watching this, that's a very important thing to keep in mind when you are dating a man, really asking yourself and maybe even asking him whether he is in the season of his life life where monogamy is going to be a priority. So as always, thank you so much for tuning in. Don't forget to man it forward. This is Connor Beaton signing off.