You prefer going deep with one person as opposed to juggling many partners. You enjoy feeling special and uniquely prioritized by a romantic partner. You struggle with maintaining many relationships at the same time, whether because of limited time or limited energy.
Having monogamous partners makes sense for us since a loyal mate doesn't need to divide his time and resources between several families. Beyond that, having multiple partners doesn't necessarily help women in the evolutionary long term, since their ability to reproduce is limited.
The benefits of monogamy include increased certainty of paternity and access to the entire reproductive potential of at least one female (Schuiling, 2003) , reduction in infanticide (Opie et al., 2013) and greater survival of offspring due to higher parental investment (Geary, 2000).
Two people in a marriage who are totally committed to each other will nourish and grow closer each and every day they are married. Having this commitment brings the husband and wife together as one. Monogamy fulfills a relationship with love and honesty.
The PNAS paper, which analyzed 230 species of primates, concludes that protecting the kids is the greatest benefit of male monogamy. By sticking close to his mate a male reduces the risk of infanticide.
Monogamy, after all, does not come naturally; it is not the norm unless a society enforces it as such. There are immense benefits to doing so. But it is unclear how well we humans can achieve this aim in the present environment.
For humans, monogamy is not biologically ordained. According to evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss of the University of Texas at Austin, humans are in general innately inclined toward nonmonogamy.
Recent discoveries have led biologists to talk about the three varieties of monogamy: social monogamy, sexual monogamy, and genetic monogamy. The distinction between these three are important to the modern understanding of monogamy.
“The human mating system is extremely flexible,” Bernard Chapais of the University of Montreal wrote in a recent review in Evolutionary Anthropology. Only 17 percent of human cultures are strictly monogamous.
Monogamy is an intrinsically unstable mating strategy. Benefits include the (relative) certainty of access to the partner's reproductive potential, but the chief disadvantage is that access to other potential partners is strongly diminished, particularly in those cases where males exhibit strong mate-guarding behavior.
Evolution dictates that genes have the final say. And if there is one thing genes want, it is to spread as far and wide as possible. That is why monogamy is rare among mammals. Females have to wait for a long gestation period to have a child, where as males could go and inseminate many other females in that time.
Just like you can be committed to multiple friendships, you can be committed to multiple romantic relationships as well — and there's nothing wrong with being single, whether you identify as monogamous or not!
Just like monogamous relationships, non-monogamous relationships can be happy and satisfying, and last just as long. And just like monogamous relationships they can difficult and challenging. But being in a non-monogamous relationship doesn't mean you are any more likely to be unhealthy or unhappy.
Balance of evidence indicates we are biologically inclined towards monogamy. Science has yet to definitively pronounce on whether humans are naturally monogamous (lifelong male-female breeding pair) or polygamous (single male breeding with more than one female).
Summary: In cultures that permit men to take multiple wives, the intra-sexual competition that occurs causes greater levels of crime, violence, poverty and gender inequality than in societies that institutionalize and practice monogamous marriage.
The practice of polygyny is inherently discriminatory and violates a woman's right to equality. Polygamy is a social disorder that weakens a family unit, its structure and the value of marriage as an institution. And the social, spiritual, psychological and economic cost of polygamy in today's society is great.
In essence, men are only socially monogamous rather than genetically monogamous.
Instead, biological indicators suggest a mating system where both sexes form a long-term pairbond with a single partner (Møller, 2003). And while polygyny was likely present in the human past, as it is across contemporary human societies, the weight of evidence seems to support social monogamy.
If we mean realistic for the species of humans, then the answer clearly is yes. In various cultures around the world people are able to engage in lifelong monogamous relationships.
Many modern relationships are monogamous. But even if they want to be with just one partner, some people have trouble staying monogamous. This can lead to infidelity, separation, breakups, and divorce. Studies in animals have shown that certain genes may be linked to monogamous behaviors.
According to the New York Times, a 2011 paper showed that early humans, or hominids, began shifting towards monogamy about 3.5 million years ago—though the species never evolved to be 100% monogamous (remember that earlier statistic).
And they discovered a set of 42 genes whose activity in the brain is strongly associated with monogamy—including genes involved in neural development, learning and memory, and cognition.
Although the Old Testament describes numerous examples of polygamy among devotees to God, most Christian groups have historically rejected the practice of polygamy and have upheld monogamy alone as normative.
So, from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, monogamy is natural because fathering is natural in the human species and fathering only evolves with sufficient sexual exclusivity to allow for paternity certainty for men and sufficient resource provision certainty for women.
But new research is clarifying matters. We now know that the first hominins, which emerged more than seven million years ago, might have been monogamous. Humans stayed (mostly) monogamous for good reason: it helped them evolve into the big-brained world conquerors they are today.