Meeting on monogamy and jealousy

We had our meeting on monogamous relationships and jealousy last night.

There was a variety of opinions with new participants from Meetup but less people from the regular crowd.

We speculated if the current marriage institution came from agrarian society's need to have a stable method of owning and passing on farm property from one generation to another.  Apparently archeological information from pr-agrarian societies do not show this.  Polynesian societies discovered by the early explorers also do not have monogamous relationships or have ownership of land.

This made us wonder if our preoccupation with ownership is an underlying drive to "own" our partners through monogamy.  Someone remarked that the North American definition of success is to own a lot while in some other cultures, social standing, education, and influence may be more significant.

Some in the group also see marriage or common law relationship as just a legal framework for joint ownership and division of assets.  You either love or don't love someone and marriage is just to set rules for the earthly goods,  it cannot make you love or not love your partner.

The marriage provides a system for loveless couples to raise their children and separate when the children are grown.

We were fortunate to have someone in the group who belongs to a poly-amorous group as well as someone who knows of people in these groups. While not practicing monogamy, they nevertheless have various forms of relationships with different partners, some sexual, some emotional, some a combination of both and all of it out in the open for their partners to know without any deception.

It is actually a more challenging arrangement as the various relationships and their implications are much more complicated to manage compared to a monogamous one.  "Thank goodness for Google Calendar!" is one participant's chant.

In terms of jealousy, it is something that poly-amorous participants have to continuously work at and they do so with lots of communication to stop speculation.

Various people remarked on how surprised they were when the feeling of jealousy came, that it was such a strong emotion and so groundless when looked at later on.  Is it genetic or socially developed?  It is impossible to figure out. 

If nothing else, monogamy represent simple rules.  We did not get to some of the emotional support and compromise issues that I would have liked to get to but it was an interesting meeting.