Welcome to the Magical Overthinkers podcast, a show for thoughts-firelers, exploring the subjects we can't stop overthinking about, from social media comparison to UFOs. If you can relate to the feeling that despite living in the information age, the world only seems to be making less sense. If you can connect to the idea that for some mysterious serious reason it just feels especially hard to exist as a human in the world right now, then you're in the right place. This podcast is here to soften the clash between our innate human mysticisms and the overwhelm of this time. I'm your host, Amanda Montell. Today, we're overthinking about monogamy. There's this concept that I write about in The Age of Magical Overthinking that continues to live rent-free in my head. The idea of zero sum bias, the fallacious tendency to assume that another person's gain directly means your loss. That can be applied to financial scenarios or social ones. Just because another person is beautiful, successful, wealthy, cool, doesn't put your beauty, success, wealth, coolness at risk. There is not a limited quantity of those things in the world. When I encounter a person who I feel like I can relate to but is superior to me in some way, at least that's my perception, my impulse is to get competitive, to perceive them as a nemesis, and that sets everybody up for failure.

Instead, I should treat that person as a connection. Their light doesn't dim mine. In fact, I'm no physicist, but I think the way that light works is that with our light combined, everyone burns brighter. That sounds like a corny sentiment or even woo, But that shift in perspective has actually saved me from a lot of suffering. Becoming aware of how our zero-sum intuitions can actually damage our ability to make friends and professional connections has naturally led me to think about other kinds of relationships. In theory, this more the merrier mentality, this notion that another person's existence is no threat to you, should apply to romantic partnerships. Isn't it, technically, an argument for non-monogamy? For me, personally, that's been a slightly tougher pill to swallow. Over the past few years, conversations surrounding non-monogamy and polyamory have exploded. I learned from a 2024 Huffington Post piece by Kelsey Borison that according to Google data, the term ethical non-monogamy has seen more than a 250% increase in search traffic since 2023. A 2020 YouGov poll of 1,300 American adults found that a A third of respondents say their ideal relationship is non-monogamous to some degree. But polyamory educator Lianyao told Huffington Post, It's not just a new fad.

People have been doing non-monogamy for a very long time. I think people are just talking about it more now. Which brings me to my first thought spiral on the matter. It's something that people can get defensive about. Is non-monogamy more natural than monogamy? It's really hard to tell what's natural about human beings in general. But this question somehow feels really high stakes. There are so many arguments for non-monogamy that I agree with. Here's a great one that a listener submitted. She said, Monogamy isolates us from our friends and community because it's this concept of having this one person who you're supposed to be closer to than anyone else. It inhibits friendships from getting past a certain level, which then means we only have one other person to support us and really understand us and that we can really trust. I feel like this is all tied into capitalism, and I sound like I'm wearing a tinfoil hat, but I think to some level, it's put in place like this to stop collectivism and organization. This is a very compelling argument. If we were all villages instead of groups of two, we would not be required to work as much as we do because we could rely more on each other.

Still, whether it is a trend of sorts or something more natural to the human species, I guess, candidly, I haven't yet seen an example of non-monogamy that I can really relate to or aspire to, unlike all the super successful and aspirational monogamy examples we get everywhere, from Disney movies to rom-coms to my own parents' relationship. There's no shortage of those. By contrast, so much of what I see of non-monogamy on TV these days is either shiv from succession surprise announcing to her fiancé Tom on the Eve of their wedding that she wants an open marriage, or Hollywood types in LA, where I live, who've made being poly their whole personality and seem to look down on monogamous as shamefully passe. Growing up in a society that puts romance on this pedestal where cheating is punishable by both God and the law, to me, it seems like our templates, or at least the ones that I've seen of both monogamy and polyamory are both equally daunting in a way. I guess I'm afraid of doing either one incorrectly or causing harm, so I end up being inert, which isn't good either. This stuff is so easy to overthink.

Sometimes I'll consider the simple, not even that deep argument of like, just do you really want to limit your sexual partners for the rest of your life to just one human being? Doesn't that seem arbitrary and imprisoning? Then I'll think, I guess I do want more fun and liberation. Why not? But then again, I want a lot of things that I don't know if I should necessarily have, and I certainly don't want to hurt this person that I love more than anyone just for the purposes of fun. But then it's like, is it even healthy for one person to be on such a pedestal? Don't pedestals obliterate our room for error and complexity and humanity? I don't know. I don't know. This is my very problem. Monogamy is a polarizing subject these days, and that makes talking about it openly or asking unfiltered questions difficult because it seems to me like advocating for or even just quietly embodying relationship structures that are different from what someone else believes to be healthy, or maybe they don't even fully believe in their own relationship structure deep down, but they have chosen it and it too scary to interrogate that.

All of this can feel threatening. With today's conversation, I just want to take the temperature down on this discourse to soothe these thought spirals that I think so many of us are having about monogamy. To help with that, I want to introduce my very special guest, Dr. Ellie Anderson, PhD, who's a philosopher, professor, and one of the two hosts of the Fantastic Overthink podcast. Dr. Ellie is a Simone de Beauvoir scholar who examines both personally and professionally, structures of monogamy and non-monogamy through the lens of philosophy, which I thought would be such a fascinating perspective to apply to this topic. Dr. Anderson is a practitioner of non-monogamy herself, one whom I'm personally quite inspired by now, I have to say. Indeed, our conversation has already shifted some ways that I might be approaching my own personal life in the near future. I hope you enjoy it. For Bridget Christ, the road to love was not so straightforward.

Bridgie, I forbid you for marrying that spendthrift youth, Miles car.

What the devil is that? I'm setting up an M50 video account on my mobile cellular telephone, thus procuring a discount on the M50 highway tow path.

Very prudent, Mr.

Carr. It seems I've misjudged you. Eflow presents accounts and accountability. Pay See your tolls automatically and get a discount with a free M50 video tolling account at eflo. Ie. Hello. Jamida Jamil here. You may know me from my role in The Good Place or from SheHulk or from social media and my activism. I Way basically started as a social movement, and my podcast is one of my truly greatest achievements. It's a podcast against shame and a place for us to have really honest and truly inclusive conversations. I love connecting with people. I love learning. I have a lot to learn, and I'm inviting you along with me. On my way with Jamila Jamil, I have friends, activists, specialists, and absolute heroes join me to teach me from their experience and expertise. People like Conan O'Brien, Jane Fonda, Roxanne Gay, Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Bayer, Aloke, Kelly Rowland, and more. I Am I, with Jamida Jamil, has new episodes out every Tuesday, and you can find the show on earwulf. Com or wherever you listen to your podcast. Could you start by just introducing yourself and your work to the listeners?

Yeah. My name's Ellie Anderson. I am an assistant professor of philosophy at Pomona College, and I work on philosophy of the self, who are we, how do we relate to others, and philosophies of love and sex, with an emphasis on feminist approaches to non-monogamy and sexual ethics. I also am the co-host of the podcast, Overthink, and we have a YouTube channel as well.

Amazing. Overthink, ex-magical overthinkers. Yeah. Got to love it. I am so excited to apply this philosophical lens to the concept of non-monogamy. But this is a podcast for overthinkers, a concept that you are intimately familiar with. And so my opening question for you is actually just, what is an irrational thought spiral that is currently living rent-free in your head?

I have way too many irrational thought spirals living rent-free in my head all the time. So I feel like deciding which one to focus on now is hard. I feel like I've had a pretty high level. When recently, I'm working on a book right now. It's an academic book on selfhood, and that's a very challenging topic to write well about. So my irrational thought spiral lately is I have no good ideas. My book is going to be horrible, an embarrassment, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm a long-time meditator. I've been meditating daily for well over a decade, and the thought spirals still come all the time. Meditation helps me deal with them, but it has not stopped them entirely. So it's just a manner of how you deal with it.

I love that as a point because in light of my work, sometimes people will ask, How do I prevent overthinking or irrationality? Or, How do I cure myself of these thoughts? And And that's a futile effort. It's more about how we manage them through these various techniques, like listening to podcasts or mindfulness. So to get into the topic, could you walk us through... This is like such a big question, but forgive me, I'm new to the philosophy of monogamy versus non-monogamy. I'm new to even the notion of whether or not we should be comparing those as a versus in the first place. But I would love if you could just walk us through the major philosophical perspectives on monogamy versus non-monogamy and how these philosophies have changed throughout human history?

Yeah, that is a very big question. But I think the way to start in answering this question is thinking about how philosophers are really divided on the question of whether love, especially romantic or erotic love, is necessarily exclusive. Is it something that humans have only towards one person, or is it something that we can have towards multiple people. And just to say a little bit about what monogamy is, because I think that's important in order to then define non-monogamy, I'm following my friend philosopher Justin Clarty here, who has a book called Why It's Okay to Not Be a Monogamous in his definition of monogamy. I'm a philosopher, so we love a definition. And according to Clarty, monogamy is a social convention that centralizes relationships between two people that are romantically exclusive. So romantic exclusivity involves both sexual and emotional exclusivity. So when we're talking about monogamy, we're talking about this way of approaching relationships that treats partners, specifically romantic partners, as central. And this also means that monogamous relationships are defined by what you can't do or what he calls Intimacy Confining Constraints. That means that you can't have sex with other people, you can't have a certain level of emotional exclusivity or intimacy with other people.

Philosophers for a long time have, as you can I'd probably imagine, at least in the Western world, skewed monogamous in terms of their theories of love. This isn't universally true across the board. There's a lot in ancient Greek philosophy about erotic love as being temporarily centered around one object, but not necessarily for a long period of time. But I think by and large, when you look at the history of philosophy of love, you mostly get monogamy. You have some philosophers, whether it's medieval Christian theologians or some of the 19th century German philosophers like Hegel and Schopenhauer, talking about how romantic love is something that is shared between two people and results in a union that is usually codified in marriage and results in a child. I just use romantic love there. That's maybe a little bit of an anachronism when We're talking about ancient Greece because they didn't have the concept of romantic love yet. That's an invention for about 300 years ago, but we could say erotic love in that time. When you get arguments for why monogamy is the orientation of romantic love or erotic love, there are a few different arguments that specifically come up.

One is the idea that monogamy is divinement ordained. I don't think that's a very popular view today, but that was definitely the view of some of the medieval Christian thinkers and a lot of philosophers in the past. Another is the idea that monogamous relationships emphasize specialness. And so love is essentially a way of appreciating one other person's specialness and treating them as special. And that is really something you can only have with one other person. By relinquishing your ability to have different sexual and romantic relationships with others, you are choosing this person. Another argument that you sometimes see is that of jealousy being an emotion that humans naturally have, and jealousy is impossible to avoid unless you have an exclusive romantic relationship. Now, I think what we see oftentimes is that it's not possible to avoid jealousy, even in monogamous relationships. But nonetheless, I think people do talk about jealousy as one reason to choose monogamous relationships. Another is that monogamy is natural. You don't see that so much among philosophers because philosophers take very seriously the idea that just even if something is natural, that doesn't mean it's the way that it should be for humans.

Humans have the capacity to move beyond what is natural for us. But that is still something you sometimes hear, even though I will say, and maybe we'll come back to this later, that it's not at all clear from evolutionary biology that monogamy is natural. And then another thing that you sometimes hear is the T-objection, T-E-A, which is time, energy, attention. The idea that you can only have enough time, energy, and attention to devote to one other partner. And that argument, I think, is pretty easy to object to because even if you have limited time, energy, and attention, it's not necessarily clear that you only have time, energy, and attention enough for one person. Maybe you could have it for two or three people. And I will try and keep this succinct. It was such a big question. I'm finding my answer is long.

I am obsessed with this, the answer, and grateful for it. Okay.

So just to quickly canvas some of the pro-non-monogamy arguments. I mentioned this one against the T objection, which is we actually don't have only enough time, energy, and attention for one person necessarily. Another is that loving relationships are goods, and if we love another person, we should want them to have as many goods as possible. And so why shouldn't we want them to have other romantic and sexual relationships, given that those are of goods, too. And I think one that's also pretty interesting to me is just that there's nothing specific about romantic love that should limit it to one person. We can think instead of romantic love as being similar or even as a friendship, We don't limit our friends to having just one friend. We accept that we can have many friends. And so why not also do that with romantic love? It doesn't seem like there's anything really constitutively different about romantic love. And I think that's an argument against the specialness this objection, this idea that actually, no, you really don't have to limit your relationships to just one romantic relationship in order to convey somebody's specialness to them. I also really like a community values approach, which takes a notion of kinship as extending beyond the hierarchical couple form that tends to dominate society today.

And so I think a lot of people who are interested in non-monogamy, myself included, are interested in it less actually specifically from a romantic or sexual standpoint and more in terms of imagining what forms of kinship look like beyond a nuclear family, monogamous marriage, couple form, because that's actually a pretty recent development in human history and by no means one that is necessary to humans.

Oh, my gosh. So much to unpack. I feel like every philosophical perspective and historical perspective you just suggested has a meme corollary. I think in arguing for non monogamy, you will often hear the example where it's like, Oh, well, in ancient Greece, there were some relationships where sex would be exchanged for knowledge. That was a temporary transaction or whatever. Where I struggle with all of this, and the reason why I wanted to include this topic in this podcast, because I truly can't stop overthinking about it, is I can encounter all of the arguments for non-monogamy in the world. That romance as a concept isn't natural or the thought exercise of, well, you can love all your children separately, but equally. You can love all your friends separately, but equally. Why can't that be the case for your romantic partner, your life partner? And still my intuition is like, no, no, no, I hate it, which, by the way, is an impulse that I'm not even sure I trust for multiple reasons, which is, I guess, why we're here interrogating all this today. So it I'd actually love to ask how you perceive the portrayal of non-monogamy in contemporary media.

It's represented in high-end media, like succession and the White Lotus, and slightly more low-end media, like the TV show couple to throuple, anybody. I wonder what you think these portrayals are saying about us as a culture with relation to non-monogamy, and what are they perpetuating, if anything?

I think, for one, just to validate what you said before about feeling that ick factor when it comes to non-monogamy or feeling that sense of insecurity, I think that's really common, very normal. We live in a society that's constantly giving us monogamous messages without our realizing it. And so I think our human feelings are always caught up in social scripts, too. They don't exist independently of them. And so I think it's very common for people to experience that. I I feel like that's also been part of my own journey of practicing this for over a decade now.

But then I also I feel threatened because it feels like my thoughts aren't my own. That alone is a tough pill to swallow, that your emotions only exist within the confines of your social environment and media and who is around you. And by the way, I have engaged in non-monogamy. I have done it. And in theory, almost not in a vacuum, but in my own private space, I'm like, actually am more interested in engaging with it. And I just really struggle to square that with what being non-monogamous in 2024 might say about me. I see. And what it threatens about these emotions, which apparently aren't even naturally fine.

It's not that they aren't yours. It's not that they're inauthentic. I think if all emotions are shaped by culture, that means that there's no other pure emotion that exists outside of that to which we could even compare these emotions. So I think that's really important to keep in mind. And I also think it's important to distinguish the idea that culture shapes our emotions from the idea that culture determines them. And so it doesn't mean that you're not feeling them. It's just to say that there's no core, authentic set of emotion that exists in this river underneath the ground of the society that we live in. And so I think the positive side of that is that we can also engage in in shaping our emotions ourselves, too. We do have some agency over this. Maybe we can talk a little bit more about what you think monogamy might say about you in 2024. I'll think about the cultural piece, and then I'm curious to hear more about that.

I feel so caught between two worlds when it comes to so many arenas of life. I feel caught between logos and pathos, for one. I feel like a highly emotional person who grew up in a household of scientists and feels very committed to facts, while also knowing that more facts and more information aren't actually always helpful and don't actually always help you make decisions and certainly don't always help you feel better. So I'm constantly living in that cognitive dissonance. And then in terms of monogamy versus non-monogamy, I feel like while I am fully a willing participant in these thought exercises about loving multiple friends separately, equally, why can't you love multiple partners? And jealousy exists even within In the confines of a monogamous relationship. I'm like, I feel this absurd sketch comes to mind here. Speaking of thoughts not being your own, maybe my whole attitude is based on this one ridiculous musical comedy sketch by a comedian named Chris Fleming. This sketch is from, I don't know, 2013. It's so old. But he's dancing around and singing this silly song about, Why are always the people who you don't want be polyamorous, polyamorous.

It's never who you want to be, polyamorous who's polyamorous.

It's like, oh, yeah. It's like, is there just a vocal minority of people who are so hyper critical of monogamy, then they backfire in the opposite direction, where now non-monogamy feels intimidating and a culture that you have to be all in on, that you can't just dip a toe into. And then I feel a little bit excluded. In the privacy of my own friend groups, and I guess the privacy of this podcast, I sometimes say that my ideal form of non-monogamy would be to say, crack a window open in the house of our relationship, not like, fling open all the doors. Yeah.

Well, I think they're actually in the majority there because there was just a new study that came out at the beginning of this year from match singles in America, and it found found that 31% of singles in America have explored consensual non-monogamy, but 49% are finding that their ideal relationship actually is a monogamous relationship. So I think in terms of dipping your toe in, that's a pretty common experience to have. And obviously, when I'm talking about 31% of singles in America, I'm not saying you're in the majority of Americans, right? 31%, not the majority. I can do math, even though I'm a philosopher. But I think in the sense of the majority of people who are exploring non-monogamy or polyamory. I would venture to say that it's really common, just anecdotally speaking. I think certainly the majority of people that I know who have explored non-monogamy have done so for a period or are doing so for a period and aren't really sure what the future holds, but might want to ultimately end up in a monogamous relationship. I think that also speaks to us just all navigating these tricky emotions and having a sense of what our ideal might be that may or may not actually end up staying that way over time.

So let's talk TV shows because you mentioned a few of them. I have to say, I find the rise of depictions of non-monogamy on TV compelling in theory, but disappointing in practice. I think in the case of Succession and White Lotus, the non-monogamous relationships that are depicted are quite toxic. And I think you also end up finding that in HBO's Insecure, for instance, the character Molly's Exploitation of Non-Monogamy is not really satisfying. Dying. And there's a lot we could say about those different relationships. I have not watched Couple of Thouple yet, even though a lot of people have been telling me I should.

That reflects well on you.

No, it really doesn't, because just wait, I'm going to talk about equally low-brow shows. So I find in terms of reality TV, the depictions of non-monogamy in supposedly monogamous shows, the most interesting. I'm thinking here about The Bachelor, Love is Blind, and the Ultimatum, Marry or Move On. Because I think what you find in all of those shows is an upholding of monogamy as the ideal, even as the participants are exploring polyamory in practice. I'm fascinated by the moment in 2016 when Ben Higgins was the first bachelor ever to say, I I Love You to Two Women. Do you watch The Bachelor? Yeah. Okay. I say I watch it without shame. I started watching it in my PhD program with another friend who was working in Feminist philosophy because we were like- We're flex, but okay. No, but This was back in 2011. And we were like, We need to be watching this for our research. And now, 13 years later, we both just still watch The Bachelor, and I do not have my critical hat on all the time while I'm watching it. But Ben Higgens was the first person ever to say, I love you to two women.

Since then, the vast majority of the bachelors and Bachelorettes who've been on the show have said, I love you to at least two people. Some have even said it to up to three or four people. And I think they're being genuine when they say that. I think they really do love these people. But multiple of them have expressed regret afterwards for saying, I love you to more than one person, saying, I didn't really mean it. Recently, you've seen a turn back towards only saying, I love you to one person, because in the weird bachelor parlance, you know how they can say, I am falling in love with you.

I certainly know. Yes.

Joey, the most recent bachelor, has said, I am falling in love with you to three or four women. But he's only said, I love you to, I think one, maybe two. But I did notice him trying to resist saying, I do love you, which is their version of I love you. They don't say, I love you. They say, I do love to multiple women as well. I think that show, it's showing polyamory, but it's within this monogamous narrative. I think there's something promising and also something deeply disappointing about that because it's almost as though the depiction of polyamory is to stave it off as an actual possibility or as a threat to the show's narrative.

That is very interesting that The Bachelor is actually this polyamorous narrative, shoehorned into a monogamous narrative. Monogamous setup for a mainstream American audience. And I actually think that that is only serving to confuse me more about polyamory because, I guess, of the power dynamics wrapped up in that show.

Yeah. Sometimes managing your money can feel like you're taking two steps forward and then one step back. It's not enough to make a budget. Then you have to pay off debt, invest, figure out what the heck a depreciating asset is. Overwhelming is an understatement.

If you need more fun and less shame when it comes to your money management, check out Frugal Friends podcast. Not in a personal finance podcast?

Good. Because we're struggling Comedy Act masquerading as a personal finance show. What is Two friends hanging out, scouring the internet to bring you real-life perspectives on spending psychology, affordable sustainability, practical minimalism, and just helpful tips to save on almost anything that costs you money. Every Tuesday and Friday, we help you align your money management with your values so you can take the vacations, buy the lattes, all while paying off debt and saving for retirement.

Listen to Frugal Friends podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. So then it's like, just to go back, because when things stop making sense to me, I do like to zoom out to a wider frame of humanity to try and figure out how real is this compared to what people had to say 200 or even 2000 years ago. How did we get here? At one point, did the conventional wisdom turn from you can have multiple different partners for multiple different reasons, to the prevailing philosophy among people who think for a living being monogamy. And when did the legally binding construction of marriage enter the picture?

Yeah, I think this is a place where it's really important for this inquiry to be interdisciplinary because I'm a philosopher, and some of the questions you're asking have really specific historical answers. So I could give a broad picture, but I do think in my work on love, I think it's really important to be in dialog with sociology, biology, history, different disciplines that are also working on these issues. So that's just a meta-level overth point about this question. I appreciate it. But there's a pretty common narrative coming out of evolutionary biology that monogamy developed once humans moved to farming in the Neolithic Revolution. So once we became people who predominantly live in stable communities. Now, take this with a slight grain of salt because evolutionary biology is constantly updating its narratives on this. I think there are reasons to believe that this narrative isn't all there is right now. I'm partway through David Graber and David Wendell's The Dawn of Everything, where they're arguing against some of these Neolithic revolution arguments. The book's not about monogamy, but it's a great big history book, and they take issue with, I think, some details on this. But yeah, common narrative is that we moved to monogamy once we started to be farmers, because then there was a division of labor that emerged where women stayed in the home more and men went out and were farming, as opposed to living in hunter-gatherer bands where women and men were both doing work.

Even if there was a division of labor in the work that they did, oftentimes there was still value that both were producing or finding, discovering. And once we move into that phase of being more domesticated, we might say, there becomes an incentive for women to maintain a hold, let's say, on men because they're dependent on them. Now, another ancient narrative that comes up is that of needing to ensure who the father is of a child.

I've heard of that argument in the context of land inheritance. Yes. Yeah. Like, I looked into this ever so slightly when working on my first book, Wordslut, because I was interested in examining how certain gendered insults developed. And so much of that had to do with the villainization of female sexuality, which aligns with some narratives about women's sexuality becoming demonized once a father needed to be certain of who their child was in order to leave land and riches to them. That was part of my understanding.

I think that is fair to say. I think that's a pretty compelling narrative for which there is, as far as I understand it, pretty decent evidence, because you can imagine that that then leads to a situation in which women's sexuality is policed far more than men's. And indeed, that is what we see throughout much of human history, throughout many, although not all cultures. The idea that monogamy tends to be enforced more strictly for women than for men. The rationale for that being that there needs to be some assurance of paternity. On the other side, you have some people in the evolutionary biology world saying that we were all originally polyamorous, and it didn't really matter who the father was because we all lived in these big kinship communities. And so there are competing debates about that. Either way, I think a place where I'm a bit more comfortable talking about the history is in the 19th century because you get a couple of really interesting developments in the 19th century. In Britain, you have the rise of the Victorian era where the mob model of the mother who stays at home with the children becomes valorized in the development of the Industrial Revolution.

There's this ideal of the bourgeois woman who doesn't have to work at the factory. She can just be at home taking care of the children. And Victorian sexuality, of course, was very uptight, tended to emphasize sexual monogamy for all married people, although in practice, mostly ended up policing the sexuality of bourgeois women. And what you also see a a little bit earlier than that period in the 19th century, is the wedding of the norm of romantic love with that of marriage. For a long time throughout human history in many societies, marriage and love didn't necessarily go together. And then you see in the 19th century, in the wake of the romantic movement, which had started in the 18th century, this emphasis on your marriage being an expression of love.

I can't believe how late that comes along. We think it's been here as long as gravity. The idea marriage and romance and monogamy have always gone together. But it's only 300 years old.

That's wild. At least in the way that we think about it now. And so Simone de Beauvoir, one of the philosophers whom I specialize in working on, She talks about how it seems like that wedding of marriage with love would be a good thing, and it also seems like it would go along with more gender equality, etc. But instead, at least on her view, it ended up actually being negative for people across the board. Oh my God. Because romantic love and marriage were taken to be fused in this monogamous situation. She thinks that eroticism and marriage are better actually kept apart. She was living and writing in the 20th century, especially around the mid-20th century, and was famously in an open relationship for her entire adult life. Oh, my God.

Everybody who's currently married to someone they're not attracted to is like, I feel validated. I'm doing it right.

Yes, but she never got married. So I think her idea would actually just be abolish marriage. Don't do it.

Yeah. That's actually huge to learn because I have historically been... I guess I'm just cringed out by everything because I'm confused and I'm overthinking it because While I feel intimidated by polyculture as it's manifested from my perspective over the past few years, I'm also completely averse to the institution of marriage. I find it an absurd construction. I find it offensive. I did propose to my long-time partner who is male.

Congratulations. Thank you.

But I feel ambivalent about it because of what marriage means culturally. I want us, and he has agreed, lovely man that he is, to define it on our own terms, because I certainly don't appreciate what it has been for the past hundreds of years. But yeah, I guess this is just another example of me feeling squirmy and irresolute about this whole idea. So sorry, Simone de Beauvoir.

No, I think that squirminess and irresoluteness is something that she was intimately familiar with. She actually struggled and talks about this in her early diaries, with pressure to marry from her family, a bourgeois family living in Paris, and her desire not to marry. I think she also struggled throughout her life with the open relationship that she had with Jean Paul Sartre, very famous existentialist as well. So they had this power couple, philosophical relationship. But it was not all sunshine and roses all the time, even though they were very committed to it. When I say it wasn't all sunshine and roses, it's also important to point out that it was profoundly unethical in certain ways, in ways that have caused people, especially really recently to reassess their legacy because, for instance, they had relationships with students, and there was a book that one of their relata wrote about their relationship in, and it seemed like it was quite exploitative for her. I'm not saying that there were these existentialists that you should model your life after because they had the perfect marriage. It's more to say they were really trying to experiment with love, and there were some really beautiful aspects of that, and there were also some really destructive aspects of that.

Yeah. No, it is useful to have all of these data points to triangulate amongst some proposition. So then let me ask, critiques have been levied against non-monogamy's modern commodification or how it's now being used sometimes as a bandaid for relationship dissatisfaction. Do you think these critiques are valid? And how can people interested in and/or currently practicing non-monogamy interrogate themselves to make sure that they're doing it for the most authentic reasons to them. Yeah.

I do think a lot of the criticisms are valid, but I think they're criticisms of other societal factors and not necessarily non-monogamy or polyamory per se. And polyamory being one form of non-monogamy. If we're talking about non-monogamy, we're just talking about something that isn't centralizing dyadic romantically exclusive relationships. So there's a whole spectrum of possibilities there. And when you're talking about your feeling a little bit out of place within the poly community, I mean, I will say I'm not really existing in that community either. And so I think there's a lot of ways to be non-monogamous. But when we're talking about the common critiques, I feel like I know the image you have in mind when you're talking about the poly people who either intimidate you or who I would say one might want to be critical of. For me, I'm just going to go there and paint a picture. Sorry to put anybody on blast here.

No, you do it, not me. Because also it's unflattering to seem like a prude or to seem judgmental. And I feel like I'm not those things. I just like, Which thoughts are mine?

No, this is a person who is probably a pretty well-off, conventionally-attractive white guy who thinks he has it figured out because he's like, Oh, my God, I I just want to hook up with a lot of people and have no responsibilities to any of them. I've discovered I'm polyamorous. That's just me. And then that label gets used as a cover for just basically being a fuckboy. And I think you've seen a bit of a backlash against polyamory among Gen Z in recent years for precisely these reasons. And I think that backlash is misplaced, but I do think it's coming from a genuine place. I think the backlash is misplaced because it's not really about monogamy. The real place where it should be is misogyny and on sexism because- Patriarchy once again.

Exactly. No, it really is. Redirecting patriarchy's critiques at something else once again. Yes.

I think for those who have been socialized as women or those who are femme. It's really, really important for us to go in with both eyes open into any relationship, honestly, especially if we're dating men, and think about the ways that there are going to be tons of layers for all parties involved, despite the best of intentions that have to do with misogyny, patriarchy, and sexism. I think one of the problems that you see within the contemporary rise of non-monogamy is the gamification of dating in general. And this idea that what we're doing is just trying to maximize our sexual and romantic experiences. That's not necessarily of itself patriarchal, but there's a sociologist named Eva Louz, whose work I love on love. And she talks about how what we would now call the gamification of dating, she was writing a little bit before that term came about in some of her earlier works on love, but how what we would now call the gamification ends up actually retrenching patriarchy in pretty significant ways because it maximizes the dating pool for men and minimizes it for women. And there's a long and complicated argument to back that up.

But I think that is something that you see today within polyamory discourse and within the way that it's practiced. I think people have to be really careful. I think in particular, one of the areas that I have worked on in the past as well is that of emotional labor or what I call hermeneutic labor, which is the labor of interpreting others' emotions. And we know that that labor tends to fall disproportionately on the shoulders of women. If it's women who are having to do a lot of the work of interpreting both their emotions and emotions of male partners, even in monogamous relationships, what happens when you're a non-monogamous woman dating maybe multiple men, trying to navigate multiple sets of That is not a great picture.

Now all of a sudden, that T perspective is starting to make sense to me.

Yes, right? And I will say I actually agree with the Tee objection as a way of limiting relationships, but I don't agree with it as a way of limiting relationships to just one. So the time energy, attention, objection to non-monogamy. Maybe I don't agree with the objection so much as I agree with the impulse behind it, because I do think it's totally fair to say that we have limited time, energy, and attention.

Yeah, it's like I'm not Scarlett Johansson in her.

And then It also means that you don't have unlimited time for your friends either, right? Yeah. So we have to be careful about- No, my favorite friends know who they are. So we have to be mindful about which friends we're letting really take up a lot of time, energy, and attention to, or that we're sharing, taking up sounds weird, but you know what I mean.

I absolutely do. Okay, I have a couple more questions, and then we're going to get to a lightning round of thought spirals submitted by our magical overthinker club. Great. Okay, I can't process how quickly non-monogamy has become mainstream over the past few years. To what do you credit this mainstreaming of non-monogamy that seems to have taken place over the past, I don't know, half decade? And do you think it has staying power? What do you think its future will look like?

Yeah, I really wish I knew what the factor or what the main factors were. All I've seen is just that people are starting to talk about it, both in the media and on television and on dating apps. On dating apps? Yes, absolutely. And so I don't know where that stemmed from. It might have just been a knock-on effect that there was something that came out that was influential, and then these other things and books, et cetera. But I do know that in the time that I have been practicing this, I've gone from being the one weird friend to then not being the one weird friend anymore. Actually, I think maybe I'm still the one weird friend. But also being an academic, I don't have specific data on this, but I think it's fair to say that academics skew a bit more non-monogamous than the average. I don't know what the most recent statistics on this are.

Oh, God, I shudder to think my parents are academics.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah, there's so many interesting ways that academics deal with this. But I feel like for me, the first time that I was really exposed to non-monogamous people was when I was in grad school, and it was from friends of mine that I had at the time. This was in the early 2010s. And I had already been interested in non-monogamy because of my interest in Beauvoir. I mean, this is like such a philosopher's classic tale. I first got interested in non-monogamy because I was getting over a breakup and I was devastated because the person that I had been in love with had moved on. And I was like, How did he move on so quickly? I thought he loved me. And I read Simone de Beauvoir and ultimately concluded that him loving somebody else did not mean anything about what our relationship meant. And that monogamous experience was actually my gateway to non-monogamy via the Beauvoir- Jokes on him.

Yeah.

So I feel like even when I was first exploring non-monogamy, There were people around me that were also exploring it within academia. But I think outside of that, yeah, I did not have friends who were doing this. Now it's like everybody who goes to Burning Man comes back polyamorous.

That's what I'm saying. I don't know how to deal with that. Okay, but then I guess My final question before we get into these thought spirals is just, considering this great patriarchal con that is affecting my ability to embrace non-monogamy as much as I maybe authentically otherwise would, how can women, or just anybody who wants to stick it to the man, interrogate themselves and open up conversations with their, say, currently monogamous partner about this subject matter in a way that is not threatening, cringe, et cetera? Yeah.

I love this question because I think there are so many ways to do it. I am not here to proselytize any particular form of non-monogamy. I think I just want to encourage to view their relationships in a way that's disrupting the traditional upholding of a single monogamous couple as the ultimate form of life. This is what the philosopher Elizabeth Brake calls a matter normativity. Which is instead of heteronormativity, a matter normativity is the norm of thinking that romantic love is the be all end all. I think the way that people can explore nonmonogamous practices in their own life without necessarily becoming sexually or otherwise emotional intimacy-wise open, is to just reframe how we're engaging in relationships. Question, why is it that I am thinking about my partner as always being my top priority relative to friends or other people. And that's not to say that somebody's partner is always their priority anyway, but just to be questioning if and when that does emerge or if you're single, how can you relate to your singleness in a way that is either appreciating it or seeing the richness of other relationships that aren't romantic relationships in your life, all of those different mindset shifts, we might say.

And then I think that also has implications for how we're conceiving of our social institutions and our laws as well. I think one way that people can interrogate their own monogamous assumptions is in how easily we often take for granted the fact that you can only share your health care plan with one person, a live-in spouse. I had to fill out my health care renewal recently and realize that there's literally something in it that says, If you don't have only one partner who lives with you, you can't share your health care plan with them. And then there are also laws around how many adults can co-own a home, and that tends to disadvantage people who are in polyamorous families. There's a long history of polyamory that is not, of course, all rosy. A lot of forms of polyamory, especially traditional polygamy, have tended to be very tightly bound up with sexism. Rather than saying, If you're monogamous, you're regressive, and we all need to be moving towards polyamory, just to question the way that amount of normativity shows up in our own lives and in the social institutions and laws that we have, I think is a good place to start.

Totally. I think that some of these laws and the ways that Amado normativity, I love that. It sounds like a dessert. I'm in order like, I will have the Amato normativity. The other day, I was listening to this song that I'm newly absolutely obsessed with. It's a very romantic song. Its lyrics are like, If I didn't love you, then what would I do? Love isn't easy, but I don't know who I would be if I didn't have you. I guess now that I'm thinking about it, we are so inundated from birth with all of these Amado normative monogamy-centered love songs. What if from birth, all of the love songs that we heard glorified polyamory as this normal, wholesome, aspirational thing that wasn't easy, but maybe made room for so many other types of connections and experiences. Does that make sense? Yeah. Which actually makes me feel like another one of the ways that some of this Amado normativity is baked into our culture as the default, sometimes keeps people in monogamous relationships that are really imprisoning towards them. In my new book, I have a chapter called A Toxic Relationship is Just a Cult of One, in which I describe how the sunk cost fallacy, and now it sounds like a motto normativity, really affected my inability to justify leaving this monogamous relationship that felt very cult-like to me.

And so even if you decide that you don't want to be polyamorous, you can even question how monogamy norms are keeping you in a relationship that might not even be right for you.

Totally. Or if you're having a dinner party, are you only inviting other couple friends? Or are you also thinking about having a group there that's not just made up of couples?

Totally. Okay. Thank you so much for answering all of those questions. And now- Thank you.

They're great questions.

Thanks. Thank you. They're just things like the haunt me night. So now we're going to transition into having you react to some thought spirally questions and comments that my magical overthinking listeners submitted on Instagram. Okay. The first one is, is monogamy explicitly connected to reproduction, or is there something else about heterosexual relationships that equals monogamy more queer relationships.

Okay. So I don't think that monogamy is necessarily more tied to heterosexuality than it is to queer approaches or queerness. But I also think that in as much as monogamy tends to be justified for a lot of people based on somewhat spurious evolutionary biological arguments about the naturalness of jealousy, especially for men, it gets coopted in ways that tie them together. I do also think that a lot of the most interesting and compelling explorations of non-monogamy are happening in queer communities. I do think that when you look to different queer communities, what you often find for a long time is really interesting and juicy, painful, but also compelling explorations of non-monogamy that the straight community can really learn a lot from.

It's the queering of so many things, seeing as you're already otherized in some way. So that with a lot of downsides, but also maybe a little bit more freedom to get creative. Yeah. Okay. Another thought spiral goes, Painting the issue as polyamory versus monogamy can be harmful without being super clear that all relationships are different and being polyamorous doesn't necessarily mean one thing. I guess what could be helpful is more labels, or not even labels, but ways to communicate these nuances with as much brevity as possible.

Yeah. Well, on the point of brevity, you sure do have a lot of acronyms as labels on the dating apps. Tell me about it. Open up field, and it's just acronym after acronym. Tell me about it. Which people have to even Google.

No, what is it? M-m-f-m-m-f-f-m-f-m. If that acronym means something to you, You're a freak.

So there is brevity going on and a proliferation of labels. I think the point about monogamy and polyamory not being opposites is so important, though, because I think what we get out of the philosophical work that's being done on this is that monogamy is a concept that has positive content. I gave a clear and coherent definition of it. But non-monogamy is really just the inverse of that, which means that it's a negative or what philosophers like to call a privative concept. It's just a lack of monogamy. Whereas polyamory is a concept with positive conceptual content, too. And so some people would define polyamory as having multiple romantic and/or sexual relationships at the same time. Others would define it as having an orientation towards those. There are different ways that you could parse this. But I think the polyamory community, at least as it's been practiced by people and popularized in the media, tends to be mostly about sexual and romantic relationships. So people who are non-monogamous but asexual or aromantic, I don't think have found an easy place within the polyamory community. And so I do think that seeing polyamory as one form of non-monogamy rather than just as the opposite of monogamy is important.

On the topic of labels, contrasting the point that the prior thought spiral made, someone else submitted, I actually think there's an obsession with overth thinking about polyamory, especially in the queer community, and this thought spiraler does identify as a part of that community, people overlabel it and overcomplicate it. A woman I met on a dating app announced to me, I'm not open, but homo-flexible poly Polyfidelitus. My relationships are non-hierarchical and closed. It was so confusing and off-putting to me. Did she really think I was going to be like, Oh my God, me too? She just seemed to want to use it to talk about herself.

Okay. I also have questions about why this woman was on the app. Maybe they were looking for somebody else to bring into the polyfidelitus relationship, because for listeners who don't know, polyfidelity is a polyamorous relationship structure where you are exclusive within your polycule or your pot. And so you can have sex maybe with the five people that are in the polycule, but not beyond that. I feel like the source of that, I would say, is the fact that on the one hand, to be non monogamous is still to be in a minority in the US and a minority that is looked down upon in a lot of ways. And on the other hand, is also getting a lot of press recently, such that in certain quarters, it's seen as trendy or cool to experiment with it. I think it's a bit odd to call it an orientation myself, but I do think the best argument for calling it an identity is to say that we need to normalize it in our society. I think if we had a bit more of that normalization, there wouldn't be such an emphasis on exactly what brand are you?

What La Croix flavor of non-monogamous are you? Totally.

I can't comment on the polyamorous subcategories, but I have seen a bid for similar some might say overcomplicated, or maybe let's just say maximalist and robust, taxonomies for different types of queer identities. I mean, we love categorizing things as a species. It makes life feel more manageable, more predictable. It helps us make quick judgments about certain microcategories enough to understand them, or at least create the illusion of understanding enough. I noticed that even just 10 years ago, you could come across queer label dictionaries that were as thick as Miriam Webster, where people were... Exactly what you're saying, because being straight and cis is the default, there were all these bids at differentiation only because it wasn't as accepted just to be anything other than straight and cis. And now that I find in our culture that that is becoming more accepted and no one really cares about the details as much, the need for those labels or the desire to craft those labels is waning. So perhaps we'll see a similar bursting of the taxonomy bubble with to polyamory versus monogamy in the near future.

Yeah. And I do understand the need for that, too, because it also ends up being a way of marking out who's closer to the norm such that they benefit from certain social privileges and who might find themselves not benefiting from those same privileges. Right.

I guess, though, at a certain point, if the phrase homoflexible polyfidelitus falls in the woods and nobody can understand it, does it even have meaning? I don't know. Okay, I'm going to do a couple more. This is going to be more lightning round. I'm just going to communicate a thought spiral from one of these magical overthinkers, and you'll just simply say whether you agree or disagree. Monogamous are just too selfish for polyamory.

I can't say agree, but I wouldn't say I entirely disagree.

Yeah, be honest.

No, I think I disagree, but there's a vibe that I'm really here for.

I think there's a negative connotation to selfish, but we're all selfish about something. Some people don't want to share their food. They're like monogamous eaters, I guess. Okay, the main modern purpose of monogamy is to survive capitalism with joint finances and full-time companionship.

These are so hard to just say agree or disagree with.

Challenging you.

I think I'm going to skew agree on that one.

I skew agree. Monogamy feels like a way for us to deal with the fact that life is uncertain and there's no such thing as forever. So we like to look for that in our romantic relationships.

Agree. As an existentialist, I want to get rid of that illusion of certainty, though.

Fair. Totally fair. Okay, this last one is spicy. This is actually from a friend of mine who will remain nameless. But this person says, Every other queer person I know is now insisting that monogamy is dead, and they're all trying to be poly but are miserable. I'm not so sure it works for most people. Being poly is certainly a thing, but not something I think we need to collectively take up as the superior way of loving.

Agree. You can't just force your feelings into a mold, like we talked about, shaping them over time is a complicated process. Agree.

Amazing. Okay, I just have one concluding question for you, which is just, what is the one thing about monogamy that you think people are overthinking the worst? And what is the one thing that you think people are underthinking the worst?

I think they're overthinking jealousy the worst. There are two very prominent philosophers, Aristotle and Michel De Monteyne, who were monogamous about friendship. They believe that you could have only one complete complete friend, basically because of the T situation, the time, energy, and attention. Oh, my God.

They were the original #NoNewFriends.

Yes, basically. And I think that we're living in a weird situation now where that's become the default for are erotic and emotionally intimate partnerships that we call romantic. And I think jealousy is just like, yeah, it's a tough feeling to face. It's a weird feeling to face. We have a lot of tools within contemporary psychology to help us face it and to help us gradually overcome it. And so I think people are overthinking the role that jealousy plays as an enforcer of monogamy, especially because, as we mentioned, plenty of monogamous relationships do not avoid jealousy.

Such a good point.

I think what people are underthinking, and this definitely goes for the rise of polyamory in public discourse today, is the way that monogamy actually ends up structuring all of our relationships because of its valorization of the hierarchical couple form and that amount of normativity. And that when we're thinking about monogamy, we're actually talking about a whole social structure that is grounded in capitalism, that is grounded in patriarchy and in other forces as well, in classism, certainly like this bourgeois ideal. And so I would say we're really underthinking the way that monogamy is not just a specific formation.

It's not just natural or un-natural.

Exactly. And the polyamory is some opposite to that because as we mentioned, non-monogamy is such a vast topic.

Amazing. If folks want to keep up with you and all the overthinking that you engage in, where can they find you?

Thank you. Well, you can certainly listen and subscribe to Overthink. We're on all of the podcast platforms as well as on YouTube. I'm on social media as Elieander PhD, and also we have our overthink_pod account. So I would be delighted to stay in touch with all of you listening in. Incredible.

Thank you, listeners, for tuning in. Now is the point in the episode where I share a tidbit of evidence-based advice for how we, overthinkers, can get out of our own heads this week. The following is a fun fact that I included in a footnote in the Age of Magical Overthinking, and it came up a lot while I was on the first leg of my book tour. It has to do with the power of crafting, specifically, knitting, to help us get out of our own heads. If you are an overthinker, needles and fabric, as it turns out, do wonders for the spirit. About 10 years ago, a study published in the British Journal of Occupational Therapy surveyed over 3,500 knitters and actually found that 81% of participants with depression reported feeling happy post-knitting. More than 50% said that they felt very happy. A much newer study out of the University of Gothenburg, I will link it in our show notes, said that knitting brings a sense of calm and serves to provide life with structure. It is a creative coping mechanism and also a repetitive action that has similar benefits to mindfulness meditation. I actually noticed at my bookstore events for the Age of Magical Overthinking that several readers brought their knitting to the event and were knitting as I was in conversation with my interlocutors, which I found really cozy.

As I continue to read about the mental health upsides of knitting, I'm starting to think that I could potentially really stand benefit from this activity. That is the magical overthinker's nugget of wisdom that I have to share for the week. I am still in the process of coining an outro. Speaking of crafting, I thought I would invite us all to help craft this outro together Several listeners were kind enough to DM the magical overthinker's Instagram account with some ideas for a zingy, memorable magical overthinker's outro. The one from my other podcast, Sounds Like A Cult, is just stay culty, but not too culty. I have a couple options for outros that I'm toying with. Maybe you all can vote on your favorite. Feel free to slide into our DMs on Instagram or comment on today's post. One option was, Until next time, remember, think it over. Just don't overthink it. Another one was, And until next time, thanks for spiraling with me, or something like that. Please do feel free to message me with any ideas that you can think of, even rough ones, sloppy ones. There are no bad pitches. Hope you tune in in another two weeks for our next episode.

And in the meantime, this is definitely not me overthinking my intro. Magical Overthinkers was created and hosted by Amanda Montell and edited by Jordan Moore of the Pod cabin. Our theme music is by Casey Kolb. Thank you to our magical coordinator, Katie Eberson, producer, Rebecca Swann, and Network Studio 71. Be sure to follow the pod on Instagram at Magical Overthinkers. We're also on YouTube, link in show notes, and ad-free episodes as well as behind-the-scenes extras are available on the Magical Overthinkers sub stack at amandamontell. Substack. Com.