from Hypatia Volume 13, Number 4

Monogamy, Nonmonogamy, and Identity

CHRISTINE OVERALL

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After a brief discussion of the terms ''monogamy'' and ''nonmonogamy,'' I evaluate explanations offered by different theorists for the pain that nonmonogamy can cause to the partner (especially a female partner) of a nonmonogamous person (of either sex). My suggestion is that the self, especially the female self, is conventionally defined in terms of sexual partners. I present and reply to a possible objection to this explanation, and then discuss my theory's normative implications.

There are some persons for whom monogamous practices, and others for whom nonmonogamous practices, are in no way problematic. I, however, am interested in attempting to understand why both monogamy and nonmonogamy continue to be, and be seen as, problematic for many of their participants, especially for women. My aim here is to try to account for the persistence of the issues--even, or especially, for feminists--and their associated ideologies, structures, and feelings, in particular the phenomena of jealousy and possessiveness.

While nonmonogamy has sometimes appeared to be more ''liberated'' and liberating than monogamy, for some, perhaps many, of those affected by non monogamous practices, it can also occasion tremendous distress (e.g., Eskapa 1984, 34). The person who is ''cheated on'' can feel profound jealousy, desperation, and hopelessness, and even women cast in the role of ''other woman'' may suffer grief and pain over sharing their lover (Richardson 1985, 95-97, 117-21). Here, I want to consider possible explanations and interpretations of the situation where a person, especially a woman, who may well have no objections to nonmonogamous behavior on an intellectual level, nevertheless feels deeply hurt when she learns that her partner has not been monogamous.

The existence of a powerful heterosexist ideology promoting monogamy is insufficient to account for these feelings. It is not enough to claim that monogamy, with its accompanying jealousy and possessiveness, ''stem[s] from patriarchal notions of men's property rights over women'' (Betsy Kassoff in ''Non? Monogamy?'' 1985, 102). Many women who are self-identified feminists have told me that although they understand, in theory, the patriarchal origins of the practice of monogamy, they are nonetheless unable to free themselves of their socialization to the extent of being able to countenance nonmonogamous relationships for their lovers or even for themselves, even after a deliberate agreement to such an arrangement (Hamilton 1990, 85). Yet such women have successfully disencumbered themselves from many other aspects of patriarchal ideology, including those that govern women's work, reproduction, and motherhood. For heterosexual feminists as for lesbians, merely being told that one should not be concerned about monogamy is not enough to prevent its being a live issue in their lives. Why does nonmonogamy continue to pose such problems for these women? How can the profound possessiveness and jealousy often associated with sexual relationships be understood in feminist terms?

I attempt to answer the aforementioned questions within the following structure: First, I provide brief discussions and definitions of the terms ''monogamy'' and ''nonmonogamy.'' I present and evaluate some explanations offered by different theorists for the pain that nonmonogamy can cause to the partner of the nonmonogamous person. Because these explanations prove to be inadequate, I propose my own interpretation, which involves a claim about the cultural construction of women's identity. I then present and reply to a possible objection to this proposal, and I conclude by discussing the proposal's normative implications.

I. DEFINITIONS

It is difficult even to define ''monogamy'' and ''nonmonogamy,'' partly because of the political baggage that the words already carry. Monogamy derived its original significance within the practice of marriage. For example, in dictionaries of English usage, ''monogamy'' is usually defined as ''the practice or state of being married to one person at a time,'' and is contrasted with ''polygamy,'' defined as ''having more than one wife or husband at the same time'' (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, new ed.). Most standard philosophical evaluations of monogamy discuss it as a feature of contemporary marriage, and sociological studies focus on the ''extramarital affair.'' Although now a nonmarital heterosexual relationship may meaningfully be described as monogamous or nonmonogamous, in philosophical discussions the benefits and liabilities attributed to monogamy are seldom separated from those attributed to the institution of marriage (Palmer 1984; Bayles 1984).¹ The result is often a persistent heterosexism within the analyses, best represented by Herbert Strean's categorical claim that ''[m]ost individuals who rebel against marriage and monogamy are angry and unhappy people who understandably rationalize their objections.... They need therapeutic help so that they can mature and derive genuine pleasure from living'' (1980, 205).

Moreover, given their patriarchal origins, the concepts of monogamy and nonmonogamy may seem particularly inappropriate to the discussion of feminist and lesbian relationships. As Julia Penelope insists,

Lesbians and feminists continue to use words like monogamy and nonmonogamy as if they made sense within a ''feminist'' conceptual framework, when, in fact, they make no sense, especially when they're being used to describe Lesbian relationships! Monogamy means, literally, ''marriage to one [woman],'' and its contrastive term is polygamy, which means ''marriage to more than one [woman].'' I've added the word woman, in brackets, here because only men ever have the option of being married to more than one [woman]. These terms assume that women are the property of the men who marry them. Both monogamy and nonmonogamy name heteropatriarchal institutions within which the only important information is: how many women can a man legitimately own? Since the question of ''ownership'' is supposed to be a non-question in feminist and Lesbian-feminist relationships, I want to know why so many wimmin who claim to have a ''raised consciousness'' persist in using such words when they're supposed to know better? (Penelope 1985, 35-36, italics in original)

Yet feminists and lesbians² do find the concepts of monogamy and nonmonogamy of absorbing interest, for good or ill, and there is no dearth of discussion of these issues within the context of lesbian and heterosexual relationships.

Here, discussion of monogamy will not presuppose that it must be defined in terms of formal marriage (an institution that raises a number of interesting additional issues of its own [McMurtry 1984]) or in terms of heterosexual relationships. I shall to some extent set aside the differences between heterosexual and lesbian relationships. Part of the difficulty of researching and writing about issues of monogamy and nonmonogamy is that most contemporary literature on the subject focuses either on heterosexual monogamy and nonmonogamy,³ especially within the institution of marriage, or upon monogamy and nonmonogamy within lesbian relationships.⁴ I shall attempt to work across that division. Of course, I am not unaware of the significant dissimilarities, particularly the power differences, between heterosexual and lesbian relationships, even when heterosexual relationships are not given the social blessing of legal marriage. Nevertheless, I believe that with respect to this issue, where intimacy, self-identity, possessiveness, competition, and jealousy find a ready expression, there may be fewer differences than usual between women involved in a heterosexual relationship and women involved in a lesbian relationship.

Certain other ways of defining ''monogamy'' and ''nonmonogamy'' also introduce, in a partisan fashion, ethical and ontological issues that should not be prejudged. Thus, if monogamy is said to be commitment to an exclusive sexual/romantic relationship with one person, the words ''commitment'' and ''exclusive'' may suggest, falsely, both that nonmonogamy cannot involve commitment and that monogamy shuts others out by excluding them. Alternatively, if monogamy is defined in terms of faithfulness to one person, the implication may seem to be that fidelity is not involved in nonsexual relationships, or that becoming sexually intimate with more than one person involves a breaking of faith, or that it is only possible to be faithful to one person at a time. (In rejecting this assumption, some feminists use the word ''poly-fidelity'' instead of nonmonogamy.) ''Fidelity,'' ''commitment,'' and ''exclusivity'' are obviously loaded terms.

In what follows, therefore, ''monogamy'' will minimally mean a pattern by an individual of sexual interactions with only one other person during a given period within that individual's life, while ''nonmonogamy'' will mean a pattern by an individual of sexual interactions with more than one person during a given period within the individual's life.

Monogamous behavior may have many precursors. It might, for example, be a consequence of a lack of available desirable other partners; it might be imposed by one's partner as a condition of the continuation of the relationship; it might be a response to a request from one's partner, or negotiations with her or him. Or, it might be an independent choice, founded upon moral or religious principles independent of the person with whom one is in a relationship. What I am primarily interested in, however, is not so much the different ways by which monogamous behavior originates, but rather, the significance of the situation in which a monogamous person wants and believes her partner to be monogamous and, subsequently, discovers that the partner is not monogamous.

II. NONMONOGAMY AND PAIN: EXPLANATIONS

What accounts for the powerful and painful feelings of anger, abandonment, jealousy, and grief that are often occasioned when a monogamous person learns that her partner is nonmonogamous? I shall consider and assess three standard explanations: the role of the promise of exclusivity; cultural conventions about scarcity; and psychoanalytic explanations.

One possible explanation, then, is the fact that in many forms of nonmonogamy, a promise, explicit or implicit, has been violated. Because the keeping of promises is still held in high regard, the breaking of this promise is an indication of general unreliability. Richard Wasserstrom, for example, attempts to construct arguments for the wrongfulness of adultery by pointing to the deceptive and promise-breaking behavior that it ordinarily entails. Adulterous behavior, he says, may be perceived as a manifestation of ''a kind of indifference,'' as ''an additional rejection,'' and as ''the intentional infliction of substantial pain'' (Wasserstrom 1984, 95).

But the question remains why promising sexual exclusivity is considered important in the first place. What is interesting is not only that the breaking of the promise is usually painful for the person who expected commitment, but also that this sort of promise is generally regarded as necessary, inevitable, and desirable. Why does a commitment to monogamy often appear to be essential to making the sexual relationship secure?

Wasserstrom's answer is that ''sexual intimacy is one of the chief currencies through which gifts [of oneself] are exchanged'' (1984, 96-97). He describes the ''correlation'' of love and sexual intimacies as ''natural'' for women, although not for men, but offers no evidence or explanation for this claim; in the end, Wasserstrom professes to be unable to say whether there is ''something about love in general that links it naturally and appropriately with feelings of exclusivity and possession'' (1984, 101).

Other writers, however, have insisted that the pain experienced by the ''betrayed'' partner is a consequence of cultural beliefs and conventions about love and sexually intimate relationships. The possessiveness often associated with monogamous relationships, they suggest, appears to be founded upon questionable assumptions of finitude: that love and intimacy are scarce and limited resources, and if another person gets love and intimacy from one's loved one, there won't be enough--or any--left for oneself. ''[M]onogamous sexual relationships [are] privatized and 'coupley': they set up barriers which [keep] other people out, as well as imprisoning the couple. They elevate[ ] one kind of relationship above all others, and this narrow[s] the scope of other kinds of friendships'' (Cartledge 1983, 174). The very notion of ''cheating'' in the context of sexual behavior suggests depriving someone of something through fraud or deceit, or the dishonest violation of rules. The nonmonogamous person owes something to her lover, something that is defined by the socially-sanctioned rules of the relationship, and she then takes it and gives it to someone else. There appears to be a limited amount of love, sexual activity, intimacy, commitment, and attention to go around. The implicit economic metaphor, consistent with capitalist culture, suggests that spending in one location means less for another. One person's gain is another's loss, and relationships are zero-sum games.

According to this explanation, monogamous, exclusive relationships are simultaneously a way of coping with fears of isolation, loss, and rejection, and a means of generating such fears. By creating the opportunity for ''infidelity,'' they also create the opportunity to be hurt further. Thus, McMurtry argues that the pain of the ''cheated'' partner springs from the depth of the cultural prohibition of infidelity: ''[O]ne is led to speculate that the intensity and extent of jealousy at a partner's extramarital sexual involvement is in direct proportion to the severity of the accepted cultural regulations against such involvements. In short such regulations do not prevent jealousy so much as effectively engender it'' (1984, 116-117, endnote 10). Similarly, Lynn Atwater claims that reactions to nonmonogamy are determined by our culture's ''feeling rules,'' which are perceived as ''the only correct emotions to feel when discovering our spouses' infidelity'' (1982, 19).

McMurtry and Atwater are correct at least in so far as, in contemporary culture, the anxiety about finite human resources often has a practical basis. An explicit or implicit promise of monogamy seems like insurance about the future availability of an apparently or potentially scarce commodity: sexual intimacy. Realistically, from the point of view of a monogamous person, the commencement of a nonmonogamous relationship by her partner or lover may seem to have a high probability of leading at least to the loss of some of the lover's time and attention, and at worst to the total loss of the lover. The experience of women such as Simone de Beauvoir, who cherished a life-long commitment to Jean Paul Sartre even while each of them conducted ongoing ''contingent'' sexual affairs with others (which nonetheless often afforded her considerable pain) (Francis and Gontier 1987), suggests that it is possible and useful to distinguish between sexual exclusivity and possession, on the one hand, and on the other, the creation of a long-term, even life-long project with another person. When one is sure of the permanence of the life-long project, perhaps sexual exclusivity matters less. Present cultural conditions, however, encourage women to fear imminent loss of the loved one when s/he begins a sexual relationship with another person. When simultaneous relationships are not recognized and validated, and when material conditions make unavailable the time and energy necessary to cultivate them, the only alternative to lifelong monogamy may appear to be serial monogamy. So when a partner begins a new sexual relationship, it is likely the beginning of the end for the old. When, in addition, there is a relationship of economic/material dependence of the monogamous partner on the person who has begun another relationship, the fear of loss takes on an even more terrifying dimension.

However, this explanation, in terms of cultural conventions about and consequences arising from scarcity, may not be powerful enough to account for the pain that is often caused by nonmonogamous behavior even when the original relationship is sustained. Nor does it account for the specifically sexual nature of romantic possessiveness. As a result, some theorists have offered psychoanalytic speculations that the depths of these feelings may come from very early experiences and sexual hurts related to one's relationships with one's parents, especially the mother. ''Where the site of control and abandon is the body, the demands of the infant self are most visible...'' (Benjamin 1988, 51). For most human beings, the mother was the first great love, the first ''one and only,'' who cared most intensively for their bodily and emotional needs and wants. For a limited time, at least, mother seemed to be all one's own, one's possession, a loved entity scarcely separate from oneself, who existed only to fulfill one's own needs. The pain of the ultimate realization that mother had a separate existence, had other needs, wants, and interests, could not be exclusively one's own, it is claimed, may remain buried within people's sense of themselves, laying a foundation for future competitions and vulnerabilities in human relationships, and a longing for the restoration of that old apparently-exclusive relationship. People want to return to the original oneness, the absence of boundaries, the community and communing that constituted the relationship with the woman who created them (Joyce Trebilcot in ''Non? Monogamy?'' 1985, 85-87; Ryan 1983, 201-202). Nancy Chodorow refers to the theory that

the return to the experience of primary love--the possibility of regressing to the infantile stage of a sense of oneness, no reality testing, and a tranquil sense of well-being in which all needs are satisfied--is a main goal of adult sexual relationships: 'This primary tendency, I shall be loved always, everywhere, in every way, my whole body, my whole being--without any criticism, without the slightest effort on my part--is the final aim of all erotic striving.' (Chodorow 1978, 194)

On the basis of this explanation, the suffering occasioned by sexual nonexclusivity may not be inevitable or unavoidable. To the extent that the adult/infant relationship, particularly the mother/infant relationship, is a product of existing norms governing child-rearing and gender role socialization in the contemporary North American family (Rossiter 1988), there is nothing inevitable and natural about the relationship; it--and its outcomes--may be subject to change.

However, attractive as this explanation may seem, it also assumes an idyllic view of infancy that may not accord with the realities of infant experience. Not enough is understood about infancy and the perspective of the little child, as well as about the extent to which early perceptions and distress persist, to be able to know whether or not or to what extent these experiences play a role in adult perceptions of and reactions to monogamy and nonmonogamy.

III. NONMONOGAMY AND IDENTITY

I suggest it is possible to account for the possessiveness associated with monogamy and the pain occasioned by nonmonogamy by looking more closely at the determinants, structures, and conventions of adult sexual relationships as they are lived and experienced in patriarchal society. ''[I]t seems that in contemporary culture, sexuality is nearly always, but not invariably, linked to identity'' (Person 1980, 49). Sex is, or at least is made to seem, part of individuality, and the start of sexual experience is commonly thought to mark the development of a more mature identity (Atwater 1982, 143). A sexual relationship cultivated for its own sake (rather than, let's say, for the sake of income or personal survival) represents in part a choice about the kind of person one is going to be, either for the short-term or the long-term.⁵

According to patriarchal conventions and norms, while both women and men define themselves partly in terms of their sexuality, they are expected to differ in how those selves are constructed. Masculine culture encourages men to see sexual activity as definitive of maleness. There is a phallic focus on performance.⁶ ''Insofar as sexuality is a major component in the maintenance of gender, it is crucial to identity. There is a wealth of clinical evidence to suggest that, in this culture, genital sexual activity is a prominent feature in the maintenance of masculine gender while it is a variable feature in feminine gender. Thus an impotent man always feels that his masculinity, and not just his sexuality, is threatened'' (Person 1980, 50). A man's self-concept may be shattered if he is ''impotent'' (a strikingly revealing term in itself) or if a woman in his life has sex with someone else, because then he is no longer performing as a man should. (This is not to deny the pain that men may feel over sexual relationships gone wrong, but only to suggest that its cultural construction may often be different from that of women.)

Women are encouraged, more than men, to define themselves not so much through sexual activity per se, but by reference to the person(s) with whom they are sexual. The convention of sexual relating, outside of paid sex work, is that in that context the woman expresses herself, becomes and is most truly and genuinely herself. In a sexual relationship, the sexual partner is the focus of attention in a special way. According to Marilyn Frye, ''Attention is a kind of passion. When one's attention is on something, one is present in a particular way with respect to that thing. This presence is, among other things, an element of erotic presence'' (Frye 1983, 172).

In many sexual experiences, not only are one's physical/bodily boundaries crossed, but also one's emotional/identificational boundaries. There is an opening up of the person to receive and encompass the other. The individual becomes a person who is in part defined by the sexual connections she makes. Because, inWestern culture, sexual relating is defined as the ultimate form of intimacy, the result in women's romantic/sexual relationships is often an expansion of the sense of self to include those with whom they have sexual relationships.

A sexual relationship then becomes a form of chosen vulnerability. As enforced access is the heart of dominance, so chosen and willing openness and vulnerability are the heart of erotic unity. Hence, in a sexual/romantic relationship, a woman may become stronger, but also more vulnerable, because of her sexual partner. That openness is the precursor of the feeling (illusory though it may often be) of oneness and mutuality of interaction, which develops from the balance of separation and fusion (Benjamin 1988, 29).

Women, I suggest, are generally expected to incorporate the sexual partner into their own identity. The social construction of women to encompass those with whom they are sexual is reinforced, for heterosexual women, by the definition of the heterosexual couple as the building block of the culture, a definition that contributes to the isolation of the couple as a social unit and the privatization of the relationship. For lesbians, merging or fusing with one's lover may be especially problematic in relationships that are highly closeted (Rotenberg 1989).

That this self-definition by reference to sexual partners is the functioning of conventions of sexual relating is suggested by the contrast to the conventions of sex work, in which women define themselves by reference to the paid labor they perform rather than by reference to the men with whom they interact, and usually choose not to be vulnerable, self-expressive, or genuinely open. Sex workers' perspective on their labor is not a distortion of the way sexual relating ''really'' is, but rather another way of structuring sexual relating, in particular, a way of dealing with an unequal and sometimes oppressive relationship. By contrast, noncommercial sex is supposed to be nonoppressive (though it often is not), and hence the conventions of sexual openness apply to it.

To the extent that this ontological convention is adhered to, the incorporation within the female self of the person(s) with whom she is sexual helps to account for the pain that a partner's nonmonogamous behavior can produce. ''Parents of four, five, six, or even ten children can certainly claim, and sometimes claim correctly, that they love all of their children, that they love them all equally, and that it is simply untrue to their feelings to insist that the numbers involved diminish either the quantity or the quality of their love'' (Wasserstrom 1984, 100). Why are similar relationships far more difficult in the case of multiple sexual interactions? I suggest that the significant difference turns on whether or not the relationships are chosen. Even when they are originally unsought and unplanned, beloved children are in an important way a chosen and willed project of their parents, who undertake to admit them to their lives. Similarly, a woman who freely takes on a second sexual relationship in addition to one she already has is likely to feel a comparable expansion of her identity, or even a claiming or reclaiming of self. She has chosen to take into her self another person; she has chosen to expand the boundaries of her person: ''The benefits of nonmonogamy that women described were an intense sexuality, the sense of emotional growth, discovery of different sides of yourself through different people, and a feeling of independence'' (Kassoff in ''Non? Monogamy?'' 1985, 101).⁷

From the point of view of a monogamous woman whose partner is nonmonogamous, however, the partner's new sexual relationship may affect her own identity in ways over which she has no control; it is likely to appear as an invasion and violation of her person, a threat to her dignity, wholeness, and integrity. When the monogamous person says, of her lover, ''I'm selfish; I don't want to share,'' she may not necessarily be thinking of her lover as a child thinks of a toy or a bag of candy. She may rather be saying that she does not choose to share herself, to extend herself to include this new person, who is not a chosen part of her self-assumed identity.

According to Sarah Lucia Hoagland, ''I am present or I am not at any given moment, and that I am later present elsewhere does not change the nature of my earlier presence'' (1988, 171). However, the person with whom one is sexually present often changes who one is, and the refocusing and redirection of attention almost inevitably affects how one is sexually present with other people. When a monogamous woman's partner is, without her assent, nonmonogamous, then not only is the monogamous woman's self invaded; it is invaded independently of her own will. Someone else has been introduced into the original dyad whom the monogamous partner did not choose and does not want. Moreover, the new person who has been introduced did not choose her either,and presumably does not want her. Thus, the new relationship undertaken by the nonmonogamous partner acquires enforced access to the monogamous person's life. This fact helps to account for the correctness of Richard Taylor's observation that the role of this new person may loom even larger than ''the role of the person to whom one jealously tries to cling'' (Taylor 1982, 143; also see Eskapa 1984). What is important in feelings of jealousy and possessiveness in response to a partner's nonmonogamous behavior is not, or not only, the loved one, the loved one's ''betrayal,'' and one's feelings about both of these, but also the perceived intruder, the sexual partner of one's sexual partner, and one's feelings about her or him.

In response to this explanation, it might be objected that relationships are not transitive: A friend of my friend need not be my friend; a lover of my lover need not be my lover. Why then would my sexual partner's new lover affect my identity? And why would my sexual partner's new lover affect my identity any more than it would be affected if my sexual partner takes up the cello, becomes a vegetarian, or changes careers? All of these actions on the part of my sexual partner are likely to have an effect on me beyond my control, yet they would not likely arouse my jealousy, and people would be unlikely to be sympathetic if I did not want my partner to change in these ways.⁸

My suggestion is that the self, especially the female self, is conventionally defined in terms of sexual partners. But if cello-playing, vegetarianism, or a new career required from one's sexual partner the intimacy that sexual behavior usually does (and sometimes activities such as these can make this demand), then I submit that it could be almost equally threatening and painful to the lover of the person engaged in these things, and the lover might become jealous. The reason is that in such cases, these activities could become parts of the sexual partner's self. However, there are fewer social conventions, expectations, and pressures that make it likely that cello-playing, vegetarianism, or even one's career will be incorporated into the female self in the way that sexual partners more standardly are. Moreover, engagement with music, with a special diet, or with professional pursuits is not the same as engagement with a person. Hence, my sexual partner's cello-playing does not make me vulnerable to enforced intimacy with a cello in the way that I may be vulnerable to enforced intimacy with another person through my sexual partner's nonmonogamous behavior. At least under present conventions, a woman is more likely to incorporate sexual partners within her identity; her self includes, or even is defined by, not the sexual activities themselves but the self or selves of sexual partners.

The monogamous person with a nonmonogamous partner thus finds herself in a kind of forced relating,⁹ which seems inevitably to change the meaning of the original relationship. While the nonmonogamous person has gained by the freely-chosen expansion of his or her personal boundaries, the monogamous person has lost through the violation of her self-definition. It is sexual conventions that make possible the pain occasioned by nonmonogamy, but these conventions operate at the deepest level of our creation and understanding of ourselves.

IV. MONOGAMY, NONMONOGAMY, AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

The perspective sketched so far suggests that although there is nothing inherently morally superior about monogamy, the development of sexual relationships under patriarchy is such that one's partner's nonmonogamy may cause considerable pain, especially for women. The ideologies of monogamy and nonmonogamy reflect cultural notions of who women and men are supposed to be. To the extent that persons, especially women, define themselves in terms of their lovers, nonmonogamous behavior by their partners is likely to cause harm. The conventional ontology for female selfhood thus creates the occasion for moral problems. These problems arise when one person is or wants to be nonmonogamous and the other person in the relationship is not or does not: ''What happens when one partner is keen to have other relationships and the other prefers to be monogamous? Whose wishes should be given greater weight? Is all the onus on the would-be monogamous partner to swallow her feelings or even try to change them? What responsibility does the other have to take account of those feelings? Is there indeed any negotiable ground upon which compromises could be worked out between monogamy and nonmonogamy?'' (Cartledge 1983, 174).

In an attempt to deal with these moral problems, Taylor offers a series of ''rules'' for the governance of nonmonogamous relationships (Taylor 1982, 13). But some of them seem maximally designed to promote men's interests in sexual access to many women--for example, rules for the monogamous partner such as ''Do not spy or pry,'' ''Do not confront or entrap,'' and ''Stay out of it.'' Others, such as ''Stop being jealous'' and ''Stop feeling guilty,'' presuppose an extraordinary ability to terminate one's feelings. And others still, such as ''Be aware of the needs of the other'' and ''Be honest,'' are so obvious as to be banal.

Yet some feminist alternatives for the governance of nonmonogamous relationships are equally problematic. For example, one writer describes a possible model for lesbian nonmonogamy by distinguishing between primary and secondary rankings of partners. In so doing, she appears to enshrine a patriarchal standard for sexual relationships:

If you were primary, you could expect certain rights, i.e., Saturday nights, vacations, making plans with your partner first. If you were secondary, you knew to expect Friday instead of Saturday night dates, not to ask for vacations, to wait to make plans with your lover after she'd checked it out with girlfriend number 1, etc. In many ways, this arrangement resembles the age-old pattern of wife and mistress, with several important exceptions: everyone knows what's going on (at least the general picture), everyone technically consents (at least by putting up with it), and each wife can have a mistress, or mistress a wife (at least in theory). (Kassoff in ''Non? Monogamy?'' 1985, 102, italics added)

Somewhat similar recommendations are made by Margaret Nichols, who advocates the emulation of nonmonogamous gay male relationships, which are assumed to be casual and brief, and the separation of romantic love from the love appropriate to a ''committed primary relationship.'' Nichols proposes that women--lesbians, anyway--follow the model supposedly set by gay men of ''extramarital sexuality [that] is almost always casual (even anonymous), brief, and recreational rather than emotionally intense'' (Nichols 1987, 118-119). But it is unclear that this proposed partitioning of feelings is either desirable or achievable, because it ignores what I take to be the underlying ontological basis for the pain that nonmonogamy causes.

In general, because problems about monogamy and nonmonogamy appear to arise from the gendered constitution of sexual relations and personal identity, it may seem that their solution is for women to become stronger, more autonomous individuals, with a better-defined sense of who they are, independent of those to whom they relate. Sexual/romantic relationships are founded upon a cultural commitment to the primacy of the (heterosexual) couple. Within this context of isolation, women are encouraged and expected to lose themselves in their sexual/romantic relationships, to fuse their identities with other persons. The solution to conflict about nonmonogamy, it may therefore seem, is for women to opt for the culturally masculine avenue of developing a strong, self-sufficient, independent identity, which does not incorporate the selves of sexual partners.

Such a solution is problematic. As Person remarks, ''any discrepancy between female and male sexuality is viewed as problematic for females. The male model of sexuality, with its emphasis on orgasm and on sexuality as performance and achievement, is used as the sexual standard for both sexes'' (Person 1980, 55; see also Lawson 1988, 217-221). Similarly, Rossiter says that proposed solutions to conflicts within patriarchy ''suffer from the very individualism that helps to construct the problem in the first place. For instance, if one attributes the problems... to the characteristics of a particular relationship between two people, then the solution has to be seen in terms of changing the nature of the relationship. What is avoided in this formulation is an examination of the ways in which power operates to produce a Woman who is herself--in any relationship--coherent with capitalist patriarchy'' (Rossiter 1988, 271). Discussion of the seemingly individual moral questions raised by nonmonogamous practices must bear in mind this political context. Although women are often socialized to be ''selfless,'' to ignore their own needs and desires, feminist critiques of the masculinist ideal of the independent self (e.g., Ferguson, 1989; Lugones 1989; Whitbeck 1983) counsel caution about its adoption by women and raise questions about whether or not it is truly undesirable to define oneself in terms of other people. For example, discussions of lesbian relationships (MacDonald 1988; Rotenberg 1989) suggest that growing criticisms (Lindenbaum 1985) of what are regarded as the unhealthy element of merger or fusion in these relationships rest too uncritically upon an acceptance of masculinist versions of what human interactions should be like and a discounting of the role of oppression in forming women's relationships. And Benjamin says,

The original sense of oneness [with another person] was seen [by traditional male thinkers] as absolute, as 'limitless narcissism,' and, therefore, regression to it would impede development and prevent separation. In its most extreme version, this view of differentiation pathologized the sensation of love: relaxing the boundaries of the self in communion with others threatened the identity of the isolate self. Yet this oneness was also seen as the ultimate pleasure, eclipsing the pleasure of difference. Oneness was not seen as a state that could coexist with (enhance and be enhanced by) the sense of separateness. (Benjamin 1988, 47)

Perhaps the real problem is not so much the construction of the self, especially the gendered female self, in terms of other people, but rather, the construction of the self almost exclusively in terms of sexual relationships with other people. The conventional production of female identity primarily in and through sexual relationships means that both monogamy and nonmonogamy will continue to be problematic for women under patriarchal conditions and assumptions.

On the one hand, the ideology of monogamy overtly limits the opportunity to love more than one person at a time: ''The logic of the preference our culture gives the principle of exclusivity is that it is better to abandon a person with whom one has built up an intimate relationship than it is to have and express feelings of love and erotic attachment to two persons'' (Gregory 1984, 267-68). But on the other hand, so also does the ideology of nonmonogamy, for it defines potential love and closeness in terms of sexual relatedness, and thus, ignores the other deep and profound forms of human connection that may well be physical and close but are not necessarily sexual. The idea of nonmonogamy holds out the deceptive promise that the way to love others, to be close to others, is through a sexual relationship with them. It creates the illusion that sexual freedom is the path to sexual liberation,¹⁰ or that it provides the route to social transformation.¹¹ It endorses the masculinist idea that sexual feelings are overwhelming and uncontrollable, and that one must act upon them.¹² Critics of monogamy often found their arguments on the assumption of the power of underlying sexual drives, which people repress only to their detriment, or even which they are unable to repress at all (McMurtry 1984, 112 and 115). Thus persons who are monogamous are assumed either to have a low ''sex drive'' or else to be exerting superhuman control over their sexual desires. The ideology of nonmonogamy also assumes, without much justification, that sexual desires themselves are entirely unbidden and unchosen, that people cannot help how they feel sexually for other people, and that they have no liberty to direct and redirect the sexual focus of their attention.¹³

My aim is not to legislate about the rightness or wrongness of nonmonogamous behavior itself. Rather, I have sought to understand the nature and meaning of the suffering that nonmonogamy can cause. Given my ontological claim that the conventional structure of the self for women incorporates intimate partners, I suggest we need to rethink the partitioning of sexual activities and relationships as self-constitutive from other activities and relationships that are not conventionally taken to define the self. The concepts of monogamy and nonmonogamy are problematic because they derive from and implicitly subscribe to certain views about sexual relations, love, and intimacy, that underlie human connections under patriarchy, and cry out for reexamination: that sexual coupling defines and is the hallmark of closeness between human beings; that being sexual is being intimate; and that sex is almost the only route to warm physical contact between adults. They endorse the notion that sexuality is necessarily central to human culture, central to who we are, and definitive of our selves; that personal fulfillment can always be achieved through sex; that sexual enjoyment in itself is a hallmark of health (Steinbock 1986, 12); and that sexual relationships have and should have a moral and emotional primacy over other relationships.

All of these assumptions are not only open to question, but also may be unnecessarily limiting to human identity and development. For it appears that if women and their bodies were not constituted as a sexual resource to which access must be controlled and limited; if there were not the present scarcity of love, intimacy, warmth, and closeness in human relationships; if human socialization did not foster dependence upon one human being--in short, if the construction of gender were not the linchpin of patriarchy--then perhaps sexual exclusivity and inclusivity would not raise problems for women's (and men's) sexual relationships. But to the extent that women continue to be encouraged to define themselves primarily or even exclusively in terms of their sexual partners, they will continue to be vulnerable to partners who choose not to be monogamous.

NOTES

I am grateful to the women and men who have discussed these issues informally with me, and to the editorial staff at Hypatia and two anonymous Hypatia reviewers for their stimulating comments and suggestions.

1. As a result of the centrality of marriage to discussions of monogamy, the concept of adultery and its associated behavior patterns and implications are the focus of a large amount of sociological investigation (e.g., Strean 1980;Wollison 1982; Atwater 1982; Richardson 1985; Lawson 1988).

2. See, for example, ''Non? Monogamy? A Readers' Forum'' (1985). My discussion draws upon the ideas expressed there. See also Athey and Osterman (1984, 48-50).

3. See, for example, Taylor (1982), which deliberately excludes all consideration of same-sex relationships.

4. It is remarkable that while lesbian and bisexual feminists have written extensively about issues pertaining to their sexual practice, heterosexual feminists are somewhat more reticent, preferring, apparently, to stick to issues such as sexual assault, pornography, and prostitution.

5. A sexual relationship undertaken for the sake of income represents a choice about the kind of worker one is going to be.

6. Margaret Carter first made this point to me.

7. These feelings are amply confirmed in the research done by Atwater (1982) on heterosexual women.

8. I am grateful to the anonymous Hypatia reviewer who presented this objection.

9. I owe this observation to Ted Worth.

10. ''By affirming one's freedom from sexual restraint one obtains a feeling of personal freedom; this, in turn, sustains one in the routinized activities of day-to-day living'' (Walshok 1974, 164).

11. ''The conquest of sexual jealousy, if achieved, could be the greatest advance in human relations since the advent of common law or the initiation of democratic processes'' (Smith and Smith 1974, 38).

12. ''Anyone who has suffered the disproportionate, inordinate and incalculable power of romantic/sexual love knows that it is a force which overwhelms both the mind and the character. It annihilates religion, reason, respect and rationality'' (Eskapa 1984, 183).

13. Taylor's book exemplifies these assumptions most clearly. He writes, ''There are, in fact, men and women who have a strong and immediate sexual attraction to each other, often inexplicable, but sometimes instantly known to both of them.... I am convinced that the presence of such feelings, or the lack of them, is totally beyond the control of people, and equally beyond their understanding--something which should, by itself, be enough to exhibit the foolishness of those who want to condemn them.... There is no comprehending why a given man or woman is swept up in a tide of sexual passion for just one particular person, and quite unable to muster such feelings for another with whom he or she might be genuinely and deeply in love, who is recognized as a better person in all ways'' (Taylor 1982, 25, italics in original).

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