Recently while out in the wild, I came across a peculiar species, one that I have never seen close up before: a man - 30 years old, good-looking, successful, socially engaging - who has only ever slept with one woman. Not just one woman at a time, but in his entire life. She was also at the party and the two of them, obviously still in love, have been together for 13 years.
This rare specimen was not gloating about this fact, but his refusal to shyly avoid the topic or seem embarrassed at all by the lack of notches in the belt captured my attention. At times, I've been nagged by the deep voice of man-dom - sitting on my shoulder like a devil - saying that my number of sexual conquests should be higher in order to justify settling down into the monogamous lifestyle. But here, right in front of me, was a Monogamous One-Woman Man who pooh-poohed the pressure. How does he do it, I wondered, and where did that nagging voice come from anyway?
David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist and author of The Evolution of Desire , took me through the usual explanation of why men instinctually crave sexual variety: If an act of shagging leads to conception, a woman spends nine months pregnant and many more nursing, whereas the man could potentially invest only the three hours - or, er, 10 seconds - it takes him to shoot his seed. Even though Earth does not seem in desperate need of more humans, Dr. Buss assures me that the imperative to spread our DNA at large still drives guys to take advantage of all this free time.
"Historically, most societies have been mildly polygynous and in some, men could marry multiple mates," Dr. Buss said. "But nowadays, acting out those behaviours in North America poses reputational damage." It's this risk, he explains, that has made monogamy adaptively sustainable for men. A good reputation, Dr. Buss says, brings status, friendships and resources, among other things.
Of course, a man could be monogamous and still feel a deep ambivalence about it. Dr. Buss reminded me that there is such a thing as individual differences. Even amongst the Ache people of Paraguay, where he says mate-swapping and open relationships are the norm, not all men partake.
"Some Ache men prefer to be monogamous with one partner," he noted, making the North American One-WomanMan less awesome.
David Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, husband and wife co-authors of The Myth of Monogamy , have a book coming out this fall called Strange Bedfellows , which looks at what humans can learn about their own inclinations from the monogamous habits of other animals.
Dr. Barash tells me that the Malagasy giant jumping rat, for instance, remains monogamous in order to doubly protect its system of tunnels from other, lazier Malagasy giant jumping rats who don't want to bother making their own. Likewise, Canadian beavers build dams as couples and tend to stick together to maintain it, something I think anyone who is making house payments during the recent recession probably understands.
According to Dr. Barash, however, some male beavers do like to get busy and instead follow the more the merrier method of DNA delivering. Ultimately, he said, the two diverging desires are a dilemma in nature.
"From the male perspective, the optimal strategy - in terms of getting as many copies of one's genes out into subsequent generations as possible would be in fact to do both: Have sex with as many willing females as you can get a hold of and also do as much estate planning as you can. But the truth is, the real world doesn't allow you to do everything. So in a sense, beavers - male beavers, since you're talking from a male perspective - have to choose."
Dr. Barash says you have to look pretty hard to find an animal that universally mates with only one other. "There's one called a diplozoon paradoxum, a parasitic worm that lives in the gills of fish." But, as he points out, they don't have much of a choice: "In that species, the male and female meet as adolescents and their bodies literally fuse together."
After some field work, I found another One-Woman Man in my friend circle. His story is different in that he started dating at a late age and met the woman he married when he was 23. He says he does sometimes wish he'd taken advantage of those pre-monogamous years to sleep around. "But my sense of morality is stronger than the sense of 'I wonder what it would have been like,'" he says.
When I asked him if maybe he could have it better but that he's just blissfully ignorant of the fact, he turned it around on me: "I've never had to go through all the struggles that are associated with short-term relationships, or juggling different women. I've never had a break up. I've had a pretty easy go of it in that sense. So I guess in that way, ignorance is bliss."
Another man I spoke to, a 37-year-old who has slept with only two women, pointed out that if the woman is sexually open and adventurous - as his partner is - one is better than many. "I might even know more about sex than a lot of people who have had limited relations with more people," he bragged.
The original One-Woman Man had a similarly optimistic outlook when I asked him about his lack of points of comparison. "I have great sex," he said. "It's liberal and open. If it felt closed and constrained, then I'd crave outside experience."
The cynic might ask how he would know the sex is great since it's the only he's ever had. But I suppose if you're asking that question, maybe you've never had great sex.
Micah Toub's memoir, Growing Up Jung: Coming of Age as the Son of Two Shrinks , will be published in the fall of 2010.