Advice on monogamy from the animal kingdom

New Scientist caught up with husband-and-wife writing team David Barash and Judith Eve Lipton to discuss their latest book, Strange Bedfellows: The surprising connection between sex, evolution and monogamy. We ask them what we can learn about monogamy from other species, and how writing a book about monogamy affected their own marriage.

Your last book, The Myth of Monogamy (W. H. Freeman, 2001) talked about the rarity of monogamy in nature. What made you decide to write another book on the subject?

David: Intellectual honesty or a scientific balancing of the scales if you will. Myth of Monogamy was looking at the glass half empty, at the problems that biology poses for monogamy, but we were aware that monogamy, for all its difficulties, does happen. It happens in animals, it happens in humans. We didn’t want to give the impression that it’s impossible.

Judith: There were both scientific and personal reasons. We thought it was important to point out that the promiscuous behaviour we were describing in ducks, for example, doesn’t necessarily hold for people. David and I have been married and monogamous since 1977.

There are different kinds of monogamy – for instance, there’s a tapeworm that has only one partner until it dies. That’s extremely unusual, but there are other forms of monogamy that are more common, like us! We were each married before and have had other sexual partners, but have been monogamous in our own marriage.

Strange Bedfellows is dedicated to David’s parents who were married for 64 years. They were joined at the hip; they had only spent a total of 3 nights apart until his father developed colon cancer and was in the hospital.

David: It is not an advice book as such, but the issue of advice looms not too far in the background. There are people who want to be monogamous but worry that it may be impossible. To some extent the book is written for those people.

So is monogamy “unnatural”?

Judith: Monogamy is rather like playing the violin. Doing it well is difficult and takes a lot of work, but it’s not impossible. And some people would argue it has real social value.

David: We can’t ever totally transcend our biology. If playing the violin was totally beyond our biological capabilities, it just couldn’t happen. The same goes for monogamy. In order to be monogamous one has to be willing to swim upstream against certain biological impulses, but there is also a biological push in favour of monogamy, especially when it comes to parenting.

Judith: Also when it comes to ageing. People are living longer than ever now, and as you grow past the age of courtship and mating, into the age of disability, picking up prescriptions and dealing with Medicare, sexual diversity is less important and having a good buddy is more important.

The way we look at mating changes when we think about people who are becoming more infirm and less motivated by fresh partners. The miracle of monogamy is the potential for long-term cooperative friendships that transcend mating desires.

David: We have horses here – you can hear them neighing in the background. This morning Judy fed them and tonight I will, and our collaboration is what it allows us to keep horses. That’s true in the animal world as well. In many cases of natural monogamy, part of the payoff has to do, not just with old age or parenting, but with maintaining stuff

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