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Throw everything you have read or been told out the window!!
We have been culturized (Ok, I know, it’s not a word – but you know what I mean!) to expect males to be monogamous.
Sure, we sort of know that some males cheat on their partners – but we just assume:
• That some (most, all?) guys can’t be trusted
• Our guy would never cheat
• Bad upbringing
• It was some woman’s fault
You name it….
But we now have a far better explanation for male mating behavior.
Before getting to that, I'd like to visit a time when being a gay male
was so severely condemned in our culture that gay men hid their gay
sexuality.
Many were in denial – who would want to admit, even to themselves – that they were this
despicable (as society then labeled them)! And terms like "coming out
of the closet" or "being outed" were coined to describe the difficulty
these men had in admitting their gay sexuality.
This experience may offer some insights into normal male sexuality as well. Because it may well be that orange and yellow neck males face the same kind of problems.
After all, it is illegal to have more than one wife (at a time) in our
culture. What’s more, the most revered book of rules that we have
in our culture, (the bible) says: “Thou shalt not commit
adultery”.
The chances are, then, that most guys want to be monogamous.
If they have urges that pull them in a different direction, they may well not understand what is happening.
They too have been culturized to expect themselves to be monogamous.
It may be that most guys intend to be
monogamous and accept monogamy as the “right” way to mate.
But research suggests that less than half of them succeed.
Unfortunately, it is women and children who pay the highest price for such mistakes.
So we need to be able to work out which guys are the blue neck ones!
And we have our work cut out for us because there are two very good reasons why guys will mislead us about this:
• Cultural reasons: They
want to be accepted as normal and Ok by their friends and family
– and that means marrying one woman (at a time, anyway!) and
hiding any other realtions they may get involved in.
• Biological reasons:
They are yellow necks and the best strategy they can have (in a
monogamous culture) is to act as if they are a monogamous male. For one
thing, that way they can get past the guard of all those blue neck
males! (Find out more here)
As women have discovered over the decades, that we cannot always rely on what a guy says his intentions are.
But by observing what happens with other monogamous animals we can recapture their instinctive knowledge and use it as our own.
Monogamous animals, it appears, put a lot of time and effort into
maintaining their 'pair bond' (what naturalists call a monogamous
couple in the wild).
They engage in:
* elaborate greeting rituals,
*spend extended time in mutual grooming, *spend months developing song duets (if they are a primate)
*and may engage in complex courtship rituals
each season before mating.
Now, animals don’t usually have a lot of spare time or energy.
Unlike humans, they don’t accumulate wealth or produce surpluses.
So any
time they spend in grooming, mating, feeding offspring, protecting
territories and fighting predators, is time they don’t have to
hunt for
food.
So you can bet that if they are singing duets, preening their mates,
and engaging in lengthy, complicated rituals – its because
that’s what it
takes to keep the 'pair bond' (marriage) working!
Another clue we can use to work out whether a guy is monogamous is by
understanding that for a man, monogamy means “putting all his
eggs in one basket (nest)”.
This is a high risks strategy unless
he shares the feeding, protection and socializing of his offspring.
(because otherwise his 'one go' at offspring may end in failure)
***Typically, then, monogamous males, are
parent-ers as well as breeders.***
How does this relate to human males?
All non-human monogamous males engage in easy to recognize bonding/nesting behavior (listed above). This behavior ensures them the long-term commitment of their mate and quality parenting of their off-spring.
So the first step to working out whether he is the cheating kind or
monogamous, simply involves checking out whether a guy carries out
these bonding and nesting (parenting) behaviors.
You can find out more abouthow to do this in my book:
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