On Human Monogamy

I watch your program regularly because I am deeply interested in its subject matter and in the human behavior your investigations reveal. Your work fascinates me not merely as a viewer, but also as a social scientist who has spent much of his life thinking, writing, and asking questions about relationships, fidelity, morality, and the human condition.

Allow me first to introduce myself. My name is Dr. Sabri Bebawi. I am a PhD social scientist, an author, and a longtime student of human behavior. I have written a number of books, many of them concerned in one way or another with the human condition. My most recent novel is titled Divine Comedy. Among its central themes are two very personal subjects: my repeated experiences with failed relationships, particularly relationships destroyed by infidelity, and my rather extraordinary history of illnesses and physical ailments. The latter, however, is not the reason I am writing to you.

What interests me here is infidelity.

Over the course of my adult life, I have experienced betrayal or infidelity in relationships an astonishing 113 times. I hesitate even to call myself a 'victim,' because I am not certain that victimhood is the most useful way to understand what happened. At the age of seventy, I have become less interested in blaming individual men or women and more interested in asking a larger question: are we misunderstanding human nature itself?

Your program has made that question even more compelling for me.

You have interviewed and investigated an enormous number of people. Again and again, your program presents individuals who are suspected of infidelity, deception, or maintaining secret relationships. I have watched many episodes, and what strikes me is the remarkable consistency of the pattern. I cannot recall seeing an investigation in which the person accused ultimately turned out to be entirely innocent.

As a social scientist, that repetition interests me enormously.

It leads me to a hypothesis that I have considered for many years: perhaps human beings are not naturally monogamous in the strict sense in which society expects them to be.

I am not suggesting that fidelity is impossible. Nor am I suggesting that people are incapable of commitment, devotion, loyalty, or lifelong love. Clearly, some people achieve all of these things beautifully.

What I question is the assumption that lifelong sexual and romantic exclusivity is automatically the natural condition of human beings.

Perhaps monogamy, at least in its conventional form, is partly a social construction reinforced by religion, law, morality, custom, family expectations, and cultural tradition. Human beings may enter marriage sincerely intending lifelong exclusivity while simultaneously possessing desires, impulses, emotional needs, attractions, and vulnerabilities that do not always conform to that expectation.

When those realities cannot be discussed openly, secrecy begins.

And secrecy produces betrayal.

This is where I find your own marriage particularly interesting. You often speak about your wife not merely as your spouse but as your friend. That distinction may be extraordinarily important.

Friends can tell one another uncomfortable truths.

Friends can admit fears, attractions, mistakes, temptations, insecurities, and disappointments. They can negotiate. They can speak honestly without automatically interpreting every confession as an attack upon the institution of marriage.

Perhaps many relationships fail not simply because people experience attraction outside their marriages, but because husbands and wives have never learned to become genuine friends.

They become 'husband' and 'wife' according to religion, law, morality, tradition, and social expectation, yet they may never develop the extraordinary honesty that friendship requires.

Your relationship with your wife appears, at least from what you describe publicly, to be built upon that friendship. Perhaps that is precisely why it works.

My larger concern is that society teaches people to expect monogamy without adequately teaching them how difficult monogamy can be. We celebrate weddings but rarely teach people how to discuss desire. We praise fidelity but often refuse to discuss temptation. We condemn betrayal but seldom ask what psychological or social conditions repeatedly produce it.

Then, when infidelity occurs, everyone behaves as though something extraordinary has happened.

Yet programs such as yours seem to suggest that it is anything but extraordinary.

That is the contradiction that fascinates me.

If infidelity were merely an occasional moral failure committed by a small number of unusually dishonest people, we would expect it to be relatively rare. But when the same behavior appears repeatedly across different ages, races, economic classes, personalities, cultures, and circumstances, a social scientist must at least ask whether something deeper is occurring.

Perhaps the real question is not simply, 'Why do people cheat?'

Perhaps the more difficult question is: Why have human societies constructed expectations of relationships that so many human beings repeatedly fail to meet?

And if human beings are not naturally strict monogamists, what would a more honest model of love, commitment, sexuality, friendship, and partnership look like?

I do not claim to possess the final answer. A good social scientist should be suspicious of absolute conclusions, including his own. But after seventy years of life, 113 painful experiences of betrayal, years of studying human behavior, and now watching investigation after investigation on programs such as yours, I believe the question deserves serious examination.

Your program may therefore be documenting something much larger than individual cases of infidelity.

Without necessarily intending to do so, you may be creating an enormous informal archive of human relationship behavior.

And that archive may be telling us something important about ourselves.

I want to thank you, Bounty Hunter D, for the intelligence, patience, dignity, humor, and humanity with which you conduct your investigations. Beneath the entertainment value of your program lies something genuinely sociological: a recurring portrait of human beings struggling between desire, commitment, honesty, fear, love, and social expectation.

That is why I continue to watch.

Thank you for your work, and thank you for taking the time to read the reflections of an old social scientist who is still trying to understand the extraordinarily complicated creature called the human being.