A remarkable life demands decisions – sometimes big, bold decisions. Big or small, decisions risk regret. Do I get married? Do I have kids? Do I go solo? Peter McGraw invites Marcel Zeelenberg, the world’s expert on regret, to talk about what makes a choice regrettable.
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Listen to Episode #198 here
Non-Monogamy With Lisa Dawn Hamilton
I’m in the Solo studio with a sex researcher, sex educator, psychology professor, host of the podcast Do We Know Things? and most importantly, a Solo listener. This is a dream interview. Lisa Dawn Hamilton, welcome.
Thank you. It’s a lovely intro.
This is a fun episode that you made happen. We’re going to do a little quid pro quo. After we tape, I will be a guest, although I may not switch seats. I may still stay in this seat for your episode of Do We Know Things in which we’re going to talk about myths of single living and so on. For readers, if you’d like Lisa Dawn, which I’m sure you will, check out her podcast. I am non-monogamous with podcasts. Play around on me. I want to start by talking about your experience as a listener. That’s wonderful. How did you find Solo? Why did you listen to the past one episode?
I have an amazing therapist from a social work background who always says her favorite thing is connecting people with resources. When I struggled with my new identity as a single person, she went out, did some research, and sent me an email with a couple of things on the list. One of them was the Solo podcast.
Who are my competitors?
There were no other podcasts. She knows that I do a podcast and I listen to a lot of podcasts so she emphasized that one. There were some other articles and things but I started listening. I’m trying to think of what my first episode was and I don’t remember but I found the joy and the expansiveness that you talk about. What so many of your guests talk about was refreshing after spending my entire life in committed relationships and trying to figure out who I was as a solo person. I started listening and kept going.
You’ve had two major escalator relationships. Did you know that you were riding the relationship escalator while you were riding it?
Both of them, yes. The first one was that I was twenty years old when we met and was adamantly against relationships. That was my stance. I met this person who was very stable and calm.
It’s the beginning of every rom-com.
He was not an alcoholic. I was like, “Relationships can be this calm, safe, stable place.”
I was joking about rom-coms but this is the setup for Trainwreck with Amy Schumer. I almost made Lisa spit face. She took a big gulp of water when I said that. This is the premise for Trainwreck. This woman doesn’t want commitment and here comes this very stable, kind man.
We started this journey and stayed on it for fifteen years.
Did you get married?
Yes, but I was also very against marriage. I went to grad school in the US in 2005. We did long distance for two years and for him to come to the US to be with me, we had to get married. We had this very last-minute, no-preparation wedding that was mainly for immigration.
Utilitarian. You rode the escalator for fifteen years. You got married partially for practical purposes and so on, and this relationship has dissolved in some way. Was it amicably?
No. It was my choice, very much against his desires.
Cultural effects?
It was more my desire for non-monogamy. That was something we had wrestled with.
You were a solo so early.
It was something we’d wrestled with off and on when we were long-distance. There were exceptions. Every couple of years, I would bring it up and be like, “I’d like to be a non-monogamous.” We were in a non-monogamous relationship that had been open for about eight months. I decided to leave him for my other partner. Almost immediately after that, I broke up with that other partner. Almost immediately after that, I met my next partner who I was with for several years.
This is a good preview. I’m a fellow academic. I’m a behavioral economist. It’s my ilk study decision-making. The joke is that you always study the things you’re not good at. The preview here is that Lisa Dawn and I are going to have a conversation about one of her research topics, which is monogamy and non-monogamy. If this story is not capturing your attention, her research might. Regrets?
The biggest thing I’ve learned since ending that relationship and the thing I vowed to myself is that I would never try to be what other people expect me to be ever again. I went out into the world being like, “I am unapologetically non-monogamous. This is something I will not vary on. I won’t do things because my partner wants them if they’re not things I want myself.” I was a people pleaser and then I consider myself a recovering people pleaser.
I appreciate that in part because Solo has a big tent. We have people who are disinterested in romance. We have people who want to ride the escalator but don’t want to feel bad until that happens. We have people who are dating casually. We have people who are doing unconventional relationships. There are all sorts of folks who follow the show.
There’s a phenomenon that happens if you have tastes, desires, and values that deviate from this one style of relationship that most people want or at least default into, and it’s this. You meet this person. They’re super sexy and smart. You share the same love of Trainwreck and have a great time with them. They are the whole package. It’s like the weirder I get, the less I’m a good match for lots of people.
Here comes this person and you’re like, “Let’s go. This is exciting.” It’s fun. You’re falling in love and all this stuff. They then tell you something that doesn’t gel. It doesn’t have to be something as big as non-monogamy but it could be something. You have a decision and you say, “I can’t do it,” or, “Maybe all these other good things will make up for me giving up that other thing.” People do it in part because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Relationships are about compromise.
What we can do, and we’re going to get to this, is you give people an alternative script to at least have a conversation about how you both might find a way to coordinate. Some of these things are deal breakers. I get that. I had that happen where as a younger man, I was like, “I guess I’m going to have kids. I’m not excited about it but if I want this woman in my life, we’re going to have children.” That is a situation where that is off the table. For someone who wants to have kids, I am the wrong dude.
One of the things that sold me on my partner of 15 years was I knew since I was 12 that I didn’t want kids. When I was twelve years old, I asked my mom how old I had to be to get my tubes tied. She got her tubes tied when I was twelve. I was like, “That’s how you don’t have kids? When can I get that done?” At twenty, I met my partner and he was like, “I never want kids.” I was like, “Perfect. I never want kids.”
You’re like, “Let’s go.” You had your tubes tied?
I didn’t.
I was curious because I’ve had acquaintances who’ve had their tubes tied. It’s shockingly difficult for a young woman to get her tubes tied.
That’s why I never bothered to try it because I had heard all these stories of denying women’s bodily autonomy. Everyone in my life too was always like, “You’ll change your mind.” I waited until 30 because everyone said, “Once you’re 30, it’s going to hit you,” and then everyone said, “Once you’re 35, then it’s going to hit you.” I remember my PhD supervisor also never wanted children. I remember trying to explain to her one time that I kept being afraid it was going to hit me. She’s like, “I don’t think it works that way.”
Not when you’re twelve and already counting it out. That was a digression. I want to have someone who navigates that system and can give people advice. One tip that I have learned is to find a woman doctor. That is one of the major steps. It’s an unfortunate end to this relationship. It sounds like one that needed to happen due to incompatible preferences. How long were you single before the next one?
It was odd. With the overlapping partner, it took about a month to break up. The day after I last spoke to him, I matched with my next partner on Tinder. The reason for that, I was in Vancouver for the holidays and I had never done online dating before.
This is when online dating was starting to heat up.
This would’ve been 2015, I guess. I had been in this relationship for fifteen years and anyone else I had been involved with was people I met organically. I was anxious about going on a first date with a stranger. I was home for the holidays in Vancouver and was like, “I’ll do a quick one-off here to get rid of that anticipatory anxiety.” My first ever date was with this person that I ended up with for six and a half years.
Did you take some lessons from your first relationship into this one? Like what?
Mainly from day one, being like, “I am non-monogamous. These are the things I’m interested in.” We had been very open from the moment that we started. When we met, I was living on the East Coast of Canada. He’s living on the West Coast of Canada. Even though we had a strong connection, I was like, “We’re very far apart. This is probably going to be a casual thing,” and it escalated very quickly.
Why did it escalate so quickly?
We both had very intense feelings for each other. We had also a very intense sexual connection. For both of us, it was something we hadn’t experienced at that level before so we dove and went all in
From jump street, you’re like, “I’m non-monogamous.” What does that mean to you? What is non-monogamy for the first audience who’s never been exposed to this idea on the show?
An easy definition of it is any relationship where you have sexual, romantic, and/or intimate connections with more than one person. I already had people in my life that I had been tangentially involved with over the years. I’m someone who likes to nurture connections and also have a lot of in-depth intense relationships with friends, in contrast to my partner that I got with who loves dating and meeting new people, which to me is a nightmare.
Lucky for you, all it takes is one match on Tinder and you found your love.
It was a weird thing to navigate where I was like, “I have these few people that I want to continue having relationships with but I don’t have any desire to date new people.” He was like, “I want to date new people all the time.”
When you said that you wanted a non-monogamous relationship, he was like, “This is awesome,” but the nature of your connections was different. You did a long-distance relationship for how long?
It was 3 years and then he moved to where I am after 3 years. We were there for three and a half years together. I live in a small town and he is very much a city person, as am I. I enjoy the city.
Academia will take you to strange places.
Especially during the pandemic when we weren’t going anywhere. He got a nine-month contract job offer back in Vancouver. I was like, “We’ve done long distance before. What could go wrong?” Things fell apart from there. It became very apparent that he didn’t want to be in New Brunswick, where I live, anymore.
New Brunswick is like proper Canada.
We’re on top of Maine and many Americans say, “I didn’t know there was even land up there.”
Vancouver, you could mistake for another place if you squint but not New Brunswick. I get it. I understand.
Yeah, for a myriad of factors.
Amicable?
Also, no.
This is striking to me because you seem so pleasant, happy, and put together.
I’ll go back to the ending of the relationship with my first fifteen-year partner. He wasn’t happy about it but we are still friends. It’s not that unamicable. It wasn’t like an agreement we came to together, whereas my most recent partner was very much not amicable. Every partner I’ve had throughout my life, I’m still in contact with or friends with somehow.
I don’t mean to put you on the defensive.
When I met this partner, I was like, “I’m friends with all my exes. I hope that’s cool.”
I have this idea for a project, which is a training certification for therapists. I give them a crash course on single living, bust a bunch of myths, which is what we’ll do on your podcast, and stop defaulting to tell someone, “You need to work harder on this relationship or do this to find the right person.” Recognize that there are diverse lifestyles and interests amongst your clients or patients and learn when to nurture them. It sounds like she at least recognized that she had a blind spot.
She is good at connecting with resources but she’s also someone who identifies on her website as poly-friendly, kink-friendly, and open to diversity in relationship styles, even if that relationship is no relationship.
It’s a relationship with yourself, which is the most important relationship. That’s wonderful. This is much longer before the Solo project. I have a therapist. He’s retired and I could probably bring him out of mothballs in case of emergency. Most of his benefits with me occurred over about ten years. I give him a lot of credit. He has a book about relationships. I’m sure he is great at couples therapy. He figured it out.
This guy is different. The normal way that I go about relating and encouraging him is not going to work for him. I give him a lot of credit. I’m stubborn, too. I knew who I was. I came to him when I was 40. It’s not like I was 26 and had no idea what was going on. Have more therapists who can at least read the room or don’t default to this.
The therapist I have, I’ve had for about eight years but before that, I was seeing someone else who was amazing in a lot of ways. When I started my new relationship and I said something about non-monogamy, she was like, “You’re still doing that?” She thought the only reason I wanted to do it was because of my previous partner to whom I was unhappy or something. I was like, “Yes, this is who I am. This is what I’ve been wanting for years and now I finally have the freedom to do it.” She couldn’t wrap her brain around it. That’s when I realized I needed to find someone more knowledgeable.
My area does training with therapists around diverse sexualities and relationship orientations. I want people to do less harm and a lot of therapists do harm. If they assume being a couple and not being solo is the right way to be, they’re unaware of that bias and that can cause a lot of harm to people and add to their shame. Training on solo living would be beneficial for a lot of therapists.
I need to get to it. It’s down low on the list but I need someone to come to me and be like, “We’re going to do this. Can you show up and do this stuff?” Looking back, you’ve had the solo experience and a new language and perspective. Do you feel like you meet the three criteria for a solo? Do you want me to go through that?
Yes, please go through them.
Number one, Lisa Dawn, you are wholehearted. You see yourself as a complete person, not someone that’s going to come along and complete you.
No.
Check. Most important one. Two, you embrace some degree of autonomy and self-sufficiency. You seek to solve your problems to parent yourself, not looking for a partner to do that for you.
Yes.
Check. For the third one, I already know the answer. You think unconventionally about relationships and life more generally.
Yes.
That’s pretty obvious, given the work that you do and the work that you’ve done on yourself. I hear you talk about these things very comfortably. When do you think you became a solo?
I became single in July 2022.
You could have been solo at eighteen.
Why I reached out to you, I thought I’d been a solo for a long time. I honestly think it started in high school where a lot of my female friends would get boyfriends and disappear. I was like, “I will never do that.” In my fifteen-year relationship, it was a bit of an issue because I did prioritize my friends. Often, I prioritize my family. I did think of myself as a relationship anarchist. I never prioritized romantic relationships. To me, all of my close relationships were important. In that sense, maybe I’ve been a solo since I was a teenager.
I can’t say the same for me. I’ve always leaned very heavily into the self-sufficiency thing. Some of that was out of necessity. The wholeheartedness was locked in at age 38 with one of those women who I thought, “I guess I’m going to have kids.” The relationship ended and I had this very distinct moment of insight. I might’ve said it out loud but I don’t know. It feels like a scene from a movie where I was like, “I’m happy when I’m single. My life is not less than.”
That point is when that wholeheartedness came to me in that sense. The unconventional thinking locked in with this show. If you listen to early episodes, I’m making my way. I don’t have all the answers. I still don’t have all the answers but I feel like I have a lot more now. I’ve learned so much from my guests. You’re living the solo life.
It is delightful, both as a people pleaser and a caregiving type of human. Being able to have more choice and freedom about those things is amazing. I’m in the midst of a two-month road trip around the US, mainly to visit some friends. I’m on sabbatical. I love driving around alone. I’ve been reflecting a lot and listening to a lot of Solo episodes on my drive. It feels very freeing to not have expectations put on me.
Let’s pivot and talk about your research. You do research on hormones and sexual response. You particularly flag this work on this spectrum.
The monogamy spectrum, as I call it.
For the reader, in our business, an important KPI is a citation. More citations are better than fewer. One great way to get cited is to generate new knowledge, be a pathfinder, break into new areas, and so on, which has its headaches. One great way to get cited is to have a psychological scale. You pay a dear price in the peer review process trying to develop a scale. Was that the case with this scale?
Yes. My concept of the monogamy spectrum is separate from the scale I developed, which is still not published because of my anxiety and avoidance.
Review or see. You haven’t even submitted it.
I’ve done nationally representative samples of thousands of people and I keep being like, “If I do one more study to validate this and one more study,” and I keep not publishing anything but soon, which is all I’m working on it in a book format at this point because I have so much data. The monogamy spectrum is the overarching concept with the scale that I developed related to that. There are a few of them but the main one is the extradyadic attraction scale as I call it.
We need to rename that if we’re going popular press. Can I set the stage for you? Something I teach in my PhD seminars is how you position a paper. This is off the cuff but let me know if it helps. I would say something about this notion of non-monogamy. A not-new concept in the history of sex is suddenly readily apparent. You see it on the dating apps. It is being covered in magazines. Vogue is writing about it. The average person thinks of monogamy and non-monogamy as a dichotomy. You’re either one or the other.
With my fifteen-year partner, I used to refer to him as the most monogamous man in the world. My background is in neuroscience and I have taken a neuroendocrinology class. I learned about these vole species, some of which are monogamous some of which are non-monogamous.
I listened to an Andrew Huberman podcast where he was talking about these things.
Around 2003 and 2004, I first learned about these voles. They had mapped essentially the brain structures and neurotransmitters. I should know this. I’m a neuroscientist. They had mapped those to demonstrate what made essentially the monogamous voles monogamous and what made the promiscuous voles promiscuous.
I love that already. For clarity, if I understand this correctly, these voles are more alike than they are different. Some of them more or less mate for life at least.
The monogamous voles mate, build dens and nests, and co-parent, essentially.
They live in the suburbs.
The promiscuous voles run around in fields, meet each other, have some sex, and then run around.
They live in New York City. I get it.
I was like, “There are these clear different mechanisms that make this species of voles monogamous and non-monogamous.”
One is like your partner and one is like you.
Right around that time, I participated in a research study that was a qualitative study about sexual violence. It was an ongoing qualitative project where we had to come back and have homework. We’d then come and talk about the homework.
You can’t pay me enough to do a study like that.
It was delightful. One of the things they had us read was the chapter on jealousy from The Ethical Slut book.
I have that on my bookshelf.
I had learned about these voles that had dichotomous things and then I read and learned about people who were polyamorous. That was when I went into this like, “Maybe people are like the voles. There are these two different categories.” Early on in my research, one of the papers I have published is looking at the neural differences between highly monogamous and highly non-monogamous men. I put them in the scanner, showed them sexual, romantic, and neutral pictures, and looked at how their brains lit up, as we say colloquially on FMRI data.
The problem with that was I had designed a series of categories to identify monogamous people and non-monogamous people. Almost everyone that my research assistants and I interviewed fell somewhere in the middle. They didn’t qualify as hyper-monogamous or hyper-non-monogamous. I was like, “This is a spectrum.”
We’re talking about non-monogamy. Are you differentiating romantic and sexual? When most people hear non-monogamy, they’re thinking about sexual intimacy. Does this matter for this particular project?
The questions I was asking were both about dating multiple people at a time without defining sexual things. I envisioned it as a sexual thing. I did ask, “Could you be in love with more than one person at a time?” “Definitely.” I combined both.
My sense of this as a layperson is that you might be sexually non-monogamous. A monogamish relationship as an example or an open relationship is the one that comes to mind. You remain romantically exclusive. That’s common. If you’re polyamorous, you have more than one romantic relationship. Knowing someone is sexually non-monogamous tells you little about whether they’re romantically non-monogamous. When someone’s romantically non-monogamous, they tend to be sexual.
Not necessarily. Some people feel very strongly about that so they might have, say, 10 partners. Maybe three of them are sexual and the rest are either deep intimate connections or deep romantic connections. They would feel strongly that that doesn’t have to be the case. It is probably more common when we’re talking about polyamory that people are both monogamous.
I didn’t mean to sidetrack. You’re like, “It’s a spectrum,” which is such a winning feeling in academia. In a world that has so few wins, it is a grind to have this moment of insight that sets you on a new course. Congratulations.
The problem with that is that epiphany came in year 3 or 4 of my PhD and that’s not what my dissertation was on. I had to shift gears and put it to the side for a while after having this epiphany. All I wanted to do was work on that. My dissertation was on stress and sexual function in women. I had people run through lab protocols. Around the second or third year when I was a faculty member, I was watching a YouTube video and it was Dan Savage.
He coined the phrase Monogamish.
It’s a video still on YouTube. It’s a Big Think video. He’s talking about monogamy. The title of it is Why Monogamy is Ridiculous. He says yes but one of the things he said was, “Everyone desperately wants to F*** other people all the time even if they’ve made a monogamous commitment.” I was like, “I don’t think that’s true,” based on this evidence from these interviews that I did. That restarted me down this line of trying to determine ways to measure whether people always desire other people when they’re in a dyadic committed relationship.
When you have a hammer and you’ve only had this hammer your whole life, it’s easy to see everything as a nail. If you are a non-monogamous person, accept it. Read the literature about how most cultures, at one point in time, have been non-monogamous and how most animal species are non-monogamous. It’s very easy to swing in the other direction and say that no one is monogamous, which does a disservice to individual differences and also, the profound effect the culture can have on people.
The problem, and I’m sure you’ve figured out a way to solve this problem, is how you look into someone’s mind while they’re having sex with their monogamous partner to know who they’re thinking about. Dan Savage would argue that at least a non-trivial amount of time, that person is fantasizing about someone else or whatever it might be in that sense. To me, that would be the strictest form of monogamy. It’s not just the behavior but the thoughts and emotions.
What I’m interested in is the thoughts and emotions. The first grant I wrote about this was essentially what I argued. We live in this culturally monogamous world and people will do what is expected of them. I want to find out what is underneath. What are their thoughts, beliefs, and desires? How do they vary depending on the situation or the relationship?
There’s a Chris Rock joke about this and he jokes about a lot of things. I won’t quote it because I can’t think of it but it is something like most men don’t cheat because no one will have sex with them. It’s the premise of the joke. Does that sound about right?
I was thinking of something else. It’s along the same lines. He is like, “Men don’t cheat but if P**** chases you, I can’t run that fast.”
It’s the same concept in this way. I think about it. Monogamy is the norm. It’s socially enforced. It is considered the moral righteous. It’s very tied up in religion. There you are. It’s hard to find someone you’re excited about who’s also excited about you. That person says, “I’ll only do it this one way.” You go, “That’s better than nothing. I don’t want to miss all this wonderfulness in my life.” What appears to be a dedication to monogamy may not be in the same way.
In the original survey, when we were trying to figure out the hyper-monogamous and hyper-non-monogamous people, one of the questions that originally I had was whether the person has to not fantasize about anyone else essentially ever. Nobody doesn’t fantasize. We changed. I can’t remember the exact criteria but it was infrequent.
I remember one person, though. I was interviewing him to see if he qualified for this fMRI study and he was checking all of the boxes for a pretty monogamous person. I said, “Do you ever fantasize? On a scale of 1 to 5, how often do you fantasize about someone other than your partner?” He goes, “Constantly.” I was like, “This is someone who, in his mind, is not monogamous.”
That’s not cheating.
Not at all.
I don’t think anybody who’s monogamous believes that their partner fantasizing about someone else is cheating.
I would disagree. I’ve read a lot of things on the internet where people are regulating people’s internal minds.
I take it back. I get it. Most reasonable people would not. Is this a normal distribution?
Using the scale that I have that looks at people’s desire for multiple partners but also their attitudes around non-monogamy or how harmful it would be if your partner fantasized about someone else and that kind of stuff comes out pretty normally distributed but the average or the mean is slight to the monogamous side. Skew is slightly monogamous but overall, it’s a reasonably normal distribution.
Your intuition as a grad student was correct. First of all, this is important for people to know. If you are a devout monogamist, recognize that most people may not share your devotion. If you’re a devout non-monogamous, you’re not characterizing them as ambivalent. This is not an ambivalent attitude but they’re not indifferent. They have modest views. It’s not as strong a value. Just know that if you’re on either end of the spectrum, you’re not normal. You have experience and it’s very easy to reinforce. The non-monogamous people I know, guess who they hang out with?
Other non-monogamous people.
It helps to get laid. The monogamous people, guess who they hang out with?
Monogamous people.
They’re less worried that their partners are going to get laid. It’s helpful for people to have that insight that the average person tends to sit in the middle. What does that look like? What is their internal dialogue? What are their attitudes? What do they feel and think?
I also have qualitative data on that. One thing I’ll add to the scale that’s normally distributed is that most of the people report being behaviorally monogamous. Most of them are saying, “I tend to be monogamous.” When they fill out the scale, they’re psychologically perhaps less monogamous. I have a note from a presentation I gave.
I want to pause at what you said, though. I have committed crimes in my mind. I’ve done horrible things in my mind. This distinction between your behavior, thoughts, feelings, and attitudes can be quite distinct. I’m never going to rob the bank that I’m planning to do but it’s fun to think about. That’s an important distinction. You’ve done a bunch of qualitative work. Give us a glimpse into the mind. Is there a term for someone who sits in the middle?
Not that I’ve come up with yet. Do you have suggestions?
I love naming things. First of all, if you’re going to write a pop science book, you’re going to need to do that. Maybe the word is normal.
Yeah, although I hate that word.
I’m joking when I say that. For this person, yet unlabeled, what is their internal dialogue like? What are their attitudes like?
On average, most of them think that monogamy is still the right thing to do. Most people will defend monogamy to death, essentially. If these people are behaviorally monogamous, even though they have non-monogamous inklings, often they justify it through things like, “This is normal. It’s normal to think about other people and wish I could cheat on my partner.” They tend to normalize it.
Jesus was tempted by the devil so I get it.
In one of the qualitative studies that I did, we asked people. I’m always trying to get at what would you do if culture wasn’t a factor, which is impossible. One of the questions I asked was, “Say you lived in a world where everyone was non-monogamous.”
“Let’s say you go to Vegas for the weekend and there was a magic pill you could take. No one remembers anything.” That’s the question.
I did have a series of hypothetical questions like that too, “If this, then this. If no one would ever find out, there were no consequences.” For that, it ended up being divided into thirds. There was the hyper-monogamous, hyper-non-monogamous, and then the people who I called discordant or technically monogamous but if these things applied, maybe they’d be non-monogamous.
When I asked, “If you live in a world where everyone is non-monogamous, what would you choose?” The people who chose non-monogamy said things like freedom, excitement, and novelty. A lot of them were saying experience. Some quotes were like, “I haven’t had a lot of experience. It would be nice to get more experience. I could get better skills and be better at sex if I had more experience.”
I have a friend who got busted cheating because he used a new move. His partner was like, “Where did you learn that? You didn’t just dust that off three years into our relationship.”
He wasn’t the type of person who read books about sex.
Evidently, no. This is a long time ago.
I feel like that needs to come with a conversation if you do want to try something new.
“I do some reading.”
Don’t just jump into it because you learned it while cheating.
You create a counterfactual world in which non-monogamy is the norm and then people can transport themselves into that world. You licensed them to see some of the benefits of this. It’s interesting.
I did this study in 2007 and then repeated it in 2017 because non-monogamy had become so much more popular in the media. The data were almost identical. In both cases, 60% of people said they would want to be monogamous even if everyone else was non-monogamous.
These are the same people who are like, “If I was alive in the 1500s, I’d be terribly progressive.”
You mentioned about the morality piece. There’s one interesting thing. One of my friends with whom I did a paper, Diana Fleischman, studies disgust and the evolutionary functions of disgust. One of them is morality.
I’ve read some of her work.
Some of their responses were visceral disgust. We coded that as morality because they’re like, “That’s repulsive. Anyone who does that is disgusting and full of diseases.” It’s this very visceral revulsion.
Some very likely people have stopped reading this show because they are hyper-monogamous. This is not a comfortable reality for them. I welcome people turning off the show. I also welcome that if they want to be challenged to keep listening.
I have the data for the two most common ones. One is for saying, “I would be monogamous,” is love equals monogamy. If you’re in love, you want to be monogamous. Dan Savage talks about this in that video. There’s this narrative that if you are in love, you then never look at another person for the rest of your life. That is the narrative we have in this culture. A lot of the people in my studies said that as well.
My sense of pair bonding is a short experience relative to a long-lasting life. It’s this very intense, emotional, evolutionary, adaptive constellation of stuff, whatever stuff you do. I get the sense that, at the very least, it makes monogamy easier, if not even crowds out. I have a friend who’s falling in love and has started the tour of telling the other women he was sleeping with that he’s no longer going to sleep with them.
I’m seeing this thing where he’s like, “No, it’s just this one person.” I bet you he’s somewhere in the middle of your scale. I can’t speak for him. Those feelings may not last forever. They may last 1 to 3 years, just so you know before you take all of this off the table. In that sense, does the research back up this notion that being in a pair bonding situation crowds out that tendency to think about other people to be turned on by others?
I’ll do an aside about pair bonding and the neuroscience behind it in a second. I do think that in new relationship energy, there is a hyperfocus. The dopamine is elevated. Some people argue that the serotonin is lower but as I talk about in one of my podcast episodes, there doesn’t seem to be evidence for that. Serotonin, when it’s low, contributes to things like obsessive thinking, OCD, and that kind of stuff. When you’re in a new relationship energy, that’s happening. You can be hyper-fixated on someone. In non-monogamy land, that is a big challenge that people talk about a lot.
I see that. You’re suddenly like, “Lisa Dawn’s not returning my calls as quickly.”
“She’s hyper-fixated over here.” That’s different from a pair bond. Neuroscience is underlying a pair bond so the oxytocin, vasopressin, and dopamine stuff are very similar in an adult love relationship as it is with a parent and a child. One of my undergrad professors said in our interpersonal relationships course was, “We never say that a parent can only bond with one child.” We talk about pair bonding with adults all the time but we would never say, “You can only bond with one child,” even though the neuroscience is the same.
You’re saying it’s more cultural than biological.
Yes and no. Helen Fisher is an anthropologist who’s done a lot of work on the different systems. She argues that there’s a lust system that’s driven more by testosterone and estrogen. It involves the reward components. The pair bonding system, that’s not what she calls it but that’s more the dopamine and oxytocin. There’s a commitment system, which I’m blanking on the hormones underlying that. There are these different systems in our brain that work differently but the bonding piece comes later. The pair bonding piece comes later on once the new relationship energy calms down.
Thank you for clarifying that. Correlates of the scale of people along the scale?
One of the things I was interested in was things like the Big Five personality inventory and different traits.
Openness to new experiences has to correlate. I knew it.
That’s the only one.
Can you say what the five are?
Yes. It’s Openness to experience. I know it’s OCEAN. C is Conscientiousness.
You’re very high on that.
Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. That was another pop quiz. I thought perhaps people low on agreeableness might correlate more highly with being non-monogamous.
They’re like, “I don’t care what anyone thinks.”
That doesn’t seem to shake out in the data. I also thought extroversion but then I thought about so many of the non-monogamous people I know. I count myself in this too as the introvert piece because introverts prefer deep connections as opposed to going out into big groups. There was no correlation.
What about going to sex clubs? Maybe the extroverts like that.
Perhaps.
There’s one thing about the Big Five, and I’m not a personality researcher in any way, but this is the very established and accepted personality scale that is super useful not only in academia but also clinically. For your self-reflection, it’s helpful to understand where you lie on these things. Openness to new experiences is not surprising. Other correlates?
One that was quite obvious and one of the first studies I did was we looked at romanticism. People who score highly in romanticism are much more likely to be monogamous.
What is romanticism?
It’s things like belief in one true love and other factors like what we think of as stereotypical romance you would see in a rom-com.
Gender?
This is something that has flip-flopped in my data. In the first set of studies I ran, there was no gender difference at all and I was quite surprised by that. I did a big nationally representative sample and, in that sample, men scored more highly towards non-monogamy.
That’s what people would guess.
That is the stereotype. What’s also interesting is not my data but other data show that men are more likely to endorse romanticism. People find that surprising. There is a cultural narrative like hyper-fixation.
“Did you put this person on a pedestal?” That’s one thing that comes up a lot. As an aside, I want your reaction to this. When I talk to men about this stuff, I say to them, “The media and cultural narrative of wooing and pursuing a woman is the wrong narrative.” I’m speaking heteronormatively. It shouldn’t take that much convincing. It turns dudes into stalkers and behaving weirdly. They end up time obsessed with a woman who has no interest in them. You cannot take someone from no to yes. You can only take someone from yes to no.
What I often say is yes, you want to make a good impression and say, “Would you like to go out with me, yes or no?” If you get a no, it’s time to move on. There’s no turning the no into a yes. I can see how that’s romanticism. It shows up in the rom-coms and these stories or tropes. It does a disservice to the world of dating.
I do a lot of sexual violence prevention education on my campus and I do a series of things with the sports teams. That’s one of the examples I give all the time. Every rom-com is boy meets girl, the girl says, “No, thank you,” and the boy spends the whole rest of the movie convincing her. No wonder we have a hard time with consent when everything in our media is saying, “If someone says no, try harder.”
Keep trying, cajoling, and so on. That’s a surprising finding but it makes sense once you unpack it.
Related to that, I went down a rabbit hole of pickup artists a long time ago when the book The Game was popular. Although a lot of things that came out of pickup artistry are very toxic and bad, the biggest thing that is important is they say, “If someone’s not interested, walk away. There’s always someone else.”
The Game is a book by Neil Strauss. This is a Rolling Stones writer who goes undercover, becomes a pickup artist, and ends up becoming good at it because he’s a smart guy. He wrote a book about this.
It’s the idea of helping these people who are obsessed with a specific woman to go out, find other women, and realize that there are more people out there. If someone is not interested in you, who cares? Move on.
I also find the pickup artist stuff pretty gross. I agree with you. That’s a positive outcome. There’s another positive outcome, which is it gets guys to try and gives them a little bit of confidence and a chance. It’s built on a faulty premise and not the right behavior but at least it gets them to engage, versus pornography in the basement in that way. I also think it’s a bad way because it’s built on deception. I don’t believe that you can have a healthy and consensual relationship that’s built on deception. I find it to be morally reprehensible but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some silver linings in it. That’s an interesting one.
I have a hypothesis. I’m so curious about this. I have a friend who has waded into the kink world by going to sex parties. They’re not your run-of-the-mill sex parties. They’re highly curated and so on. I’m curious about education. I have a feeling that some of the most elevated people stumble into this world. I don’t know if it’s simply open-mindedness, like the Big Five. If you see The Matrix, you then go, “It’s not right or wrong but it’s a reasonable path to try and be navigated.” It’s more difficult but it has an upside as your participants can see in the thought experiment that you give them. I can’t put my finger on what that thing is.
There’s been data going back to the ‘70s on swingers. I also came from doing some archival research on monogamy at the Kinsey Institute, which is a sex research institute.
At the University of Indiana.
It’s called the Kenneth Haslam Polyamory Archive. It has mostly stuff from the ‘90s and 2000s but also references to things from the ‘70s. Both that and other research I’ve done, I have a couple of books on swinger research from the ‘70s, which are fun to read.
Are they how-to books?
No. It’s more like an anthropologist going in, observing these swingers, and reporting on them.
It’s the Jane Goodall for the swinging crowd.
Research on non-monogamous people, whether it was swingers in the ‘70s, queer folks in the ‘90s, or more mainstream things in the 2000s shows that the people on average tend to be highly educated or at least have a college degree and live in urban centers. There’s a reason why the Bay Area is seen as a high area.
That also correlates with the political spectrum. They tend to be a little left of center.
Although swingers are more likely on average to be conservative.
Other lifestyle folks tend to be left.
They tend to be more liberal.
I have a book coming out. People are like, “I already pre-ordered it. Shut up.” The swingers are on an island. The monogamous crowd is like, “Stay away from me. I’m not sure we’re inviting Jane and John to the dinner party because who knows what they’re going to do.” They don’t fit there. They are also seen as too traditional by a lot of the other lifestyle folks because they still often adhere to hierarchy. They tend to be monogamous most of the time. They merge their lives. They tend to live together in very traditional and almost nuclear households a lot of times. They’re too kinky for the non-kink people. They’re too traditional for the kink people. Is that fair?
The poly and other non-monogamous people look down upon swingers. There’s a lot of judgment.
They’re like, “They’re taking the easy way out.”
It is interesting because there are a lot of stereotypes about swingers. Even in the research literature and books, it’s defined as partnered couples go and have sexual interactions with other couples. There are no feelings involved. Everybody goes home. That’s not the reality. I haven’t been involved in swinging communities but I know people who have and they form lifelong friendships and relationships. There can be a lot of feelings and connection. Also, there are lots of swinging groups that are like the stereotype. If you’re going to these events again and again and these are people you have an affinity with, you’re going to have a connection with them.
That’s vacation.
My swinger friends go on vacations. Ten couples will go to Prague or something.
You’re in the archive. I have this view of you in this library with these stacks of books and you have this smile on your face doing this stuff. They’re like, “Dr. Hamilton, we’re closing.” Did something stand out from those? You have this lens to see a world that has not been talked about in this way. I feel like that’s a powerful tool that you have.
Non-monogamy has been common, particularly for gay men but also queer communities generally. Anytime you’re out of the mainstream about something, you’re going to be outside of the mainstream and other dimensions as well. That wasn’t talked about or documented. There were a few studies but I looked at the writings of polyamory newsletters and things like that from the ‘90s, which is when the term polyamory was coined.
Shockingly, it took that long.
Yes, for the official word to be coined. Many of these publications within the community talk about monogamy as religious zealotry and religion or a cult. That was something that stood out to me. Poly people in particular, especially people new to poly, tend to evangelize about it, tell all their friends, and be like, “I’ve found this new way.” Back then, when the identity of the community was first starting, they were referring to monogamy as the cult. Many different things I came across had religious references to monogamy.
We’re tribal so some of that is a little bit of us and them thing. The rise of monogamy was fueled largely by religion. It’s not the spirit. It has some truths to it, which is interesting. It’s fascinating stuff. It feels like a brave new world to me. I say that in a positive way. I have lots of different types of readers. I have people who are asexual so they’re reading this. If they are, they’re like, “What a fascinating world those people live in.” I should ask this, though, maybe I shouldn’t assume. For a person who’s asexual, how does this fit?
There’s a shocking amount of asexual people who would consider themselves polyamorous or within polyamory communities. There’s no sex required so things like romantic connections and intimate connections are valued as well.
For an asexual, aromantic person, how does this fit? Do they look at this and go, “I got nothing for you?”
Not necessarily. I’m thinking of a specific person who’s an activist in the community who identifies as demisexual aromantic but says that she forms intimate connections with people. She has people she says she doesn’t have romantic feelings for and doesn’t have sex with them but they have this deep, intimate bond. In theory, this could be for everyone.
That’s useful because I don’t want to misspeak about this.
I should correct that to say for everyone who desires a connection with others at some level.
There are folks out there who that’s not the case. What I like about this is I feel that this can be liberating for someone. First of all, learning that the average person sits somewhere in the middle of this continuum can be liberating. You no longer have to feel guilty that you have these naughty fantasies while you’re with your partner, for example. That’s much more common than you might have assumed. For the person who has been struggling within a monogamous relationship, it’s much more average or typical to not fully endorse everything about monogamy. That’s empowering.
Lastly, I don’t prescribe singleness. I’m not anti-marriage. What I want people to do is to figure out the right path for them. Having information that is science-backed and empowers them to make decisions that are better for them and their partners is exciting. The work that you’re doing is important. A popular press book could be valuable. We can workshop some ideas for titles and categories. I’m the guy who has the someday, just may, no way, and new ways.
I want to bring this full circle as we close. Having a relationship for 15 years and 7 years, isn’t it sad that we’re talking about these deep, intimate, and important relationships based on the number of years you were together? You have these relationships. You’ve fully embraced your soloness, even though it’s been part of you since you were a teen. You may be very happy in a phone conversation when we were planning this, where you offhandedly were like, “I have a new partner. We used relationship design,” to what?
To essentially plan what we wanted this relationship to look like.
That is one of my favorite episodes. It’s one of the most important episodes that I’ve done. Also, to have someone with your experience and training, and using it successfully.
It helps that both this new partner and I are very logical and rational. That sounds demeaning to other people.
We’ll call this person Spock.
Spock lives in Vancouver because I only date people in Vancouver.
You have a type.
It was funny. I was staying with my parents and my mom was like, “Where were you? Why were you out so long?” I was like, “I went on a date.” She was like, “Why are you dating? Why are you doing this here? Are you going to do this all over again?” I don’t even know if I would call it a relationship.
It’s a relationship. It may not be an escalator relationship. Can I ask a favor of you? I’m putting you on the spot. When you say you are engaged in relationship design, what does that mean to you?
He visited me and we were driving a lot. We listened to the Relationship Design episode together. I had already listened to it. I picked him up at the airport and was like, “I listened to this podcast. It would be beneficial for us. Do you want to listen to it with me?” It took us three days to get through it because we kept pausing and having conversations about it.
I wish I could tape these conversations.
Both of us are very comfortable being frank and that’s something a lot of people struggle with.
I’m not suggesting that relationship design is easy. It goes against a lot of our instincts and cultural training. It takes special people to do it well.
I found it beneficial to think about the pieces we want to make in this relationship.
The tapas that you want to share.
I live in a small town with a friend. All my other friends are very close by and they’ll pop by. He ended up meeting all of my friends on that first visit. I said to him, “What do you think about meeting family and friends? It was weird that you met all my friends. That’s not super normal.”
Especially because that’s a typical stage in the escalator ride. You’re meeting the friends.
He was like, “I don’t see the point.” I was like, “I don’t care if I meet your friends in Vancouver.” One of the things was he had never heard of the relationship escalator before. He thought that was an interesting concept. One of the things we decided is we wanted this relationship that I said and he agreed to. I was like, “I want it to be the moving walkway, like at the airport. I like long-term relationships so I want this to continue. We enjoy each other’s company but I don’t want it to change. I want it to be this casual thing on this moving walkway.”
There’s a long one at O’Hare that you could use as a model. It has bright, flashing, and colored lights. It’s super long. That’s the one.
It’s like a lot of pizazz.
If you were to give me a note, what’s missing? Having done it and done it in what sounds like a frank way, is there something that would’ve been useful in that episode?
I’m blanking if you’ve talked about this but I think about attachment styles.
I have a separate episode but not incorporating it.
Having that conversation with someone perhaps with an anxious attachment might be very distressing for people to know themselves. Even an avoidant attachment person, like someone who doesn’t want to talk about feelings or engage in that way. I skew a little bit avoidant but I found it refreshing to be able to have that frank conversation. Maybe that’s the people knowing potentially what might be emotionally activating for them based on attachment style, which is one possibility.
There’s no secure single attachment style, which is missing from that model. If I was interested in writing papers like that, I would go gung-ho on that and then deal with the brain damage of trying to publish it. The relationship design works best for someone secure. That is like the person who tends to be anti-jealous, knows what their strengths are, and has at least a sense of the repertoire of behaviors and lifestyles that they’re open to. It’s knowing yourself kind of thing. That helps a lot. Engaging in relationship design with my first girlfriend might have been fraught but now, it can come quite naturally. Lisa Dawn Hamilton, this was very good. I enjoyed this more than you.
I appreciate you coming to the Solo studio and taking time out of your precious sabbatical road trip to talk to me about your journey. It’s nice. On a podcast, you spend a lot of time talking into a microphone. One of the things that I have enjoyed about having a small community and also for this book to have invited letters, I have these Solo love letters, is you get to see the many ways that people are living remarkably, growing, and being comfortable to be a little different in a world built for two. It’s very fun to have one of you come out of the woodwork. Also, to be so thoughtful about relationships and sex more generally because of your work. That’s a very long way for me to say thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Cheers.
Important Links
- Lisa Dawn Hamilton
- Do We Know Things?
- The Ethical Slut
- Why Monogamy is Ridiculous
- The Game
- Relationship Design – Past Episode
- https://MTA.ca/directory/Lisa-Dawn-Hamilton
- https://Twitter.com/LDHamz?lang=en
About Lisa Dawn Hamilton
Lisa Dawn Hamilton is a sex researcher, sex educator, psychology professor, host of the podcast Do We Know Things, and most importantly a Solo listener.