"The Lifestyle refers to social/sexual relationships involving multiple partners - sometimes anonymous, sometimes standing - or, put more plainly, swinging. Recent conversations led me to consider whether Lifestyle proponents constitute a deviant subculture or in fact a logical progression toward a more natural state of relationship.To even consider such a theory, one has to suspend their natural tendency towards the rigid moral conventions to which we have all been socialized and look at this notion from a completely objective standpoint. That is undeniably difficult, but consider it rationally for a moment.
Very few species on the planet are actually monogamous. One presumes that this is because monogamy would not be evolutionarily advantageous in terms of perpetuating a species. Marriage is a social convention imposed to legitimize human sexual activity, which, at some point in our history became something to be regulated, if not disdained.
Infidelity - be it actual, emotional or objective - is almost a given within our culture. Doesn't monogamy seem contradictory to some primal hardwiring which is innately driven to perpetuate the species? What if we were to characterize infidelity not as a moral transgression, but, rather, as unnatural restriction imposed onto a system which is inherently unwilling to adopt such a rigidity? Is it possible that we were never meant to be monogamous at all, which means in turn that all of the variations of infidelity -- whether they be actual, emotional or objective -- would be redefined as mere results of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole?
Doesn't it make sense that, at some point in our social evolution, polyamory would be re-introduced as the logical standard and that such a lifestyle is actually more in line with that evolutionary imperative to perpetuate the species."
-Michael Formica, Psychology Today
