Why do people choose polygamy

By Brian Bethune March 4, Brady Williams poses with his wives, from left to right, Paulie, Robyn, Rosemary, Nonie, and Rhonda, outside of their home in a polygamous community outside Salt Lake City. The more people think monogamy is ordained by nature—or God—the more they are likely to think sexual temptation means they are evil people, or that they simply married the wrong spouse.

It also tends to keep the focus on male misbehaviour. In , the University of Wisconsin surveyed more than a thousand societies and found that only were monogamous. Officially, that is: adultery exists in all times and places. Some cultures had occasional open polygyny, and in more it was quite common, while just four featured recognized polyandry. In fact, many religious people think that monogamy is the way to go and that everything else will not be in line with religious beliefs.

Consequently, people who live in regions where religious beliefs are quite important may also have a quite hard time living a polygamous lifestyle since they may get socially excluded by the local population due to that.

In fact, while many partners claim that they are satisfied with polygamous relationships, they are actually not and they know it deep inside. In turn, spouses may become quite jealous over time and jealousy is problematic for every kind of relationship. In the long run, jealousy may translate into fear, desperation and also into a state where some spouses feel neglected, which in turn greatly lowers the overall quality of life of those partners.

In case you have multiple partners and you have to provide for all of them, this can also be quite problematic from a financial standpoint. In fact, many people underestimate the costs related to polygamy and are surprised of how expensive it can be to have multiple partners.

In fact, you will often have to pay for the shopping trips of multiple partners and also have to buy presents for your spouses from time to time. Therefore, if you are currently on a budget and try to save money, polygamy will likely not be the way to go for you. Another problem with polygamy is that you will also need a bigger home in order to accommodate all of your spouses. This also implies that you have to pay a much higher rent compared to a state where you were in a monogamous relationship.

In turn, this will imply an additional financial burden on you and you should make sure that you can afford having multiple partners in order to protect yourself from any financial difficulties related to your polygamous lifestyle. In fact, in regions where men have multiple wives, those wives often only have quite confined rights. Consequently, polygamy can also be considered as problematic from a gender inequality perspective. In fact, the incentive to treat your partners with respect decreases with polygamy since you will have a bigger selection of spouses and will not care too much whether a partner leaves you or not.

Although your partners may claim that they are fine with you having multiple spouses, they will often not be fine with it at all. In fact, your spouses will likely try to manipulate each other in order to get your attention and to turn you into a monogamous creature. In turn, those manipulation attempts can lead to serious tensions inside your family and to many unpleasant outcomes in the long run.

In fact, women will always prefer their own children over the children from the other wives and this can lead to a state where one wife will not accept the children of another wife. In fact, in many polygamous relationships, spouses will be treated rather poorly and will also not be allowed to earn their own money. In turn, the level of dependence on their partner is enormous and those spouses will often not be able to leave the marriage due to financial reasons, even though they might not be happy in their marriage at all.

However, if there are too many children in a household, chances are that some of those children will suffer from serious neglect. In turn, those children may not get enough food or also not have the opportunity to get proper education. Many partners in polygamous relationships also suffer from mental problems. While spouses are often fine with polygamous relationships at the beginning, they often realize after a while that they rather want to spend their lives in a monogamous relationship instead.

In turn, those people will often suffer from serious mental issues since they will lose all their hope for a better future. In general, the overall level of acceptance towards polygamous relationships is often rather limited.

In fact, in many regions all over the world, polygamy is considered to be rather dodgy and not in line with cultural and social norms. In turn, if you want to practice polygamy in those regions, chances are that you will get socially isolated and may not be considered as a valuable member of society anymore. Polygamous relationships also imply the problem that the risk for the spread of diseases increases significantly. In fact, if you are intimate with many different partners, chances are that you will transmit certain diseases from one partner to the other.

I certainly wouldn't stay with Joe if he had any of those traits. I'm not here to be a toy for a man, nor are my sister wives. Most men don't enter this lifestyle so they can have more sex; rather, they have a sincere sense of a higher purpose. I'd rather share Joe than have a hundred men of lesser quality to myself. I consider Joe to be a monogamist.

He is faithful to me, and faithful to the people I expect him to be faithful to. I've learned during my darkest times just what a gift this lifestyle can be. After a five-year break between pregnancies, I had trouble conceiving my seventh child, and then had a miscarriage. I feared my childbearing days were over, but I finally got pregnant again. I was extremely excited at the prospect of once more being a mother to a newborn. My relationship with Joe was at an all-time high, and my interactions with Alina and Val flowed easily.

My life seemed perfect. But something felt off right from the start of this pregnancy. My morning sickness, severe from the outset, never let up. I also was plagued by constant headaches and exhaustion. A sweltering heat wave that summer made me feel miserable. I couldn't sleep at night because I was too hot; as a result, I was too tired to get up early enough to exercise, which always made me feel better during my pregnancies.

The final link in that chain of consequences was that I gained weight. And it was all Joe's fault! Joe couldn't win no matter how hard he tried to meet my emotional or physical needs.

I couldn't stand myself, but that didn't keep me from lashing out at Joe, which added to our strained interactions. Our nights together were filled with tension, and instead of taking time to talk and connect, we would tumble into bed exhausted. It didn't help that as my relationship with Joe withered, his relationship with Alina blossomed. For the first time in my life, I wondered if I had the strength and staying power necessary for plural marriage.