It saves you a lot of emotional rollercoasting. Or in my mother’s words: “dealing with one man that you love and like and is one of the good ones is a serious pain in the ass sometimes, why would I want to deal with more than one?”
I don’t think the paperwork got anything to do with it, either, the advantage to “I like the one I have, can’t be bothered check others out” exists for any monogamous relationship in which both members happen to have that mindset.
I’m not trying to pick a fight either. I apologize if you are reading a tone that suggests that.
But you did raise a premise for a topic that is to me quite baffling. ** Smeghead**'s turn of the phrase makes it sound quite ridiculous. So if you don’t have this point of vew yourself, and it doesn’t sound as if anyone else does…what’s the point of the thread?
I guess I could start a thread to see if anyone’s farts smell like purple.
Suppose my tribe knows how to send smoke signals to communicate with other tribes. In the age of cell phones, are smoke signals still necessary? No.
Same premise. If the original intent of sexual exclusivity was so that a man could be certain that his children were his, is that need obsolete now that we can nearly flawlessly determine parentage through DNA testing?
Based on the responses I got from the thread, it seems the answer is, “It may be unnecessary, but now sexual exclusivity in a relationship serves other purposes.”
The original question was anthropological in nature more than anything else.
I find it interesting that you think knowing the parentage more definitively would lead to more affairs, not less. It seems to me that the opposite argument - fear of being caught and likely divorced would lead to fewer women risking sleeping with men other than their husbands - would be much easier to make.
I think a far more interesting question that I would love a definitive answer to - how many children in days of yore were the result of affairs?
And to address the OP - I don’t care about the parentage of children in my marriage, but kid or no kid I sure as hell don’t want to stir anyone else’ss porridge, which is not going to be addressed either way by DNA testing.
:smack::smack::smack: Please show me where in the thread I said this.
You’re assuming there was just one intent to monogamy – or an intent at all. It’s not like people sat down and came up with monogamy. It happened but there may have been a variety of factors in it.
That’s a pretty massive misunderstanding. One of the theories (there are several, and there’s no definitive evidence for any of them) is that monogamy was evolutionarily selected for because paternal certainty makes males more likely to contribute resources to the mother and child, thus providing better survival rates of offspring. And there seems to be a pretty general agreement that it’s unfair and just plain wrong for a guy to have to raise someone else’s kid just because it was born to his wife. Let’s not even get into the outrage generated whenever there’s a story about someone paying child support for a kid that was the product of an ex-wife’s affair.
I’m frankly not seeing where DNA testing really affects any of this. If you’re going to raise the kid regardless, it makes no difference if your the bio father or not. If you’re only going to raise the children that are provably yours, then monogamy is still completely relevant because people will be less willing to take the risk of accidental pregnancy that would implode their family units and threaten their children’s stability.
Do you need a dictionary definition of an extramarital affair or what?
I think he’s proposing one of these things:
Since DNA tests can be used to assure a father that a child is his, his wife might feel free to risk getting caught having an affair, because she can assure him that their children were not fathered by a paramour.
Routine DNA testing would reveal that cuckoo’s egg babies were so common that society would adjust to accommodate it, such as Robin Baker’s speculation regarding an automatic “baby tax” on men who father children outside of their own marriages. The commonplaceness of such occurences would result in people getting more used to the occurrence of infidelity on the part of married women.
But he objected to my assertion that his idea was that knowing DNA should logically lead to more affairs, so…I don’t know.