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Comment by jbrown | Hacker News Reader

> It feel like you are pushing a specific aspect to the detriment of the whole.

Maybe. What detriment are you thinking of?

I'm just observing that since monogamy restricts us to this 1:1 gender ratio, and since in some cases one of those 1s is taken off the table (either literally or if not literally, maybe effectively due to low quality) this drastically restricts society's ability to meet a basic human need one a wide scale. To make matters worse, situations like China's gender imbalance add to the challenges that already exist when the gender split is close to 50-50. Wouldn't you agree that these kinds of challenges might be reduced if a many-to-one structure was just as socially acceptable as a one-to-one structure? Could the pigeonhole principle have something to do with the demand for sex trafficking? If this is an unreasonable line of thought, I'd love to understand why.

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> Maybe. What detriment are you thinking of?

The marriage as a whole. I see accurate representation of expected monogamy/polygamy or fidelity/infidelity (WRT sex) as just one aspect of many that may cause marital problems. What about a husband that expects the wife to be a homemaker when she is unhappy in that role, or a wife that expects the husband to provide all financial support when the husband is unhappy with that. There are many reasons marriages fail, and I think focusing specifically on one of them may not help as much as making people more aware of marriage expectations altogether.

As for the rest of your comment, I would be happy if marriage as a whole was less strictly regimented by society, but I understand the reasons it is. Marriage is the building block of families, and families are the building blocks of our societies. We optimize for successful families that produce well adjusted offspring. The problem is that I'm not sure exactly how we are defining "well-adjusted". If it's primarily in relation so society and culture (it is, the question is how much), it may just be self selecting. That's not necessarily a way to make things better, just to perpetuate the status quo. I just don't know enough to make a call.

> The marriage as a whole.

How precisely do you think the things I'm saying harm the marriage as a whole? I'm still not seeing your point. I'm not talking here about causes of marriage failure. I'm talking about the graph structure of society's sexual relationships.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't have monogamous marriages. I'm asking if changing society's expectations to the point where both monogamy and all variations of non-monogamy were perceived to be equally legitimate (with a likely corresponding increase in the number of non-monogamous relationships) could have an impact on the demand for sex trafficking. I don't think making this change would eliminate sex trafficking, but I think it could plausibly help the situation.

> How precisely do you think the things I'm saying harm the marriage as a whole?

I think focusing on one possible problem with marriages which I view to be a subset of a larger issue may take focus from other, equally important aspects. Not so much in that it harms a specific marriage, but that it may be a less useful way to look at marriage in general if our goal is promote happy and long lasting unions.

> I'm not saying that we shouldn't have monogamous marriages.

I didn't think you were saying that. I'm more conversing than arguing a point. We seem to be mostly in agreement, I just think an approach less focused on a single aspect would be more beneficial overall.

> I just think an approach less focused on a single aspect would be more beneficial overall.

Fair enough. I was focusing on the monogamy issue because it seems a lot more directly related to sexual trafficking and this thread than, say, how a couple manages finances or who cleans up the kitchen. :)

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