The following excerpts are taken from:
William R. Jankowiak, Illicit Monogamy: Inside a Fundamentalist Mormon Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023)
To document that many people find monogamous less than satisfying does not mean monogamous marriage cannot be very satisfying. By the same token, to acknowledge that a polygamous family can be dissatisfying for some does not mean that polygamous marriage cannot work or bring satisfaction to many of its participants. (p. x)
The conventional feminist critique of the polygamous or plural marriage states that the dissatisfactions of women are the by-product of their dependency on their husbands, who monopolize both their earning power and sexuality. However, recent research of the polygamous family has not found this dynamic to be typically the case. Most Angel Park women have their own earning power and are more than ready to engage their husband in the give-and-take negotiations that potentially benefit themselves (Bennion 1998, 2004; Altman and Ginat 1996). Moreover, fundamentalist religious doctrine and its ethnical guidelines also restrict men’s sexual behavior. For both sexes, premarital sex is condemned. Also condemned are affairs that married and non-married men might have outside a church-sanctioned marriage. Contrary to the feminist critique of the polygamous family, it is not women but young men who are more likely to lose out in the evolutionary struggle to obtain a wife (Bennion 1998, 2020; Jankowiak 2019). (p. 32)
Since the Middle Ages, people have erroneously misunderstood the primary motivation for the establishment of a polygamous family. Contrary to the prevailing folklore, the polygamous family was never principally designed to satisfy male sexual desire. On the contrary, it is the institutionalization of a marriage and family system designed to increase reproduction to achieve an exalted spiritual state of being. It stands in contrast, therefore, to the monogamous family system, which is ideally anchored in the intimacy of a couple, complemented by active coparenting of the mother and father. The polygamous family system values and promotes the development of warm supportive relationships with all family members. Its structure is a distinctly more collective than individualistic.
Every family is different. Because a person’s place and understanding of family life is shaped by his or her position within the family, any investigation into the plural family requires probing the way fathers, wives, cowives, and offspring understand their place within the larger family structure. There are variations within variations. Still, there are prevailing themes and commonalities typical of most polygamous families. It is a misconception to think that most fundamentalist families live in bad faith and/or assert and affirm religious doctrine and moral standards they do not believe in—I found this not to be so. (pp. 267-68)
The Mormon fundamentalist ideal of plural or multiple love bonds is similar to the contemporary cultural phenomenon of polyamory (or the ability to love more than one person) found across the world. Both strive to avoid creating or establishing emotionally exclusive dyads. The community readily acknowledges that the best family is where everyone takes pleasure in one another’s well-being and finds joy in witnessing their love for their husband. But this is an ideal seldom realized in actual life.
Successful polyamorous unions are grounded in greater material affluence, linked to a personal commitment sustained through informal but ongoing conversations. In effect, polyamorous unions functions as ad-hoc therapeutic groups when three or more individuals gather to discuss their relationship with each other and the benefits of their mutual love. Significantly, the issue of reproduction and care for offspring is not a matter of contention for sustaining most polygamous unions. In a polygamous family, each wife is primarily focused on providing care for her offspring. Plural wives do not have the opportunity to engage in regular in-depth conversations with family members. For most of them, focusing on their natal family is the primary way in which they organize their time and thus their relationship with their children and their husband.
Given the polygamous proclivity to form exclusive dyadic bonds, we are left with a critical question: can contemporary polygamous families endure over time? Their success will depend to a large extent on whether their members can uphold another equally salient and very human capability: sustaining a commitment to a cosmologically inspired ideal that says plural love is superior to monogamous love. This presents something of a paradox; humans are both a pair-bond species that desires to form dyadic unions, even when these are not culturally sanctioned, and one that shows an adaptive cognitive capacity to create alternative ways of living. (pp. 275-76)
