10 Reasons: “Why is One Wife Not Enough?”
With the rapid growth in the West of hookup culture, friends with benefits, situationships and polyamory in general, a lot of the more moderate or traditional younger people are asking the question:
Well, why not polygamy?
Isn’t being committed to multiple people for life and having a big family WAYYY more moral and traditional (and even Biblical) than jumping from partner to partner to partner?
To quote manosphere podcaster and Biblical polygyny advocate, Rob B Kowalski,
“So what, you’re telling me that I can legally have multiple girlfriends, I can legally knock them all up, they can legally kill my offspring without my say, but if I want to publicly commit to them in marriage and provide for them for life and raise a big, happy family, THAT’s illegal. That’s where we draw the line. Really?”
But, understandably, there’s still a majority pushback from the more religious, conservative side of the aisle. Conservatives, as a rule, are more resistant to change than progressives. That’s generally how stability works.
So, those of us on the more conservative side who do advocate for the option of polygamy (because monogamy-only marriage isn’t a Biblical principle) often find ourselves faced with questions from our friends and family like,
“What, one wife isn’t enough for you?”
“Why would you want to do that to women?”
“But is your wife allowed to have other husbands too?”
“Okay, but where do you draw the line? What’s the limit? How many wives are too many?”
Besides displaying a complete ignorance of what Biblical marriage actually is and looks like, these questions are often just echoed talking points from a pastor or a Daily Wire-type character trying to spout off gotcha questions in order to “own the left”, that, when aimed at our fellow brothers and sisters, are ultimately argumentative and divisive, because there’s an in-built presumption of guilt or wrongdoing.
If you ask me, “why is one wife not enough for you?”, my immediate instinct is going be defensive.
It’s like me asking you, “why do you beat you wife?”, and then when you get upset and angry at the implication, immediately backing it up with, “woah, why are you getting so defensive? Looks like I really touched a nerve there. Look out for this guy, am I right?”
It’s just not the foundation of a productive conversation in which we’re both seeking to understand, learn from and uplift each other. It’s adversarial by nature. And Jesus taught us that when things get adversarial, we should try to come into agreement or find a middle-ground, lest resentment build and things get more serious.
So, in that light, our first response to the question, “why is one wife not enough for you?”, should be maintaining our cool, pausing for a breath, and responding with something like, “well, why do you think that’s an okay question to ask? What’s your motivation in asking?”
And assuming that it’s all in good faith and we’re friends and there’s no targeted agenda here, well, there’s actually a whole bunch of reasons why. Here’s ten of them.
1. Economics
Our currency has been so devalued that the single-income households of our grandparents and great-grandparents are long gone. Most households now rely on two incomes in order to survive.
But a polygamous household can have three, four, five or more income streams; much easier to build stability, security, and long-term wealth, while still allowing for more time with family.
2. Anthropology
Most mammals and people are not and have never been monogamous by nature. They have always functioned best in harem-style families centered around a strong male. This is survival 101. In larger communities, the strongest male gets the best females, and the secondary males on the outskirts might have one or none.
3. History
85–90% of all cultures have allowed polygyny. Anti-polygamy laws only came about in the Roman empire as a means of restricting the ability of the slave/working class to outgrow their station.
The military class were always allowing to take concubines (conquered “foreign” secondary wives).
And the elite families generally always had multiple wives and concubines and handmaids that provided sex and secondary “backup” children, they just kept it pretty private within the walls of their palaces. This ensured they had more children than the working class, because family is wealth, but it also meant that they had to keep expanding their empire to integrate new slaves/working class and maintain the class balance, which was problematic.
And this idea has, through Roman Catholicism, permeated in the West until today.
Well, I don’t accept that. America was founded on the idea that every man is a sovereign on their own land. I’m not a slave. My family are not slaves. Family is still wealth, and more wives equals both more children and more adults to care for those children. Everybody wins.
4. Sociology
Roughly 80% of the things women are looking for in a long-term relationship (ie. emotional connection, validation, someone to talk to, someone to help with the cooking, cleaning, housework, etc.) are all qualities they naturally get better from other women than from men.
A marriage of one man and two women not only allows a man more time to be present at home, because there’s less chores that need his attention,but it also essentially cuts a woman’s load in half, leaving the women more time for themselves, more time for the children, more time for each other, more time with their husband, and more time to pursue a side hustle.
5. Genetics
Monogamy defenders will often cite the roughly equal number of men and women according to population statistics in order to justify one-man-one-woman monogamy as the natural default coupling of mankind.
However, geneticists have now shown pretty conclusively that only 40% of men and 80% of women have historically passed on their genetic material. The average norm for mankind has always been one man to two women. And there’s a load of reasons for that, and none are because women aren’t enough.
6. Biology
So many of our natural, gendered biological differences point us towards polygyny.
Case in point, at the most, a woman can have one baby a year for maybe thirty years of her life, but there’s enough sperm inside just thirty men right now to impregnate every woman in the world.
7. Psychology
Men and women are wired to pairbond very differently.
Women want to pairbond with only one man. But they’re also hypergamous, meaning that they want a guy that’s superior, over them, a leader, a man they can respect and submit to.
But because women are generally also more socially-driven, group-think individuals than men, they also tend to only find as attractive men that they believe other women are attracted to. They want a man that other women want as well.
In other words, women want a top guy, and they know other women want a top guy too, so one of the big things that assures them that their guy is a top guy, is seeing other women want their guy.
Men don’t pairbond that way. Men are wired to sow their seed, to seek variety, and to pairbond by conscious choice when we find women we value, that will give us what we seek.
We seek loyalty, exclusivity, humility and fertility. And when we find those things, we will pairbond by choice.
But that doesn’t make us want to be exclusive back. We’re not wired that way. We can pairbond with a dozen women at a time, and provide for and protect all of them. And still even sleep with random women for sex beyond that without it affecting out commitment to the women we’re committed to.
This is because commitment fundamentally means something different to us than the modern feminized romance version. Commitment for men means we will provide for you, protect you, do right by you and our children, and you can count on us to keep doing that. Sleeping with other women in most cases won’t stop us from providing those things.
And many cultures actually recognize this. You go on YouTube right now and find Japanese street interviews with women saying they don’t think their men going to prostitutes or having a random hookup counts as cheating or an affair because there’s no emotional component there.
Monogamy-only culture has created this false idea for men and women, that a man sleeping with someone else means that he’s going to leave or abandon his wife and children. In reality, the monogamy-only culture created this problem. A marriage culture that embraces polygyny would drastically lower divorce rates, because it affirms that a man sleeping with another woman does not alter the expectation of commitment in the marriage.
8. Sexuality
Men, especially high testosterone men, generally have higher sex drives, want sex more often, and want more variety, than women.
Also, there’s an important point to be made about female bisexuality. Attraction works differently for men and women.
Women spend a lot more time looking in the mirror than men do because they’re more sexually attracted to what they see.
Some have attributed this phenomenon to the universality of being breastfed. In healthy environments, we all, male and female, are wired from infancy to seek breasts, and associate them with life, nurture, warmth, food, and emotional and physical comfort.
Pupil dilation studies have shown that 100% of women’s pupils react equally to sexually attractive men AND women, whereas the majority of men don’t. Men, we look at a jacked guy and most likely think, yeah, I want to work out and get ripped like that so I can be strong and healthy. Women look at other attractive women and feel sexually attracted to them, (and in a monogamy-only culture, view them as competition and dislike them immediately) and this is also why women love or hate their own bodies so much more than men do.
So, there’s actually a big argument to be said that all women are naturally some degree of bisexual, bisensual, bi-curious, etc, with other women, which itself reaffirms polygyny as a base aspect of our natures.
And interestingly, unbiased readings of both the Bible and the Qur’an in the source languages only specify male homosexuality as a sin, not female homosexuality.
9. Scripture
In both the Bible and the Qur’an, essentially the sum total of the scriptures of all the monotheistic religions, God never ever commands monogamy-only marriage. Men always have the right to take multiple wives based on means, desire and mutual consent, and men are even actively encouraged to take in the widows of their relatives as additional wives.
James, brother of Jesus and first Bishop of the church at Jerusalem, in his epistle to the church, says that pure religion is caring for the widows and the fatherless.
And God, in both the Old and New Testaments, describes himself as being the polygynous husband of multiple tribes, nations, churches, etc.
It’s never about a man just having more sex, it’s about the moral virtue in providing every woman/child in society with a good husband/father.
10. Hierarchy
Allowing a man to have multiple wives is the antithesis of feminism.
Because women are the gatekeepers of sex, many feminists have relied, consciously or unconsciously, upon their ability to deny their husband sex as a means of getting their way and controlling the relationship.
Nothing kills a feminist’s power quicker than her man being able to turn immediately to another woman.
And this is precisely why the literal Satanists pushing feminism in the 1800s (see Rachel Wilson’s book Occult Feminism) had to make sure anti-polygamy laws were in place all across the West before they could start pushing women’s suffrage.
Conversely, nothing will cure society of the myriad problems caused by feminism like broadly reaffirming the Biblical right of men to take multiple wives.
And that’s it. That’s ten reasons why one wife might not actually be enough for a traditional family.
I could go on, of course, but the real question should be, why wouldn’t I as a man want another wife for my family/household? If every additional child is a blessing, why not every additional wife too?
