According to sexologists, some serial monogamist red flags are: There is barely any gap between the end of one relationship and the beginning of another. A serial monogamist will not like it when their demand for exclusivity is not accepted. They might be engaged more than three times without getting married even once.
Serial monogamists do sometimes settle down. They get married, have children. But it seems like they're never really in search of a great love. If a great love happens to find them, that's well and good, but more pressing is the issue of finding someone right now.
Staying in an Unhealthy Relationship
While it's good that serial monogamists will last through some tough times, staying for love isn't always healthy. Relationships can be toxic, abusive and just mismatched. You may often stay in relationships they know are bad, just to avoid being alone.
While a serial monogamist likely has never been married or engaged, they do tend to have a history of long-term relationships. “They enjoy deepening a relationship and getting close with others, rather than keeping things casual and light,” Diller explained.
Why Do People Engage in Serial Monogamy? People who engage in serial monogamy may be described as 'addicted to love. ' However, it's more accurate to say they are addicted to the high of a new relationship. New relationships involve excitement, fun, and lust that is less common in older relationships.
Serial monogamy might be associated with mental disorders such as borderline personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder. People with borderline personality disorder might engage in serial monogamy as they have fears of abandonment.
Evolutionary psychologists tend to focus on how serial monogamy influences the survival of the species. Since many social scientists believe that lifetime monogamy is not natural for humans it makes sense that many cultures would have versions of serial monogamy.
First and foremost is codependency. Serial monogamists often love spending time with their partners, so much so that it leads to an overall lack of independence. If you ever feel guilty for leaving your partner, or find it hard to make time for yourself within the relationship, it can be extremely unhealthy.
Under polygamy, a male can be married with two females simultaneously, and have children with every wife. Under serial (or sequential) monogamy, both males and females can have more than one spouse over their lifetime, although not simultaneously.
A serial monogamist is a person who moves from one romantic relationship to another very quickly, spending as little time single as possible. Some serial monogamists might have short-lived relationships, while others might have long-term relationships.
Recent discoveries have led biologists to talk about the three varieties of monogamy: social monogamy, sexual monogamy, and genetic monogamy. The distinction between these three are important to the modern understanding of monogamy.
One of the things Tuckman's survey revealed was that persons with ADHD were more likely to have participated in both consensual non-monogamy (i.e., being in some kind of sexually open relationship) and non-consensual non-monogamy (i.e., cheating or infidelity).
So, from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, monogamy is natural because fathering is natural in the human species and fathering only evolves with sufficient sexual exclusivity to allow for paternity certainty for men and sufficient resource provision certainty for women.
1. Take your partner for granted. There's no better way to help hurry the end of the relationship than to just assume your partner is always there to make your life easier.
“The modern monogamous culture has only been around for just 1,000 years,” says Kit Opie, an evolutionary anthropologist from University College London.
Here's a well-known move from a serial monogamist's playbook: you leave someone for the chance someone else might be better. In polyamory, there is no “better,” only “different.” So you don't have to leave a good thing if it's missing something — you just add another to fulfill that lack.
In essence, men are only socially monogamous rather than genetically monogamous.
For humans, monogamy is not biologically ordained. According to evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss of the University of Texas at Austin, humans are in general innately inclined toward nonmonogamy.
This means that of all marriages, 58 per cent are monogamous. Only men in the top 10 per cent of status married more than two women. The most wives that anyone has is four.
Jumping from one relationship to another is a common practice. Nevertheless, most psychologists agree that it's never a good idea although, as in everything relating to being human, there are always exceptions.
Codependents seek out partners whom they can save and get drowned in taking care of their partners while never being taken care of themselves. Like a pair of dysfunctional puzzle pieces perfectly fitting together floating across a sea of misery, codependents attract those who desire caregivers and enablers (vampires).
Examples of Serial Monogamy
An individual gets married but their partner dies, and they later remarry.
If we mean realistic for the species of humans, then the answer clearly is yes. In various cultures around the world people are able to engage in lifelong monogamous relationships.
Evolution dictates that genes have the final say. And if there is one thing genes want, it is to spread as far and wide as possible. That is why monogamy is rare among mammals. Females have to wait for a long gestation period to have a child, where as males could go and inseminate many other females in that time.
“The human mating system is extremely flexible,” Bernard Chapais of the University of Montreal wrote in a recent review in Evolutionary Anthropology. Only 17 percent of human cultures are strictly monogamous.