A US tech company says its chief executive has quit after he was apparently caught on a big screen at a Coldplay concert embracing a female co-worker, in a clip that went viral.
The clip showed a man and a woman hugging on a jumbo screen at the arena in Foxborough, Massachusetts, before they abruptly ducked and hid from the camera.
The pair were identified in US media as Mr Byron, a married chief executive of Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, the firm’s chief people officer.
I think we as a society need to get over compulsory monogamy. It clearly doesn’t work for everybody. Why must two consenting adults refrain from expressing mutual love for one another?
Don’t get me wrong, cheating is unethical and monogamy is still valid for those who want it. But the idea that monogamy is the most pure form of love is a social construct that has no basis in reality.
If you don’t want to be monogamous don’t get married. It’s an easy solution.
You can be in a non-monogamous marriage. Quite common, actually.
Why would marriage be an issue? It’s convenient for purposes of healthcare coverage, hospital visitation rights, guarantees that without a will stating otherwise your spouse makes all decisions regarding the disposal of your corpse, and they automatically inherit any wealth you have, and if you have military benefits in many cases marriage is required to transfer those, or have them automatically transfer on death.
I’m not monogamous, neither is my spouse, but we are married because of all the above reasons. Marriage isn’t about love and monogamy it’s about financial and death planning
You’re right to call out that marriage != monogamy. The comment should have been:
Except all those advantage of officially marriage cannot be enjoyed by people who actually want the polygamous marriage as the system does not recognize that.
Oh for sure, it’s incredibly frustrating, even more so since realistically no one is really fighting for poly marriage recognition outside a couple east coast towns. That’s great and all, but isn’t perfect by a long shot. I’ve toyed with reporting myself for polygamy (well technically it would be bigamy stauetorally) and trying to get it overturned that way, though looking through case law and the like I don’t really see a way that would work. And there aren’t enough of us to really easily get it on the ballot I don’t think.
Or have ab open marriage, or habr a marriage where you swing
Good point.
The idea is that no one is stopping you from being poly. If that’s the type of relationship you want, then have fun with that. The problem in this case is when he wants to see other people and his wife believes they’re in a monogamous relationship.
My issue is that people jumped to harrassing these people before they knew that and then used that newfound knowledge to justify said harrassment.
While that’s technically true, it’s a lot more nuanced than that.
Our society instills monogamous values in its media and traditions. The sentiment around polyamory is that it’s weird, naive, frivolous and immature at best. The very suggestion of polyamory outside of friendly circles is often met with negative vitriol, as evidenced by the amount of down votes I’m getting in this thread.
I recognize now that I have always leaned towards polyamory and that’s been an awakening that’s taken nearly a decade over the last third of my life. I never cheated but I went through deep emotional pain and have caused emotional pain to others trying to figure that out in a world that was telling me monogamy was what I needed to strive for if I wanted a meaningful relationship. Even now, I’m voluntarily in a monogamous relationship because I deeply value my partner, though I can’t help but wish society hadn’t scared me into rejecting that part of myself for the better part of my life.
I never argued against that. Cheating in any relationship is deceptive and immoral. My qualms are with the fact that our society is biased against non-monogamy and due to that many people don’t realize it’s an option and instead resort to ways of getting their needs met that cause emotional harm and turmoil.
I don’t think western governments allow polygamous marriages. Or do you mean only dating and never having legal rights?
I was mostly just talking about OP’s “compulsory monogamy”, which is obviously nonsense. No one is forcing you to be monogamous. If you don’t want monogamy, don’t do it, assuming your partner is okay with it.
Having some kind of polygamous marriage arrangement as a legal agreement is a different issue that should be worked out.
You do know that -gamy means marriage right? We aren’t talking about polyamory, we are talking about polygamy.
Compulsory heterosexuality has been the standard of our society for centuries up until very recently. It was common for closeted gay men to marry women in order to fit into society and then have secret affairs with other men on the side to satisfy their homosexuality. That’s changed over the last few decades but even now it still happens. Would you have told a gay man from 50 years ago that compulsory heterosexuality is nonsense? That nobody is forcing them to fall in love with and marry a woman? Despite the fact that every social normality and structure was oriented towards heterosexuality and fiercely rejected homosexuality to the point where homosexual people closeted themselves out of fear for their own lives.
I’m not saying non-monogamous people have it as bad as homosexual people did in the previous era. But you can’t deny that our society strongly encourages monogamy and strongly discourages non-monogamy through social norms and structures. Similar to homosexuality in the previous era, there are little to no widely available resources for non-monogamous people to help them understand that part of themselves and the vast majority of them don’t consider it to be an option due to the stigmatization of non-monogamous relationships; in other words, compulsory.
That’s frankly a poor take.
On one hand, you’re arguing that the social and legal benefits of marriage should be exclusive to monogamous couples. Why should marriage require monogamy? It may imply monogamy by tradition but up until recently those same traditions excluded same-sex couples and we’ve moved on from that requirement by now.
Alternatively, there exist those who are married but practice some form of non-monogamy, e.g. swingers, porn stars, polyamorous couples, separated couples. Does practicing non-monogamy invalidate their marriage? You could argue that it traditionally would, but again, we’ve already moved on from traditional marriage. In reality, the only thing that invalidates a marriage is divorce or death. Monogamy is not a requirement.
On the other hand, you seem to be implying that committed romantic relationships outside of marriage aren’t widely and by default of social expectation (i.e. compulsory) monogamous. I’m certain you would be hard pressed to find anybody who would tell you otherwise.
Regardless, it’s still at the very least a grey area to get involved with a subordinate, and I think a majority would find that unethical regardless.
When I was beginning to work at the university, there was a professor who had started an affair with his student. Everybody knew about that, no one cared a s***. Later on, the student got employed at the department, and then they got married. The only thing I ever heard of it being talked about was that it wasn’t quite sure whether it was the student or her professor who actually did her “maturity exam” (a then-compulsory exam after finishing your MA thesis, the questions of which were based on the thesis).