Over 100 years of hidden harems
Our monogamy is constantly varied by polygyny, or pseudo-polygamy, lacking the sanctions and responsibilities of Mohammedan plurality.
That’s not a hot take from a controversial dating podcast. It’s from a book published in 1914, written by Walter M. Gallichan, an Edwardian sexologist who spent years studying marriage customs across cultures. Reading Women Under Polygamy today feels less like historical curiosity and more like prophecy.
Gallichan’s central argument was uncomfortable then and remains so now: Western societies have never actually practiced monogamy. What we’ve practiced is a concealed form of polygamy—affairs, mistresses, prostitution, kept women—but without any of the legal protections or social obligations that Eastern plural marriage provided. The Edwardian gentleman keeping a mistress in Mayfair was functionally polygamous, but his secondary partner had none of the property rights, divorce protections, or social standing that a Turkish second wife enjoyed under Islamic law.
A century later, we’ve simply found new names for old arrangements.
The situationship has a history
Gallichan quoted the philosopher James Hinton: “What is the meaning of maintaining monogamy? Do you call English life monogamous?” He then observed that “side by side with monogamic marriage, concubinage has always existed,” noting that even in thirteenth-century England, “the concubina legitima” was often the recognized companion of the wife.
The point wasn’t to defend polygamy. It was to expose hypocrisy. Western civilization had constructed an elaborate fiction of monogamous purity while tolerating—indeed, quietly institutionalizing—precisely the arrangements it publicly condemned in Eastern societies. The difference was honesty. The Turkish husband with four wives had legal obligations to all of them. The Victorian gentleman’s mistress had nothing but his goodwill.
Now consider the contemporary dating landscape. We’ve developed an entire vocabulary for relationships that exist in definitional limbo: situationships, talking stages, exclusive-but-not-official, seeing each other. These aren’t new behaviors—they’re new labels for patterns that have always existed when formal commitment mechanisms weaken.
What Gallichan called “pseudo-polygamy” we might call “rotating roster culture.” The underlying dynamic is identical: multiple concurrent or sequential intimate relationships without the social scaffolding that makes expectations clear and obligations enforceable.
The signaling problem
In Costly Signals, I trace how dating advice has evolved across more than a century as a response to changing commitment mechanisms. Victorian courtship was heavily ritualized precisely because the stakes were so high—marriage was economically consequential and essentially permanent. Every interaction was laden with signals about intention, character, and suitability.
Gallichan noticed something similar in his cross-cultural analysis. He observed that in polygamous societies where marriage was arranged, “courtship begins with wedlock. Two strangers unite in the closest of human intimacies.” The signalling happened after commitment, not before. Partners learned about each other within a structure that obligated them to make it work.
Modern dating has inverted this entirely. We’ve removed most formal commitment mechanisms while extending the pre-commitment evaluation period indefinitely. The result? An exhausting signalling arms race where everyone is simultaneously auditioning and being auditioned, often with multiple candidates, with no clear criteria for when evaluation ends and actual relationship begins.
This is Gallichan’s “pseudo-polygamy” updated for the app age: all the variety-seeking behavior that plural marriage historically accommodated, but stripped of any framework that protects the participants or clarifies their standing.
What we lost (and what we never had)
Gallichan made an observation that seems almost quaint today. He noted that “it is fairly certain that sexual promiscuity never prevailed among primitive people to the extent that it prevails in the most highly civilised nations of to-day.” His evidence? Prostitution, which he described as “one of the evils rarely apparent among polygamic nations.”
His reasoning was straightforward: when societies acknowledge and structure multiple partnerships legally, there’s less need for underground markets. When they pretend such desires don’t exist while providing no legitimate outlet, you get exploitation.
We can update this argument for contemporary conditions. Dating apps haven’t created new human desires—the “craving for variety in sexual unions,” as Gallichan put it, is “probably as deep-rooted in human nature as the desire to subdue enemies and to reap the wealth of conquest.” What apps have done is enable patterns of behavior that were previously available only to the wealthy or socially powerful, while providing none of the structure that made those patterns survivable for everyone involved.
The Edwardian aristocrat who kept a mistress at least operated within known social scripts. Everyone understood the arrangement, even if they didn’t approve. The modern dater toggling between three situationships exists in a fog of ambiguity where the very act of seeking clarity can be framed as “moving too fast” or being “too intense.”
The honest conversation we’re not having
Gallichan’s book wasn’t arguing for polygamy. It was arguing for honesty about human behavior and its consequences. He’d seen societies that acknowledged variety-seeking and built structures around it. He’d seen societies that denied it while tolerating shadow systems. He thought the latter was worse—not morally, but practically. They produced more suffering with less accountability.
A century of relationship “progress” has brought us to a strange place. We’ve abandoned most of the social scripts that governed courtship while maintaining the fiction that monogamous commitment remains the goal. We celebrate “freedom” and “options,” while surveys consistently show rising loneliness and declining relationship satisfaction. We’ve democratized access to variety while privatizing all the costs.
Perhaps what we need isn’t nostalgia for Victorian courtship or curiosity about Eastern harems, but the honesty Gallichan advocated: a clear-eyed recognition that human mating psychology hasn’t changed nearly as much as our dating technology, and that stripping away commitment structures doesn’t eliminate the need for them—it just forces individuals to rebuild them from scratch, over and over, with each new connection.
Serial monogamy is just polygamy with more paperwork and less honesty. Gallichan saw it in 1914. We’re living it now.
My book Costly Signals: The Evolution of Dating Advice examines how relationship guidance has evolved as commitment mechanisms changed across different eras. Available soon.
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