Libertine Genes

I’ve been non monogamous ever since my hormones kicked in at puberty. This has always felt normal and natural to me. I’ve never felt any desire to be any different and have always been baffled and amazed by people who are able to remain monogamous for any length of time.

In my very early twenties, I was briefly married, and I tried to be monogamous to try to get along, but I wasn’t able to do it. My attempt failed after less than two weeks. If I’d known myself then as well as I do now, I’d not have gotten married in the first place, but I learned after making that one mistake, and have never seriously considered marriage since.

Despite the biology and anthropology texts I’ve read, telling me that human beings are not naturally monogamous, it is also undoubtedly true that some people are able to adjust to living monogamously much easier than others. I apparently fall way to one side of that particular bell curve.

Though I have accepted my basic nature and I am happy with it, I’ve always wondered how it came to be. The fact that I was raised by liberal, tolerant parents no doubt accounts for some of it, but it’s not the entire story.

I have two older siblings, a brother and a sister, and they are not like me. My brother is almost my total opposite. He didn’t marry until he was nearly 30 and only had a couple of girlfriends before getting married. It’s quite possible that my sister-in-law has been his only lover all these years. My sister, who is ten years my senior, told me that her ex-husband had been her only lover by the time she’d gotten married at age 25. Since her divorce, after less than ten years of marriage, she has had a few lovers, but no more than four or five, if I were to make a guess. She has not married again, though it is more because of lack of opportunity, than lack of interest.

I have an adult son. He's not much like me, either, despite the fact that I've raised him alone since he was eight months old, and I did little to hide my libertinism from him. He's had a few lovers, but they've all been in the context of exclusive relationships.

My parents were married for twenty-eight years before my mother died suddenly while only in her late 40s. My father outlived her for nearly 25 years, remaining widowed for more than a decade before marrying again when he was nearly sixty. Though I cannot say for absolute certain that neither of them ever strayed, from what I know, they were monogamous.

My mother’s sister, however, had a few affairs that the family knew about. And then while researching my family’s genealogy, working on my paternal grandmother’s line, I discovered a 3 times great grandmother (1808-1880), whom I am almost certain was a libertine. Her first two or three children had unknown fathers, of which my 2 times great grandmother was one. There are two men named as fathers of her subsequent children, about seven or eight of them, but it is unclear which man was the father of which children, as her marriages/relationships to each of these men overlapped.

I later got in contact with another of her descendants from one of her other children and this person shared some stories about our common ancestor that an elderly relative had shared with her. She told me that her family was quite exasperated with her because she had “too many men”, to use the words of my distant cousin.

After discovering all this about her, I got to thinking that perhaps the tendency to libertinism might be something inherited. This is certainly something I’d like to research further.

After learning about this ancestor, I felt an immediate affinity with her -- she was like me.