Is Monogamy Dead? Cheating, Consent, and What Ubuntu Teaches About Keeping Faith

ANCESTRAL WISDOM · HEALTH & WELLNESS · UBUNTU PHILOSOPHY

The Question Behind the Question

Every few years the headlines ask it again: is monogamy dead? Dating apps, open relationships, polyamory, and a steady drumbeat of celebrity affairs make it feel as if the old promise of “forsaking all others” is collapsing. Beneath the headline sits a quieter, more important question: what makes a relationship trustworthy?

Our answer is that monogamy is not dead. Many people still choose it, and choose it with their whole hearts. What is dying is the idea that any relationship structure can hold without honesty. A monogamous marriage built on secrets is fragile. An openly non-monogamous relationship built on deception is just as fragile. The line that matters is not how many people you love. It is whether everyone involved has told the truth and agreed to the terms.

What the Numbers Actually Say

Infidelity is common, but it is not the norm. Drawing on decades of the US General Social Survey, the Institute for Family Studies found that about 20 percent of married men and 13 percent of married women report ever having had sex with someone other than their spouse while married. That is painful for the people it touches. It also means most married people, by their own account, have kept that promise.

At the same time, openly agreed non-monogamy is more common than many assume. In two national samples of single American adults, researchers found that more than one in five had been in a consensually non-monogamous relationship at some point, a share that held steady across age, income, religion, region, political affiliation and race. So the honest picture is not “monogamy is dying”. It is that people are being more explicit about what they want, and that explicitness is long overdue.

Why People Cheat

There is no single reason. People describe feeling unseen at home, craving novelty or aliveness, drifting through years of unspoken resentment, or avoiding a conversation they were afraid to have. Some are acting out old wounds; as we explore in How Childhood Trauma Shapes Adult Relationships, early experiences of abandonment or instability can shape how safe closeness feels in adulthood. None of these reasons excuses the betrayal. Understanding them is how we stop repeating it.

Many affairs grow in silence, in the gap between what a person wants and what they feel allowed to say. That is why the healing work so often has less to do with the third person and more to do with the conversation the first two never had.

Cheating Is a Wound to the Village

Western culture tends to treat an affair as a private matter between two, or three, individuals. Ubuntu sees it differently. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, describing Ubuntu in No Future Without Forgiveness (Doubleday, 1999), wrote that our humanity is bound up in one another’s, and that we are diminished when others are diminished. A betrayal between partners ripples outward: to children who absorb the tension, to in-laws, to friendships forced to choose, to a community’s sense that its promises mean something.

This is not a call to shame anyone. It is a call to take love seriously enough to see how far it reaches. When we understand that our choices touch the whole web, honesty stops being a private virtue and becomes a form of care for everyone we are connected to.

Consent Is the Line: Polyamory and Open Relationships

Polyamory is the practice of having more than one loving or romantic relationship at a time, with the knowledge and agreement of everyone involved. It is not cheating with better branding. The difference is the whole point: in cheating, someone is deceived; in consensual non-monogamy, no one is.

Research is beginning to catch up with this reality. A major 2017 review in Perspectives on Psychological Science argued that relationship science has long assumed monogamy is the ideal. It found little evidence that people in consensually non-monogamous relationships fare worse on satisfaction, commitment, jealousy or trust. That does not make non-monogamy right for everyone. It does mean the structure matters less than the honesty holding it up.

Jealousy does not disappear in open relationships; it gets named. People who do this well tend to treat jealousy as information rather than an enemy. What need is it pointing to? Reassurance, time, clearer agreements? They check in often, renegotiate when life changes, and treat each partner’s feelings as real, not as an inconvenience to manage. Many polyamorous communities even have a word, compersion, for the opposite of jealousy: finding joy in a partner’s happiness with someone else. Those are skills every relationship needs, monogamous or not.

What Our Traditions Already Held

Many African societies never treated love and marriage as a private contract between two people. Among the Baganda of Uganda, the ssenga, traditionally a paternal aunt, counseled young women on intimacy, marriage and the realities of partnership. Ugandan legal scholar Sylvia Tamale has shown that the ssenga institution both reinforced patriarchal expectations and quietly subverted them, giving women knowledge and voice inside their relationships. Among the Kikuyu of Kenya, marriage negotiations such as ruracio bring two whole families into relationship, not just two people.

Non-monogamy is not new to the continent either. Kenya’s Marriage Act of 2014 recognizes customary and Islamic marriages as polygamous or potentially polygamous. Historically, those arrangements were often shaped around men’s choices more than women’s. That is exactly why Ubuntu’s lens matters: the ethical question is never simply “one partner or many?” It is “whose voice counts, and did everyone truly agree?” A tradition that honors community must also honor the consent of every person inside it.

Keeping Faith: Practices for Honest Love

Whatever shape your relationship takes, these practices help it stay trustworthy:

• Make the agreement explicit. Don’t assume you share a definition of faithfulness. Say out loud what is and isn’t okay, including emotional closeness, online connections and past partners.
• Revisit it. People change; agreements should be allowed to change with them, together and in the open, never quietly and alone.
• Tell the truth early. A hard conversation about unmet needs is far less painful than the discovery of a secret.
• Build a circle of counsel. Like the ssenga of old, trusted elders, friends or a skilled therapist can help partners hear each other when they can’t hear themselves.
• Practice accountability without humiliation. If trust breaks, repair needs full honesty, time and consistent changed behavior. We explore this kind of repair in Accountability Is Love.

When trust has been broken and both partners choose to rebuild, repair asks different things of each person. The one who broke the agreement is asked for full disclosure rather than a slow trickle of confessions, patience with questions that return again and again, and changed behavior that stays consistent long before it is trusted. The one who was betrayed is allowed their anger and grief, and is never required to hurry toward forgiveness. Neither person can do this work for the other, and neither has to do it alone. This is where a circle of counsel earns its place.

So, Is Monogamy Dead?

No. Monogamy is alive for everyone who chooses it with open eyes, and so are other honest forms of love. What Ubuntu invites us to bury is the idea that love is a private possession rather than a shared trust. I am because we are. The promises we make to one partner are also promises to the children, families and communities who build their lives around them. Keep faith with the truth, and whatever shape your love takes, it will have ground to stand on.

Know a couple working through a hard season? Share this with care. Sometimes the right words open the conversation that saves the trust.

Sources & Research

• Wang, W. (2018). Who Cheats More? The Demographics of Infidelity in America. Institute for Family Studies.
• Haupert, M.L., Gesselman, A.N., Moors, A.C., Fisher, H.E. & Garcia, J.R. (2017). Prevalence of Experiences With Consensual Nonmonogamous Relationships: Findings From Two National Samples of Single Americans. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 43(5), 424–440.
• Conley, T.D., Matsick, J.L., Moors, A.C. & Ziegler, A. (2017). Investigation of Consensually Nonmonogamous Relationships: Theories, Methods, and New Directions. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(2), 205–232.
• Tamale, S. (2006). Eroticism, Sensuality and ‘Women’s Secrets’ Among the Baganda. IDS Bulletin, 37(5), 89–97.
• Tutu, D. (1999). No Future Without Forgiveness. Doubleday.
• Republic of Kenya (2014). The Marriage Act, No. 4 of 2014. Kenya Law.

Related Reading

• Ruracio: The Day Two Families Become One — A Kikuyu Love and Negotiation Story
• Accountability Is Love: What African Community Justice Models Offer Our Neighborhoods
• How Childhood Trauma Shapes Adult Relationships
• Why Do We Fall in Love? The Purpose of Love Explained

I Am Because We Are. And Together, We Heal.