When we think of polygamy, we often imagine men with multiple wives. However, according to a recent study, men don’t get much out of this arrangement. In fact, it’s women who should have multiple husbands as they're the ones who benefit from it more.
Study Suggests Women Should Have Extra Husbands, ‘Just In Case’
By
Zainab Pervez in
Relationships
On 9th November 2022
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It is well known that men benefit reproductively from having multiple spouses, but the reasons why women might benefit from multiple marriages are not as clear. Women, as a result of pregnancy and lactation, can't reproduce as fast as males.
But according to a recent study, having multiple husbands is found to be beneficial to women in difficult times as they can buffer themselves against the economic and social crisis.
The concept of having multiple spouses is a bit unconventional but new research by the University of California, Davis, challenges sexual stereotypes about men and women, finding that multiple spouses can be good for women too.
"We can't pin down the exact reasons for this finding, but our work (together with suggestions of others) suggests that marrying multiply may be a wise strategy for women where the necessities of life are hard, and where men's economic productivity and health can vary radically over their lifetime due to the challenging environmental conditions," said the lead researcher, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, UC Davis professor of anthropology.
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The study, titled “Unpacking mating success and testing Bateman’s principles in a human population,” was published in the journal 'Proceedings of the Royal Society B'. They studied 2000 people living in Pimbwe, a community in a western part of Tanzania, for two decades. The Pimbwe are hunter-gatherers who are not only used to times of scarcity but also tend to be pretty polygamous, which made them the perfect study subjects.
The researchers found something surprising: women who married multiple times had more surviving children than women who married fewer times. Also surprising was that men who married multiple times had fewer surviving children than did men who married fewer times.
This contradicts Bateman's principles which suggest that because men are able to spread their seed around indiscriminately, they more effectively reproduce if they have multiple partners. Women, on the other hand, bound by time and the number of children they can carry, are more likely to fare better in fewer and longer sexual relationships.
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There’s also a financial benefit to a woman having multiple husbands as it makes economic hardship less likely and also means there’s a backup should one of the husbands become ill or otherwise unable to work. Makes sense to me!