If you're going to biology, absolutely strict monogamy is not really part of our package. But, some sort of monogamy (or pairing) is almost certainly. Culture m

If you're going to biology, absolutely strict monogamy is not really part of our package. But, some sort of monogamy (or pairing) is almost certainly. Culture makes these rules, not biology and culture is pretty malleable in this regard. Your great grandmother might have had a much more forgiving reaction to this infidelity stuff as a lot of people today. She probably thought girls having extra marital relationships some lasting days and some lasting years (as is normal today) as immoral trollop behavior. Side note on evolutionary monogamy: A lot of birds are monogamous. A lot of foundational zoologists were Victorians so they saw eye-to-eye. There were a lot of studies of avian reproductive behavior for the entirety of the modern scientific period. Recently, DNA tests on nestlings revealed that birds cheat. The reason Victorians (and other later) rarely picked up on it is because they're so damn sneaky about it. It's a no no in bird marriages, but they still do it.