In this video of our teaching series on polygyny, we delve into the fascinating advantages and disadvantages of polygynous relationships, shedding light on the complexities surrounding this age-old practice. We will learn about potential economic benefits that polygynous households may experience, including shared resources and division of labor. We will discover how polygynous relationships can create expansive support systems, providing emotional and practical assistance within the family structure.
In addition we will also explore the potential emotional complexities and struggles that individuals in polygynous relationships may face, from jealousy to communication issues and uncover the social challenges and stigmas that individuals in polygynous relationships may encounter, both within their communities and on a broader scale.
Join us as we explore advantageous and disadvantageous aspects of plural marriage. Come with us as we get into the good, the bad, the ugly, but most importantly, the truth: the God Honest Truth.
Polygyny Series Playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZk643l4iAPXp0uVF-yKqiZ6Tx1-D3EoB
Transcript
The teaching discusses the advantages and disadvantages of polygyny or plural marriage. Public acceptance of plural marriage has grown over the years, with 23% of people now believing it is morally acceptable compared to 7% in 2003. The United States Census of 2020 shows that there are more women than men in America, particularly in the marriageable age category. This trend is observed globally as well. Advantages of plural marriage include social support, networking opportunities, economic support, emotional support, and sexual support.
So like I said, this teaching is going to be all about the advantages and the disadvantages of polygyny or plural marriage. As always, check down in the description below, you’ll be able to see the article link for this teaching. It doesn’t matter if you’re watching on a video platform or listening to an audio podcast platform. The link should be down there all the same. Click on that and it’ll take you directly to our website and the article for this teaching.
There you can find the drash slides that you see on your screen right now. You’ll also be able to find the on-demand video, the notes that we took for this episode, as well as a transcript, and there’s also going to be a link to the series playlist on YouTube where if you happen to miss a particular episode, you can go through there and catch up at your convenience. Now as we talk about polygyny, in the past it used to be thought of in a certain way.
It’s still thought of in a certain way nowadays, but the times they are changing and along with that, the public perception of plural marriage also. In a Gallup poll, it was asked what do people think about plural marriage, a married person having more than one spouse, specifically a man having more than one wife. Well, as the years have progressed, public acceptance of plural marriage has grown. Back in 2003, only 7% of those polled agreed that plural marriage was morally acceptable.
Nowadays, in 2023, it’s grown up to 23% believe that it’s morally acceptable. And if it continues this trend, it only gets higher than that. Now full disclosure, if you go to that link that we’ve got on the slide here and also in our notes on the website, if you go to that link, there’s a whole bunch of other polls they did on various other topics. All of those opinions seem to have changed as well. So take that for what you will as to the reasoning behind it, but as far as plural marriage or polygyny goes, public acceptance is growing year after year.
And speaking of numbers, this is going to be an aspect that is going to be important as we go along and talk about the advantages and disadvantages, but just something that a lot of people may find rather neat and interesting nonetheless. According to the United States Census of 2020, there were more women than men in America. Now under 18 years, it happens to turn out that men actually outnumber women. From zero birth to 18 years old, there are more men than women.
And in fact, it’s a rather interesting fact that there’s more boys born on average than girls. And at some point in life, that number switches over where there is more women than men. According to the 2020 Census, those in America that are 16 years of age and over, there happens to be more women than men. And we’ll get into some more statistics anyways, but at 16 years and over, there are approximately 4 million more women than men.
And these differences go up as much as 5, 6 million. Sixty years and over, there’s 6 million more women than men. Now this doesn’t take into account various other factors that go into people’s lifestyle choices. Say, perhaps those who decide to remain celibate their entire lives. So we’re talking about marriage and marriageable age people. Some people decide to remain celibate and never get married, and that’s fine. Other people also decide to go the homosexual route, and that takes mostly men out of the marriageable category for women.
But these numbers hold up all over the world, and it seems from what we’ve researched, it holds up census after census. Back in the 2010 Census, there was a point from 35 to 39 years of age where the numbers flip around and women outnumber men, and then from there on out up through the ages, women outnumber men. This is important. If you look back at the year 2000 Census as well, so up to a certain age, men outnumber women, and then for whatever reason, women outnumber men.
There are various things that go into that. Men tend to choose more risky jobs and are more prevalent in those risky jobs where their life is in danger. Take for instance military, law enforcement, fire department, oil rigs, wilderness, all kinds of stuff. These occupations are dominated by men more than women, and as such, men’s life expectancies kind of decrease because of that, and the number of men decrease because of that. For other reasons as well, men, unfortunately, we tend to take more risk in just being dumb sometimes, especially in our early life.
As teenagers, as early 20s, some people suffer from alcohol overdose or driving too fast or extreme sports, things like that, and these are things that women don’t fall prone to nearly as much as men. So for various reasons, there’s a point in our lives where the number of women outnumber the number of men, and usually, this affects the marriageable age category of both women and men. So during the marriageable years, there are more women than men, and that’s obviously relevant to our discussion regarding plural marriage and polygyny, and this tends to hold up over most of the world as well.
As you can see on the map here, the countries that are in blue, that means there are more females than there are males in the population. At a significantly lower number of countries that are in red here on this map, that means there are more males than there are females. Now, one of the red countries here is China, and I don’t really count them because they have artificial or have had artificial population control. So, you know, take that for what it’s worth, but there’s an even smaller number of countries there, as you can see, that are in green, which have a more proportionate number.
We have more of an equal number of women and men, but most of the world, and especially in North America and South America, you have the population, which is composed mostly of women. There are more women than men, and like I said, that is in the marriageable age category, over 16 to over 18. So keep all this in mind as we go throughout this DROSH, throughout this teaching. This is also going to be a rather more relaxed, more scaled-down teaching than we have done in the past.
There’s not going to be as many links, as many references, but still lots of good information and things to consider when thinking about plural marriage or polygyny. Now, let’s go with the advantages first. Starting out with some of the advantages of plural marriage is the social support that comes along with this type of lifestyle. You have various networking opportunities that you would not have had in a purely monogamous relationship. This is for obvious reasons. There’s more people in the family going out and touching more people on the outside, whether it’s through work, social clubs, churches, families, things like that.
But your networking influence greatly increases and don’t really need to explain the advantages of networking in your personal and professional lives. You can also have a greater opportunity to develop various alliances, let me put it that way, to help and support from social networking and stuff like that. Another advantage is the economic support, and this comes from both the professional sphere and the personal sphere. There are shared resources, because you have one family, you can still just do one house with multiple people, not just two.
You could have fewer cars, potentially, depending on your lifestyle choices and what you decide to do. But there’s also the impact of shared burdens. Many hands make light work. You can get more done, usually more efficiently, with more hands in less time. You have the potential for multiple incomes. This may not always be the case, depending on how you choose to conduct your family. If one or more of the ladies stay home with the children, then that may not be the case, and that’s okay if you decide to go that route.
But if every adult is working, that would be the potential for multiple incomes coming in with those exact same shared resources. The next one is going to be emotional support, and this is more of an advantage for the ladies that are involved. There are a greater number of shoulders to cry on and ears that can listen to you than in a monogamous relationship. And let’s just face it, men and women are different. If you’re listening to this right now, you already know this.
You’re part of the common sense group that knows men and women are different. As such, men and women process and handle emotional things differently than the opposite sex gender. With that being said, in the case of a plural marriage, you have two or more women who can share and deal with things on a female level from a female aspect, and you wouldn’t have that in a monogamous relationship. Now, yes, in a monogamous relationship, the lady has her friends and family that can kind of serve the same thing, but not to the same degree as those who are in the same marriage.
When you’re in a marriage, you know things about your spouse and your children and those involved that the outside world doesn’t know about. And you understand things on a deeper level than the outside world ever could. So that emotional support is going to be much more different than just going out and talking with your friends and stuff like that. With a fellow sister wife, that gives you that same female understanding and female aspect to the whole emotional aspect of marriage.
Yes, emotional support, a lot more shoulders to cry on, ears to listen to, and you have that whole female versus male way of handling things that’s an advantage you get from plural marriage. Obviously, it goes without saying, but plural marriage offers sexual support as well. There’s a lot of men. Obviously, polygyny would help with this need and this desire. This is also an advantage for women. I learned this firsthand when I was talking with someone about the Bible and plural marriage.
And it was a lady, and she’s a distant cousin. So she’s in my family. She wasn’t someone I was seeking after. She was already married, and she said that, yeah, my husband, I’d be fine if he had another wife as long as she takes care of the sex. So there’s that aspect. Some women would rather offload the sexual aspect onto another wife, as it were. So sexual support is not just for men. It can also be an advantage for women also.
There’s a greater selection of husbands within a society that practices plural marriage. Think about it like this. We already know that there are more women than men. So if we just do a one-to-one matching up, there’s going to be some women who are left out of the game, as it were. They have absolutely no opportunity to have a husband because all the men would run out. Now, in a polygynous society, who is accepting of this, as a woman, you have your pick of the litter.
It doesn’t matter if he is married or not, and this is to your advantage. You can pick someone who is a wonderful guy who is very wealthy, very successful, even though he might have one, two, three, or however many wives. You can still go and be his wife and share in that family. How many times have you heard a woman say, all the good guys are gone because they can’t find a good man to have a relationship with? Well, in plural marriage, that excuse is gone because as a woman, you can go after any man you wish.
Now, this helps. Well, we’ll get into disadvantages later. But yeah, for women, polygyny offers the advantage of a greater selection of husbands, a greater selection of men, and offers a greater selection of higher quality men because this requires men to really step up their game and be men. Another advantage to polygyny is the potential for an abundance of children. Maybe you don’t want a lot of children, and that’s fine too, but some people do want large families, like myself.
I’m the kind of person who would love to have an extremely large family. 20 to 30 kids is ideal for me. I’m on four right now, but we’ll get there maybe. I don’t know. Anyways, this would allow more people to have more children. Say, for instance, a wife has a certain number of children, two or three, but there are certain complications that happen within her pregnancy that make it either impossible or extremely dangerous for her to continue having children.
But they want more. Plural marriage would be an avenue to explore that. Also, there are certain women who are infertile. They cannot have children, but they still love their husband and they’ve made a commitment because they’ve gotten married, correct? Plural marriage would allow them to circumvent this obstacle and still bring children into the family. Plural marriage would also alleviate serial monogamy. What do I mean by serial monogamy? This is something that happens within a monogamy-only society where a man and a woman get married, and then for whatever reason, the man kicks her to the curb and then goes and marries another woman.
So now you’ve got the first wife who is out in the cold by herself because he wants a younger wife, a thinner wife, a prettier wife, a more fertile wife, whatever the reason. There’s just one monogamous relationship marriage after another. That’s serial monogamy. That also happens with women, too, but probably not near as much as it does with men. So, plural marriage would help alleviate this curse of serial monogamy. It also helps to eliminate something I call bureaugamy.
Now, when someone, especially in today’s day and age, when a woman gets pregnant out of wedlock, a lot of people don’t bat an eye at this. However, she’s still going to need some kind of support, financial and otherwise. So if she’s not married, she’s not turning to her husband, who does she turn to? Uncle Sam, the government, bureaucrats. The bureaucrats become her husband. The government becomes her husband, and she’s pretty much in a relationship of bureaugamy.
Not monogamy, not polygyny, bureaugamy. With polygyny, you can take these women under your wing, help support them both emotionally, financially, etc. Help with their children, be a father to their children, and children need a mother and a father. They don’t need Uncle Sam. They need a father. So plural marriage or polygyny would help alleviate bureaugamy as well. And like I alluded to just then, it would help with the crisis of single mothers and fatherless children. It would also help with orphans.
So the larger family with more hands to help would be able to adopt and take care of a lot more kids who don’t have parents, who have drug-addicted parents. There are at least two children that I know of in my connected family who have been adopted because their birth mother was drug-addicted. They were born with drug addictions, and they went through a horrible recovery process immediately after they were born. I mean, it’s horrible to think that anyone would put a child through this, but it’s the times that we live in, unfortunately.
Plural marriage, a man with multiple wives would be able to help with these children who need a good family, these orphans, these children that come from drug-addicted parents who the state has taken them away from them. It would help with single mothers if they would actually choose to go into this lifestyle and better themselves and their children. It would help with fatherless children. So this is yet another advantage of plural marriage or of polygyny. Now, speaking of widows and orphans and fatherless children, Scripture speaks out on this.
We look at just a couple of verses real quick, the first one being James 1, verse 27. Clean and undefiled religion before the Elohim and Father is this, to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world. And again from Isaiah 1, verse 17. Learn to do good, seek right ruling, reprove the oppressor, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow. And this is just two verses. There’s many more. But time and time again, Scripture talks about taking care of the widow, the orphan, the fatherless.
And plural marriage or polygyny would be one way to accomplish this goal. As a side note, and this is just a tangent to tonight’s teaching, you ever heard the word bastard or illegitimate? Well, according to dictionary.com, a bastard is a person of unmarried parents or an illegitimate child. This is not so much nowadays but in times past. A bastard was someone who did not have a father, a continuous at home in their life father. That’s what the definition of a bastard was or an illegitimate child.
Merriam-Webster has pretty much the same definition, a child born to parents who are not married to each other. And they go on down this note to let you know that up until about the mid-20th century, this term was actually a neutral term. Nowadays, we think of it as an offensive term. In modern parlance and general conversation, yeah, it is used as an offensive word. But technically speaking, according to the technical definition, a bastard or an illegitimate child is just a child without a father.
A child born and raised by a parent who is not married to the other parent. But anyway, this is, like I said, a tangent or a side note in case you’ve never heard that before. But what about the disadvantages of polygyny? There are some of you out there who already understand the truth of plural marriage as it comes from scripture. Not from Mormonism, not from Muslims, from scripture. But you may not understand some of the disadvantages that go along with this kind of lifestyle as well.
For example, there could be some jealousy and insecurity, especially for the first wife when you first bring in an additional wife. Now, this is something that has been and can be overcome. And there has been a really good conversation we had just this summer about how jealousy and men and women work. We’ll get into all that. It was a really good conversation. I wish I had it recorded or typed out. But anyways, but there is definitely a feeling of insecurity sometimes with women, especially the first wife.
They feel like they’re being replaced. They feel like they’re being maybe even done away with. But as a man, you have to reassure them and let them know that you have made a commitment to them. Regardless of how many wives come into the picture, you have a commitment to them. And there’s no reason for them to be insecure. But you’re going to go by the – how should I say this? The regulations that are laid out in scripture as far as not diminishing the resources and the marital duties of your previous wives.
So this is something that could come up. I’m not going to say it will come up, but it’s definitely something that could come up and has come up in the past in polygynous marriages. There’s also a possible lack of wives. This is a disadvantage for some, but an advantage for others. Remember when we were talking about the advantages for women? This allows women to choose whichever man they want to go after, whether they’re married or not.
Well, if a lot of men are having multiple wives because they’re actual real men, well, the beta males, those on the lower end of the spectrum, are going to lose out and they’re not going to have that supply of wives. So that is a – that’s an aspect that is disadvantageous for some but advantageous for others. So take that as you will. A big disadvantage that I personally think that a lot of us suffer from, especially here in America, is the lack of examples or experience within our culture.
We’re not raised in plural marriage situations. We don’t see other men and women engaging in this, setting a good example for us. Therefore, when we come up to the age of marriage, we don’t have any experience or practice in this lifestyle. So that is a disadvantage. I have personally seen several families in the same situation, but they overcame it. They bettered themselves, they educated themselves, and they’re living happy, productive lives with one man and two, three, four women.
So it can be overcome, but just know that if it’s something you decide to get into, that you’re not getting into it because your father set a good example with his three wives or your grandfather didn’t show you his example with his eight wives. You’re coming at this, a lot of times, brand new, but that is starting to change. Also, another disadvantage is there’s only so much time to go around. We all only have 24 hours in a day, and that time has got to be divided up between sleep, work, each of your wives, each of your children, and maybe a hobby.
You got something like that. But, yeah, there’s only so much time to go around, and the more people you add to your family, whether that be additional wives or additional children or an additional job, all of this affects your time, and it spins out how much time you can spend on the other areas of your life. There’s definitely the disadvantage of social stigma, at least right now. Maybe that’ll change in the future, but right now, if you decide to participate in a plural marriage, whether you’re a man or a wife, there’s that social stigma that’s going to come along with it, especially here in America.
It could affect your social status by being rejected at church, by being rejected in your social clubs, at your children’s school, the PTA, PTO, whatever you want to call it. There could be some shunning that goes along with it. Your job could be affected. I’ve heard instances of people being run out of their job. Other instances where the job is like, hey, as long as it don’t affect your work, we’re cool. But that possibility still exists that your job could be affected.
You could experience some kind of shunning or ostracization. So it’s definitely something to be aware of and be prepared for. Also, take note of the possibility that as a man or even a woman, you could be suffering from what we call the pot of gold syndrome. Let’s say that you’re a man, like myself, and you’re in a marriage with a woman. You’re in a monogamous relationship, and there are issues. And for whatever reason, you see this lifestyle as a way to correct those issues, and you think that another woman will be your dream, just what you’re thinking of, and it’s going to be so much better.
It’s going to be that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But you get there and find out that you still got issues. Even with a second woman, you’ve got issues in that relationship as well, and now there’s three people in a relationship with problems. And all along, you as the man are the one that should have been correcting yourself before adding to your family. You’ve got to be that biblical alpha male, the way you’re supposed to be.
Handle your own house first before adding to your house. So don’t think that adding another wife is going to be that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that’s going to solve everything. Because until you’ve got your own house in order, and I don’t mean your physical house, but right here inside you, in your head, until you’ve got your own house in order, adding another wife is not going to solve anything. They say the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, but sometimes the grass is only greener over the septic tank.
So keep that in mind. Correct yourself before you bring anyone else into your problems. So in summary, I’m going to wrap this up, be a short one tonight. As we saw from the statistics, not just my word, but the statistics, women outnumber men on a global scale even. Like we said, right about birth, there are more boys that are born than girls. But at a certain point, the demographics and the numbers switch around and women outnumber the men, especially at marriageable age.
There are a great number of advantages to polygyny. There were a lot of those, and the vast majority of those were advantages for both women and men. Not just men, but also women. There are a great many number of advantages for women in polygyny. However, also understand that there are some serious disadvantages that have to be understood and accepted in this subject as well. And there are many aspects to consider when you’re considering plural marriage, whether you’re considering partaking in this lifestyle or even just studying it out.
Make sure that you know as many of these aspects, the ins and outs, the pros and the cons, the advantages and disadvantages of plural marriage. Because there are both good and bad to this lifestyle. And that’s just the God honest truth.
