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Citation please?

All the data I’ve ever been able to find on the subject has suggested the same conclusion: monogamy (past as well as present) is what’s best for relationships.

Firstly, this isn’t some abstract nebulous thing: we can see these special sexual bonding systems down at the biological level in the brain. According to http://66.199.228.237/boundary/addiction/boundary/anatomy_of_pair_bond_neurochemistry.pdf, by analyzing a monogamous species (voles specifically, in this case) and the effect mating and mates had on their neurochemistry, it was found that in their mating “Circuits involved in the processing of social cues and formation of social memory are tightly coupled with the brain’s reward and reinforcement circuitry. These two circuits are modulated by…circuits conveying somatosensory information from the genitalia during sexual interactions. The interaction of these pathways during sex culminate in the development of a powerful association between the conditioned stimulus (sex) and the unconditioned stimulus (the partner) to form the conditioned ‘partner’ preference, or pair bond”.

Humans have this same design. So one might theorize that first these systems make the association between sex and this partner. But then if you add in others, it makes the association between both partners, decreasing the overall strength bonds.

And the rest of the data firmly supports this. All the signs of decreased bonds with future sexual partners are present. For example, according to http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2003.00444.x/abstract, “premarital sex or premarital cohabitation that is limited to a woman's husband is not associated with an elevated risk of marital disruption. However, women who have more than one intimate premarital relationship have an increased risk of marital dissolution”.

And like http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3214800.html says, based on their research with unfaithfulness among married or cohabiting couples, “The more sex partners a respondent had had between age 18 and the time of first marriage or cohabitation, the more likely he or she was to be unfaithful”. By the same token, “those who did not approve of extramarital sex had reduced odds of experiencing infidelity”, specifically being half as likely as those outside this group. This is equivalent to saying that those who had not had extramarital sex were less likely to be unfaithful, as the full paper states that “only 10% of those who think extramarital sex is ‘always wrong’” had engaged in it.

The link between the strength of the bonds and faithfulness has been demonstrated in apes. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2387250/ describes an experiment with titi monkeys, involving “males [who] had…been part of a previous [brain] lesioning experiment…which resulted behaviorally in increased interaction with their pair-mates and apparent ‘strengthening’ of the pair-bond. Specifically, post-lesion the males were more often in physical contact with their mates, were less likely to break contact, and spent more time grooming their mates. They also displayed less behavioral arousal (arching, tail-lashing) towards strange females than they did pre-lesion”.

Notice also that the perceived quality and satisfaction of the bonding also seemed to increase when the bond was strengthened. We can see how strongly the strength of the bonds is connected to monogamy in humans in studies such as this one, which found that “In all cases but one, the more exclusive the sexual relationship, the greater the emotional satisfaction reported”. The fact there was only one single exception is quite notable, since their data was drawn from all those in a sexual relationship from a sample of “3,432 adults”.

And that study’s findings aren’t just because of cultural attitudes among the participants towards monogamy. Its universal in humans, indicating an inherent biological basis. For example, according to http://isp.sagepub.com/content/52/1/5, even among “Bedouin-Arab women”, in a culture where polygamy is not stigmatized in the slightest, it was found that “women in polygamous marriages…had significantly more problems in family functioning, marital relationships and life satisfaction” compared to women in a monogamous marriage.

The most common counter-argument to this reasoning is generally something along the lines of: “By this logic everyone should only have one child. If what you’re saying were the case wouldn’t having multiple children decrease the strength of our bonds with our first child?”. But as was said previously, your brain treats the romantic/sexual bond as a unique one. We can directly observe this – a study here describes an experiment where brain activity was monitored while women viewed pictures of their children, their friends, and their partners, and then “The activity specific to maternal attachment was compared to that associated to romantic love”. It was found that “Both types of attachment activated [brain] regions specific to each”. (Though there were of course also “overlapping regions in the brain’s reward system” that were triggered by each).

We can continue looking at more data, but so far as can be seen it appears that humans are like other monogamous animals when it comes to these things. We have the same structures and systems that treat sexual bonds as a unique type. So it would be logical that the effects we see when we strengthen their pair bonds would also be what we would see when humans’ pair bonds strengthen. (Though this hasn’t been proven since most research organizations frown on performing experiments that involve manually altering people’s brain to watch how their life changes :P). If this is so then we’d see an increase in fidelity as well as relationship satisfaction and stability with strong pair bonds. Something that weakened these bonds would produce infidelity and a decrease in the satisfaction with and stability of the bonds.

Having sex with multiple partners fits all of these. The more sexual partners someone has had, the lower the stability of their bond and the less faithful they tend to be towards their partner. We see that, whether you’re in a society that sees even a single incident of unfaithfulness as a horrid offense or one that sees permanent polygamy as perfectly fine and normal, sexually exclusive relationships are significantly more satisfying for those involved. Everything says that more sexual partners means weaker bonds formed through sex.

Unfortunately then you have sustained damage to these systems. However, the situation here is far from irrecoverable! Having had just a couple sexual partners other than your life partner doesn’t seem to cause too terribly much damage. So fortunately if there’s a change now from the whole having sex with someone after a week or two thing, it’ll all be good. What about this, at the very least: say you decide to only have sex with someone once you’ve fallen in love with them. Wouldn’t that be a simple proposition?

And if you find yourself struggling with the strength of your sexual urges before that happens, then think: isn’t one of the greatest things someone can do, one of the surest signs of courage and strength, to resist pains and forsake pleasures for the sake of their family? A lot of people fail to do that. So the fact you’d be doing it should score major points for that self-confidence!