Those birds were never married in the eyes of God! They were living together in sin! Hence, they can not be divorced.

Oh, man, I relate to this so hard. My spouse and I are textbook examples: I had secure attachment growing up, he had insecure attachment and I need and want waaaay more space/time alone than he does. I am managing for now, but we're going to have to talk this out soonish.

When I saw this article on NPR the other day I knew someone somewhere was going to use it to defend monogamishy. The problem with this is that albatrosses are not people. Neither are orangutans, bees, lions, bonobos, etc.

It would be just as easy to point to the forced copulation of female orangutans, call it rape, and say hey orangutans share 99.99% of our DNA, they rape, we rape. It's our nature!

The entire article reeks of anthropomorphism, which Krulwich is great at. He's not a scientist; he's a journalist.

In case you misunderstand me, I'm definitely not against monogamishy. Monogamishy by people for people has it's own merits and shouldn't be put up against an animals behavior. We shouldn't be attempting to use studies of birds to analyze human behavior.

I'm with @1. The link doesn't show that marriages are stronger when the partners spend months away from each other.

The only relevant evidence it provides is: "Of those who reported being unhappy, 11.5% said the reason was lack of privacy or time for self. [Compared to] 6% who said they were unhappy with their sex lives."

It doesn't say what the other 80% of unhappy partners are unhappy about. Maybe a lot of them are unhappy their partner is gone so much. We don't have that information, so we can't argue from this piece that marriages are stronger when one partner goes on long book tours -- sorry, Dan.

Marriage is one bird and one other bird for life!

@5 Animal mating behavior can be characterized in many ways, one of which is the length of time that pairs stay together as a social unit. To suggest that humans are magically special and can't have their mating behaviors compared with those of other animals reeks of anthropocentrism.

As for rape and orangutans - that something occurs naturally does not make it "ok". You;re missing the point. The point here isn't that being monogamish is ok because bids do it, it's that of all the birds, the ones that stay together the longest exhibit certain behaviors, and we could infer from that fact that those behaviors may also contribute to humans having successful long term pairings. Whether this is "good" or "ok" isn't the point.

It's perfectly ok to take data from other species as suggestive evidence for our own species, because we're all pretty friggin similar.

Yo Dan, the conclusions drawn by that WSJ article you linked are fuckstupid. Just because more spouses said their #1 relationship concern was having enough space than said it was their sex life doesn't mean that having space is more important for couples than having good sex. (It just means that it's a more prevalent problem.) And I have no idea HOW you went from that morass to "[r]esearch shows" that spending lots of time apart leads to healthier relationships.

Sounds like the ever-shifting arguments you used to hear against teh gays. To wit:

Fundamentalist: "Homosexual behavior is unnatural!"
Scientist: "Here are 300 species that have been observed displaying homosexual behavior."
Fundamentalist: "Homosexual behavior is base and animalistic!"

In other words, the argument can change all the time, as long as the conclusion stays intact.

The NPR article is misusing the word "faithful" as it is currently defined for sexual contexts. I'm not sure that the non-sexual meaning of the word applies here either, considering that the albatrosses don't really have shared lives the way human couples do.

But yes a little time apart can work wonders.

I agree with most others that, while this is ornithologically interesting, it doesn't really make any broader point about human relationships.

That being said, I am a fan of non-monogamy, monogamishy, and lots of space in relationships. For anyone with a "clingier" partner, you can now reassure them: Hey, baby, I'm not gonna do you like some flamingo. No, baby, I'm an albatross.

Yes, yes—people are not birds, blah blah blah. That would be a more devastating point if supposedly monogamous birds were not held up for centuries as a moral example to humans who had a much harder time being monogamous. Then along comes genetic testing and we discover that—lordy!—none of those monogamous birds were sexually monogamous.

We had a lot to learn from birds when we believed they were monogamous. Now that we know they're not... nothing to see here, folks, move along.

Penguins too - turns out they do make exclusive pair-bonds .... but only for one breeding season at a time. Next year, all the hot skanky penguins down the street are back on the table.

Dan @13, okay. Agreed that as a scientific argument it is thin, but to counter decades of pro-monogamy, bird rhetoric it is a solid and useful response.

To be fair, there are far more "failed" marriages than there are divorces. That may be true with birds as well, but we don't have to watch birds sit in annoyed silence next to each other in airport waiting areas.

Dan, most posters here agree with you that many happy marriages don't stick to monogamy. And that outside observers can't tell whether a marriage is monogamous or not (sometimes one of the partners also doesn't know), so we underestimate how many non-monogamous happy marriages there are.

But when you write this --"Research shows that human couples who do the same are happier and have stronger relationships" -- what do you mean? What research are you pointing to? And what do you think it shows for humans?

If humans are so special, I guess we should just quit studying any other animals, from fruit flies to apes, for any more insight into our own physiology, evolution, behavior, and ecology. Shucks, we've done this in ernest since the late 1700s and all we've got to show for it is modern medicine, the human genome project, developmental homiostasis, an understanding of why such behaviors as altruism and infanticide arise in social groups...come to think of it I guess we can learn something from animals. Before modern biology theologians looked for evidence of God's wisdom in the birds, beasts, and flora. With scientific activity around the world in evolution of behavior and cognition, we now gain enormous insight into humanity from non-human animals that are not much different from us. Darwin proposed the theory of evolution by SEXUAL selection to explain much of what he observed in the behavior of males and females. Since birds face many of the same constraints as humans when it comes to reproduction (females bear more costs) and parenting (it takes two parents to successfully raise chicks in most cases), we can and do learn a LOT from birds. Doubters and the willfully ignorant could learn a lot by skimming a used textbook on animal behavior. And DAN SAVAGE: I've meant to tell you for years that you might LOVE more info from that perspective. Sexual selection theory really does explain a lot about people....

Well, you can see our lizard predecessors in the fetus of both humans and birds. So, comparing us to birds is not at all farfetched.

@20: Pinning! Yes! Yesssssss…

@21: Lizards, hell. Fish, mofo!

@20. Ive had plenty of access to females my whole life. Still turned out gay. For me, that's normal.

I've been deleting your posts, Troll.