One rule for him, another for her: The ugly truth about "one-sided monogamy"

If you’ve been anywhere near the internet lately, you’ve probably heard the term “one-sided monogamy” bouncing around. It sounds almost reasonable at first, a kind of bespoke relationship arrangement, sitting somewhere on the increasingly crowded spectrum of non-monogamy options. Polyamory? So 2019. Throuple? Old news.

But one-sided monogamy? That’s the hot new thing — at least, according to a handful of manosphere influencers whose idea of a thriving relationship is one in which they get to do whatever they want and their girlfriend packs their condoms for other women. Yes, really.

The term has exploded into public consciousness thanks to Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere, which landed in March 2026 and hit number one on the platform. In it, Theroux asks Justin Waller, a manosphere influencer, to explain his relationship setup. “One-sided monogamy, yeah,” Waller says matter-of-factly. “Women don’t want to sleep with other men when they love a man. The mother of my children, the woman that I’m with, she doesn’t talk to other men.” His fellow manosphere figure Myron Gaines is even blunter on his podcast: “I do what the f*** I want to do. She’s loyal to me. It’s monogamous on her end, open on my end. She packs my f***ing condoms when I travel — that’s how real it is.” Charming.

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So what, exactly, is going on here? And should we be at all surprised that the men most loudly committed to “traditional values” have landed on a relationship model in which they themselves don’t have to be faithful?

This isn’t ancient wisdom, just ancient patriarchy

Here’s what the manosphere would have you believe: that one-sided monogamy is the “natural order”, rooted in evolutionary truth. Men are wired to spread their seed, women are wired to be loyal. It’s biology, they say! Science! Except, inconveniently for them, the actual history of male sexual privilege is a lot less flattering than they’d like to think.

It is true that virtually all large human civilizations were polygamous, with rulers of ancient China, India, Africa, the Americas, and Europe keeping hundreds, sometimes thousands of women at their disposal. The Old Testament alone features Abraham, Jacob, King David (eight wives), and King Solomon, who reportedly managed 700. But the manosphere influencers invoking this history as justification might want to read a little further before they start celebrating. Anthropologist Dr. Laura Betzig has noted that in each of these societies, powerful men mated with hundreds of women, passed their power to a son by a legitimate wife, and took the lives of men who got in their way. These weren’t romantic heroes. They were despots. Being compared to them is not the compliment these influencers seem to think it is.

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More to the point, this kind of arrangement was never really about what women wanted — it was purely about what powerful men could take. It is a tough sell getting the wealthy and powerful men who control society to give up their privilege of monopolising female companionship.

In other words, the reason one-sided arrangements existed throughout history wasn’t because women found them fulfilling. It was because women had no legal, financial, or social means to refuse.

There’s also a delicious irony in how the Church — which these traditionally-minded men tend to align themselves with ideologically — actually tried to put a stop to all this. By the 4th century, the Catholic Church had begun penalising plural marriages with excommunication.

Even Martin Luther, who famously wrote that he couldn’t find scriptural grounds to forbid multiple wives, was largely overruled by history. The conservative Christian tradition that the manosphere claims to represent spent centuries trying to enforce monogamy on men who didn’t want it. So when Waller and Gaines dress up their arrangements in the language of tradition and masculine nature, they are, ironically, rejecting the very conservative values they claim to champion.

What’s more, monogamous communities ultimately out-bred and out-competed polygamous ones. The research shows that in polygamous societies, monopolisation of women by wealthy men left large numbers of other men without partners — and studies have shown that unmarried men are more likely than married men to commit murder and rape, with greater rates of violent crime correlating to higher percentages of unmarried men in a population.

The Manosphere’s favourite contradiction

What makes the manosphere’s version of this arrangement particularly rich is the sheer brazenness of the hypocrisy. These are men who present themselves as paragons of masculine virtue: providers, protectors, pillars of tradition. And yet Waller and his partner Kristen, who has children with him and was pregnant during filming, are not legally married, a fact the documentary reveals is down to “the financial side.”

When Theroux gently points out that this arrangement seems riskier for Kristen than for Waller, she replies that she doesn’t feel at risk, and Waller swiftly changes the subject before she can dwell on it.

The truest exposure of it all came in one of the documentary’s most memorable scenes. When Theroux asks Gaines’ girlfriend Angie about their arrangement, and specifically about the prospect of Gaines having multiple wives — she visibly grimaces. “I don’t know how that would work,” she says uncomfortably. Gaines, clearly rattled, immediately backpedals. “I might find two women too much,” he admits, before asking Angie to leave the room entirely.

The man who claims to know what women want better than they do couldn’t handle a single awkward question from his own girlfriend without clearing the room. Shortly after filming, Angie and Gaines broke up.