Don't have time to pick apart Ross Douthat's column in today's NYT. (Guess what? I'm on an airplane, and the doors are closing.) But I do want to toss this out there...

A lot of those blissfully happy people in monogamous long-term relationships—and it seems odd to credit monogamy for their happiness instead of the personality traits and interpersonal skills that allowed them to form those long-lasting partner bonds—actually aren't in monogamous relationships. People cheat and they don't always inform their partners and spouses; and just as premarital sex isn't a modern phenomenon, cheating—and getting away with it—isn't exactly a new thang.

Perhaps some studies have found a high correlation between monogamy and happiness. But have those studies compared people in successful, long-term non-monogamous relationships with people in successful, long-term non-monogamous relationships? I suspect not. I'd wager that most-if-not-all of these studies have compared people in long-term monogamous relationships—or people in what they believe to be monogamous relationships—to people who aspired to be in stable monogamous relationships and failed, e.g. people who have gone from one failed monogamous startup relationship to the next. These studies would have very little tell us very little about how honest, ethical non-monogamy stacks up against traditionally monogamous relationship models.