Does Monogamy truly exist?

The other day I met a guy at a pub who told me that he had a real problem with monogamy. "I find it really difficult to remain monogamous with any girl I date," he said. And, apparently, it's not just him. "It's biological for men to want to spread their seed," he continued. "That's why so many men go cycling." Cycling? "Yep, it's to get those urges out of our system by pounding the bike on the street."
While it's obviously not the case for all men (can't some blokes fancy a little exercise without being accused of wanting to bonk someone?), I felt the urge to dig a little deeper into the topic. And what I found was quite different to what we usually discuss in this column ...

A guy by the name of F. Roger Devlin, who's written essays on gender dynamics and the sexual revolution, says that it's not actually the guys who always want to be non-monogamous, but it's actually a biological imperative of women ...

Yep, we can stop blaming the DNA of gents for their wandering eye because, by his reckoning, it's more accurate to say that the female sexual instinct is to be hypergamous. In other words women only want to mate with a man who is at the top of the food chain in terms of wealth, job status, educational level and social standing. (This as opposed to men who tend to value physical attractiveness in a woman above all else.)
"Men have the tendency to seek sexual variety," writes Devlin. "But women have simple tastes in the manner of Oscar Wilde: They are always satisfied with the best."

He explains that hypergamy does not negate monogamy because, while women might be into only one alpha bloke at a time, when another alpha male comes along and topples the position of the first, well, you get the picture. "As a result, women are the first to want in to a monogamous relationship, and the first to want out."
When I carried out an unofficial poll on the subject, the sentiment didn't exactly mirror Devlin's theories, and the results were a very mixed bag.

While Max claimed monogamy "has been born of thousands of years of experience", Cameron retorted with, "Hell no, that's like eating pumpkin soup for the rest of your life, and who seriously could handle that!"
Wendy claimed, "If the love is real and both keep working at making it interesting and have good communication, then it can work." But she also admitted that you have to "really love a person and not want anyone else".

Graham said, "People who refuse to be monogamous are too selfish to ever have fulfilling long-term relationships."

And Georgia concluded: "It's not for assholes or sex addicts."
Which brings me to my next point: are the famous and powerful different from the rest of us? Is monogamy more difficult when temptation is everywhere and hormones are surging through your veins faster than a Roger Federer forehand? Of course, with the latest spate of tawdry affairs, crude text messages (written to women who are not their wives) and raunchy pictures being leaked (of people other than their wives), it would seem that, indeed, people in the spotlight find the whole notion of monogamy extremely difficult.

Take the conversation I had the other day with a personality who regaled us with her adventures of dating a sports star.

"We'd sit at the bar and hordes of these scantily dressed women would come up to him and whisper things in his ear or start rubbing his shoulder. And I couldn't even get angry at him because it was the women who were the problem, not him!"

When I asked her if she thought he ever cheated on her, she replied, "Oh absolutely. There's no doubt they do it because who in their right mind could resist all that temptation?"

In keeping with her observation, a recent story for CNN News had a similar conclusion, and, in jest, urged couples to change their vows to something more along the lines of this:

"Till a tempting new partner do us part."