Indeed! And yeah, we always thought we were a pretty progressive and egalitarian couple until we opened up our relationship and started encountering all sorts of hidden ways that we had bought into cultural ideas of what marriage looks like and means that we had never affirmatively evaluated or chosen. It was truly eye-opening and caused a few waves there for a while, but working through that and confronting all that subconscious stuff was excellent for the relationship in the long run.

A while back this guy said to me in a comment that he wasn't bought into cultural messaging - essentially that he was an individual and his relationship with his wife had nothing to do with societal expectations. "Oh yeah," I said, "how many times a month do you and your wife have in depth discussions about what you want, expect, desire, etc., from your relationship?" Needless to say, the answer was never - he was going entirely off of subconscious scripts that were so deeply the ocean he swam in that he didn't even realize that's what he was doing. I think this is most people, to be honest, and while I certainly don't think polyamory is for everyone, I sure encourage all couples to have those same kinds of conversations where you do actually co-create your own relationship and don't just blindly follow ancient scripts written by others. But mostly, people don't want to be that honest or that vulnerable and so they just lean on the "structure" of marriage or relationships to avoid the work.