Modern Romance (25 page)

If you think the best life would be one with the most passion in it, then yes, that strategy would be much better than getting married. Falling in love is the most intense and wonderful experience—the second-most intense, after certain drugs, which are more intense for a few hours. Short of that, falling in love is the most wonderful thing.

But I didn’t get much work done when I was falling in love with my wife. And then we had kids, we finally had children, and that was totally involving—and it would be weird to be such a romantically involved couple when you’re raising kids. And now that that insanity has passed, I can return to writing books, which I really love doing. And I have a life partner who I think about all day long. And that’s not tragic. That’s not even disappointing. I have a life partner. We work together really well. We’ve built a fantastic life together. We’re both really, really happy.

If you take a narrative view, there are different things to accomplish at different stages of life. Dating and having these passionate flings are perfect when you’re younger, but some of the greatest joys of life come from nurturing and from what’s called “generativity.” People have strong strivings to build something, to do something, to leave something behind. And of course having children is one way of doing that. My own experience having children was that I discovered there were rooms in my heart that I didn’t even know were there. And if I had committed to a life of repeated sexual flings, I never would have opened those doors.

If you think the whole point of life is to gaze into your lover’s eyes all day until you die—well, then, I wouldn’t want your life.

Was he quoting James Van Der Beek in
Varsity Blues
at the end there? Odd choice. Other than that, though, Haidt’s analysis made a lot of sense to me. Passionate love is a drug that makes you feel amazing. A plan to just repeat that feeling over and over sounds nice in theory but in practice would be kind of dumb. Ecstasy makes you feel amazing too. But if I told you that my life plan was to make enough money to just do ecstasy all the time for twenty years, you’d think I was a lunatic.

Also, it’s nice to imagine that graph being nothing but a series of high peaks with little valleys below, but as anyone who’s been single for an extended period knows, the graph would probably be much weirder:

MONOGAMY, MONOGAMISH

There are many great things about being in a committed relationship.
You have a bond full of love, trust, and stability. It’s beautiful. But the excitement and novelty of a totally unexpected romantic encounter? That part of your life is dead.

For many people we interviewed, this creates a conflict that isn’t easily resolved. No matter what their dating situation, people are torn between the benefits of a faithful, monogamous relationship and the novelty and excitement of single life.

Some people, including many prominent evolutionary psychologists and biological anthropologists, say that men and women aren’t even wired to be monogamous.

I spoke at length about this with the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher. Fisher contends that our cave-dwelling ancestors, compelled to spread their genetic material, had many sexual partners simultaneously, and after thousands of years of promiscuity, human brains are still wired to mate with multiple people.

The current norms of faithfulness and sexual exclusivity are actually relatively new even in modern times. According to the marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, in the eighteenth century American men were quite open about their extramarital escapades. She found letters in which husbands described their mistresses to their wives’ brothers and recounted how they contracted sexually transmitted diseases from prostitutes. I wasn’t able to find one of those letters, but I imagine it was something like this:

My Dearest Charles,

I hope this letter finds you in the halest and heartiest of conditions. I’m sure it will, as your constitution, as I recall, was always most impressive for its resilience and fortitude.

What do you make of this so-called “Revolution”? I fear that, win or lose, we shall be feeling its reverberations for decades to come.

In other news, in addition to your sister, I am fucking Tina, this woman I met at the bar last week. I also caught syphilis from a prostitute I met in Boston.

Fondly, your brother-in-law,

Henry

Men, Coontz explains, believed sexual adventure was their birthright, and women basically accepted this as a facet of the relationship. “For thousands of years it was expected of men they would have affairs and flings,” Coontz told the
New York Times
. “That would be unthinkable today.”
5

So what changed?

I spoke with the journalist and sex columnist Dan Savage, who has written at length about the age-old conflict between being faithful and having sexual adventure outside of a committed relationship. Savage contends that the women’s movement during the twentieth century fundamentally changed our approach to the problem. Women, he explains, rightly contested the presumption that men could fool around while they had no outside sexual options. But the decisive shift came when, rather than extending to women the leeway men had always enjoyed to have extramarital sexual escapades, society took the opposite approach.

Men could have said, “Okay, let’s both mess around.” But instead men got preemptively jealous of their wives messing around and said, “What? No, I don’t want you boning other dudes! Let’s just both not mess around.” This, Savage says, is when the monogamous expectation was placed on men and women, and it’s an expectation that neither sex is wired to meet.

“You’re told in the culture that if you want to fuck somebody else you need to do the right thing and end this relationship before you fuck somebody else or you’re a bad guy or you’re a bad girl,” he said. “I think that that’s bullshit. There’s higher loyalty. There’s a greater good. A relationship is more than just not touching anybody else with your penis ever again.”

I put myself to the test with a thought experiment. Let’s say my girlfriend was in Miami for a bachelorette party, and she ran into R&B superstar/actor Tyrese Gibson (
Fast and the Furious
franchise,
Baby Boy
). And for some reason they hit it off, and she ended up hooking up with Tyrese. It was a one-night thing. She wasn’t in love with Tyrese. She wasn’t trying to be with Tyrese. She wasn’t trying to get invited to dinner at GibsiHana, the custom restaurant Tyrese had built in his backyard to mimic a Benihana Japanese steak house.
*

If that were the case, I think I would be okay with it—if I didn’t know about it.

I posited this hypothetical situation to my girlfriend and reversed the roles, with it being me who took another partner. She didn’t feel the same way. She saw no reason for us to stray from our monogamy and felt that doing so would be a violation of the trust in our relationship. She said if I got drunk and something like that did happen, she would be understanding, but it would be a big deal and she’d want to know about it. However, she also said there was a big difference between me being really drunk and making a mistake and actively pursuing a sexual tryst outside our relationship, hitting bars and texting women to have a quick fling.

Also, probably best if I had this whole conversation at home in private, as opposed to a bar, where I definitely got looks from people who seemed to be curious as to why I was discussing my girlfriend hypothetically cheating on me with Tyrese.

Savage believes that cheating is tempting for just about everyone and that for some people it’s simply too hard to resist. Rather than succumbing to urges we all have, cheating behind our partner’s back, getting caught, and destroying the relationship, Savage thinks we’d be better off acknowledging that we have these desires and deciding how to deal with them—as a couple.

“If you have children together, if you have a history together, if you have property together, if you melded two extended families together, all of that has to weigh more than one blow job you got on a business trip,” he said.

Savage isn’t opposed to monogamy. He recognizes its advantages for those who can sustain it and produce successful relationships. The problem, he says, is that today far too many people are making commitments that they cannot realistically honor.

The idea of trying to maintain a committed relationship while also satisfying our urges for sexual novelty has led to a lot of experimentation over the years with “open relationship”–type arrangements. Couples have tried everything from open marriages to being “swingers” to maintaining “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies.

Just how many people have experimented with these arrangements? The latest survey data show that 26 percent of American men and 18 percent of American women report having engaged in “an open sexual relationship.” Surprisingly, young adults between the ages of twenty-one and thirty are the least likely to have tried this, at only 19 percent, whereas it is most prevalent among those in their forties, at 26 percent. And seniors? Twenty-two percent of them have tried an open sexual relationship. Damn!

“Open relationships? Is that where you fuck other people? Yeah, we do that sometimes.”
*

Savage coined the term “monogamish” to describe his own open relationship with his partner. The gist of it is that the couple is deeply committed to each other, but there is room for outside sexual activity.

“Monogamish” is not a one-size-fits-all concept. Each couple works out their own terms and agrees beforehand to what sexual activity outside the relationship will be tolerated. Some demand complete honesty from their partner, while others may prefer a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Some restrict how close the outside person must be—at least a friend of a friend, at least a friend of a friend of a friend, a stranger neither of you will ever see again, someone who lives in a different state, or it can
only
be Michigan State University provost June Pierce Youatt. (All right, the last one not as much.)

In our interviews and on our subreddit, we met several couples who had set up arrangements in the vein of what Savage discussed. Some of the people were incredibly enthusiastic about their experiences. On the subreddit one woman wrote:

I
’ve been in open relationships for the last ten years now, and have been with my husband for 8 years. I chose to be in one when I realized that every boyfriend I ever had cheated on me, and I cheated on every one of them. I finally decided that maybe I need variety, and that I was attracted to sexually adventurous men.

Being in an open relationship is such a relief—no more lies, no more horrible break ups, no more guilt. My husband and I have rules we follow, like he can only see someone else once a week, and if I don’t like the girl he picks I can make him stop seeing her.

The best part is, we can be honest about how we feel without judgement. No more hiding crushes or sexual tension. We are madly in love, and have a daughter together. I know it’s not for everyone but it works for us.

Other couples used these kinds of arrangements to facilitate long-distance relationships. One woman, who had been seeing her musician boyfriend for a few months, told me about the agreement they made when he went away on tour. She understood that he was on the road for months at a time, and in the interest of maintaining the relationship, she would let him have some leeway while on tour—up to a point. They created “tour rules” that he had to follow. “No sex, just blow jobs. That’s as far as it could go,” she said.

And she didn’t want her boyfriend maintaining contact with anyone this stuff happened with. “I don’t want to be in bed and look over and seeing him texting some girl from Cincinnati,” she explained. “And while he’s away, I have the same privileges.”

We also met a woman from Brooklyn who had just starting dating someone who made it clear that he wanted to occasionally hook up with other people. They entered into an agreement where they could have sex with others, but only under the following conditions: The person had to be at least two degrees outside their friend group (a friend of a friend), it was “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and if they were out hooking up with someone else, they had to make a good excuse that didn’t let on that they were out messing around. It was an “out of sight, out of mind” type of arrangement, and it was working.