Marriage and the difference between men and women
Browsing the web, a review by sexologist J.D. Weinrich of Nicolosi’s pro-reparative therapy book caught my eye:
This rosy view of heterosexuality comes out especially clearly when he opines that the difference between men and women are good things — for example, that women’s domesticity helps keep men’s rampaging promiscuity in check. He implicitly assumes that heterosexual couplings will produce the most happiness. Although Nicolosi is hardly the first to assume that Man and Woman were designed for each other’s happiness, whether this is true in any sense of the word “designed” is an open question. Models in modern evolutionary biology typically do not assume this, for example, and suggest that husbands and wives will be perpetually at each other’s throats in certain circumstances (Diamond, 1993) — a view closer to Thurber (and the coadaptation of predator and prey) than to Masters and Johnson. I do not insist that the biologists are right and Nicolosi wrong; I simply wish to point out that the assumptions Nicolosi makes are open to question. They short-change heterosexuals by failing to affirm the complexity of their lives and lead me to wonder if Nicolosi knows any more about heterosexuality than he does about homosexuality.
How do I put this? On the one hand, sure, sometimes the differences between men and women (on average) can be a boon to a relationship, and help us complement each other. Just as other differences an individual couple has are sometimes a boon (Joel often says that people with bipolar disorder are best off not marrying each other, and that he’s glad I don’t have bipolar disorder). That said, the kinds of explanations of the difference between straight and gay couples that resonate most with me aren’t the ones that talk about all the complementarity that same-sex couples are missing. They’re the ones that see straight couples as, in some sense, the weaker party, and the one more in need of being shored up. *Christopher has written about this on occasion, how some ways of handling relationships that work among gay men just don’t work so well in heterosexual couples.
None of this means I’m willing to join Maggie Gallagher in opposing same-sex marriage; I still think that Jonathan Rauch’s case for same-sex marriage wins handily over the case against. But it does say to me that the norms of marriage should be those that work for those couples who could face pregnancy at any time, and who may not sync up so naturally and easily in their approach to sex, pregnancy, investment in parenting, etc. And all the rest of us – couples who’ve proved to be infertile, couples where the woman is past menopause, same-sex couples – should generally fit ourselves to those norms.
The catch is that many of us find that marriage involves norms and expectations that we don’t intend to buy into. I’m far from the only woman to be annoyed when Joel is praised as exceptionally wonderful for cooking me dinner, while if I cook him dinner, it’s routine. I mean, yes, I love his cooking, and he cooks better than I do, but it’s not as if I don’t work all day. When did either of us agree that all the housework is my job, too, and he’s being noble and good any time he helps with it? So, there are things which are definitely appealing about same-sex relationships – to not have the whole world assuming that it’s your job to pick up after and take care of your partner! I could gladly look to lesbian couples for inspiration on the household division of labor front.
But only if I get to pass on the brave new world of negotiated non-monogamy that many (though not all) gay male couples offer as an ideal. However well that may or may not work for two men, when you’re talking about straight couples, Bullwinkle, that trick never works. OK, rarely, for a few unusual couples, it works out as subjectively OK. Often even then only for the couple, and not for their lovers. But as a general rule, polyamory just isn’t a route to greater happiness, much less more stable environments for raising kids, in the straight world.
December 24th, 2005 at 7:02 am
I guess I’m not sure what “many” gay couples means. As a partnered, monogamous gay man in the midwest I know polyamorous couples must exist, but I don’t know any. And though our circle of friends (straight and gay) don’t spend a lot of time disparaging others sexuality, I have yet to hear any one I know speak of polyamorous couples in “ideal” terms.
December 24th, 2005 at 11:13 am
Good point, Troy. I’m thinking mostly about gay men in discussions I’ve encountered online, and to some extent in person in the SF Bay Area. I think actually some of the description of non-monogamy as more ideal (more honest, for example) than monogamy is a defensive reaction to being disparaged by the straight world. And, it’s not so much that I’m hearing all the gay men I know praising polyamory to the skies, as that I run into some gay men who report much what you do, and some who report more open relationships (I think it must be different subcultures, maybe differences in where you live, or something). So, “many” doesn’t necessarily even mean “most” – it means “I don’t know how many exactly, but gay men who claim to be happy with some kind of non-monogamy seem a lot less rare than straight couples who make that claim.”
It’s actually hard to tell, with gay men giving wildly different accounts of how monogamous most of their circles of friends are, just how non-monogamous gay men really are. I think it’s got to be something that varies a lot from one social circle to another.
December 24th, 2005 at 2:02 pm
FWIW, the few gay men I know here in Orange County seem to be either unattached at the moment or in settled monogamous couples, but it’s not as if I’ve enquired into everyone’s sex life in detail.
December 24th, 2005 at 11:39 pm
Weinrich says “…or example, that women’s domesticity helps keep men’s rampaging promiscuity in check.”
But is that true?
In other cultures isn’t certainly not true that men are considered the more promiscuous gender. Nor has this always been the assumption even in Anglo-American history.
I’m prepared to believe that monogamy as contemporarily defined is a stable configuration but it’s not without its costs. Actually, given the frequency of heterosexual affairs in the general population (if not yours or my immediate ones) I might take some convincing before I agree that it’s necessarily the best configuration.
We (you and I) might prefer it, but that doesn’t make the generalization true.
figleaf
December 25th, 2005 at 8:55 am
To whatever extent it *is* true (at least in this culture) that “women’s domesticity helps keep men’s rampaging promiscuity in check,” it’s a mixed blessing. There’s a definite tension in being the spouse expected to domesticate the other spouse. And if, as seems likely, Nicolosi expects a woman to be better than a man at checking a *gay* man’s rampaging promiscuity, I have to be skeptical.
What I do believe is that it’s easier for gay male couples than for heterosexual couples to *lower the stakes* of “open” relationships. There’s no risk of pregnancy (and condoms protect more thoroughly against AIDS than against pregnancy, since the inherent risk of AIDS per sex act to begin with is lower), and if, as is the case in many “open” relationships, the couple try to contain the openness with rules that amount to “casual sex only outside marriage,” they’ll have an easier time than an opposite sex couple both believing that the other takes the outside liaisons casually.
December 25th, 2005 at 8:11 pm
I was once friends with a gay male prostitute. He insisted that there’s no such thing as a monogamous gay couple, no matter what they might tell their friends.