“for the most part monogamous, but for maybe a casual three-way”: on monogamy and non-monogamy
With same-sex marriage hitting California, and a ballot initiative on the same approaching in the fall, anti-same-sex marriage folks are pointing to the New York Times article “Gay Couples Find Marriage Is a Mixed Bag.” In particular, they’re featuring this quote:
Eric Erbelding and his husband, Michael Peck, both 44, see each other only every other weekend because Mr. Peck works in Pittsburgh. So, Mr. Erbelding said, “Our rule is you can play around because, you know, you have to be practical.”
Mr. Erbelding, a decorative painter in Boston, said: “I think men view sex very differently than women. Men are pigs, they know that each other are pigs, so they can operate accordingly. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Still, Mr. Erbelding said, most married gay couples he knows are “for the most part monogamous, but for maybe a casual three-way.”
Not exactly the idea of monogamy, or the idea of practicality, that I grew up with. And also – let’s be frank – not exactly surprising. Maggie Gallagher grabs hold of the quote like a bull dog
For the most part . . . except for the casual three-way?
But hey, if the word “marriage” can be redefined as a civil-rights imperative, why balk at lesser ideas like “monogamy” or “fidelity”?
I am in no position to confirm or deny Mr. Erbelding’s judgment about what the men he knows in gay marriages do. But David Benkof, a gay columnist who gave up sex with men when he adopted a Torah-observant lifestyle, recently made the same point in his intellectually fecund new website Gays Defend Marriage.
Problematic kinds of relationships that are “commonly found in the LGBT community but virtually unheard of among opposite-sex couples” Benkof warns, “will have every right to use the word marriage.”
He goes on to point out these differences: “I have never been at a soiree with multiple straight “committed” couples in which someone suggests we take off our clothes and see what happens, but I’m sad to say it’s happened with gay friends in long-term relationships. Of course, I know, many men cheat on their wives. But they almost never define their marriage as something that accommodates adultery.”
…
No surprise there, either, since gay men’s non-monogamy bringing down the neighborhood has been a major theme in Gallagher’s anti-same-sex marriage advocacy for some time now. It’s a less major theme, to be fair, in the New York Times article. Read that article, and I learn various things. After a burst of pent up demand, same-sex marriages have declined to a lower (but steady) level. Two thirds of the marriages are among lesbians. Same-sex couples now have the same kinds of conflicts that straight couples have always had about marriage – you know, the part where one person wants to marry and the other doesn’t. Some marry mainly for practical benefits – access at the hospital and pharmacy, knowing they won’t be separated from each other when they grow old and ill – while others feel more strongly about the symbolism.
“I feel totally different inside my skin,” said Linda Bailey-Davies, 62, who married her longtime partner, Gloria Bailey-Davies, 67. With marriage, she said, “I felt legitimate in the world.”
And precisely one male couple offers the quotes about being practical and not considering sexual exclusivity a big deal.
It is true though, and often noted by gay men and outside observers alike, that gay male couples are more likely than either heterosexual couples or lesbian ones to have negotiated open relationship arrangements. How much more likely? That’s not clear to me – and I’m not sure anyone else knows either. Some articles will quote gay men as saying that nearly all gay male relationships are eventually non-monogamous, but cite such an article, and you’re liable (as I once did) to get a gay male commenter from somewhere in the Midwest assuring you that his gay associates are no more given to casual sex than the women he knows. I suspect that like clusters with like, here, and given that most sex surveys (of gay and straight alike) are of non-representative samples, it’s hard to get a clear idea of the relative numbers. Certainly gay male couples that promise sexual fidelity exist; it seems equally clear that there’s some real difference on average, even if we don’t know the magnitude.
What do I make of this difference? Well, to answer that, first I’d have to say what I make of gender differences in general. It’s often said that liberals believe gender differences are purely social, except for homosexuality, which is totally biological, while conservatives believe the reverse: differences between men and women are born in us, but homosexuality hasn’t the least biological basis, not at all. To tell the truth, though, I think both are probably a mix – part biology, part early environment, with biology and environment interacting in such complicated ways that it’s hard to say where one ends and the other begins.
Research on sexual differences that hits the popular press is often easy to mock, and can be (at least in its popularized form) deserving of mocking.
An article in New Scientist presents a startling new scientific finding: Researchers whose definition of male success involves carefree sex with lots of women have discovered that men who have carefree sex with lots of women are successful …
Phila’s right to mock, IMO, since the article she begins to quote appears to jump from a finding that thrill-seeking men have more casual sex to that old trope that women just love men who are callous and no good for them, and will have nothing to do with men who, like the guy usually telling this sort of story, are nice, know how to treat them, and could love them better if they were only allowed. And fail to consider other possible explanations for their findings.
In other words, they asked male college students who scored high on a test for narcissistic and deceitful personality traits to report on their own sexual conquests, and took their answers at face value.
I’m no expert, but that really doesn’t seem like a very good way to proceed.
Still, it does seem plausible to me that men and women really do differ a lot (with, of course, plenty of overlap as well) in their willingness to have relatively casual and emotionally detached sex. All the more plausible from my time in the gay community observing the differences between men and women there (we’ve all heard the joke, right, about what a lesbian brings to a second date – a U-haul – and what a gay man brings – what second date?). It also seems plausible that at least some of this (average, with overlap) difference comes from biology – if there’s anything where having the body that gets pregnant naturally impacts your behavior, wouldn’t sexual choices and assessment of sexual risks be high on that list? It’s certainly a more obvious biological tie than choice of engineering as a career. Not that biology’s some sort of lockstep determinism here, and not that one can’t overstate these differences – read some varieties of religious chastity advice, and I get the feeling that they’re saying that women have no real sex drive at all, and get nothing out of premarital sex, other than the belief that we’re pleasing the men we love. If biology were so completely deterministic here as some people make it out to be, we’d hardly need all the social pressures on women to be more chaste than men (pressures that continue, post-sexual revolution, just moving a notch over on the scale – so that instead of being expected to be virginal at marriage while your husband-to-be isn’t, you’re expected to have a lower “number” than he does).
Anyway, as I say, I do think men and women have some level of inherent difference here, with society filling in a lot as well. And I think the same of gender normativity vs. gender variance, of all kinds. Culture fills in a lot of the content of what it means to be a man vs. what it means to be a woman, but in any culture, there will be some people who are wired (from a combination of being born that way and early environment) to want to be more gender normal, and some who are wired to want to be more gender variant. And the guy who’s more femme by our culture’s standards might have a similar tendency, but expressed in a very different cultural way, if born elsewhere. Or perhaps not, to the extent that it’s early environment, rather than something like in utero hormone levels, at work. And, similarly, I think homosexuality, male and female, is a mix, some of it born in us, some of it coming from environment, little of it subject to change once you’re grown up.
So, what does all of this mean for same-sex couples vs. opposite-sex ones? Well, people are people, and to some extent couples of all kinds face the same issues. And to some extent not. Here’s another New York Times article that gets into some of the differences. Same-sex couples – no surprise here – share housework more equitably. Same-sex couples are better at using humor to defuse arguments. Opposite-sex couples have to work harder to see each other’s perspective. And yet, at the same time, some differences thought to be gender-based turn out not to be.
One of the most common stereotypes in heterosexual marriages is the “demand-withdraw” interaction, in which the woman tends to be unhappy and to make demands for change, while the man reacts by withdrawing from the conflict. But some surprising new research shows that same-sex couples also exhibit the pattern, contradicting the notion that the behavior is rooted in gender, according to an abstract presented at the 2006 meeting of the Association for Psychological Science by Sarah R. Holley, a psychology researcher at Berkeley.
Getting back to monogamy, it’s my belief that, however large or small the number of male couples who follow the sort of “practical” arrangement allowing for playing around that Erbalding describes, couples with a woman in them just aren’t going to do this in large numbers.
From time to time, I’ll hear from a certain type of utopian polyamorist (to be carefully distinguished from the sort who realizes his or her choice isn’t for everyone). Jealousy’s purely social conditioning, I’ll hear. We can grow beyond it, drop it, apparently, as easily as you discard an old outfit, and more into some grand utopia where we’ll all be freer. Monogamy’s unnatural, while polyamory is the most natural and easiest thing in the world, if only we’d cast off our social shackles and realize it.
It’s a load of crap.
Actually, neither monogamy nor non-monogamy is purely natural to most of us. What’s natural, if we thought we could get away with it, is to want room to play on the side ourselves, but to have our spouses more exclusively bound. And that’s as true of women as it is of men; as I’ve said before, the fact that I might lust after a smaller number of people at a time than the average man (if indeed I do) doesn’t make it any easier to reduce that number to “only one person ever for the rest of my life.” I’m not so fond of emotionally detached sex, but I’m certainly capable – repeatedly – of being in some sense in love with two people at once. And, like Jimmy Carter, I can confess to plenty of lust in my heart, even if I’ve been faithful in my body. In the real world, though, where I don’t get to play around and keep my husband purely for myself, where lovers bring their own demands and complications, polyamory isn’t likely to be easier for me than monogamy – just a different variety of difficult.
And here we come to the “forsaking all others” part of the marriage vow – the part where monogamy’s made, not just an individual choice, but a matter of social norms. Obviously it’s not the only way a culture can come down. My sister-in-law’s culture comes down differently; her father has many wives, and she has a thundering horde of half-siblings. I do think that it’s easier to have equality – both between husband and wife and between one man and another – in the world of monogamy than in the world of polygamy. And I think that, any time you have relatively easy divorce (as we do) and ability of both spouses to earn their own money (as we do), that polygamy becomes harder to manage. But sure, some varieties of polygamous rules can be made to work in the straight world. Only probably not, you know, for most people, the sort of “both parties get to play as long as it’s casual” arrangement that Erbalding describes. Straight couples who really each believe that the other can keep it casual, and are really comfortable with that, are always going to be the exception. And there’s this little thing called birth control failures which can threaten to throw a monkey wrench in the works.
David Benkof pushes the argument that same-sex couples undercut these social norms of monogamy. He points to an article at a gay web site on Keeping A Sexually Open Relationship Intact.
Our National Survey of Lesbian & Gay Couples shows us that female respondents heavily favored exclusive sexual relationships. Exclusivity was also the preferred mode for male couples, however, the men made far more exceptions…
And it talks about negotiating your own boundaries that allow for sex on the side, but with limits so you won’t be threatened by it – only when one of us is out of town, or only if there’s no emotional involvement, or whatever.
Benkof asks same-sex marriage advocates to Take the Monogamy Pledge. I predict that he’ll get few takers. In particular, I predict that he’ll get few takers even among lesbians, despite the fact that lesbians (who, remember, make of two-thirds of the people actually choosing same-sex marriages in Massachusetts) are just as likely as heterosexual couples to choose and value monogamy and sexual exclusivity.
Why? Well, the GLBT world has a certain ethic to it, a kind of solidarity among outcasts. A sense that, having had the only sexuality and way of falling in love that you can experience judged disgusting by others, you don’t want to do the same in your turn. So, when I recall first encountering my own local lesbian community back in college, I remember running into almost nothing but monogamous couples, but monogamous couples who’d be scrupulously tolerant of the one triad or the couple of poly folks. I recall a couple of lesbians who were open about being into BDSM – certainly no more than the straight people I’ve run into who’ve expressed such interest – but the more vanilla folks taking great care to accept such as a personal choice. You can find such an ethic of sexual tolerance in the straight world, too, of course, but it’s stronger in the GLBT world, because of the whole business of yourself being in some sense an outcast.
And to some degree I expect it to change. I think that, for better or worse, marriage will change the GLBT community, in just the ways Jonathan Rauch approves, and Jack at Feministe fears. If you can be accepted yourself, will you continue to be quite as eager to defend those choices that still aren’t accepted, and that maybe you don’t find all that appealing yourself? Is negotiated openness to casual sex and the occasional threesome necessarily going to look like an equally good choice? Probably not.
And, at the same time, some of the people marrying are going to want to bend things the way they’re used to in the GLBT world. Right now, with an initiative looming in November, the groom may hesitate to wear a gown. After marriage has been around for a few years, he’ll get confident, and wear a gown, or jeans, or a tux, just as he pleases.
Now, the taken for grantedness of monogamy in the world of heterosexual marriage has, to my mind, some weaknesses (bear with me a moment here), but also some strengths.
Where it’s a weakness is well set out by this heterosexual polyamorist.
Monogamy is way too complicated and confusing for me.
…
You know what’s complicated, to me? Figuring out these little social boundaries of what is and is not supposed to be an appropriate interaction. I once accidentally hurt my best friend in high school quite badly by napping with my head in his lap on the way home from a concert, which he took as having romantic inclinations….
I don’t understand what’s supposed to be okay and what’s not, under the principles of surrounding monogamy. I know of people who would be horrified by the sort of stuff I consider normal interaction, wouldn’t have a relationship with someone who did that.I hear people going on about “emotional infidelity”, and who want to police vigorously against the possibility that someone might have a friendship with a person of the other sex…
I think, to a degree, she’s right – that people sometimes start with all sorts of assumptions of what fidelity means, that they don’t check and air with each other. Is it totally obvious that people should keep their exes at arm’s length? That you don’t go on solitary lunches with a friend of the opposite sex (with whom you’ve never had a romantic relationship)? That one person gets to police the length of the other person’s skirt? Worse, men and women sometimes have systematic differences of opinion about what counts as infidelity. Does cybersex count? Does porn count? And if you don’t talk, if you assume that you both ought to be on the same page, you have a problem. Maybe your page is even the righter and more workable one, but chances are it’s not the self-evidently obvious one. To the extent that the not-taken-for-grantedness of monogamy spurs a lesbian couple, say, to actually talk about their boundaries in ways a straight couple doesn’t, well and good.
But the taken-for-grantedness of monogamy to other people outside the relationship is a strength. When it comes to other people, you don’t want your monogamy to be up for question or negotiation, you want it respected. It’s a strength that Joel and I can simply wear our rings and have everyone know, by default that we’re taken. That if we wanted to declare an open relationship, we’d have to work to communicate that to the world, rather than the other way around. Commitments of any kind are hard to keep for an entire lifetime, and one of the great values of marriage is the way it gets the world to respect your commitment. That’s good when the commitment is “in sickness and in health,” and it’s also good when the commitment is “forsaking all others.” It would be a bad thing if our norms shifted such that the thing most people want – a partner who’s faithful to them – was a thing that got routinely challenged, and that other people didn’t feel bound to respect.
At the same time, unlike Maggie Gallagher, I don’t see that kind of shift as a clear and present threat. I think that, in couples with women in them, the couples themselves will continue to enforce sexual exclusivity, on pain of divorce, and I think that pure practicality, in the straight world, will continue to point in a very different direction from where it points for Erbelding and Peck. The threat I see to heterosexual marriages isn’t so much negotiated open marriages – which a small number of people will continue to do, but which just won’t happen on a large scale – but failure to commit at all, and particularly the problem of disappearing fathers. For that reason, I’m with Rauch in seeing same-sex marriage as more of a win than a loss for straight commitments. More people announcing their commitments and getting them recognized? Good. More children being raised with parents who get to publically say, and have it recognized, that they’re committed to each other? Good. All of that reinforces an ethic of standing by your commitments – which is valuable to putting pressure on those missing fathers to man up and stand by their children.
June 23rd, 2008 at 7:44 pm
One strong quibble before I get into more detailed commentary — I really, really twitch at the usage of “fidelity” to mean “sexual exclusivity”. I know it’s common, and I know it’s there because most people commit to sexual exclusivity, but the subtext of it always reads to me in such a way that I feel that people will call me an oathbreaker over promises I never made and never wanted. I am perfectly faithful to my partners; I keep my vows.
That little defensive twitchiness declared…
Only probably not, you know, for most people, the sort of “both parties get to play as long as it’s casual” arrangement that Erbalding describes.
Actually, some variant on this is one of the most common poly arrangements I’ve seen, enough so that the idiot poly utopianists scream about how it’s not really properly enlightened and poly enough. There is a core dyad, often a married opposite-sex couple, who have casual/dating/sexual relationships on the side.
How well it works depends a lot on the people. I know some folks who have a really detailed agreement that happens to shake down that way, because it’s what works for them, and because it’s what works for them it works. Many of the setups like that, though, turn up in poly advice forums with “We had this agreement and now I am/my partner is too serious about someone…”
But the taken-for-grantedness of monogamy to other people outside the relationship is a strength.
Honestly, I wish for a world in which people would respect other people’s relationship boundaries without throwing a fit about it. “Are you available to me?” “No.” is as far as it needs to go, whether the incompatibility is orientational, being in a closed relationship system, or not wanting to date people who smell like that, y’know?
What drives me absolutely batshit are the people who don’t respect those lines. And monogamy isn’t a taken-for-granted thing if one’s, say, out as bisexual — I have a number of bi monogamous friends who seethe at being presumed available because of their orientation. There’s a guy who hangs out on a poly newsgroup who assumes that any woman who’s in a discussion group focused on multiple relationships is a whore available to him, and who spits seething, misogynistic invective when turned down. Religion is another excuse that gets given or not respecting those lines. And so on.
So, basically, the more one fits the norm, the more that code will get respected. If one’s bi, or pagan, or in any sort of open relationship, or kinky, or probably some other things as well these are just the ones I know, that line will not be respected as consistently … unless one carefully keeps people from knowing about such things.
I think that, in couples with women in them, the couples themselves will continue to enforce sexual exclusivity, on pain of divorce, and I think that pure practicality, in the straight world, will continue to point in a very different direction from where it points for Erbelding and Peck.
One of the things that I see come up in any discussion of social acceptance of multiple relationships and/or legal polygamy is what I refer to as “the impending gold-digging whore shortage”. The argument that comes up every time is “Then all the rich and powerful men will have all the women and ordinary guys like me won’t.”
And … this blows my mind. People who value monogamy can offer it to each other and find each other, and that will blatantly raise their “value” (if one puts it in crass terms) above having one-zillionth of a Brad Pitt. Not to mention that the world in which the rich and powerful have all the women they want already exists and feeds the tabloids….
Y’know, I should take that one back to my place and chew on it some.
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Actually, some variant on this is one of the most common poly arrangements I’ve seen, enough so that the idiot poly utopianists scream about how it’s not really properly enlightened and poly enough. There is a core dyad, often a married opposite-sex couple, who have casual/dating/sexual relationships on the side.
Sure, among poly folks. But Maggie Gallagher’s suggesting a kind of poly dystopia in which monogamist folks start imitating such poly arrangements in significant numbers, inspired by the example of newlywed male couples. I don’t see that happening. Where poly arrangements of some sort are more mainstream, there’s generally an economic incentive; it’s needed to get the all the people who’d really prefer to keep their sexual partners to themselves to go along. “Casual dating/sexual relationships on the side” isn’t an arrangement that’s going to scale to being accepted beyond a particular subset of people. After all, we’ve had vocal folks of the poly utopian variety at least since the 70s, and out gay men with various kinds of open relationships, too, and monogamists aren’t, on the whole, jumping into the swinging lifestyle (cheating continues as it always has, but that’s another story).
Honestly, I wish for a world in which people would respect other people’s relationship boundaries without throwing a fit about it.
Sure, I’m all in favor of respecting boundaries without throwing fits.
And monogamy isn’t a taken-for-granted thing if one’s, say, out as bisexual — I have a number of bi monogamous friends who seethe at being presumed available because of their orientation.
Oddly, I haven’t run into that personally, but that may be because the main place I tell people about being bi is my Quaker meeting. I do agree that the whole “bi people are always up for wild sex” stereotype is one we could do without.
Not to mention that the world in which the rich and powerful have all the women they want already exists and feeds the tabloids….
It does exist to a greater degree in some cultures than in others. Depending, to a significant extent, on whether women can control their own money. If you can, then you’re freer to ask for as much monogamy as your heart desires.
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:49 pm
But Maggie Gallagher’s suggesting a kind of poly dystopia in which monogamist folks start imitating such poly arrangements in significant numbers, inspired by the example of newlywed male couples. I don’t see that happening.
Me neither.
But that’s because there I go, looking at reality again. Always gets me in trouble.
June 24th, 2008 at 2:41 am
I absolutely see gay marriage as more of a win for straight couples, particularly those with something invested in the idea of marriage (which is, of course, most of the population).
I think you do well to point out that cheating continues and that what most people would like is to be able to fuck around while their partners stay loyal.
I see that as coming from this tendency to see marriage/relationships as a deal brokered between two essentially hostile sides. Coming from the ‘old days,’ of course, where women traded sex and housework for money and protection, and continued in the pages of Cosmo where they teach you how to ‘get him to’ do whatever it is that you want.
I’m speaking of course of heterosexual relations, but I wonder if there’s just less of that dynamic in homosexual relationships (obviously not none) because both partners are on the same ’side.’
If relationships are decided between two people (three, four, etc.) and defined by those people, however they feel it works for them, perhaps they can end up less like two different sides of a battlefield if they aren’t trying to fit exactly into those social roles. Heterosexual monogamy is still of course an option, but it doesn’t have to be a set of rules that someone else handed down that you have to follow and chafe against.
And nothing burns me up more than the idea that I can’t just not be into someone–that I have to have the excuse of being in a relationship that’s socially acceptable to that person for them to accept “No” as “No.” I wish for a world also in which “No” didn’t mean some earthshattering blow to someone’s ego, but just, y’know, not that way, sorry.
June 30th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
I’m coming to this party late via Dw3t-Hthr’s blog. Hi!
I want to say that you missed an important data point in your discussion on gender and nonmonogamy. Namely, bi women, who are nonmonogamous at similar rates to bi men and gay men. (Various sources disagree on the exact numbers, but I would say all these groups are poking around the 50% range. I can provide my references if you wish.)
Bi women are nonmonogamous at much higher rates than either straight or lesbian women. Having such a large group of women (2.8% of adults aged 18-44, according to the CDC) nonmonogamous points to the fact that a woman’s particular cultural (or subcultural) experience feeds into her decisions around monogamy. In other words, bi culture and experience tends to be nonmonogamous more than lesbian or straight culture, and unsurprisingly this leads to lots of nonmonogamous bi women.
Another subculture with lots of nonmonogamous women is polyamory. At the mixed-gender (mostly bi and straight) poly events I attend in San Francisco, it is common to find just as many (or often, more) women than men in attendance. And that remains true even if you discount the bi women in the room.
Anyways, it’s easy to buy into the “women are more monogamous than men” theory, but it seems clear that if you get the right subculture or the right approach to nonmonogamy, that all goes out the window.
What’s natural, if we thought we could get away with it, is to want room to play on the side ourselves, but to have our spouses more exclusively bound.
I have to disagree with this. I have met plenty of people who really had no wish to play on the side. At all. In polyamory circles, these folks sometimes end up in mono/poly relationships on the monogamous side. They really have the option of playing with others, but choose not to, simply because they do not want to.
Similarly, some folks just aren’t jealous. While some of these people understandably end up doing nonmonogamy, just as many or more end up monogamous and just not jealous in their relationships. I have a number of monogamous friends who fit this bill.
I feel like you are over-generalizing here, from your own experience.
And even worse, the end point of this sort of thinking is a kind of “strike a deal” mentality about monogamous relationships, where a person decides they are giving up something (playing on the side) by promising monogamy, but they are getting something (the other person playing on the side) in return. This tit-for-tat attitude encourages cheating, and feels like it is selling monogamy short. There’s a lot to be said for dating only one person, without having to be tied into it by the threat of your partner seeing folks on the side.
June 30th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Welcome, pepomint! Yes, I would like to see your reference on the nonmonogamy rates of bi women. My impression when I was young and single was that bi circles tended to be more poly oriented, and, as a result, women who were both bi and monogamy oriented sometimes gravitated toward either the lesbian or the straight world (if monogamy with someone – of either sex – was more important than availability of partners of both sexes).
Anyways, it’s easy to buy into the “women are more monogamous than men” theory
I don’t, myself, though, so much believe “women are more monogamous than men” as “gay male couples have an easier time believing of each other that they can have truly no strings casual flings than het and lesbian couples have believing it of each other.” The difference between the first assertion and the second is that I think men are very much part of the heterosexual monogamy dynamic, being on average every bit as unwilling to accept non-monogamy from their spouses as their spouses are to accept it from them.
(And, yes, sure, poly subcultures exist, but as subcultures; I’m not forseeing all the monogamous folks turning poly.)
I have to disagree with this. I have met plenty of people who really had no wish to play on the side. At all.
For an entire lifetime? I’ve known plenty of people who are happily monogamous for significant periods of time, and plenty of people who genuinely didn’t want flings without emotional ties, but people who really only ever want to sleep with one person for the rest of their lives? I’d be surprised if those are more common than hen’s teeth.
Similarly, some folks just aren’t jealous.
Again, ever? For an entire lifetime? Some people are less jealous than others, sure, and some people are less interested in multiple partners (maybe even enough that the downside will always outweigh the upside, even when they technically have permission).
I’m not positing a state of constant cold war here. But I am arguing that any sort of marriage – monogamous or polygamous – just isn’t going to come naturally all the time for a whole lifetime, and that the poly variety doesn’t come any more naturally (to people in general, however much some particular people may feel it comes more naturally to them) than the monogamous variety. That overcoming jealousy hits ordinary human self-centeredness just as hard as giving up the chance to sleep with other people.
I feel like you are over-generalizing here, from your own experience.
I’m drawing from my experience of being married twenty years, sure, through plenty of sickness as well as health. But I’m not looking at my own experience alone; I’m looking at lots of other long term married people who, even if they sleep only with their spouses, still sometimes look and think of others, and I’m drawing on plenty of observation of people in overlapping relationships, some of whom make it work and some of whom don’t, but most of whom, over the long haul, I do see having to deal with jealousy.
This tit-for-tat attitude encourages cheating, and feels like it is selling monogamy short. There’s a lot to be said for dating only one person, without having to be tied into it by the threat of your partner seeing folks on the side.
Are you saying that the only kind of monogamy that’s worthwhile is the kind that’s unconstrained? (“But you can’t possess a woman … if you love her so, you’ve got to let her go…”) Because, if so, I really have to disagree. A) There’s a whole lot to be said for dating only one person, sure, just because many people don’t even feel like doing otherwise, during the first months or years of infatuation anyway. But when you’re talking marriage, and a whole lifetime (which was what Maggie Gallagher was addressing), then, well, there may still be plenty to say for monogamy, but “I don’t ever even want to sleep with anyone else” probably isn’t one of those things. B) It’s not a matter of “being tied into it by the threat of your partner seeing folks on the side”; it’s a matter of actually caring about your partner’s feelings, and being able to see how they’d resemble your own. One would hope people wouldn’t stop at tit-for-tat in thinking of ways to make each other both happy. But, sure, there may be times in a long marriage when you’re in “strike a deal” mode (in all kinds of things, not just sexual boundaries).
Anyway, I do have some level of belief in basic human selfishness. It’s natural to want your spouse to get up for the baby, while you sleep. It’s natural to want to skip your share of the housework. It’s natural, when you’ve agreed to monogamy, to want to see your own flirting as harmless, but be quicker to draw the line at the same sort of flirting from your spouse. But it’s also natural to be able to recognize that selfishness in yourselves, and try to check it, because you do still love each other. As long as society isn’t excusing one party being selfish at the expense of the other, and letting one person off the hook while the other person is expected to pick up most of the slack, people can work past these kinds of self-centeredness.
July 1st, 2008 at 6:01 am
Maybe I should add here how I see shifting social norms interacting with “no strings” sex.
The way I see it, a couple in a marriage or long term relationship is going to agree to “no strings sex” on the side (as opposed to monogamy or other possible polygamous arrangements), usually, only if both parties find the occasional fling attractive for themselves over the long haul, and also think “no strings” sex is something that actually makes sleeping with someone else less threatening to the relationship (meaning, your negotiated rules designed to keep sex non-stringy are actually going to work).
Traditionally, lopsided “no strings sex” arrangements were more common than they are now, because women were supposed to be the naturally monogamous sex, that had to turn a blind eye sometimes to the doings of the naturally non-monogamous sex. But few people find that fair now, and so lopsided non-monogamy is on the decline, the province of couples who have some special individual reason to wind up in this arrangement (sometimes an accomodation to illness and loss of sex drive, sometimes something else). Because “you’ve got to put up with it due to lopsided power and unfair social norms” is very much on the decline as a reason, and is likely to stay that way.
And, the number of het couples who both enjoy “fling” type sex over the long haul and feel confident, again in relationships that they hope to last over the long haul, with partners having flings and that those flings will stay just flings, is and is likely to remain small. Which is why, though some cultures have had various varieties of polygamy, “both people get to have the occasional fling” hasn’t been the way this sort of thing has tended to shake out as a cultural norm (as opposed to something a few people do, or how things work in a smaller subculture – subcultures are different, because the people who are more comfortable with a choice self-select in, so even if there are only a few of them, you can still have the subculture living with its own norms).
So, Maggie Gallagher doesn’t need to fear the mainstreaming of marriages open to negotiated casual sex arrangements, because it’s not going to happen. (And, to anyone on Gallagher’s flip side, who anticipates the spread of negotiated casual sex arrangements and thinks it would be a good thing, I say the same thing – dream on, not going to happen.)
Dating is another matter. As social norms against the hookup/fling/casual sex/friends with benefits type of arrangements weaken, the number of people who incorporate them in a marriage may stay small, but lots more people do flings between serious coupled relationships, or go through some monogamous and some openly overlapping relationships in the process of making up their minds with whom they’ll wind up over the long haul, etc. So, if Maggie Gallagher needn’t realistically fear the open marriage, she has plenty to fear, quite realistically, from the world in which it’s normal for both men and women to openly play the field. The one in which there’s no significant social disapproval of hook ups, if that’s what you both want to do.
However, those flings and overlapping dating arrangements are going to happen whether same-sex couples get to marry or not; they’re not going to suddenly increase if men get to marry each other. So, if one wants to roll back hook up friendly social norms in favor of “take sex less casually” ones, fighting to prevent same-sex couples from marrying wouldn’t be the place to start (not your argument, of course, pepomint, but the one that inspired this post, and the reason I’m more focused on poly arrangements in marriage than poly arrangements in dating).
July 2nd, 2008 at 7:09 am
[...] said, in the monogamy/polyamory thread, that I think there are some natural constraints on what we can make of marriage, or at least [...]
July 2nd, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Yes, I would like to see your reference on the nonmonogamy rates of bi women.
My best numbers are unfortunately unpublished numbers from Kassia Wosick-Correa of UC Irvine. She did a relatively large study (the number of bisexuals was in the 100’s) that pegged around three-quarters of bisexuals as nonmonogamous in some way and about 45% as explicitly polyamorous. Numbers for bi men and women were similar.
Paula Rodriguez Rust has done a lot of work on this as well. Her most recent study is in the Bisexuality anthology edited by Firestein, and it had 33% of bisexuals in a nonmonogamous situation, and a higher (though unfortunately unspecified) number considering nonmonogamy to be their ideal situation. Again, men and women similar though she didn’t give the full breakdown.
I haven’t read it, but apparently Weinberg’s 1994 study of bisexuals came to similar conclusions around (non)monogamy.
For an entire lifetime?
Hard to say, since the mono/poly thing is relatively new. But certainly we have folks going on 10 years or more, having had the ability to step out in their relationships, and who are still not interested. Note that this is not the same as “only having sex with one person for the rest of your life”, since these days most relationships are not going to last the rest of your life.
So yes, I’m going to say that there are some people out there who simply prefer to only have one sexual or romantic partner, and more power to them. I think they are definitely in the minority, even among nominally monogamous folks, but are perhaps not as much of a minority as people think. Certainly I frequently see people pulled into poly situations who really don’t want to be part of it, not because they get jealous, but rather because they really only want one partner at a time.
And there are people who really don’t get jealous. It’s a learned response, and some of us (me included) never learned it.
Also, I’m not positing any particular state as natural here, certainly not polyamory. I’m a deconstructionist, so “natural” doesn’t exist in my arguments.
Are you saying that the only kind of monogamy that’s worthwhile is the kind that’s unconstrained?
No, but I am saying that being monogamous under threat of your partner being nonmonogamous is a relatively weak position, compared to being monogamous because you see value in your own personal practice of monogamy.
Sure, people are selfish, and indeed we compromise on many things in relationships. I’m not trying to place one’s choice to be monogamous outside these compromises. I am saying that viewing monogamy as an undesirable chore (say, like feeding the baby) tends to lead to high rates of discontent, and cheating. Or increasingly, nonmonogamy.
Traditionally, lopsided “no strings sex” arrangements were more common than they are now, because women were supposed to be the naturally monogamous sex
This is an important point. One interesting thing that’s happened over the last fifty years is that men are now really actually expected to be monogamous, and women now have the financial independence necessary to dump them when they are not. This is definitely a change, and there’s still a lot of resistance and bitterness from guys who think that a nonmonogamy double standard is their right. In fact, if there is an erosion in monogamy currently happening (hard to say, no statistics on this) then I would say that a significant motivator is men striking a kind of conceptual deal, and deciding that nonmonogamy in women is now okay so long as they can be nonmonogamous as well.
And, to anyone on Gallagher’s flip side, who anticipates the spread of negotiated casual sex arrangements and thinks it would be a good thing, I say the same thing – dream on, not going to happen.
While I certainly agree that this is not going to happen any time in the next decade or two, I wouldn’t be so sure in the long term. Certainly no one could have forseen the divorce explosion 100 years ago, and we could consider that to be relatively analogous to a switch from general sexual fidelity to a general willingness to experiment with nonmonogamy. There are a lot of pressures on monogamy these days: longer lives, a greater expectation of sexual and romantic satisfaction, a decoupling of relationships from people’s financial lives, and so on. So we could potentially see a nonmonogamous flowering similar to the sexual revolution in the relatively near future, though I’m not holding my breath.
In any case, same-sex marriage certainly has no effect one way or the other, as you say. If we’re talking about heterosexual relationships, then heterosexual power dynamics are paramount.
And, I just want to state that anything Maggie Gallagher says is suspect before it comes out of her mouth. She’s a right-wing shill who regularly attempts to dress up socially conservative arguments in a patina of science. She has no qualms about making incorrect inferences or manipulating statistics.
July 2nd, 2008 at 3:20 pm
I would note that I know quite a few people who simply don’t form attractions when they’re in a relationship. Not “Oh, that’s too much effort to follow through on” or “I committed to monogamy”, but “… what do you mean, there are other attractive people than my partner?”
As I’m wired up almost the same way (I don’t form attractions significant enough to register as meaningful when I’m in two relationships), I’m pretty sure these people are self-reporting with reasonable accuracy.
Meanwhile, the problem with “jealousy” is very much one of defining one’s terms. Often, when poly people say “Oh, I don’t get jealous”, what they’re specifically meaning is that they haven’t found the specific case of their partner being sexually or emotionally involved with someone else threatening to their safety and security in a relationship.
To me, this has always been a “Well, duh.” If I’m secure in the stability of a relationship, then of course stuff that has nothing to do with me doesn’t threaten it. That includes relationships with other people, having a job, going to school, playing computer games …. On the other hand, if I’m not secure, then whatever’s seeming to take away from what I need to be secure is obviously a threat, and thus cause for jealousy.
The big historical one was a PhD thesis.
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:22 pm
I’m a deconstructionist, so “natural” doesn’t exist in my arguments.
I’m more of the opinion that nearly everything human is learned, but some things are easier to learn than others. Cats can learn quickly that manipulation with the paws will get them out of a cage, but set the cage up to open when they lick themselves, and they’ll have trouble making sense of it (an experiment I read about in one of our cat books). Humans are, obviously, smarter and more mentally flexible and adaptable, but still find some things easier to learn than others (easier, say, to develop a phobia of snakes than butterflies, though enough association might in principle give you a phobia of either). And, for some things, there’s an optimal age for learning them. I think that’s true for a lot of sexual/orientational things, to the extent that they’re not innate – what’s learned or primed by the environment happens young, and isn’t so easy to shift once you’ve passed whatever the key age is.
I am saying that viewing monogamy as an undesirable chore
I think, usually, the “undesirable chore” part would be more intermittent. Though I suppose for some people and some marriages it might feel that way continuously (which wouldn’t be a good sign).
Note that this is not the same as “only having sex with one person for the rest of your life”, since these days most relationships are not going to last the rest of your life.
Oh, serial monogamy with break ups, I think a lot of people could actually do fairly easily (and prefer to having the same relationships in parallel). About half of all marriages, though, do still last for life (I’ve even heard higher estimates for first marriages, since some people repeatedly divorce).
In fact, if there is an erosion in monogamy currently happening (hard to say, no statistics on this) then I would say that a significant motivator is men striking a kind of conceptual deal, and deciding that nonmonogamy in women is now okay so long as they can be nonmonogamous as well.
Which would mean it wouldn’t so much be an erosion in monogamy as a shifting in it – more men actually being monogamous who could have gotten away with the one-sided deal in the past, as well as more men allowing nonmonogamy for women if they can be nonmonogamous themselves.
I would note that I know quite a few people who simply don’t form attractions when they’re in a relationship.
This could be partly a matter of definition – how significant a sexual draw do you count? Since I started this as a liberal Christian reply to conservative Christian Gallagher, I was figuring in all the “lust in the heart” stuff, which to me seems so stringent as to be practically humanly impossible to avoid, but some people hold such lusts and fantasies more lightly than others, and feel less of a pull than others to act on them.
It could also depend on how long the relationship has lasted (if you’re doing serial monogamy and tend to break up when you get past the infatuation period, it’s easier to never have been much attracted to other people while you’re in a relationship), or how healthy your sex life stays (I question whether just being in a relationship is going to quell all other attractions if illness or something is putting a big crimp in the sex – which is part of why I’m doubtful of it working that way consistently in an “in sickness and in health” situation that actually does last a lifetime).
Part of where I’m really resistant to seeing significant numbers of people as “naturally” monogamous is that it’s so often been pushed as, well, women are naturally monogamous and men aren’t, which, to my mind, even if men tend less sexually choosy than women, is plainly false. The other part is that whole “forsaking all others as long as we both shall live” thing; in the context of a marriage that actually lasts for life, to never even want to sleep with someone else seems an unreasonable expectation. But just as I see some forms of nonmonogamy as more likely to happen in dating situations than in marriage, I also see just naturally not ever really wanting to sleep with anyone else as more likely if your relationships have had a shorter term than an actual “till death do us part.”
I don’t form attractions significant enough to register as meaningful when I’m in two relationships
I tend to be significantly attracted to a maximum of two people at once, and for some stretches of time only one. And past experience in my single days tells me that trying to make out with people I’m not significantly attracted to is a really bad idea, and that trying to see two people at once leaves me feeling pulled too many directions.
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:15 pm
This could be partly a matter of definition – how significant a sexual draw do you count?
I’d need a definition for “sexual draw”, because anything I’d define as a sexual draw doesn’t really happen for me outside the context of a relationship or developing relationship, which kinda makes the whole thing tautological.
The most vehemently wired-up-monogamous person I’ve ever met was male.
July 3rd, 2008 at 4:34 pm
I was trying to think of a term general enough to describe all the sorts of sexual attractions people feel, including the ones they don’t make (and sometimes don’t particularly strongly want to make) any move to act on: ongoing relationships, developing relationships, one night stands where the people never see each other again, unrequited crushes that the other person never finds out about, drooling over celebrity photos or magazine centerfolds, being turned on by the sight of someone’s ass in the street – both the ones I’d feel and the ones I wouldn’t so much, and both the intense and lasting ones and the fleeting ones that are gone from a person’s mind later in the day (but still carry a noticeable sexual charge when they’re there). What word would you use for that kind of thing, if “sexual draw” means only relationships to you?
July 6th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
“That kind of thing” is a huge set of completely different things to me. “Sexual draw” strikes me as requiring being drawn to something, having some positive tropism towards the thing. I only experience a positive tropism from things at the ‘crush’ level on up, and generally that only goes specifically sexual for me once some level of consensuality is established.
I mean, I’ve written a couple of times about the really nice-looking friend who I do tai chi with, but the fact that he’s attractive doesn’t mean that I’m attracted to him. No tropism, just “he is decorative”. And there are frameworks from which that could be considered sexual, as my standards of “attractive” are rooted in my heterosexuality, but I need eros in it before I parse it as sexual.
I’m way at the end of the “I don’t get eros from strangers” bell curve. I can get raw creative beauty, which is, at least in my beliefs, a related thing — I was mesmerised last weekend by watching a former gourmet chef chopping potatoes, of all things, just because I have a positive appreciation for the skill displayed and find it beautiful — but that’s pretty much the closest I have to erotic engagement outside a potential relationship.
A little story: I had known my liege for years before we started our relationship. I honestly don’t recall if there was a ping of potential interest (there may have been, but it never fanned into anything); I was doubly partnered, he was both severely depressed and in a relationship that was at the time monogamous. We spent years doing things in each other’s company on and off, and only started our arc together when our respective partners got involved (leading to us being at loose ends in each other’s company a lot) and he supported me through the disintegration of my five and a half year relationship with my ex, thereby building the emotional connection that could support eroticism. At this point, despite us missing that “sexual draw” thing for years, I think this is arguably the most erotically charged relationship I’ve had in my life.
People are wildly and hugely variable.
July 6th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
But when you say that, are you saying that you don’t feel a sexual draw in the situations I gave (because, for some of them, I really don’t, either), or that, if someone does have one night stands or get turned on by the asses of passing strangers in the street, you still wouldn’t define it as “sexual draw” if they don’t have any desire for an actual ongoing relationship? Because I’m trying at this point to figure out what kind of word, for you, would encompass all the different kinds of reactions people might have that they’d find to be sexual, not to say that you (or I) would necessarily have sexual (as opposed to aesthetic) experiences in all of those situations.
Where this intersects with monogamy is that some people actually are monogamous as far as direct in the flesh sexual activity with someone other than their partner, but still turned on by nude or scantily clad photos. And some people have passing attractions to friends, that they may fantasize about, but aren’t that much tempted to act out, since they’re happy with the one relationship they have. And so on. And then there are even people who have overlapped relationships who’d still think of themselves as monogamous more than poly, because, perhaps, the one time they overlapped in their lives was when they were switching from the relationship that didn’t work so well to the one they now consider the love of their life.
July 7th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I wouldn’t define anything as a sexual draw unless there’s some sort of draw towards some kinds of sex. If there isn’t desire towards, if there isn’t tropism, then it’s not a draw.
Someone on the street has a nice ass? Okay. But does that come with any impulse towards? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Trying to categorise the two together doesn’t parse to me. It’s not a draw if someone’s not drawn; a sexual response is not necessarily a draw.
I have no idea if I’m making any sense.
Maybe this is useful as a thought, maybe not: physical and emotional/intellectual responses aren’t the same shape of thing. I know that some guys get erections from driving on bumpy roads; I know that I’ve gotten wet for no perceptible reason at times. On the flip side, sometimes the draw is there, the impulse to express sexually, but the physical lags.
“Being turned on” is a phrase that points at the physical to me; it doesn’t have any implications of active desire. As such, it doesn’t indicate any “sexual draw”; it can be present without the desire, and absent with the desire. It doesn’t matter if it’s a one-night stand or a marriage of sixty years or a crush or what; if there isn’t the emotional backing to go somewhere, at least in fantasy, no “draw”.
To back up: you said something to the effect that you found it implausible that someone could go umpty time without experiencing a “sexual draw” to someone other than their partner, and we’ve been trying to hash out what that means. I suspect at this point you may mean sexual and/or romantic and/or fantasy/potential-based attraction, in some combination or form, rather than strictly sexual; it’s possible that that’s broad enough for me.
“Sexual draw” just means to me “I want to have sex with that person, at least in theory”. It’s not a broad thing, it’s very specific. And there are plenty of people, monogamous and otherwise, whose desire to have sex is limited to particular contexts or relationships and simply doesn’t develop outside that context.
So, terminology problem.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
OK, I’ll agree to that terminology explanation. Yes, I was thinking broadly of a whole combination of sexual or romantic or fantasy attractions, not so much of only the ones you’d take to an actual specific desire to have sex with someone.