It’s not often that someone feels like hiding The New York Times from her husband. But I have to admit I sort of snuck last week’s Sunday magazine into the recycling bin. “Married, with infidelities” was the title of a long piece arguing that it’s ridiculous to expect fidelity as the norm for every marriage.
“Hah!” I could hear my husband say if he’d read it. Despite the fact he unfailingly comes home at night to watch Law & Order reruns with me, he’s always argued that people, especially men, aren’t designed to be monogamous.
It turns out Dan Savage agrees. Both my husband and I adore Dan Savage. He’s the most entertaining sex-advice columnist in the world, and also the subject of that dangerous article in the Times. Mr. Savage argues that what’s really wrong with marriage is not infidelity, but society’s obsession with it. (He himself is happily married to another man, and describes himself as “monogamish.”)
“People in monogamous relationships have to be willing to meet me a quarter of the way and acknowledge the drawbacks of monogamy around boredom, despair, lack of variety, sexual death and being taken for granted,” he says. A willingness to accommodate your partner’s needs – even if that means occasional non-monogamy – can actually strengthen a relationship, he argues.
Mr. Savage’s column, Savage Love, is indispensable reading for anyone who’s interested in the astonishing variety of human sexual behaviour. He tackles moral issues you never dreamed existed. Where else would I have learned that there are little old ladies who like to masturbate their budgies? (Mr. Savage thinks that’s okay so long as they both enjoy it.) He launched a stirring campaign to prevent suicide among gay teenagers, called It Gets Better. He even popularized a new definition for “santorum,” which is so vulgar I can’t possibly repeat it. This is a man who deserves respect.
Like my husband, Mr. Savage argues that humankind didn’t evolve to be monogamous. Throughout history, men have had concubines and mistresses. (In France, they still do, or at least the rich and powerful ones do.) Then we ruined it all by deciding that marriage had to be “egalitarian and fairsy.” It’s not only unrealistic, he argues, but it’s been a “disaster.”
I’m not entirely unsympathetic to this argument. In fact, I used to believe in it myself. In the high noon of hippiedom, I believed that marriage and monogamy were for squares. We were determined to reject society’s hypocrisies and lead lives that were open, honest and authentic. We all read Open Marriage. Sometimes, we’d smoke dope till 4 a.m. and confess how attracted we were to each other’s boyfriends and girlfriends. This was thought to be very progressive. Then feminism came along and decreed that women could be just as liberated as men.
Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy sexual liberation as much as I’d hoped. Eventually, it occurred to me that it seemed to be working better for guys than it was for me. Men, I noticed, tended to agree that sex without meaning was pretty swell. Women tended to agree that sex without meaning was impossible. Although we approved of it in theory, we were all too susceptible to messy emotional entanglements.
I’m not saying monogamy is easy. It’s not. Sometimes, when you’re faced with an almost irresistible temptation in a scenic spot far from spouse and home, you need to lock yourself in the bathroom and take a long, cold shower. Sometimes, when your spouse leaves his dirty socks on the floor for the 432nd time, you wonder whether you’ll ever feel the flames of desire again. Some people don’t. And I feel sorry for them.
I agree with Mr. Savage that we tend to moralize too much about other people’s private lives. People should have the right to conduct themselves as they wish, so long as they’re not harming anyone else. If someone wants to exchange dirty pictures with an octopus, and the other wants to fool around with a troupe of trapeze artists, then why not, so long as everyone involved is okay with it?
But here’s the problem. Mr. Savage is assuming that everyone is completely rational (which is never true, especially when it comes to sexual desire), and that no one will inadvertently get hurt. In the real world, lots of people inadvertently get hurt. Someone says he won’t mind if his partner has a casual affair, then discovers he minds quite a bit. Or people fool around in a harmless kind of way, then fall in love. Or one of them does. Or someone gets pregnant. These things are going to happen anyway, of course. But when you look for trouble, you’re likely to find it.
If men and women were equal in their sexual desires, we’d have a different conversation. But as that famous piece of doggerel goes, Hogamus higamus/ Men are polygamous;/ Higamus hogamus/ Women monogamous. The long history of civilization is in many ways a progressive effort to rein in the indiscriminate (and frequently destructive) sexual desires of men. This effort, no doubt, frustrates men, but it’s good for women and children, and also for society.
Besides, there’s something about monogamy that some long-married people have discovered (much to their surprise). It’s the same thing Dan Savage tells gay kids: It gets better.
