David Klinghoffer discovers a shocking truth about my marriage: like Mark Sanford’s, Eliot Spitzer’s, Bill Clinton’s, John Ensign’s, Larry Craig’s, and several of Newt Gingrich’s, my marriage isn’t strictly monogamous. But unlike Clinton’s, Ensign’s, Sanford’s, et al., mine is honest. The boyfriend and I are non-monogamous, as as I wrote The Commitment, the book where I cleverly buried this shameful secret about my marriage five years ago, but we’re more non-monogamous in theory than we are in practice. So I’m sorry to say that my marriage isn’t quite the raging fuck fest that Klinghoffer imagines it to be. (Or Slog trolls, for that matter.)
Hope that doesn’t spoil the massive jack-off session you’ve got planned for tonight, David.
Once again: you don’t have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Straight people have been demonstrating that for millennia. The Hebrew Bible that David’s always humping away at is shot through with examples of non-monogamous heterosexual men. (How many concubines did that King David person have again?) There’s an organized movement of heterosexual swingers in the country and plenty of disorganized-but-honest straight non-monogamy going on out there too. So no one has to, as David encourages us to do, “imagine a man and a woman, of impeccably heterosexual tastes, with an open marriage on the Dan Savage model.” There are lots of men and women out there with thoroughly heterosexual tastes who are in successful, long-term, open relationships—”marriages on the Dan Savage model”—that allow for varying degrees of outside sexual contact. Straight couples have been doing the legally-married-but-not-monogamous thing for a lot longer than gay couples have, David, so if anyone is modeling their marriage on anyone else’s, gay people are modeling their open marriages on the open marriages of straight people.
Sorry, David, but monogamy isn’t natural and men are particularly lousy at it—and for most of recorded human history, men weren’t required or expected to be monogamous. Sixty or seventy years ago, in a moment of mass delusion, humanity decided to put the monogamy at the center of our marriages and, gee, how’s that working out for us? I know this hard for monogamy fetishists to grasp, but here goes: Allowing for some outside sexual contact—being realistic and successfully negotiating some degree of openness—defuses one of the leading causes of divorce. It’s pro-marriage, pro-stability, pro-family. It is a good and decent thing, not a threat to all things good and decent.
And my goodness, David, are you really so stupid as to invoke the story of Lot in defense of monogamous heterosexual marriage? You’re going to point to Lot as an example of “modesty where private expressions of passion are kept private,” David? After offering up his daughters to a mob to rape, Lot flees Sodom with the wife and kids. God turns Mrs. Lot into a pillar of salt for having the gall to take a peek over her shoulder at the fireworks, and then… Lot’s daughters get their father drunk and have an incestuous threesome with dad and nine months later they present Lot with two sons/grandsons. My sexual “adventurism” may shock you, David, but I’ve never done anything so depraved as that lot.
Do open relationships hurt women, as David insists? Not according to the straight women I know who’re actually in them. (Needless to say David doesn’t know any women in open relationships—he doesn’t seem to know they exist at all.) But who should these women believe? Their own life experiences or David “You’re Doing It Wrong!” Klinghoffer? “Every woman with a brain in her head knows that in [an open] relationship,” David writes, “she’s likely to be the one who gets hurt.” I guess that means that no one gets hurt in a closed relationship. Let me check with Mrs. Sanford, Mrs. Spitzer, Mrs. Clinton, et al., about that.
Here’s the story I wrote for this year’s queer issue that David just can’t bring himself to link to.
How did people miss this?
The reason why people insist on getting “married” even though they don’t want to enter a “marriage” as defined by a church or someone else is that “marriage” has become a legal institution necessary to people of a number of different prerogatives. I am glad to live in a place where domestic partnership is open to everyone and confers almost all the rights of marriage on the happy couple (yes, even tax benefits, and health benefits if you work for the District), but federal law does not recognize this and other states don’t recognize this and so if I were to move or have a large estate or work for the federal government my partner would not receive all the same benefits as he would if we were married. (Aside: I am not yet domestically partnered, but hope to be some day!)
Get religion out of the government’s definition of “partners” and the state out of whatever churches want to do and I, for one, will shut up and be happy and stop insisting on infringing on your right to be “married” under your own rules.
Oh yeah, and I’m monogamous. I don’t get jealous, but I *also* don’t have the time or energy for more than one partner. As for the BF, well, there was something about “I get more than my manwhore friends, what’s to complain about?” 😉 Given that he’s honest and smart and responsible, if he wanted some variety we could probably work that out.
Finally, I just have to say that if people didn’t take “traditional marriage” to an extreme, they would be a lot happier and possibly less likely to cheat. I don’t have time for more than one partner because I have a career, friends, hobbies, interests, and personal distractions that I like to indulge in once in a while. Meanwhile, my married friends sit at home and stare at the TV all evening (not that there’s anything wrong with that if you really love TV, but these people are channel surfing and complaining that nothing’s on). Moreover, as a number of commenters have noted here (mostly in the most offensive ways), a lot of people get married to make them feel better about themselves. More stable and secure and less lonely. Boy, if there wasn’t a worse way to live your life! If you enjoy yourself and your personal time, you don’t need someone else there with you. Please don’t take this as bashing the polys here…nothing wrong with that, just pointing out that many people who “cheat” (which is qualitatively different from “being open”) aren’t happy with themselves.
I can define my relationships any way I see fit. It’s between me and my partner and is uninfluenced by your personal paradigms and arbitrary morality, Klinghoffer.