95: Monogamy

Ira Glass

Yes, yes, yes. Like you, I have heard everything I ever care to hear for the rest of my life about President Clinton and his marriage. But you know, there was a brief moment, at the very beginning of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, when the public discussion included not only the questions of impeachment and lying and is it about sex, or isn't it about sex-- all that stuff-- but also questions about marriage, about how bad it is, how common it is, for people to be unfaithful to their spouses.

And it wasn't just the Lewinsky scandal that made that happen. Around the time the Lewinsky story broke, Roy Romer, the governor of Colorado, the head of the Democratic party, publicly declared that for 16 years, he'd had a relationship outside his marriage with an aide named B.J. Thornberry. He told the press that his wife and family knew about the relationship and that they accepted it. And he argued in his press conference that it might be helpful if we would talk about what really happens in marriages, long-term marriages, instead of what we usually pretend.

Ira Glass

Here is the window of discussion that's being opened up right now in our country. It came up with Roy Romer. It came up with Bill Clinton before him. And it has to do with monogamy, how to think about it. In a magazine called Critical Inquiry, a Northwestern University professor named Laura Kipnis makes the case that there are a lot of marriages where people are simply unhappy. And these people are like workers who are alienated from their jobs, numb, going nowhere.

You know, we're told these days that we're supposed to work at marriage the way that we're supposed to work at a job. And so you work your job, and you work at home. And what do you get? And for these people in unfulfilling marriages, she says, having an affair is like a wildcat strike. It's an action, a civil action, a small attempt at altering the business-as-usual of their own lives.

Ira Glass

Most of us, I think, are very hesitant to believe that any kind of non-monogamous relationship can work. And Roy Romer did not have an easy press conference. The 69-year-old professional pol, a glad hand from the world of soundbites and fund-raising dinners, found himself theorizing publicly about trust and love and what marriage is.

Ira Glass

Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today in our program, monogamy and its discontents. Stories of people struggling to redefine monogamy, to stay monogamous, and what we should make of these ad hoc experiments in everyday life. Today, we hear case examples. Act One, Scientific Experiment, the story of a couple, the wife got a crush on another man, and how they tried to contain the crush, channel the crushy feeling, and what happens when you apply rational ideas to irrational feelings. Act Two, Love and Happiness. Dan Savage talks to real non-monogamous couples, who explain whether they're actually happy and why it might be OK to see other partners, but only if it happens in other time zones. Act Three, Istanbul. Ian Brown talks about the experience that most of us have struggling to stay monogamous, and what we should think of that struggle. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Scientific Experiment. Well, the essential question of monogamy is what to do with feelings that you may find that you have for someone else when you're in a couple. You think you still love your spouse, and then you get this crush. You can ignore it and agonize, or you can act on it and agonize. This is the story of a couple, Sylvere and Chris. The wife, Chris, got a crush on another man. And her husband, Sylvere, suggested that she turn her crush into a kind of art project, a writing project, that they would do together. The two of them put out a magazine called Send Me a Text. And he thought maybe the writing could end up in the magazine or somewhere else.

But a crush is a powerful thing, an irrational thing, really. Trying to contain it within an art project, within monogamy, is not so easy. Here's what happens if you try.

Ira Glass

Months passed. Chris kept writing love letters to Dick. The experiment of containing her feelings in a rational little art project was, in fact, unleashing her feelings. She became obsessed. She says it was like self-hypnosis. Dick never wrote back. She fell deeper and deeper in love. And as she wrote, she started to reflect on her marriage, on how she'd become an appendage to Sylvere, how she no longer had a separate life, a separate identity. She was resentful.

Ira Glass

After some time, Chris and Sylvere were reconciled. They're still married, but their jobs have now taken them to opposite sides of the country. He lives on the East Coast. She lives on the West. They talk every day, or nearly every day. They lean on each other, share their lives. And for now, they're non-monogamous. Each of them sees other people from time to time.

Ira Glass

Sylvere Lotringer and Chris Kraus. She collected their letters, plus an account of what happened, in a book called I Love Dick, published by Semiotext(e).

Coming up, 82 monogamous couples, 82 non-monogamous couples. Who's happier? Who's more likely to stay married? Answers, real answers, in a minute, from Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers, performers and other people to come on and tell us stories on that theme. Today's program, monogamy and its discontents, people struggling with monogamy, grasping for alternatives. We have reached the second act of our program, Act Two, Love and Happiness.

I think, for most of us, our first reaction when we hear about non-monogamous arrangements that couples sometimes have is that queasy feeling you get when you hear about somebody's life that you would not want to ever be your own. How can these people possibly be happy? In this act, Dan Savage explains. A warning before he begins-- he talks about sex in this story. Nothing explicit or graphic, but the subject does come up.

Dan Savage

With apologies to Leo Tolstoy, monogamous couples are all alike. Each non-monogamous couple is non-monogamous in its own way. For a non-monogamous arrangement to function properly-- "properly" meaning no blood, no tears-- both persons involved have to agree on a set of rules. The rules of monogamy are pretty simple and straightforward. After you've said, "Honey, let's not have sex with other people," what's left to discuss?

But functional non-monogamy, the having of sex with persons other than your partner, with your partner's foreknowledge and consent, well, that sort of an arrangement requires some delicate negotiation. If it's OK with you for your partner to have sex with other people, does that mean it's OK for your partner to have sex with other people under any circumstances? In the bed you share? With your best friend? Probably not. And that's where the rules come in.

The rules vary from couple to couple. I've heard of couples who weren't allowed to sleep with each other's friends or with their exes. Not in our apartment, house, bed, is a common one. I've been in three non-monogamous relationships. In one, we could sleep with other people so long as we weren't in the same time zone. In another, outside encounters were limited to a certain few and very specific sex acts that, for a certain few and very specific reasons, we didn't enjoy doing together. One straight couple I recently heard about has a rule that requires them to lie to each other. Not just lie, but lie convincingly. The idea seems to be that it's OK if they sleep with other people. They're just not allowed to make the other person feel bad by actually letting them know about it. A clumsy lie would be as bad as telling them. I interviewed one woman who was in a non-monogamous relationship for three years.

Dan Savage

The rules seem to fall into three broad categories-- who you can have sex with, under what circumstances, and what you can tell your partner about it. It's that third set of rules that are the stickiest. How much do you want to know? If your partner has sex with a tree in a forest and you're not around to hear it, did it actually happen?

The woman I interviewed made a non-disclosure pact with her boyfriend. But ultimately, they couldn't live up to their "don't ask, don't tell" policy. They began sharing their experiences with each other, which resulted in competition. If one got some on the side, the other felt entitled and would go looking for it. Breaking their own "don't ask, don't tell" rule was complicating their arrangement, which begs the biggest question of all. Do these non-monogamous arrangements work? Was this couple happy?

Dan Savage

Back when she was in her non-monogamous relationship, all her straight friends thought she was crazy. Her gay friends, however, were supportive and provided her and her boyfriend with role models. Non-monogamy is more common among gay couples than straight or lesbian couples. It makes some gay politicos uncomfortable when anyone points this out. But every study of long-term male couples has demonstrated this. Sometimes, gay couples even skip a formal rules conversation, so established are non-monogamous relationship models in the gay community.

I think non-monogamy is easier for a lot of gay men because gay men think about sex differently than straight people do. We recognize that different sex acts carry different degrees of intimacy. Many non-monogamous gay couples have a rule that stems from this commonsense notion. Outside sex is OK, goes the rule, so long as it does not include penetration. This rule allows for outside encounters, protects both partners from disease, and holds in reserve a few especially intimate sex acts that the gay couple, while non-monogamous, share only with each other. Since so many straight people-- not all, but many-- can't imagine having sex without intercourse, this rule just wouldn't work as well for them. My friend Dave is gay, and he's currently in a non-monogamous relationship.

Dan Savage

As I said earlier, I was in three non-monogamous relationships-- past tense. All of them ended. And the woman I spoke with earlier is no longer in her non-monogamous relationship. Judging from just her and me, you would think non-monogamous relationships don't last. Well, you'd be wrong.

Dr. Arline Rubin conducted the single largest study comparing non-monogamous couples to monogamous ones. Dr. Rubin interviewed 164 couples, half monogamous, half not, and did follow-up interviews with all 164 couples after 5, 10, and 19 years. Dr. Rubin discovered that there was no difference. Non-monogamous couples were just as happy or just as miserable as monogamous ones. And the number of couples who stayed together was exactly the same. Non-monogamy was no indication of instability or a lack of commitment. According to Dr. Rubin, whether a couple is monogamous has nothing to do with how long they stay together. Dave and his boyfriend, Eric, had been together for five years, and they're still going strong.

Dan Savage

The other assumption that is often made about non-monogamy is that it's a phase. A couple may open their relationship for a time, but they will, once they get serious, return to monogamy. Dr. Rubin's studies have shown that this isn't true either. The couples she followed, all straight and now all in their late 50s and 60s, with houses, mortgages, and kids, as their marriages went on, these couples pretty much stuck to what they'd been doing all along, whether it was monogamy or non-monogamy. So it isn't an experiment or a phase. It's a choice. And like Dave says, it works for the couples that it works for.

Ira Glass

Dan Savage writes a syndicated sex advice column, Savage Love. He also works at The Stranger, a newspaper in Seattle.

Ira Glass

Act Three, Istanbul. So where does this leave most of us, the rest of us? Where does it leave those of us who understand what it is that we actually sacrifice to be monogamous-- adventure, surprise-- but also understand what we would be sacrificing, what difficulties and jealousies we might be subjecting ourselves to if we were non-monogamous? Where does this leave us? Well, Ian Brown has these thoughts.

Ian Brown

There's a couple across my street who make love in their living room. I hear them in the evening when I walk after dinner. From the sidewalk, I can see cream walls, a mantel draped in animal hides, African carvings. The woman makes most of the noise, mid-range "ohs" a second apart, dropping like small, crystal cups out of the open French windows of their flat. Passion and disregard for the neighbors, a tremendous combination. The air stops moving around me.

Is their sex better than my own? I wonder what she looks like when she's moaning. Does she love him? Presuming it's a him, which I always do. Or is she there just for the sex? I can never decide which would be more exciting. I imagine she's in her 30s and that she has dark hair, an ordinary woman with ordinary chores, whose passion is nonetheless excitingly unsuppressable in the evening. But which woman is it? Is the moaner the doctor who just had a baby, only now returning to sex? The Mexican girl who works out all the time at the gym? Or the Chinese caterer, the woman who drives the Volvo with Ohio license plates?

Her cries never last more than half a block. Walking back to my house, I usually have a few bent, embarrassed thoughts. I think, you're a 39-year-old married man who stands in front of his house, listening to an unseen couple make love. You're sick. But I keep stepping out there, hoping to hear that little duet.

My wife wants to have a baby. And it's not just talk or a plan she inherited at birth or the fantasizing she used to practice with her girlfriends-- "Well, I want to have four." No, this is different, more insistent.

"When would you like to start?" she said again this morning, third time in a week, as we read the newspaper over breakfast. The sun was already bearing down furiously at half past 8:00 in the goddamn morning. I could hear the buzz of a weed whacker next door. "Anytime you like," I said, not taking my eyes off the paper. I didn't want to encourage her because the truth is this. Some days, I'm for it. But when I'm not for it, I'm really not for it.

My wife's body has changed. Her body, overtaken by hormonal committee, is telling her to get on with its grandest physical purpose. I can see it in the slight post-marital widening of her hips, no less sexy than the originals, but still, wider, when she lilts away from the bed at night to perform her ablutions. I can see it in her taste in clothes. She doesn't go anymore for the sprayed-on Lycra skirts I used to buy her. Even in her sexual habits-- she has less interest in sex than she used to. She wants to make love now, for keeps. Pause here for sadness.

Last week, as if by magic, two baby books appeared in the pile on the floor on her side of the bed-- at the bottom of the pile, but there they were. I walked into the bedroom, saw them like a promise I made long ago, and had to leave the house. I went to a matinee.

When did all that happen? I can't remember anything. The dates of our courtship, the countless touching things she claims I said, they're at best a blur to me, a fog of declarations. One day, I was living my comfortable life. And the next, she was living with me. On a bad day, it makes me nervous to remember all this. On a bad day, when I think about the slow gelling of our togetherness, its gathering weight and formality, the muscle around my heart closes in and my breath come short and I start to panic. One day, she and I were dating. And then we were living together. And then we bought a house. And then we'd married. And then she wanted to have a baby. An escalator of commitments onto which I had apparently stepped.

My friends were astonished. They said I wasn't the type to marry. A few of them had made bets against it. I told them I wanted "to find out what lay on the other side of boredom." I stole that line from an old girlfriend. I thought I was an adventurer. And yet, here I stand, in a well-trimmed front yard, surrounded by neighbors and swing sets and sport utility vehicles, the movable monuments of domesticity, listening to a couple copulate. And across the yards, I see another man looking warily back at me, doing exactly the same thing.

Just because I'm married now and practicing what's known as monogamy doesn't mean I don't think about other women, because I do. I still conjure up women from my past. And I still ask myself the question. You know the question. Every man does. Women have their own version of it. The question is the question you ask yourself every time you see a woman on the street, every single time, no matter who she is, how old she is, no matter how attractive she is or isn't. And the question is, "Would I sleep with her, or her, or how about her?" Not "Will I sleep with her?" or "How can I sleep with her?" or even "Could I sleep with her?" The question is, "Would I?" But even though I always ask the question, I don't act on it, because I'm trying to be monogamous.

That's why monogamy has such a bad reputation. It's boring. Monogamy is the habit of not acting on what you want. I even hate the word itself. It sound so staid, so bourgeois. Monogamy, like a board game, the approximation of excitement.

Sometimes, of course, I hear about open marriages. Jung had one, Sartre had one, Henry Miller, Dickens, Freud. I hear about open marriages, and they seem like some fabulous, exotic city that I've always wanted to visit but never seem to get to. Istanbul. Open marriages are like Istanbul, some ancient, mysterious place where there are minarets and strange music, where one entire civilization suddenly ends and a whole new, stranger one begins. A whole new religion, even, the mysterious East. I've always wanted to go to Istanbul.

Like most couples, my wife and I sometimes talk about open marriage. Well, I say we talk about it. It'd be more accurate to say that the subject comes up and immediately lies down again. We'll be lying in bed in the dark and talking about our lives, about what we like and what we miss, in that quiet, pleasant way you do when you're trying to be monogamous. Then my wife will say in the dark, "You know, if you ever have sex with someone else, some passing fling, I don't want you to tell me about it." And I say, "Really?"

I say, "Really?" because I don't know what else to say. If I say, "OK, Honey, that's fine with me," she'll say, "What, are you thinking about it?" And then I'll have to say, "Of course not," even if I am. So I say, "Really?" Or I'll say something noncommittal, like, "Don't worry." Whatever I say, a few minutes go by. And then she always says, still in the dark, "But I don't want you to sleep with someone else, anyway. OK?" And I say, "OK." That's the kind of conversation you have when you agree to be monogamous.

I don't want to sleep with anyone else. Or to be more exact, I'd like to, but I really don't have the constitution for infidelity or for an open marriage or for the guilt. Monogamy may be boring, but the alternatives take up a lot more time and energy. When I hear stories about the president and I think, he must have an arrangement with Hillary, I think, gee, that must be great.

But some part of me also feels-- not disappointed, not morally outraged, nothing that loud and sharp and pompous, but-- sad. That's the word-- sad. And I'm not sure I know why. I'm not even sure I know why I'm trying to stay monogamous. Why have I chosen this route over the other? I don't pretend it has anything to do with moral standards. In fact, I suspect it comes down to something my wife once said to me.

We were having one of our conversational minuets in the dark, one of our gentle but ever so delicate chats about faithfulness, when my wife said that the only thing she missed as a monogamous woman-- at least I assume she was speaking as a monogamous woman-- was newness, new bodies, new hands, new sex. I said I knew what she meant. And I said, "But isn't that kind of sad? I mean, if you go through your whole life, 20, 30, 40, 60 years of marriage without ever straying, you do that, you never get to know what it's like to be unfaithful. You never get to know what it feels like to be emotionally illegal. And that's an important feeling, one of the great human themes, after all, a whole constellation of humanity you'll never know."

My wife was quiet for a long time. And I could hear the fridge downstairs. And in the street light coming through the curtains, I could just see her outline. And I thought to myself, I've spent a long time in this bed. "Yes," my wife said then, "That's true. But if you do sleep around, you'll never know what it's like to be faithful to one person your whole life, which might also be an 'important constellation of humanity.'" There was just a touch of sarcasm in her voice.

And then it was my turn to lie in the dark for a long time. I'd never considered monogamy as an adventure. I thought it was, well, domestic travel, where no international borders are crossed. But monogamy is an adventure, and in some ways, a more mysterious one than open marriage. Because trying to be faithful to one person is a trip that takes time. And you never really know if you're getting close or if you've reached the destination. You never really know when you've arrived.

For my generation-- the first one that assumed free love for both sexes was a birthright-- for us, monogamy is the last sexual mystery on Earth, the great unknown. We've tried everything else. It's certainly a different kind of trip than open marriage, which has lots of stops along the way. But most of them are the same. Maybe that's the problem with open marriage-- not many surprises. It's titillating, but not very mysterious. Maybe that's why hearing about open marriages always makes me a little sad, why there's always a whiff of defeat about them.

I lay there in the dark beside my wife, thinking about all this, as I say, for a long time. I thought about that dream of hers, to be faithful her whole life. I thought, it's a sweet dream, almost like an ideal. And I knew I didn't want to be the one to prove to her that it couldn't come true. It scared me, too, all that responsibility, because it's not such a wise thing to promise.

Anyway, I'm trying to be monogamous, maybe not even for myself. Maybe I'm just doing it for her. Is that so unusual? Maybe if I do it for her long enough, I'll start to do it for me, as well. It's not that I don't want to go to Istanbul anymore. I really want to. In fact, I think about Istanbul all the time, if only to remind myself that it's still there. It's just that there's this other place I want to get to first, a little town that, for the longest time, I never even knew was there.

Ira Glass

Ian Brown is the host of Talking Books on the Sunday edition of CBC's This Morning. Part of his comments are from his book Man Medium Rare.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself with Nancy Updike and Julie Snyder. Senior editor Paul Tough, contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Rachel Day, Jorge Just, Todd Bachmann, and Sylvia Lemus.

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Dan Savage

It isn't an experiment or a phase. It's a choice.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life.

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