LONG-TERM NON-MONOGAMOUS MALE COUPLES: Tom Moon

in the San Francisco Bay Times:

Blake Spears and Lanz Lowen have been together for over 34 years. They told me that they still have great sex, contradicting the common belief that sexual interest inevitably wanes in a long-term relationship. How do they do it? “One reason,” Lanz said, “is that we’ve been in an open relationship from the very beginning. If we hadn’t been open, we wouldn’t have been able to grow individually or as a couple.” But, they write, this was a journey they took “without a roadmap… Information about how couples navigate this terrain is surprisingly lacking. We were curious about the experience of others and assumed many long-term couples might offer valuable perspectives and hard-earned lessons.”

So, a few years back, they decided to use their combined training and experience in research and psychology to do an independent, in-depth study of other long-term open gay male relationships. ....

The study includes a summary of previous research on non-monogamy, in which the authors report that “Most research shows that approximately two-thirds of long-term male couples who have been together for five years or more are honestly non-monogamous,” and that “Multiple studies have found no differences in relationship quality or satisfaction between samples of sexually exclusive and non-exclusive male couples.”

Despite those findings, they had a hard time recruiting participants. They had no trouble finding non-monogamous couples, but relatively few who wanted to talk about it. One man who chose to participate said “Having an open relationship feels like a funny way of being in the closet again. Family and friends expect that we’re monogamous, and we don’t tell them we’re not. It’s like a secret….In our community and society, it feels like something huge isn’t being talked about or studied or understood.”

more (the study itself can be downloaded here as PDF)

Labels: culture, gay couples, men, open relationships

posted by Eve at 6:59 PM VOTE

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