EXPERTS IN PHILLY DESCRIBE MYSTERIES OF POLYAMORY: The Philadelphia Inquirer

reports:

You think a romantic relationship between two people is hard? Try polyamory.

A panel of experts at the American Psychiatric Association meeting in Philadelphia last week said that open relationships between more than two people can work, but it requires a lot of talk about rules, boundaries, and time spent with various lovers.

William Slaughter, a psychiatrist in Cambridge, Mass., who has been treating polyamorous patients for about five years, said they need to have very good communication skills and be especially good at “mentalizing” or understanding others’ emotional reactions. He and Richard Sprott, a psychologist at California State University East Bay, and Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist who recently left Georgia State University, talked about what to expect from polyamorous patients. Such patients often complain that they have to spend too much time educating their therapists, Slaughter said. ...

Sheff and Sprott believe polyamory is increasing. Sprott said younger generations are less insistent on monogamy than their parents. He cited research that found that 29 percent of lesbian couples, 29 percent of cohabiting straight couples, and 47 percent of gay couples are not monogamous. Among married couples, 23 percent of men and 19 percent of women cheat at some point in the marriage. He said there is no way to know how common polyamory is. ...

Sheff has studied children in polyamorous families. In her small sample, the “kids tend to be in great shape.” These families often aren’t obvious to the mono world. They look like a couple whose good friends come over a lot or people who are good friends with their exes. Most are discreet about sex, so the kids aren’t confronted by it and neither are their friends.

Sheff said the children say they like having extra adults in their lives. There’s always someone to drive them somewhere or help with homework. “A number of them expressed pity for children who only have two parents,” she said.

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Labels: adultery, children, cohabitation, gay/straight differences, lesbians, mental health, monogamy, more than two parents, parenting, polyamory, professional associations

posted by Eve at 10:37 AM VOTE

15 WAYS TO STAY MARRIED FOR 15 YEARS: Lydia Netzer

at Huffington Post:

...1. Go to bed mad.

The old maxim that you shouldn't go to bed mad is stupid. Sometimes you need to just go to freakin' bed. "Let not the sun go down upon your wrath" is prefaced in the Bible by the phrase "Be angry and sin not." So, who's to say it doesn't mean "Stay angry, bitches. Don't let the sun go down on that awesome fierce wrath of yours." Seriously. Whoever interpreted this to mean that you should stay up after midnight, tear-stained and petulant, trying to iron out some kind of overtired and breathy accord -- was stupid. Shut up, go to bed, let your husband get some sleep. In the morning, eat some pancakes. Everything will seem better, I swear. ...

7. Have kids.

Kids stop you from being as crazy as you want to be. Because when you have kids, you can't be that crazy. ...

10. Stop thinking temporarily.

Marriage is not conditional. It is permanent. Your husband will be with you until you die. That is a given. It sounds obvious, but really making it a given is hard. You tend to think in "ifs" and "thens" even when you've publicly committed to forever. If he does this, I won't tolerate it. If I do this, he'll leave me. If I get fat. If I change jobs. If he says mean things. If he doesn't pay more attention. It's natural, especially in the beginning of your marriage, to keep those doubts in your head. But the sooner you can let go of the idea that marriage is temporary -- and will end if certain awful conditions are met -- the sooner you will let go of all kinds of conflict and stress. Yes, you may find yourself in a horrible situation where it's absolutely necessary to get a divorce. But going into it with divorce in the back of your mind, even in the way way way back of your mind, is going to cause a lot of unnecessary angst. Accept that you're going to stay with him. He's going to stay with you. Inhabit that and figure out how to make THAT work, instead of living with the "what if"s and "in case of's."

11. Do not put yourself in trouble's way.



Leave your ex-boyfriends and girlfriends alone. I'm sure you're very trustworthy. Aren't we all? The thing is, there's absolutely no reason to test it. Your husband and your marriage are more valuable than any friendship. Any friendship that troubles the marriage should be over immediately. Protect it with knives and teeth, not because it's fragile but because it's precious. Don't ass around with a "hall pass" or a "harmless flirtation." Adultery isn't an event, it's a process with an event at the end. Don't put your feet on a path that could lead someplace bad.

more [I don't believe in advice, as a rule, but there is some good stuff here --E]

Labels: adultery, children, culture, Marriage, parenting, sex

posted by Eve at 10:34 AM VOTE

HOW COUPLES RECOVER FROM AN EXTRAMARITAL AFFAIR: Wall Street Journal

feature:

It was just before midnight one night in October when Hillary Rothrock, a 30-year-old stay-at-home mom, discovered a side of her husband she'd never known existed.

The Lancaster, Pa., couple had been to an exercise class at the YMCA, then took their two small daughters for ice cream. When they got home, Ms. Rothrock put the girls to bed, took a shower and decided to check Facebook.

"Hey, can I look at your computer for a sec?" she asked her husband, Paul Rothrock, a 30-year-old product-support representative for a social-media ad company. He was in the living room, on his laptop, and his reaction stunned her. "No!" he hissed, pulling the computer to his chest.

Confused, she asked him again, and he became even more agitated. "You are not looking at this!" he insisted, gripping the computer tightly.

That was when Ms. Rothrock realized what was wrong. ...

Some 20% of men and 14% of women who have ever been married have had extramarital sex, according to federally sponsored research conducted since 1972 by the social-science research organization NORC at the University of Chicago. (Reliable statistics about infidelity are scarce, largely because many people won't own up to an affair.) Mr. Rothrock's affair took place by video chat and other electronic means, but it was no less sexual or emotional, he says.

How many marriages survive infidelity? Peggy Vaughan, a San Diego researcher who runs the website Dearpeggy.com, surveyed 1,083 people and found 76% of those whose spouses had affairs were still married and living with the spouse. That figure may skew high, though: Respondents were self-selecting visitors to Ms. Vaughan's website, an "extramarital affairs resource center." Estimates from a sampling of marriage therapists range from 30% to 80%.

Several studies indicate couples in marital therapy dealing with infidelity were just as successful as couples for whom no cheating was involved, says Jay Lebow, psychologist and clinical professor at the Family Institute at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who published a review of couples-therapy research in the January 2012 issue of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy.

Whether a marriage survives an affair depends on how healthy the marriage was to begin with, how long the affair lasted and the manner in which it was discovered.

more

Labels: adultery, culture, divorce, Marriage

posted by Eve at 12:19 AM VOTE

THE FIRST SEXUAL REVOLUTION: LUST AND LIBERTY IN THE 18TH CENTURY: Faramerz Dabholwala

in the Guardian:

We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk about it; we devour news about celebrities' affairs; we produce and consume pornography on an unprecedented scale. We think it wrong that in other cultures its discussion is censured, people suffer for their sexual orientation, women are treated as second-class citizens, or adulterers are put to death.

Yet a few centuries ago, our own society was like this too. In the 1600s people were still being executed for adultery in England, Scotland and north America, and across Europe. Everywhere in the west, sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to hunting it down and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian society, one that had grown steadily in importance since late antiquity. So how and when did our culture change so strikingly? Where does our current outlook come from? The answers lie in one of the great untold stories about the creation of our modern condition. ...

Indeed, the first sexual revolution was characterised by an extraordinary reversal in assumptions about female sexuality. Ever since the dawn of western civilisation it had been presumed that women were the more lustful sex. As they were mentally, morally and physically weaker than males, it followed that they were less able to control their passions and thus (like Eve) more likely to tempt others into sin. Yet, by 1800, exactly the opposite idea had become entrenched. Now it was believed that men were much more naturally libidinous and liable to seduce women. Women had come to be seen as comparatively delicate and sexually defensive, needing to be constantly on their guard against male rapacity. The notion of women's relative sexual passivity became fundamental to sexual dynamics across the western world. Its effects were ubiquitous – they still are.

A crucial reason was the rise of women as public writers, which introduced into the cultural mainstream powerful new female perspectives on courtship and lust.

more

Labels: adultery, class, culture, Europe, gender, homosexuality, men, premarital sex, race, religion, sex, women

posted by Eve at 12:20 AM VOTE

CHEATING ON YOUR SPOUSE IS STILL A MISDEMEANOR IN ARIZONA: Phoenix New Times

blogs:

​If your marriage includes some (ahem) extracurricular activities with someone who isn't your spouse, you're not just a cheater -- according to Arizona law -- you're also a criminal.

That's right, cheating on your spouse is a misdemeanor in Arizona -- and a Glendale man actually used the statute as grounds to call the cops on his straying wife.

Turns out, even if you're single you can be prosecuted under Arizona law. ...

The officer who finally took Banks' police report told him it was unlikely the Maricopa County Attorney's Office would prosecute the case. He also told Banks "It's about time she got on with her life and you get on with yours."

more

Labels: adultery, Arizona, culture, law, Marriage

posted by Eve at 10:28 PM VOTE

WIFE'S LOVER RUINED MARRIAGE, SAYS HUSBAND WHO SUES FOR $1.5 MILLION: Salt Lake Tribune

reports:

One man has sued his wife’s lover for $1.5 million in damages, claiming the extramarital affair ruined his life and caused his wife to run off with her lover to Idaho.

The plaintiff, who lives in Salt Lake County, married his wife in 1995, and they have two teenage children together, according to a civil lawsuit filed Thursday in 3rd District Court.

The lawsuit alleges the wife started an affair in 2010, culminating with her decision in September 2011 to move to Burley, Idaho, so she could live with her lover. The lawsuit claims the woman left her children behind as well.

The husband alleged the lover knew all along that he was having an affair with a married woman who had two children, but continued the affair anyway. ...

Similar lawsuits have been filed in Utah. In 2000, a Salt Lake County jury ordered a woman to pay $500,000 after it found she stole another woman’s husband. In 1999, a woman sued the state and a female wildlife officer after the officer and the plaintiff’s husband fell in love during a poaching sting, causing the breakup of a 23-year marriage. The case against the state was later dismissed. The last news reports on the matter indicated the wife and the lover were settling out of court. In 2000, a wife sued after she alleged her husband ran off and later married their therapist. That case was dismissed in 2005, court records show.

more

Labels: adultery, alienation of affection, Marriage, Utah

posted by Eve at 11:22 PM VOTE

DIVORCE RESEARCH 2011

a slideshow from the Huffington Post.

Labels: adultery, childhood, children, culture, custody, divorce, economics, Marriage, men, poverty, women

posted by Eve at 11:47 PM VOTE

HOW TO STAY MARRIED: Anne Kingston

in Macleans:

Cynthia is a 68-year-old woman in a 45-year “committed marriage” who has figured out how to keep it that way. Every other month or so she goes out to lunch with her college boyfriend Thomas, who is also married and has no intention of leaving his wife. Usually their outings end in a hot and heavy “petting session” in his Mercedes. Sometimes, he rubs Jean Naté lotion, the scent Cynthia wore in college, onto her legs and compliments her beautiful feet. They’ve never consummated their relationship, nor do they intend to. Being with Thomas is “like a balloon liftoff,” Cynthia reports, one that eases some of the tensions between her and her 74-year-old physics professor husband. “I’m a nicer, more tolerant person because of this affair,” she says.

Cynthia’s story is one of more than 60 confessionals from long-time wives that punctuate Iris Krasnow’s new book The Secret Lives of Wives: Women Share What It Really Takes to Stay Married. And what their stories reveal is that marital longevity requires wives to establish strong, separate identities from their husbands through creative coping mechanisms, some of them covert. Krasnow spoke with more than 200 women, married between 15 and 70 years, who report taking separate holidays, embarking on new careers, establishing a tight circle of female friends, dabbling in Same Time, Next Year-style liaisons and adulterous affairs, and having “boyfriends with boundaries.” Yoga and white wine also feature predominately.

The 58-year-old Krasnow, an author and journalism professor at American University, writes she was “stunned by the secrets and shenanigans” in her journalistic journey through American marriages. She comes to the subject from the vantage point of her own 23-year marriage to an architect she loves but admits to “loathing” occasionally. She credits summers spent apart, separate hobbies and her close relationships with male buddies for some of their marital stability.

It’s a theory that builds on her previous books, Surrendering to Motherhood and Surrendering to Marriage, which extol the virtues of sublimating the self to a higher ideal.

more

Labels: adultery, culture, divorce, Marriage, open relationships, women

posted by Eve at 10:11 PM VOTE

THE RISE OF THE MARRIAGE CRISIS MOVIE: Benjamin Dueholm

at The Atlantic:

...This attitude toward adultery departs from the classics of the genre. The Grass is Greener found an American millionaire (Robert Mitchum) trespassing on the property and affections of a lady of Britain's lower aristocracy (Deborah Kerr). Soon she joins him in London on a transparent pretext, without any objection from her knowing husband (Cary Grant). Asked why he didn't stop her from seeing him again, Grant's Lord Rhyall explains, "If she hadn't, I'd have been the obstacle preventing her from seeing him again, and that would have damaged our relationship, even at the cost of encouraging theirs." It's the Hall Pass scenario, but with silent toleration rather than explicit permission as the hinge on which the action swings. "A spoken word, like a lost opportunity, does not come back," Rhyall's friend advises. It's advice that might have been profitably heeded by the characters in the more recent films.

When Grant's scheme to win his own wife back becomes revealed, they sit down for one of the great marriage-saving scenes in film. "If your mistress is unfaithful, she should be discarded," Grant pronounces. "If your wife is unfaithful, she should be befriended." "Meaning helped and patronized?" Kerr rebuffs. "Loved and cherished," Grant explains.

Likewise, when Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney cheat on each other in Two for the Road (1967), it's a painful but not shocking development. Both films take the somewhat old-fashioned view that adultery is a part of marriage rather than an interruption of it. Their characters meet it with more patience and dignity than any of the grieved spouses in the recent films. Divorce is an option in the older films, but a grim and even tragic one. In Crazy, on the other hand, Cal's co-worker roars with relief when he hears that Cal is only going through a divorce and not cancer. In the old movies, characters needed forgiveness, or at least indulgence for their wanderings. In the new movies, they need permission. And in the older movies, forgiveness was enough for a fresh start. In the new films, someone has to be punished. Cal's moment of glory, and the audience's chance to eat and have its cake, fades as he suffers a public humiliation. The characters in Hall Pass and The Kids Are All Right who act on their entirely plausible desires, have to pay for it somehow before their second chances. These films are telling us that marriage has become more, rather than less, rigid, both emotionally and sexually.

more

Labels: adultery, culture, divorce, Marriage

posted by Eve at 11:29 PM VOTE

SCOURING THE GLOBE FOR SEX ADVICE: Salon

interviews Judith Stacey:

This is part of an ongoing Salon series of conversations about monogamy.

Whether in need of examples to bolster the fight for same-sex marriage or boost one's spirits in the face of disillusioning high-profile failures of monogamous marriage, one need only look to Judith Stacey.

The sociology professor at New York University is something of an expert on alternatives, having spent more than a decade studying everything from "monogamish" arrangements among gay men in California to polygamy in South Africa to nonmonogamous, matriarchal households in southwest China. The result is her fascinating book, "Unhitched." It doesn't simply offer a mind-bending cross-cultural perspective -- you can find that in any Anthropology 101 textbook. Instead, Stacey uses her observations to underscore just out how stifling and unstable the Western romantic ideal of marital monogamy can be for some people, as well as the vast array of romantic arrangements that are already out there in the world. ...

I'll tell you about a very different society that I write about in my book, and that's the Mosuo people of southwestern China, an ethnic minority culture that does not insist on or value monogamy, nor does it care about biological paternity. It's a maternal extended family system in which adult children stay in the mother's extended family compound. They have "night visiting," there's no double standard of sexuality, men and women are each free to have as many or as few lovers as they wish. They can have exclusive long-term lovers, they can have multiple partners, they can be chaste, whatever. And all of the children that are born to the women belong to that family's household; the biological mothers and fathers don't live together. They don't have marriage, and the children are brought up by basically aunts, uncles and grandmothers. ...

I do think we can learn a lot from that culture. One of the things that's interesting is that because you don't have marriage, you don't have divorce or singlehood or widowhood or orphans. Everyone has a family and family security. In a culture that is so divorce-prone, I think there is a lot to learn from being able to imagine different ways of providing childcare and stability.

It seems harder to challenge our notion of romantic love than monogamy.

Absolutely. As I've written in the book, it's curious that the notion of fidelity should come to mean sexual exclusivity when it's really about faithfulness. I think it should mean integrity. For many, many people, including many of the gay men I studied, monogamy is absolutely essential and they wouldn't have it any other way. But plenty of others, including my gay male friends who have had 30-year, 40-year relationships, feel that sex can involve very little emotion and that it's OK to have a few escapades on the side without threatening their relationships. That idea is threatening to a lot of people. I've had some disagreements with a number of feminists who are afraid I'm giving men permission ...

more

Labels: adultery, beyond marriage, culture, gender differences, Judith Stacey, Marriage, monogamy, open relationships, polyamory

posted by Eve at 8:00 PM VOTE

THE DIVORCE GENERATION: Susan Gregory Thomas

in the WSJ:

For much of my generation—Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980—there is only one question: "When did your parents get divorced?" Our lives have been framed by the answer. Ask us. We remember everything.

When my dad left in the spring of 1981 and moved five states away with his executive assistant and her four kids, the world as I had known it came to an end. In my 12-year-old eyes, my mother, formerly a regal, erudite figure, was transformed into a phantom in a sweaty nightgown and matted hair, howling on the floor of our gray-carpeted playroom. My brother, a sweet, goofy boy, grew into a sad, glowering giant, barricaded in his room with dark graphic novels and computer games.

I spent the rest of middle and high school getting into trouble in suburban Philadelphia: chain-smoking, doing drugs, getting kicked out of schools, spending a good part of my senior year in a psychiatric ward. Whenever I saw my father, which was rarely, he grew more and more to embody Darth Vader: a brutal machine encasing raw human guts.

Growing up, my brother and I were often left to our own devices, members of the giant flock of migrant latchkey kids in the 1970s and '80s. Our suburb was littered with sad-eyed, bruised nomads, who wandered back and forth between used-record shops to the sheds behind the train station where they got high and then trudged off, back and forth from their mothers' houses during the week to their fathers' apartments every other weekend.

The divorced parents of a boy I knew in high school installed him in his own apartment because neither of them wanted him at home. Naturally, we all descended on his place after school—sometimes during school—to drink and do drugs. He was always wasted, no matter what time we arrived. A few years ago, a friend told me that she had learned that he had drunk himself to death by age 30.

"Whatever happens, we're never going to get divorced." Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born. Apparently, much of my generation feels at least roughly the same way: Divorce rates, which peaked around 1980, are now at their lowest level since 1970. In fact, the often-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce was true only in the 1970s—in other words, our parents' marriages.

Not ours. According to U.S. Census data released this May, 77% of couples who married since 1990 have reached their 10-year anniversaries. We're also marrying later in life, if at all. The average marrying age in 1950 was 23 for men and 20 for women; in 2009, it was 28 for men and 26 for women.

Before we get married, we like to know what our daily relationship with a partner will be like. Are we good roommates? A 2007 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that, among those entering first marriages in the early 2000s, nearly 60% had previously cohabited with their future spouses. According to the U.S. government's 2002 National Survey of Fertility Growth, 34% of couples who move in together have announced publicly that marriage is in the future; 36% felt "almost certain" that they'd get hitched, while 46% said there was "a pretty good chance" or "a 50-50 chance."

I believed that I had married my best friend as fervently as I believed that I'd never get divorced. No marital scenario, I told myself, could become so bleak or hopeless as to compel me to embed my children in the torture of a split family. And I wasn't the only one with strong personal reasons to make this commitment. According to a 2004 marketing study about generational differences, my age cohort "went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history." Census data show that almost half of us come from split families; 40% were latch-key kids.

more

Labels: adultery, children, cohabitation, culture, divorce, Marriage, parenting

posted by Eve at 4:16 PM VOTE

THE FUTURE OF GAY MARRIAGE: Ross Douthat

in the NYTimes:

In 44 states, the future of gay marriage still depends on legislatures, governors and voters — and eventually, perhaps, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. But in New York, as in five states before it, gay marriage’s future is in the hands of gay couples themselves.

Over the decades ahead, their choices will gradually transform gay marriage from an idea into a culture: they’ll determine the social expectations associated with gay wedlock, the gay marriage and divorce rates, the differences and similarities between gay and lesbian unions, the way marriage interacts with gay parenting, and much more besides.

They’ll also help determine gay marriage’s impact on the broader culture of matrimony in America. ...

Still, there’s a third vision that’s worth pondering — neither conservative nor liberationist, but a little bit of both. This vision embraces the institution of marriage, rather than seeking to overthrow it. But it also hints that the example of same-sex unions might partially transform marriage from within, creating greater institutional flexibility — particularly sexual flexibility — for straight and gay spouses alike.

more (and more here; Mark Oppenheimer replies here)

Labels: adultery, culture, Dan Savage, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, Marriage, open relationships, Ross Douthat

posted by Eve at 1:22 AM VOTE

A FEW COMMENTS ON THAT NYT MAGAZINE COVER STORY: Eve

These are criticisms, not because I think everything in the piece was wrong but just because these are the only things I think I have to contribute to the discussion of Mark Oppenheimer's cover story.

1. There's gonna be a few things--maybe several things--you're gonna find really difficult to forgive. I was struck by the conflation of forgiving adultery and understanding nonmonogamy such that there is nothing to forgive in the first place. These actually seem to me like opposite moral positions, but both Savage and Oppenheimer (in his role as sympathetic conveyer of someone else's position) consistently conflate them.

2. Stay Together for Which Kids? On a related note, I'm struck by how the only players in this story are a) the adults (in the magazine story as printed it's really only the adults in the marriage, but even in Oppenheimer's comments here he only looks at e.g. the mistress, her boyfriend, or other adult parties who might be affected emotionally) and b) the children within the marriage. Have we really forgotten that sex still makes babies? There will be children of affairs, too, and so framing (heterosexual) adultery as a stay-together-for-the-kids plan strikes me as a great way to enhance the inherent inequality between children of the marriage and those outside it. Out-of-wedlock children, in this worldview, become unfortunate side effects of the sexual license designed to protect the marital children.

3. O reason not the need! But couldn't we all just be rational actors, contracepting demi-perfectly and backing it up with abortion? Then no worries!

But of course the whole weird premise of Savage's claim is that eros is so powerful and irrational, sexual fulfillment such an obvious non-negotiable, that... we should talk things out like rational adults before we get married and then stick to our rational rules and goals. Eros is simultaneously overwhelming--breaking down the strong norm of marital fidelity--and easily-tamed, contained within little well-contracepted well-communicated honest and generous mini-affairs.

Ultimately I think this piece, although it takes a really long time to hit its stride, offers a deeper analysis of Savage's ethic--both the good points and the bad.

Labels: adultery, children, culture, Dan Savage, divorce, gay/straight differences, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, monogamy, open relationships, sex, women

posted by Eve at 12:20 AM VOTE

DAN SAVAGE ON THE VIRTUES OF INFIDELITY: Mark Oppenheimer

in the NYTMagazine:

...Although best known for his It Gets Better project, an archive of hopeful videos aimed at troubled gay youth, Savage has for 20 years been saying monogamy is harder than we admit and articulating a sexual ethic that he thinks honors the reality, rather than the romantic ideal, of marriage. In Savage Love, his weekly column, he inveighs against the American obsession with strict fidelity. In its place he proposes a sensibility that we might call American Gay Male, after that community’s tolerance for pornography, fetishes and a variety of partnered arrangements, from strict monogamy to wide openness.

Savage believes monogamy is right for many couples. But he believes that our discourse about it, and about sexuality more generally, is dishonest. Some people need more than one partner, he writes, just as some people need flirting, others need to be whipped, others need lovers of both sexes. We can’t help our urges, and we should not lie to our partners about them. In some marriages, talking honestly about our needs will forestall or obviate affairs; in other marriages, the conversation may lead to an affair, but with permission. In both cases, honesty is the best policy.

“I acknowledge the advantages of monogamy,” Savage told me, “when it comes to sexual safety, infections, emotional safety, paternity assurances. But 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.”

The view that we need a little less fidelity in marriages is dangerous for a gay-marriage advocate to hold. It feeds into the stereotype of gay men as compulsively promiscuous, and it gives ammunition to all the forces, religious and otherwise, who say that gay families will never be real families and that we had better stop them before they ruin what is left of marriage. But Savage says a more flexible attitude within marriage may be just what the straight community needs. Treating monogamy, rather than honesty or joy or humor, as the main indicator of a successful marriage gives people unrealistic expectations of themselves and their partners. And that, Savage says, destroys more families than it saves. ...

“The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told me, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitar­ian and fairsey.” In the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women “the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we extended to men the confines women had always endured. “And it’s been a disaster for marriage.”

In their own marriage, Savage and Miller practice being what he calls “monogamish,” allowing occasional infidelities, which they are honest about. Miller was initially opposed to the idea. “You assume as a younger person that all relationships are monogamous and between two people, that love means nothing can come between you,” said Miller, who met Savage at a club in 1995, when he was 23 and Savage was 30. “Dan has taught me to be more realistic about that kind of stuff.

“It was four or five years before it came up,” Miller said. “It’s not about having three-ways with somebody or having an open relationship. It is just sort of like, Dan has always said if you have different tastes, you have to be good, giving and game, and if you are not G.G.G. for those tastes, then you have to give your partner the out. It took me a while to get down with that.” When I asked Savage how many extramarital encounters there have been, he laughed shyly. “Double digits?” I asked. He said he wasn’t sure; later he and Miller counted, and he reported back that the number was nine. “And far from it being a destabilizing force in our relationship, it’s been a stabilizing force. It may be why we’re still together.”

While his marriage opened up gradually, Savage says that “there’s not a one-size-fits-all way” to approach nonmonogamy, especially if both partners committed to monogamy at the start. “Folks on the verge of making those monogamous commitments,” Savage told me in one of our many e-mail exchanges, “need to look at the wreckage around them — all those failed monogamous relationships out there (Schwarzenegger, Clinton, Vitter, whoever’s on the cover of US magazine this week) — and have a conversation about what it’ll mean if one or the other partner should cheat. And agree, at the very least, to getting through it, to place a higher value on the relationship itself than on one component of it, sexual exclusivity.”

Not that heeding our desires always simplifies matters. One recent writer to Savage Love thought he would enjoy seeing his wife fool around with another man, and initially did: “Almost every kinky kind was being had and enjoyed.” But when his wife had vaginal intercourse with the other man, something happened. “It was as if all the air in the room was sucked out through my soul,” he writes. Savage’s reply is pragmatic: “If there’s a sex act — say, vaginal intercourse — that holds huge symbolic importance for you or your partner, it might be best to take that act off the menu.” The answer, to Savage’s way of thinking, is smarter boundaries, not hard-line rules about monogamy.

For most people, sex cannot be so transactional; it is bound up with emotional need — to feel we excite our partner above all others, to believe that we have primacy in their lives. The question is whether it’s possible to act on our desires sensibly, as Savage would have it, while maintaining the special equilibrium we trust our marriages, or long-term partnerships, to preserve. Do we know our relationships well enough to go outside them?

more

Labels: adultery, children, culture, Dan Savage, divorce, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, gender, gender differences, Judith Stacey, Marriage, men, monogamy, open relationships, parenting, women

posted by Eve at 7:46 PM VOTE

A PROVOCATIVE NEW BOOK ON THE EVOLVING INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE: Ruth Franklin

in the New Republic:

There was something hollow about the hubbub last month over the revelation of Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s split. As one of the weirder new clichés lately to invade the language puts it, we were shocked but not surprised. Nothing is less earthshaking these days than infidelity: According to current statistics, up to 50 percent of men and 40 percent to 45 percent of women cheat. No, the real scandal was not that Schwarzenegger had been unfaithful; his misbehavior had long been public knowledge. It was that, in fathering a child with his mistress, he had been spectacularly, stupidly unfaithful in a way that even a wife apparently accustomed to overlooking infidelity—a wife who had perhaps decided that a 25-year marriage, with four children, could withstand a few dalliances—could not ignore.

With infidelity now seeming less like a deadly plague and more like a relatively mild form of cancer—we all know someone who has suffered from it, even if we haven’t experienced it ourselves—does it still make sense for monogamy to constitute the basis for marriage? Or should couples figure out creative ways to expand the boundaries of their relationships, acknowledging that they might want to continue to be life partners even if one or both needs the occasional night off? This is the argument of Pamela Haag’s new book, Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses, and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules, in which “affair-tolerant” couples aren’t a regressive throwback—they’re the benchmark of a new kind of modernity. Its abundance of gimmicky catchphrases aside, this book asks serious questions about whether we have come to expect too much from contemporary marriage: a partner who is simultaneously an emotional and intellectual “soul mate,” a monogamous provider of sexual thrills, and a best friend to see us through our creaky final decades. If marriage has a hard time living up to these burdens—and a divorce rate holding steady at 50 percent suggests just how hard it is—maybe we ought to be thinking about ways to transform it.

Following Stephanie Coontz, who covered much of this ground more soberly in her book Marriage: A History, Haag notes that marriage has undergone a dramatic transformation from the “traditional” partnerships of the nineteenth century, when marriage was “a social institution and an obligation,” to the “romantic” marriages of the twentieth century, when the practice of choosing a partner for reasons of love rather than practicality first became widespread. Now, she argues, we are moving into a “post-romantic age.” People have become far more likely to marry in mid-life, when they already have established careers and friendships; and they are having children much later than their counterparts did 50 years ago. But they continue to organize their marriages around the same assumptions—assumptions that, possibly, no longer work.

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Labels: adultery, culture, divorce, Marriage, monogamy, open relationships

posted by Eve at 12:51 PM VOTE

DOES OUR SOCIETY SUPPORT MARRIAGE?: Gina B.

at ChicagoNow:

...A relationship had just ended badly, and I decided to give myself a break from even talking to any new men. I didn't care if I missed out on great guys, and I didn't want to have a lot of extraneous conversation about my decision; I just wanted to be left alone.

I was doing some online shopping and stumbled across a site that specializes in knockoff jewelry, and there I saw it - just what I needed! The ring that I would want if I were to get married. For the low, low price of $30! I bought it with expedited delivery, and a few days later, The Decoy arrived - just as beautiful and convincing as it was on the website (as long as you didn't look too closely). ...


About 60% of the time, my plan worked. The man would back off and politely declare that my husband was very lucky. I saw it as a win-win. I didn't have to have further conversation, nor did I have to reject a man who didn't deserve it.

The remaining 40% of the time, my plan failed, and made for even more difficult conversation.

Persistent men would ignore The Decoy (and in some cases, were further intrigued), and ask slimy follow-up questions, like:

- "How married are you?"

- "Is your husband married too?"

- "Are you always married?"

- "Does that mean you can't have friends?"

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Labels: adultery, culture, Marriage

posted by Eve at 12:48 PM VOTE

DISSENT CLAIMS KY SUPREME COURT TOSSED MARRIAGE ON FUNERAL PYRE IN ADULTERY PATERNITY RULING: ABA News

reports:

The Kentucky Supreme Court has ruled that a man who had an affair with a married woman may assert a paternity claim to the child he conceived in the relationship.

The 4-3 ruling overturned centuries of common law and a 2008 Kentucky Supreme Court decision, the Louisville Courier-Journal reports. ...

A dissent by Justice Bill Cunningham spoke of the institution of marriage and the children nurtured within it. “Interlopers cannot use their own adulterous behavior as a license to invade and disrupt the matrimonial circle,” he wrote. He would not, he said, “stand quietly by as the legal institution of marriage is surrendered to the funeral pyre of modern convenience and unanchored values.”

According to the story, Kentucky is now one of 33 states that allow a man to challenge the presumption that a child born to a marriage is fathered by the husband.

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Labels: adultery, biological parenthood, Fathers, Kentucky, Marriage, parenting

posted by Eve at 4:14 PM VOTE

THE TRICKY CHEMISTRY OF ATTRACTION:Wall St Journal

reports:

Much of the attraction between the sexes is chemistry. New studies suggest that when women use hormonal contraceptives, such as birth-control pills, it disrupts some of these chemical signals, affecting their attractiveness to men and women's own preferences for romantic partners.

The type of man a woman is drawn to is known to change during her monthly cycle—when a woman is fertile, for instance, she might look for a man with more masculine features. Taking the pill or another type of hormonal contraceptive upends this natural dynamic, making less-masculine men seem more attractive, according to a small but growing body of evidence. The findings have led researchers to wonder about the implications for partner choice, relationship quality and even the health of the children produced by these partnerships.

Evolutionary psychologists and biologists have long been interested in factors that lead to people's choice of mates. One influential study in the 1990s, dubbed the T-shirt study, asked women about their attraction to members of the opposite sex by smelling the men's T-shirts. The findings showed that humans, like many other animals, transmit and recognize information pertinent to sexual attraction through chemical odors known as pheromones.

The study also showed that women seemed to prefer the scents of men whose immune systems were most different from the women's own immune-system genes known as MHC. The family of genes permit a person's body to recognize which bacteria are foreign invaders and to provide protection from those bugs. Evolutionarily, scientists believe, children should be healthier if their parents' MHC genes vary, because the offspring will be protected from more pathogens. ...

Both men's and women's preferences in mates shift when a woman is ovulating, the period when she is fertile, research has shown. Some studies have tracked women's responses to photos of different men, while other studies have interviewed women about their feelings for men over several weeks. Among the conclusions: When women are ovulating, they tend to be drawn to men with greater facial symmetry and more signals of masculinity, such as muscle tone, a more masculine voice and dominant behaviors. The women also seemed to be particularly attuned to MHC-gene diversity. From an evolutionary perspective, these signals are supposed to indicate that men are more fertile and have better genes to confer to offspring.

Women tend to exhibit subtle cues when they are ovulating, and men tend to find them more attractive at this time.

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Labels: adultery, animal research, children, contraception, gender, gender differences, men, sex, women

posted by Eve at 5:54 PM VOTE

GERMANS COOL TO MARRIAGE AND MONOGAMY: TheLocal.de

on a survey:

Germans have serious doubts about marriage, monogamy and life-long partnerships, according to a survey released on Thursday.

Some 53 percent believe most couples won’t stay faithful during their marriage or partnerships. And an overwhelming 80 percent think divorce is no big deal, according to GfK market research firm's survey of 2,028 men and women from throughout the country. ...

About a third of the roughly 375,000 German marriages that take place each year end in divorce, according to government statistics. But contrary to popular opinion, many of the failed marriages last quite a long time – on average they end after more 14 years.

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Labels: adultery, divorce, Europe, Germany, Marriage, women

posted by Eve at 10:44 PM VOTE

Does Adultery Matter When the Kids Are Grown?: Erica Manfred

at the Huffington Post:

A year ago, Cynthia Shackelford, a 62-year-old North Carolina wife won an "alienation of affection" case against her husband's mistress. The case is ironic on so many levels, it's hard to know where to start. The facts: Shackelford charged that the other woman, Anne Lundquist, 49, broke up her marriage of 33 years by setting out to deliberately seduce her husband in 2004. A jury awarded her $5 million in compensatory damages and $4 million in punitive damages to be paid by Lundquist. Lundquist has appealed. ...

Another irony is that Shackelford says she wants to make the point that infidelity can do real harm. Why is this ironic? Because we live in a society that treats infidelity as a juicy scandal without any lasting consequences. The real harm infidelity does is rarely acknowledged. ABC News reported Shackelford as claiming her distress over her husband's alleged affair caused her health problems, including severe weight loss. She worries about how her children, now 23 and 27, are coping with the mess. Despite the casual attitude of our society towards adultery, the consequences are real, and dire. Being dumped after 30 years of marriage can destroy both your health and sanity. Most people bounce back, some never do.

The suffering of grown children is ignored. Young adult children like Shackelford's may be traumatized to the extent of suffering severe depression, or being unable to form committed relationships of their own. At the least they lose one of their parents when they take sides.

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Labels: adultery, alienation of affection, children, culture, divorce, no-fault divorce

posted by Imapp Staff at 12:16 AM VOTE