CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Confronting the Sky Together
Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away …
—Louis de Bernières, Correlli’s Mandolin
There is a cost … for the society that insists on conformity to a particular range of heterosexual practices. We believe that cultures can be rationally designed. We can teach and reward and coerce. But in so doing we must also consider the price of each culture, measured in the time and energy required for training and enforcement and in the less tangible currency of human happiness that must be spent to circumvent our innate predispositions.
E. O. WILSON1
So now what? Having written this whole book about sex, we’d like to confusingly suggest that most of us take sex way too seriously: when it’s just sex, that’s all it is. In such cases, it’s not love. Or sin. Or pathology. Or a good reason to destroy an otherwise happy family.
Like the Victorians, most contemporary Western societies inflate the inherent value of sex by restricting supply (“Good girls don’t”) and inflating demand (Girls Gone Wild). This process leads to a distorted vision of just how important sex actually is. Yes, sex is essential, but it’s not something that must always be taken so seriously. Think of food, water, oxygen, shelter, and all the other elements of life crucial to survival and happiness but that don’t figure in our day-to-day thinking unless they become unavailable. A reasonable relaxation of moralistic social codes making sexual satisfaction more easily available would also make it less problematic.
This appears to be the overall trajectory of history. While many are perplexed and disturbed by the “hooking up” culture, the sexting of racy images back and forth, full recognition of all legal rights for gay male and lesbian couples, and so on, there’s not much they can do to stop any of it for long. In terms of sexuality, history appears to be flowing back toward a hunter-gatherer casualness. If so, future generations may suffer fewer pathological manifestations of sexual frustration and unnecessarily fractured families. Concerning the Siriono, with whom he lived, Holmberg writes, “The Siriono rarely, if ever, lack for sexual partners. Whenever the sex drive is up, there is almost always an available partner willing to reduce it…. Sex anxiety seems to be remarkably low in Siriono society. Such manifestations as excessive indulgence, continence, or sex dreams and fantasies are rarely encountered.”2
How would it feel to live in such a world? Well, we all know how it feels to live in this one. Apart from death itself, what causes as much human misery as the ongoing demise of marriage? In 2008, almost 40 percent of the mothers who gave birth in the United States were unmarried. This matters. As Caitlin Flanagan reported recently in Time, “On every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households. Longevity, drug abuse, school performance and dropout rates, teen pregnancy, criminal behavior and incarceration … in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others.”3
“Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing,” observed German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. “A confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.” Indeed. By insisting upon an ideal vision of marriage founded upon a lifetime of sexual fidelity to one person—a vision most of us eventually learn is highly unrealistic, we invite punishment upon ourselves, upon each other, and upon our children.
“The French are much more comfortable with the idea that their affair partner is just that—an affair partner,” writes Pamela Druckerman in her cross-cultural look at infidelity, Lust in Translation. Understanding that love and sex are different things, Druckerman says the French feel less need to “complain about their marriage to legitimize the affair in the first place.” But she found that Americans and British couples seemed to be reading from an entirely different script. “An affair, even a one-night stand, means a marriage is over,” Druckerman observed. “I spoke to women who, on discovering that their husbands had cheated, immediately packed a bag and left, because ‘that’s what you do.’ Not because that’s what they wanted to do—they just thought that was the rule. They didn’t even seem to realize there were other options…. I mean, really, like they’re reading from a script! “4
Psychologist Julian Jaynes described the commingling of terror and exhilaration one experiences upon realizing that things are not as they’d seemed: “There is an awkward moment at the top of a Ferris wheel when, having come up the inside curvature, where we are facing into a firm structure of confident girders, suddenly that structure disappears, and we are thrust out into the sky for the outward curve down.”5
This is the moment too many couples struggle in vain to avoid or ignore—even to the point of choosing bitter divorce and fractured family over the daunting task of confronting the sky together, with all the “confident girders” behind them in the past.
The false expectations we hold about ourselves, each other, and human sexuality do us serious, lasting harm. As author and sex advice columnist Dan Savage explains, “The expectation of lifelong monogamy places an incredible strain on a marriage. But our concept of love and marriage has as its foundation not only the expectation of monogamy but the idea that where there’s love, monogamy should be easy and joyful.”6
To be sure, toe-curlingly passionate sex can be an important part of marital intimacy, but it is a grave mistake to think it’s the essence of long-term intimacy. Like every other kind of hunger, sexual desire tends to be smothered by its satisfaction. Squire says that thinking of marriage as an enduring romance is unrealistic: “It’s not like you want to rip your clothes off with somebody that you’re sleeping with for the thousandth time. We should know going into it that the nature of love and sex changes from what it begins as, and that a great love affair doesn’t necessarily make a great marriage.”7 High-libido sex can just as easily be an expression of the utter absence of intimacy: consider the notorious one-night stand, the prostitute, basic physical release.
Couples might find that the only route to preserving or rediscovering intensity reminiscent of their early days and nights requires confronting the open, uncertain sky together. They may find themselves having their most meaningful, intimate conversations if they dare to talk about the true nature of their feelings. We don’t mean to suggest these will be easy conversations. They won’t be. There are zones where it’s always going to be difficult for men and women to understand one another, and sexual desire is one of them. Many women will find it difficult to accept that men can so easily dissociate sexual pleasure from emotional intimacy, just as many men will struggle to understand why these two obviously separate (to them) issues are often so intertwined for many women.
But with trust, we can strive to accept even what we cannot understand. One of the most important hopes we have for this book is to provoke the sorts of conversations that make it a bit easier for couples to make their way across this difficult emotional terrain together, with a deeper, less judgmental understanding of the ancient roots of these inconvenient feelings and a more informed, mature approach to dealing with them. Other than that, we really have little helpful advice to offer. Every relationship is a constantly changing world that requires specific attention. Other than warning you to be wary of those who offer one-size-fits-all relationship advice, our best counsel echoes that of Polonius to Laertes (in Hamlet): “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man [or woman].”
Still, it will take more than a deeper understanding of ourselves and each other to fully address the many issues raised by a more relaxed and tolerant approach to fidelity. “The people I feel sorry for are the ones who don’t even realize they have any other choices beyond the traditional options society presents,” says Scott, who is a member of a long-term triad relationship with Terisa (a woman) who is also involved with Larry (whom Scott introduced to Terisa). While such three- or four-person committed relationships have, by necessity, flown under the radar until recently, so-called polyamorous families are thought to number about half a million in the United States, according to an article in Newsweek.8 Although Helen Fisher thinks people involved in such configurations are “fighting Mother Nature” by trying to confront their insecurities and jealousy head-on, there is plenty of evidence that, for the right people, such arrangements can work out very well for all concerned—even the kids.
As Sarah Hrdy reminds us, conventional couples struggling to raise a family in isolation might be the ones fighting Mother Nature: “Since Darwin,” she writes, “we have assumed that humans evolved in families where a mother relied on one male to help her rear her young in a nuclear family; yet … the diversity of human family arrangements … is better predicted by assuming that our ancestors evolved as cooperative breeders.”9 From our perspective, people like Scott, Larry, and Terisa appear to be trying to replicate ancient human socio-sexual configurations. As we’ve seen, from a child’s perspective, having more than two stable, loving adults around can be enriching, whether in Africa, the Amazon, China, or suburban Colorado. Laird Harrison recently wrote about his experience growing up in a house his biological parents shared with another couple and their children. He recalled, “The communal household enjoyed a kind of camaraderie I have never felt since…. I swapped books with my stepsisters, listened in awe to their stories of crushes, exchanged tips on teachers. Their father imparted his love of great music and their mother her passion for cooking. A sort of bond formed among the 10 of us.”10
Everybody Out of the Closet
An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.
ARTHUR MILLER
Much of recent history can be seen as waves of tolerance and acceptance breaking against the rocky headlands of rigid social structures. Though it can seem to take almost forever, the waves always win in the end, reducing immobile rock to shifting sand. The twentieth century saw the headlands beginning to crumble under surges of anti-slavery movements, women’s rights, racial equality, and, more recently, the steadily growing acceptance of the rights of gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual people.
Author Andrew Sullivan described his experience growing up both gay and Catholic as “difficult to the point of agony. I saw in my own life and those of countless others,” Sullivan recalled, “that the suppression of these core emotions and the denial of their resolution in love always always leads to personal distortion and compulsion and loss of perspective. Forcing … people into molds they do not fit helps no one,” Sullivan wrote. “It robs them of dignity and self-worth and the capacity for healthy relationships. It wrecks family, twists Christianity, violates humanity. It must end.”11 Sullivan’s comments were provoked by the twisted collapse of the publicly homophobic but privately homosexual televangelist Ted Haggard, but he could have been speaking for anyone who doesn’t fit the socially sanctioned mold of his or her day.
And who does fit this mold? Yes, self-hating gay televangelists and politicians need to come out of the closet, but so does everyone else.
It won’t be easy. It’s never easy to stand up to shame-fueled anger. Historian Robert S. McElvaine previews some of the shrill denunciation awaiting those who may dare to wander from the monogamous fold, declaring, “Free love is likely to degenerate into ‘free hate.’ Since loving everybody is a biological impossibility, the attempt to do so [becomes] ‘otherization,’ and the hatred that goes with it.”12 Like
McElvaine, many relationship counselors seem both terrified by and ignorant of nonstandard marital relationships of any kind. Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, quotes a family therapist she knows (and respects) stating unequivocally, “Open marriage doesn’t work. Thinking you can do it is totally naïve. We tried it in the seventies and it was a disaster.”13
Maybe, but such therapists might want to delve a little deeper before reflexively dismissing alternatives to conventional marriage. Asked to imagine the first swingers in modern American history, most people probably picture hairy hippies in headbands lolling about on waterbeds in free-love communes under posters of Che Guevara and Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane on the hi-fi. But be cool, Daddy-O, ‘cause the truth is gonna blow your mind.
It seems that the original modern American swingers were crew-cut World War II air force pilots and their wives. Like elite warriors everywhere, these “top guns” often developed strong bonds with one another, perhaps because they suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the military. According to journalist Terry Gould, “key parties,” like those later dramatized in the 1997 film The Ice Storm, originated on these military bases in the 1940s, where elite pilots and their wives intermingled sexually with one another before the men flew off toward Japanese antiaircraft fire.
Gould, author of The Lifestyle, a cultural history of the swinging movement in the United States, interviewed two researchers who’d written about this Air Force ritual. Joan and Dwight Dixon explained to Gould that these warriors and their wives “shared each other as a kind of tribal bonding ritual, with a tacit understanding that the two thirds of husbands who survived would look after the widows.”* The practice continued after the war ended and by the late 1940s, “military installations from Maine to Texas and California to Washington had thriving swing clubs,” writes Gould. By the end of the Korean War, in 1953, the clubs “had spread from the air bases to the surrounding suburbs among straight, white-collar professionals.”14
Are we to believe that these fighter pilots and their wives were “naïve”?
It’s true that many high-profile American forays into alternative sexuality in the 1970s ended in chaos and hurt feelings, but what does that prove? Americans also tried, and failed, to reduce their reliance on foreign oil in the 1970s. By this logic, it would be “naïve” to ever try again. Besides, in intimate matters, discretion and success tend to go together, so no one really has any idea how many couples succeeded in finding their own unconventional understandings by experimenting with low-key alternatives to standard, off-the-shelf monogamy.15
What isn’t debatable is that conventional marriage is a full-blown disaster for millions of men, women, and children right now. Conventional till-death-(or infidelity, or boredom)-do-us-part marriage is a failure. Emotionally, economically, psychologically, and sexually, it just doesn’t work over the long term for too many couples. Yet while few mainstream therapists would contemplate trying to convince a gay man or lesbian to “grow up, get real, and just stop being gay,” these days, when it comes to unconventional approaches to heterosexual marriage, Perel points out, “Sexual boundaries are one of the few areas where therapists seem to mirror the dominant culture. Monogamy,” she writes, “is the norm, and sexual fidelity is considered to be mature, committed, and realistic.” Forget about negotiating alternatives: “Nonmonogamy, even consensual nonmonogamy, is suspect.” The notion that it might be possible to love one person while being sexual with another “makes us shudder,” and conjures “images of chaos: promiscuity, orgies, debauchery.”16
Couples who turn to a therapist hoping for guidance on ways to loosen—but not break—the bonds of standard monogamy are likely to be offered little but defensive condemnation and stilted bromides like this advice from an evolutionary psychology based self-help book called Mean Genes: “The temptations we all face are deeply ingrained in the genes of our hearts and minds … [but] as long as we remain interesting dynamos, there will be no conflict between monogamy and our infidelity-promoting mean genes.”17 Interesting dynamos? No conflict? Sure. Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.
Perel is the rare therapist willing to publicly consider the possibility that heterosexual couples might find alternative arrangements that can work well for them—even if they find themselves outside the bounds of what mainstream society approves. She writes, “It’s been my experience that couples who negotiate sexual boundaries … are no less committed than those who keep the gates closed. In fact, it is their desire to make the relationship stronger that leads them to explore other models of long-term love.”18
There are an infinite number of ways to adapt a flexible and loving partnership to our ancient appetites. Despite what most mainstream therapists claim, for example, couples with “open marriages” generally rate their overall satisfaction (with both their relationship and with life in general) significantly higher than those in conventional marriages do.19 Polyamorists have found ways to incorporate additional relationships into their lives without lying to one another and destroying their primary partnership. Like many gay male couples, these people recognize that additional relationships need not be taken as indictments of anyone. Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, authors of The Ethical Slut, write, “It is cruel and insensitive to interpret an affair as a symptom of sickness in the relationship, as it leaves the ‘cheated-on’ partner—who may already be feeling insecure—to wonder what is wrong with him…. Many people have sex outside their primary relationships for reasons that have nothing to do with any inadequacy in their partner or in the relationship.”20
Despite centuries of religious and scientific propoganda, the basic illusions underpinning the supposed “naturalness” of the conventional nuclear family are clearly exhausted. This collapse has left many of us isolated and unfulfilled. Blind insistence and well-intentioned inquisitions have failed to turn the tide, and show no signs of future success. Rather than endless War Between the Sexes, or rigid adherence to a notion of the human family that was never true to begin with, we need to seek peace with the truths of human sexuality. Maybe this means improvising new familial configurations. Perhaps it will require more community assistance for single mothers and their children. Or maybe it just means we must learn to adjust our expectations concerning sexual fidelity. But this we know: vehement denial, inflexible religious or legislative dictate, and medieval stoning rituals in the desert have all proved powerless against our prehistoric predilections.
In 1988, Roy Romer, then governor of Colorado, faced a feeding-frenzy of questions about his long-running extramarital affair that had become publicly known. Romer did what few public figures have dared. In the spirit of the Yucatán, he refused to accept the premise underlying the intrusive questions: that his extramarital relationship was a betrayal of his wife and family. Instead, he called an extraordinary press conference where he pointed out that his wife of forty-five years had known about and accepted the relationship all along. Romer confronted the tittering reporters with “life as it really happens.” “What is fidelity?” he asked the suddenly silent gaggle of reporters. “Fidelity is what kind of openness you have. What kind of trust you have, which is based on truth and openness. And so, in my own family, we’ve discussed that at some length and we’ve tried to arrive at an understanding of what our feelings are, what our needs are, and work it out with that kind of fidelity.”21