by Tim Kreider
T.J., in the honeymoon phase of her open relationship, felt like she’d successfully cut through the whole psychosexual Gordian knot. She proselytized about polyamory, pointing out how our whole society—tax codes, legal and medical rights, social welfare programs—is biased in favor of long-term, monogamous relationships. (The most outspoken proponents of polyamory I’ve known have all been women, perhaps because they have more social taboos to overcome; a polyamorous man is just an opportunistic sleaze per everyone’s expectations, but a poly woman is treated more like a traitor to her gender.) Like my YA author girlfriend, she’d lost all patience for plots that turned on temptation, jealousy, or infidelity, the same way she got exasperated by Dostoyevsky’s compulsive gamblers. Her solution was: Why not fuck them both? She’d watched her boyfriend have sex with his ex-girlfriend, she told me, and it hadn’t bothered her at all. I found myself dwelling unhealthily on this mental image, although I couldn’t tell whether it aroused me or crept me out.
T.J. assuaged my envy by advising me that although polyamory multiplies the amount of sex you have, it exponentiates the number of relationship talks you have to have. During the Dilemma, around Valentine’s Day—an occasion everyone agrees is a meaningless greeting-card holiday but which seems to trigger the same sorts of histrionic crises as weddings and funerals—I had to have six relationship talks in the space of two weeks, which is more than I normally like to have in a year. When I heard that some poly people bought Christmas gifts not only for their various partners but for their partners’ partners, I decided: Forget it—I’m out.
During the Dilemma, Kevin came to visit me in New York in the middle of what he was calling a “trial separation” from Renee. I had just gotten an alarming late-night phone call from Renee, who’d taken every sedative in the house in an effort to fall asleep, and felt it incumbent on me to give him a little talking-to. “Renee sat next to your bed every day for a month when you were in the hospital,” I reminded him. “She’s put up with a lot from you. Even if you leave her,” I said, “you owe it to her to treat her with respect and salvage some sort of relationship with her.” I relayed a piece of old-world wisdom a friend had been given by a Haitian cabdriver: Your mistress must respect your wife.
My stern message might’ve gotten lost in the noise of mixed signals, since we also misbehaved like drunken twenty-two-year-olds the way we do every time we see each other. We met some German girls at a barbecue place and ended up spending the whole night with them, eating thick glistening slabs of pork belly, drinking pints of beer, smoking pot back at their hostel, and dancing to ’80s music in a nautically themed bar. Although nothing actually Happened with these girls, I reflected, hungover in bed the next day while begging Kevin to stop talking for just one minute and please put on some pants, that it’s the lure and pursuit of sex that keeps life interesting. On a spring day in New York City, the nonstop parade of the excruciatingly beautiful and heartrendingly hot makes the city seem like a bottomless cornucopia of erotic opportunity. Like many men, I am tormented by the delusion that for every attractive woman I see there is some hypothetical sequence of events that will lead to me having sex with her, and end up damning myself as a coward and a failure the 99.9999907 percent of the times this fails to happen.
Except how many times have I ever actually gone to a party or a bar and ended up getting the number of/making out with/going home with someone I met there? Even on the rare occasions when this has happened, there have been moments when it’s occurred to me that it’s three a.m., and I’m tired, and this is all getting to be rather a lot of work, and in truth I might’ve been happier watching a movie with the cat on my lap. It’s the tantalizing possibility of sex—reinforced, like an addiction to nickel slots, by the rare, sporadic payoff—that gives life its luster.
The closest I’d ever come to infiltrating the polyamorous lifestyle was when my friend Lorraine had invited me to a “kissing party,” which proved to be an adult game of spin-the-bottle. I felt I went home a winner: kissing a whole roomful of pretty girls was exactly as fun I’d imagined it would be—a warm, light-headed hormonal high I could feel for hours afterward, like an opiate—and I did not have to kiss the fat guy in the wizard hat. But I also found that, with the barrier of having to convince pretty girls to kiss you miraculously lifted, some of its allure is diminished. Without the possibility of rejection, kissing is almost as worthless as self-publishing. Freud again: “It can easily be shown that the psychical value of erotic needs is reduced as soon as their satisfaction becomes easy.” Also some people are terrible kissers.
What might be hardest to give up for the sake of monogamy isn’t sleeping around so much as a certain self-image that goes with it: I liked thinking of myself as single—available, interesting, faintly dangerous. Undomesticated. So many couples seem inert, done, the men tamed and denatured, the women wearing those brittle middle-age helmets of hair, blunt as a cab’s OFF DUTY light. I once asked a writer I admired, whom I’d noticed was drinking soda water in a bar, whether he drank. “I’m spiritually a drinker,” he said. “I no longer practice.” It sounded like a well-rehearsed answer. He’d found a way of maintaining his street cred as a Drinker—rowdy, irreverent, and fun-loving—while forgoing the behavior that defined that identity. I wondered whether it was possible to do something similar with monogamy—to remain spiritually single without sleeping around.
My friend Lauren told me that back when she was young and single there was a certain kind of guy she’d never liked because they only ever seemed to be provisionally present—always keeping their coats on, sitting on the arm of the sofa, affecting an air of being just about to take off for a better party somewhere else. Later, she said, after everyone got married and had children, those same guys were exactly the same, except that now their excuse was that they had to get home to the wife and kids—sorry, you know how it is. Both roles, Party Guy and Family Man, were just different excuses for being withholding, not quite there—unavailable. The guys she’s always liked have a way of letting you know that you have their full attention, of being flirty and confiding and genuinely engaged, even if you both know nothing’s going to come of it. They are available in a way that has nothing to do with cheating. Lauren herself is happily married and an incorrigible flirt. “My head is easily turned,” she sighs.
* * *
Kevin moved in with his new girlfriend four months after I’d first learned of any serious trouble in his marriage. Even his friends were discomfited by the abruptness of it, like citizens waking up to news of an overnight coup. He sent me a text:
I have to say this midlife crisis thing has been excellent. I have behaved selfishly and it has been fantastic. I am happy as fuck.
Kevin has a signature move when he’s stuck in traffic: just driving up the shoulder for as far as a mile to get to the next exit, an unapologetic fuck-you to the whole highway social contract. It had become an eponym among his friends: “Should we Kevin it?” This maneuver outrages his fellow motorists, all dutifully suffering through rush hour. He’d also become a pariah among his former friends and coworkers since leaving Renee, even though both of them seemed happier now than when they’d been married. (Renee had begun running, returned to her premarital weight, and was dating again.) His offense wasn’t just disloyalty or callousness but flouting the social order; it scared them the way the death of someone their own age does, reminding them that their own marriages might not be as placid or stable as they seemed. Maybe this is also why so many monogamists find polyamory, open marriage, and other defections from fidelity so obscurely threatening, something to be frowned on or quashed, in the same way that capitalism has to buy out or carpet-bomb any alternative economic system, no matter how penny ante or out of the way it may be.
The real currency of affection in T.J.’s open relationship turned out to be not sex but time. Her boyfriend would never commit to an evening out with T.J. and her friends ahead of time because he might have some work to do: his standard RSVP was
“Can we play it by ear?” She hadn’t minded watching him fuck his ex, but when she found out he was cooking dinner for one of his other girlfriends—something he never seemed to have time to do for her—she was furious. “And then she stood him up and I ate it,” she told me, smoldering with pyrrhic triumph. “That must have been a bitter dinner,” I ventured. By way of reply she stared unblinkingly at me and pantomimed chewing forkful after forkful of food, slow and purposeful as a cobra.
She made every effort to instruct her boyfriend in how to keep her, issuing an explicit list of things he could do to let her know that she was loved. One item on the list was: Make pancakes for me. He had never once done this. And he still didn’t do it, even after receiving the list. I’m sure he intended to make pancakes some Sunday morning soon, but it was never the right Sunday, there was always something else he had to do, and somehow he never got around to it. When she finally informed him that she’d made arrangements to move out, then, oh yes, then came the frantic belated making of pancakes, many, many of them, but alas, T.J. had made up her mind. The pancakes came too late.
Let traditionalists take pause before seizing vindication from this story. The failure of T.J.’s open relationship doesn’t prove that polyamory doesn’t work any more than the failure of Kevin’s marriage means that monogamy doesn’t. Maybe the moral is, nothing works. How could any single system hope to regulate the mating behavior of an animal afflicted with consciousness? Psychoanalyst Irwin Hirsch suggests, in a tone that sounds a lot like resignation, that the ideal of a long-term monogamous relationship that successfully integrates love and sex might ultimately be doing more harm than good, presuming that monogamy is a priori a virtue and requiring everyone to conform to a narrow, if not imaginary, norm.VI It’s not as if psychoanalysts’ own relationships are all models of happy functionality, he admits.
“Psychoanalytic research . . . is quite satisfied if reforms make use of its findings to replace what is injurious by something more advantageous,” Freud wrote, “but it cannot predict whether other institutions may not result in other, and perhaps graver, sacrifices.” It’s probably just as well that Freud didn’t live long enough to know about Playboy and the Pill, free love and key parties, bukkake and dogging. Whether the sexual revolution has brought about a net increase or decrease in human happiness would be hard to gauge. Traditional solutions to the problem of monogamy were rigid and institutional, involving systemic incentives and penalties like tax breaks, dowries, and stoning, but since the chain-reaction fission of the nuclear family, they’re increasingly improvised ad hoc. I know married couples who’ve had consensual flings or foursomes, some who maintain a French don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, and one who observe what they call “the Week of Decadence,” an annual sanctioned holiday from fidelity. One woman told me she’d married her best lover instead of her best friend, figuring she could always work on the friendship; a male friend confided that he and his wife like to keep a certain playful distance, making a game of whether he can win her over. We all assume we’re talking about the same things when we use words like marriage or relationship, but I suspect that beneath these labels, however normal or similar they may look from the outside, people’s private lives are as different from one another as frigid Neptune is from lead-melting Venus beneath their bland blankets of cloud.
* * *
“Making decisions takes no time,” writes Lionel Shriver. “It’s the not deciding that takes so much time.” Per my usual MO, I put off the moment of decision in the Dilemma until the deadline, when both women were literally minutes from breaking up with me, inflicting the maximum possible suffering on everyone involved, including myself. But in the end I made my choice. Like most big decisions, it looks inevitable in retrospect: it was the pastor’s infectious happiness, her conviction that today was going to be great, that won me over. She made happiness seem like no big deal, a thing you could manage to pull off every day, instead of the distant, mythical goal it had always seemed to me, something more like world peace. I would never regret the choice I’d made, though I’d always regret the one I hadn’t.
I had hoped that having made a choice in the Dilemma would at least put an end to my month of nerve-racking tension, but instead I found myself still secretly panicked. Had I just somehow cornered myself into committing to an exclusive relationship with someone I hadn’t even slept with yet? This did not sound like me; in fact it sounded insane, like an arranged marriage in which the bride is veiled up till the last second. Monogamy still felt like something being imposed on me, not my choice, but I couldn’t figure out how to negotiate a compromise. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing you could ease into gradually; apparently backsliding was a big deal. In retrospect, it’s obvious that my irrational sense that I’d somehow been entrapped into this relationship was a symptom of my fear that it was a serious one. My trepidation was both justifiable and stupid. Of course no one is the Right Person when you meet her; this is just an illusion necessary to lure you into investing the years and making the sacrifices necessary to love someone. It’s like telling yourself your book is going to be a masterpiece and make you rich in order to undertake the laborious ordeal of writing it. It’s only after making all those compromises and forfeitures, and amassing a shared fortune in memories, regrets, in-jokes and secrets, fights and reconciliations, that that person becomes the only possible one for you, unique and irreplaceable.
T.J. changed her answer in the “What I’m Looking For” category on her dating profile from “anything goes” to “monogamous relationship/marriage.” Almost immediately, after a string of emotionally absent boyfriends, she found a guy who unabashedly adored her; when she excused herself to get a drink at a party he would talk behind her back about how amazing she was. Within a year of their meeting, they’d moved in together, she’d proposed to him, and she was pregnant.
Kevin is already married to his new girlfriend. She forged her own wedding ring out of a gold Krugerrand he’d given her, and makes her own marmalade from things like Meyer lemons and quince. They sent me a few jars in the mail. Kevin tells me he’s had to renounce getting pissed off in traffic or snapping at panhandlers, because he feels he’s used up his lifetime quota of Asshole Points. He recently sent me a photo of a tombstone he likes to sit beside when he eats his lunch, a massive boulder engraved, by coincidence, with his own last name. “I love that fucking rock,” he wrote. When people ask me what I think about Kevin’s divorce and remarriage, all I can tell them is: It’s really good marmalade.
Not long after I’d made my decision in the Dilemma, my friend Lucy invited me to a swanky literary event. There were a lot of young women there—interns, assistant editors, agents, publicists, aspiring writers—all wearing sexy party dresses. This was also one of the few imaginable venues in which my own meager stock, being A Writer, might conceivably have any value. But I wasn’t going to be flirting or asking out or going home with anybody there. You become an artist in the hope of attracting girls; now that I had a girlfriend, why was I an artist? Come to think of it, now that I was in a relationship, what was the point of social functions—of dress-up events, clubs or concerts, parties or bars, of ever going out at all? Why was I here: to talk with other writers? There is nothing writers loathe more. To network? Jesus—please.
Later the lights went down, the music got loud, and the women all started to dance while I sank into a bitter self-pitying funk. For reasons as yet unexplained by evolutionary psychology, almost all women love to dance. They also like to pressure men to dance, despite our repeated protests that we really don’t want to, no, seriously, because they know that once we’re out there, we will love it. It’s supposed to be cute and fun, their cajoling you out onto the floor as if onto a gangplank, forcing you to jiggle and twitch miserably in front of everybody. I wondered whether it was some kind of test or ordeal ritual for potential mates, like working for months in order to purchase a single token stone. Also, my dancing has been likened to the flailing of those infl
atable tube-men who advertise used car lots, and I was afraid I would be mocked.
But then the DJ played “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5. That first ecstatic moan from the throat of Motown’s own castrato, voluptuous and pure as the sinuous clarinet that opens Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun—who can resist it? Lucy’s a married woman, with two kids; she and I have never dated or slept together or even so much as drunkenly made out on a New Year’s Eve. But I’ve known her since she was thirteen, a quiet, awkward adolescent with a secret crush on me, long before she became the formidable person she is now. She has held me while I’ve cried; she sometimes appears in my dreams, taking charge and hailing cabs. We are intimates. Maybe this is what Lauren meant by being available without having to give everything away. It’s not unlike dancing—a ritualized pantomime, all bold approach and coy demurral, but not necessarily an invitation or prelude; it can be a pleasure in itself. Maybe it’s all less a matter of the right person, or the right time, than of waiting for the right song to come on. I held out my hand to Lucy, which she took with delighted surprise, and we stepped out onto the floor.
* * *
I. Basically an extended appeal to nature, debunking the bias that monogamy is biologically determined and arguing that multiple partners, orgies, or gang rapes rather than pair-bonding were the norm in human prehistory. It’s an attractively validating theory for the promiscuous, but the evidence is pretty inferential, plus the authors use words like mighty and downright as intensifiers.