by Joel Derfner
So monogamy is a really tricky thing to talk about, at least among gay men. Or, rather, it’s not so tricky to talk about among gay men, but it’s tricky to talk about among gay men if straight people are listening, because the cultural standards are simply different—our inability to marry each other has to play into this—and there simply isn’t as strong a belief, as there seems to be in straight society, that monogamy is the only way to get a relationship right. I think much of this has to do with the fact that gay male couples are made up of two men, each of whom understands that it’s a struggle for the other to get anything done in life at all given the strength of his desire to bed every halfway attractive man who walks by. In straight couples, it’s a struggle for the man to get anything done in life given the strength of his desire to bed every halfway attractive woman who walks by, but his partner has little personal insight into this feeling, and whether she understands or not he usually doesn’t think she does, so things get complicated.
Of course, it’s much simpler in the rest of the animal kingdom. It turns out that even the much-vaunted monogamy of the prairie vole is a myth, at least in the way monogamy advocates talk about it. The only examples of absolute sexual monogamy I could find in the animal kingdom were a) the urban coyote and b) several species in which, after they mate, the female kills the male. Monogamy is unnatural and probably stupid.
Nevertheless, Mike and I have decided to be monogamous, and since the day I made a commitment to him I haven’t slept with anybody else. For all I know he may have turned his office at the hospital’s department of psychiatry into a lurid cavern of venial delights, but given his schedule I suspect it’s unlikely. I think we talked for like a minute and a half once, early in our relationship, about the idea of having threesomes as a couple, but even then our hearts weren’t really in it.
For me it was easy to choose monogamy, for a very simple reason: I’m way too insecure for anything else. If Mike and I decided that playing around was okay, I would spend every single moment I wasn’t with him obsessing over who he might be with, into what orifices he might be inserting what turgid body parts, and in what ways he might prefer which partner(s) to me. I would become so shrill a harpy that Petruchio, come to wive it wealthily in Padua, would take one look at me and go home. “So, honey,” I would say very casually when Mike came through the door at 6:17, “I see that it took you twelve minutes longer than usual to get home from the hospital. Is there anything you want to tell me?” And when he said no I would say, “Really? Are you absolutely certain? Because I called you and got your voice mail and it’s difficult for me to believe that . . .” and so on and so on through hissed accusations all the way to shouting and ostentatious silences and we would break up before the week was out.
I suppose the other alternative would be for me to sleep around without Mike’s permission and not tell him, but that, too, would render me practically nonfunctional, because doing something I’m not supposed to do and then trying to keep it a secret sends me into a dazed state that would give Oliver Sacks enough material for a new book. My entire life begins to revolve around my transgression and my world becomes narrower and narrower and narrower until finally the secret becomes the only thing that exists, preventing me ultimately from even chewing food.
So what’s left is monogamy, no matter how stupid and unnatural it is.
As the years have passed, however, I find that I have another reason not to sleep with anybody else.
We in twenty-first-century America have burdened marriage with much more weight than it has ever had to bear.
Until a couple centuries ago, marriage as we know it tended to be a business arrangement. In the upper classes, wives were for bearing children and cementing political alliances; for love, a man had a mistress, or several. (Women took lovers too, of course, but these arrangements were less sanctioned by society, given that, by creating uncertainty in questions of paternity, they threatened the passing of property from a father to his son.) In the lower classes, men and women were essentially corporate partners, because to plow the field, milk the cow, feed the children, and mend the clothing was simply beyond the ability of one person. One presumes that the lower classes had extramarital flings as well, but since they rarely featured in broadsheets we have much less information about them. The point is: for most of our history, monogamy has been an incidental part of marriage at best.
I suspect that it was in 1848 that this began to change in America, with the passage in New York State of the Married Women’s Property Act, which decreed that women who came into marriage with property could keep it instead of automatically giving up ownership to their husbands. This meant that, if a man married a rich woman, he could no longer take his right to do what he liked with her property for granted, and married women gained a degree of power thitherto, I believe, unknown to them. (When I asked Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History, she wasn’t so specific as to name a particular date or law, but she said I had the right idea; she added that the change in attitude toward monogamy continued in the twentieth century with the wider availability of divorce and contraception, aided by the increasing importance of what she called “the love match.”) Society had never stopped turning a blind eye to men who had extramarital sex and frowning on women who did the same, it’s true, but with the Married Women’s Property Act women were finally in a position to do something about the double standard. Either they should be allowed to have affairs too, or their husbands should be forbidden to do so. Since the first option required abandoning the basic principles of inheritance—if your wife could sleep with other people then how did you know you were leaving your property to your own son and not somebody else’s?—men had to get a lot more discreet about their mistresses if they ever wanted access to their wives’ money again.
As a result, the only person left to love with the approval of society was your spouse.
And nobody noticed it, but since then marriage has had to carry the double load of work and love. And that’s some heavy cargo.
Because really the old arrangement made a lot of sense, at least for those who profited by it. Gay men have just been more honest about it; my understanding is that roughly a third of gay male couples are monogamous, a third claim to be monogamous but one partner or the other cheats (or both), and a third are either explicitly non-monogamous or what author and sex columnist Dan Savage brilliantly calls monogamish. (Of course there are non-monogamous straight and lesbian couples too, but either there are fewer of them or they’re more discreet.)
I have no stake in other people’s decisions about monogamy. Secretly I feel smug and superior to men in non-monogamous couples but even I know there’s no justification for this feeling; I just seize every opportunity I can to feel smug and superior. I suppose I take a dim view of cheating, but really what business is it of mine what anybody else tells or doesn’t tell his husband?
I’ve realized, though, that, for me at any rate, there’s a very good argument in favor of monogamy, which is: I want to guarantee my emotional intimacy with Mike. And if he’s my sole sexual outlet—if monogamy has cut off any other options—then I’ll have to maintain emotional intimacy in order to satisfy the fundamental human need for sex. If he does something obnoxious and plants thereby a tiny seed of resentment in me that grows slowly into something hale and poisonously healthy, then if I can have sex with other people I’m just going to continue resenting him and go off and have sex with whoever until that resentment becomes a mighty, poisonous oak that I’ll never be able to chop down, and I’ll just keep having sex with other people and that tree will always be there and I’ll never feel close to him again. (I’m working here on the assumption that it’s not possible to sustain willingly a long-term sexual relationship with somebody toward whom your strongest feeling is resentment.)
Obviously it’s possible to bridge distance and uproot resentment in the absence of monogamy. But I’m so frightened of conflict that I can easily see doing nothing about the s
ituation and growing old in a loveless, lonely marriage and being miserable until I die.
So if that’s the alternative, then eliminating all options except the one that forces me to maintain an emotional closeness with Mike seems the obvious choice.
Not that that makes it easy. And of course, I don’t know whether monogamy is the chicken or the egg in this situation. Those fantasies I begin to spin when I see a potential The One aren’t just emotional, and sometimes when one of The Ones notices me shifting to cover the physical component of my fantasies he smiles at me in such a way as to make it clear that I needn’t do so on his account, and very occasionally he even suggests that we do something about it. (I don’t mean to suggest that men throw themselves at me wherever I go, which is certainly not the case, but I do live in New York City, after all.) After Mike’s father died and he and I were growing more and more distant because of that whore the television, my Facebook chats with my friend Eric (he of the giant penis), who is gorgeous and smart and sweet and who has made no secret of his desire to sleep with me, got longer and longer, and when I had to take a trip to the city where he lives I couldn’t keep myself from asking him whether he had an extra bed. Luckily he said he’d be out of town while I was there; I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have ended up sleeping with him, especially because we have conflicting preferences in a certain question of practice, but I was also fairly sure I wouldn’t break my left hand when I tried to do a flip back when I was on the gay cheerleading squad in my twenties, and look how that turned out.
Ultimately, though, I can’t help noticing that the level of my temptation to take advantage of any given opportunity to be monogamish instead of monogamous usually correlates very directly with how close I’m feeling to Mike at the time. And I guess what keeps me on course is the understanding that the part of me that feels empty is not the part giving in to temptation would fill.
The day finally came in couples therapy when we reached the central issue in our relationship, or at least what I saw at the time as the central issue. (I still believe what I said before, that many of my fights with Mike could be avoided by his not being an asshole, but I think that’s actually a side effect.)
“You’re so goddamn self-sufficient,” I said to Mike. And I realized that was it. “You won’t let me in. And if you don’t leave any room for me to support you emotionally, then eventually I stop trying.”
“ What?” he said. “I have to be emotionally self-sufficient, because if I don’t support myself completely, you certainly aren’t around to do it. You’re too busy worrying about your damn ketubah.”
“I suspect,” said Dr. Basescu, “that we’re looking at a vicious circle.”
And I think this is the one problem that, according to Mike’s friend Tony, our relationship has; everything else boils down in the end to this. Mike will have a particularly busy two weeks at work and I’ll feel shut out, so I’ll stop paying attention to him. Then he’ll feel ignored, so he’ll become seemingly self-sufficient, meeting all his own needs. This self-sufficiency makes me feel further shut out in turn, which makes me stop paying attention to him, which makes him feel further ignored, which makes . . .
This is, Dr. Basescu helped us realize, what was going on after Mike’s father died. If I could have supported him, he could have let me in. If he could have let me in, I could have supported him. But we couldn’t.
Since discovering the issue we’ve gotten a little better at noticing when this happens and pointing it out to each other so we can step back from it and let it go its merry way, but when we’re in the middle of the fray, we can be rendered even today so incapable of real communication that we might as well be living in the Pliocene Epoch, before human beings developed language. Here are some examples.
What I say : “Honey, come in here and hang out on the couch with me.”
What I’m thinking: “What if he says no? That would mean I’ve chosen to spend my life with somebody who doesn’t even want to spend time with me, and whereas before I was alone with the potential to meet a life partner, now I have a life partner and I’m still alone.”
What he hears: “I demand that you abandon whatever you’re doing, come here this instant, and hang out on the couch with me.”
What I say : “What’s on your mind?”
What I’m thinking: “He’s quieter than usual. Is he mad at me about something? What is he mad at me for? If I can figure it out then I can apologize before he tells me and then I’ll get credit for knowing what it was and apologizing before he even says anything.”
What he hears: “I don’t care that you’re worried about your mother; I’m more important.”
What I say : “What are you ordering [from the menu]?”
What I’m thinking: “Is he going to get a margarita or not? Alcohol makes him fall asleep the instant he gets in bed, so if he gets a margarita then I know we’re not having sex tonight and we haven’t had sex in like forever so if he gets a margarita then obviously it’s because he’s not attracted to me anymore.”
What he hears: “Will you hurry up and make a fucking decision already?”
“Oh, are you looking at pictures of your new husband Cole again?” asked Mike as he passed by a few minutes ago.
“No,” I said. “Cole is a hateful, hateful blackguard and he and I are no longer married.”
“Why?”
“It was my fault. I saw him in another reading and left yet another Facebook post on his wall about how great his performance was.”
“Well, that was desperate.”
“Yeah, which I realized about one second after I clicked send. And then I proved myself to be even more desperate by messaging him when I saw him online and was like, hey, you were great the other day, and he was like, I did see your wall post, and I was like, something stupid, and he was like, something forbearing, and I was like, something even stupider, and he was like, isn’t the weather great, and I knew what we’d had was gone forever.”
“You want me to rough him up?”
“No, that’s okay. I’m married to Nick now.”
“Let me see.” He moved to look over my shoulder. “You and your bland blonds.”
“You’re just jealous.”
“No, ’cause you don’t really love him.”
“I do, too!” I said. “As a matter of fact, he’s on his way over right now.”
“Okay,” said Mike. “So we shouldn’t waste the time we’ve got left.”
“It should take him about an hour,” I said.
“Oh, but my new husband Jonathan will be here before then.”
“Well, we’ve had a nice run, haven’t we?”
“Nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Wanna go see The Avengers?”
“Sure. Let me get my keys.”
“But what will happen when Nick and Jonathan get here and we’re gone?”
“They’ll find something to do.”
8
Taking Care of Last-Minute Details
Saturday, September 11
One month from today, I am getting married to my boyfriend of seven years. I suspect I would feel much more nervous than I do if it weren’t for the fact that all my energy is taken up by the HGTV Urban Oasis Giveaway, which is in the grand scheme of things at least as important to me as my wedding, if not more.
Because I hate living in Brooklyn. Our house is in an area populated largely by people from the Caribbean, the downside of which is that the restaurants tend to serve a lot of goat, when what I want instead is a really first-rate Taco Bell. While the crack dealers on our right have come to love me—they call me Jimmy, after Clark Kent’s sidekick Jimmy Olsen, and I am supremely confident that if anybody tried to mess with me I could go to the crack dealers and ask them to intervene on my behalf and somebody would end up looking down the wrong end of a sawed-off shotgun—and the retired schoolteacher on our left has calmed down quite a bit, I would feel the same way if I lived in a posh neighborhood like Park Slope or Brookly
n Heights, because I believe, with the utmost provinciality, that Manhattan is the center of the world, which means I’m living in a suburb of the center of the world, and why would anybody do that?
(If anything, the fact that my neighborhood is a ghetto makes it better than Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights, simply because it’s more interesting. Though the gunfire we used to hear once a week has slowed down, thanks to gentrification, to once every few months, and though I will never forgive Mike for not calling me at once so I could join him when on his way to the grocery store he walked by the body of the guy who had been stabbed to death, telling people where I live still produces a dismayed response often enough for me to enjoy doing so. Nonetheless, since the police crackdown that led the Crips to abandon our corner store as a hangout and move to a different corner more than two blocks away from the Bloods hangout, things haven’t been the same.)
All the hours I have put in watching Mike’s goddamn home and garden television shows with him, however, have now presented me with an alternative. HGTV is giving away an apartment in downtown Manhattan, designed and furnished by none other than Mr. Vern Yip himself, the only halfway decent designer from Trading Spaces and now one of the judges on Design Star. The apartment, which is in the Residences at the W Hotel on Washington Street, has an area of 800-some-odd square feet and an astonishing view of the Statue of Liberty.
You’re allowed to enter the giveaway once a day online, at hgtv.com. I read the small print, however, and it turns out that the once-a-day rule applies only to online entries and that, if you enter by mail, sending an index card with your name, address, birthday, phone number, and social security number handwritten on it in a hand-addressed, hand-stamped envelope to the HGTV post office box in Tennessee, you’re allowed to enter as many times as you like.