April 1, 2022 • 26 mins
Why do you love the way you do?
We're expected to love only one romantic partner at a time. But we can love more than one parent, sibling, and friend - so why do so many cultures demand monogamy in romance? Is it time to reconsider the old model?
Dessa speaks with a philosopher, an economist, and sexpert Dan Savage to talk about love, sex, and commitment.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Years ago, a man I loved very much handed me
a book called The Ethical Slut. It's essentially a how
to guide for non monogamous relationships. This title was emphatically
not on my Christmas list. This man and I had
been struggling for a long time to try to sort
out a viable relationship. We were on again, off again tears, ultimatums,
(00:29):
and I could not believe he had the goal to
hand me this book. Weren't we working through trust issues already?
Hadn't we just started to see a therapist, and with
so much work to do, he's out here looking for
permission to get something on the side. I felt like
I'd gone to a tea party and been served a
Molotov cocktail. The man, on the other hand, seemed to
(00:52):
think this book could actually help us. When my temper cooled,
which it did at geological place, I reassessed the situation.
I had several well adjusted friends in non monogamous arrangements.
Some cultures even expect people to have more than one
mate at a time. Okay, I got ahead of myself. High. Hello,
(01:18):
I'm Dessa. This is deeply human and together we are
going to rummage around your intuitions about romantic love, monogamy,
and its alternatives. For the word Nerds in the room ahead,
(01:39):
put your hands down, I see you. Yes. Monogamy strictly speaking,
describes being married to only one person, but we're using
it here as we do in casual conversation to describe
having a sexual relationship with only one person at a time.
Monogamy is definitely the norm where I grew up, But
why should romantic relationships be exclusive when other relationships don't
(02:03):
have to be? Like, we can love more than one sibling,
more than one parent, and if we run into a
friend having lunch with someone else, we don't flip the
table over. So why was I so reluctant to even
consider a more open relationship? If you're committed loving relationships
have been exclusive. Is that the product of a conscious
(02:23):
choice or just social conditioning? Why do our relationships have
to be one at a time? First, let's talk about monogamy.
We need to talk about it the way we talk
about sobriety. You can fall off the wagon, sober back up,
and get back on the wagon. And I'm here to
tell people, and I'm often in the position of having
to tell people in monogamous relationships, that it's the person
(02:47):
you were with for forty years only cheated on you
once or twice. They were good at it, not bad
at it. They were good at it, good at monogamy.
My name is Dan Savage, and I write Savage Love,
which is syndicated sex and or relationship and ice column
that I've been writing for thirty years, and I also
host the Savage Love Cast. And a lot of people
are interested in what Dan has to say on this
(03:08):
stuff because podcast is crazy popular. He's written a best
selling book, and what he says is that our understanding
of monogamy is in serious need of an overhaul. Western
convention usually presupposes that love and monogamy go hand in hand,
like if you love someone and the relationship is serious,
you're exclusive and if someone cheats, well, that's grounds for
(03:32):
media termination. We ask for perfect fidelity, but we don't
expect perfection from our partners and other aspects of the relationship.
And Dan thinks that's sort of absolutism about monogamy, sort
of heartless. If you're with somebody for ten twenty years, kids,
you merged finances, social networks, families, and it comes out
(03:54):
of your partner has cheated on you five years ago
and you find out about it, maybe that's something you
should be able to get past. By placing so much
weight on sexual fidelity, monogamists might set themselves up to
throw away a good thing if somebody misses up. Dan
himself is married and he's been with his husband, Terry,
for a very long time, and over the course of
(04:16):
their relationship, they revised the terms of their arrangement. My
relationship with Terry twenty years ago, we were mostly monogamous.
When we were having sex. It was almost always usually
with each other, but sometimes, you know, when the planets aligned,
we could have sex with other people together or separately.
But as an out gay couple in the middle of
(04:38):
the marriage equality debate and as parents, when we told
people we were in, you know, not monogamous, people made
assumptions about troops of men, strange men coming in and
out of our house at all hours of the day
and night. You know, it feels like like the mainstream
popular imagination we conceptualized like the opposite of monogamy as
(04:59):
either jact loneliness or NonStop promiscuity. Oh my god. Yeah,
that's why I coined the term monogamoush I kept saying
mostly monogamous, and so I just thought we were monogamous
with some squish. There are so many terms for the
(05:21):
many ways to have a modern relationship. If you found
yourself referencing a dog eared copy of Urban Dictionary to
decipher the acronyms on Tinder, you might have also run
across E n M or ethically non monogamous, or words
like polyamory or open relationship where everybody's got permission to
see other people. When Dan talks about non monogamy, he
(05:42):
doesn't sound like a hedonist throwing weekday orgies. He sounds
kind of prim When will we stop pretending that relationships
have to be defined by the sexual connection that may
have brought that relationship together at the start? When will
we stop putting so much emphasis on sucks? But I
feel that you do you due diligence to say, like,
(06:04):
you know, I'm a favor of monogamy if you choose that,
and I wanted to work for you, But then I
I don't believe. I feel like you talk about monogamy
like a needle exchange program, like if you can't quit it,
then here's the way to try to do it safely. Yeah.
I guess if you're going to do this dangerous, stupid,
reckless thing, you should do it as safely as possible. Yeah.
(06:26):
I mean, I can see that there are advantages in
a monogamous relationship. Also myself having been in monogamous relationships,
you know a certain amount of emotional security, definitely, you
know sexual safety. The monogomous relationship I was in for
five years was high to the HIV AIDS epidemic. It
kept us safe. It's probably one of the reasons I'm
(06:48):
alive now. Even though we weren't perfectly monogamous, or I
wasn't the entire time we together. Dan since built a
life where important relationships can be plural rather and strictly singular.
The first person I knew to really commit to a
non monogamous lifestyle, let's call him Roy. We've had an
(07:10):
actor voice up his bits and will explain why in
a second. Roy met his now wife when they were teenagers.
We've been together since we hugged in a play in
high school. Wait did you hug in a play? Because
that was like written into the script of the play. Yes, okay, cool,
And then you were like I think also off stage,
(07:31):
we should also just hug until um we're dead. Right.
Somewhere near the end of our college years was when
we decided to be non monogamous, and maybe two years
after that is when we got married. The decision to
open up their relationship was sparked by a request from
(07:53):
a female friend of Royce. She was lesbian, looking to
get pregnant, wanted to do with the analog way, and
so she asked if roy would be willing to have
sex with her. Roy said he'd consider it, but obviously
he had to talk about it with this partner. I
shouldn't say as a name, right, all right, my first
(08:14):
big crush was Janine Garoffalo, so I'll say Janine. So
me and Janine were out for dinner. A brief interruption
for a little exposition for those of you who missed
the nineties cult classic reality bites. Janine Garoffalo is a
comic and an actor. Former Saturday Night Live cast member
with dark hair, quick wit, expressive features. A favorite of
(08:37):
progressive bookish boys back in high school. Roy carry on. So,
me and Janine were out for dinner, and I brought up, Hey,
my friend asked today if I could get her pregnant,
what do you think? And it started this whole conversation
and we kind of figured out like, oh, actually, like
(08:58):
the physical part of it as an a comfortable if
we're being honest, The part about cheating that we were
scared of that seems the most harmful was the like
lying and the sneaking about it, and if we erased
that part of it, that the physical part didn't seem
like it would be that much of a challenge. You know,
we'd been together at that point years and years, and
(09:20):
it felt like we had been totally honest with each other,
but one conversation that we had never had was the
honest I'm attracted to other people conversation. We just kind
of pretended that that we weren't. We finally like admitted, like, yes,
as I walk through the world, I notice other people
that are attracted or that are attractive, and I am
(09:44):
attracted to them. And so we started the conversation of like, well,
what would it look like if we got to pursue
some of that attraction And we talked about it and
discussed and wrote and rewrote rule rules and read books
for I mean probably six months or more before either
(10:05):
of us actually went out on a date with anybody.
Slowly and cautiously, they started to see other people, which
at first confused the daylights out of their friends twenty
years ago or whatever. It was like, it was hard
to find information about it, and it was hard to
like to find other people that knew a lot about it.
(10:26):
And most people we were telling would be like, so
you're breaking up and it's like no, and and they're
like I thought things were okay with you guys, and
it's like no, actually, like this is a sign that
things are really good. That were like so comfortable that
we're messing with it and like trying something else. Being
(10:49):
very thinky people, Roy and Jeanine were deliberate about trying
to make connections with people who were already living a
non monogamous lifestyle successfully many years ago. We went to
like a local polyamory meet up and it was at
a Turtle Bread. We were sitting there and this is
(11:09):
like where like a month then, where we haven't even
started dating anyone yet. We're just looking for people to
talk to and listener. I must interrupt here. Turtle Bread
is like a homey, neighborhood Minneapolis bakery slash restaurant place
that makes a subway sandwich shop look like Studio fifty four.
It's just like very mild mannered um like mom jeans
(11:33):
dog bowl out front. It's like norm core with carbs.
So when you kiss on the mouth four people in
a row in the middle of the Midwest at a
turtle bread, you've been noticed at that point by everyone
in the restaurant, right, Like, it's a fairly public display.
That wouldn't tend to happen there, And so we were like,
(11:54):
that's maybe not our vibe. But they did end up
finding other Polly friends that were a better fit and
didn't creet with Tom. We kind of just like talked
about like science and art and politics, and like we
were just kind of we were like, oh, we're just,
you know, fairly like minded and curious and interested people.
In those early years, however, Roy was worried the choices
(12:17):
he made in his private life could be professionally risky.
He's worked in public service for a very long time,
and over his career has been recognized with some significant accolades.
I've been doing the job that I've been doing now
for over fifteen years, and I think when I was
newer and the world was maybe different than it is now.
I was very worried that, like, if this was a
(12:38):
public thing, it's possible I would just get fired or
demoted or shelved in some way, just because like the
place I work wouldn't want that kind of reputation attached
to it. I mean, I think it's anyone who's doing
something not heteronormative, not whatever, can be looked at as perverts.
(12:59):
You know. For me, my life feels very very normal.
But the most immediate motive for discretion. The reason we've
got an actor doing Roy's side of the conversation. His family,
Janine Garofalo's family is very, very conservative. It seems natural
(13:24):
to have strong feelings about our own love lives, but
we've also got such intense emotions about how other people
are loving other people, even if they seem happy. Why
some people react like as if my open relationship is
a threat to their monogamous relationship, you know, not that
like I'm trying to sleep with their partner or anything,
(13:46):
but just like the existence of open relationships or people
that might be happy in those is some sort of
message of danger to the relationship they have. And I
think that's true of like a lot of ways of
living that have been norm When there's an alternative presented,
people can be really uncomfortable with that or feel like
(14:06):
it's an attack when you know it's obvious people are
living their own life. Sexual exclusivity is part of the
predetermined course that a romantic relationship is expected to follow.
So where is this course supposed to be heading exactly?
Philosopher Luke Brunning describes it as the relationship escalator. In
(14:31):
our society, we typically think that relationships ought to deepen
over time. Right that you start off, you meet someone,
you might get to know them a bit, perhaps you
start dating them. Then over time you might become exclusive.
Then you might say, oh, now this person's my boyfriend.
Then people will actually say, ah, you know, when you're
gonna get engaged, when you're gonna get married. Let's say
(14:51):
you get married. Then they might start asking when are
you're gonna buy a house or have children. It's on
and so forth. So the relationship exclated this really simple
idea that once you're in a relationship, that relationship has
to sort of change and involve over time to become
more complicated, more committed in a way that ends up
with your lives practically and often legally. Entwined Luke is
(15:16):
a lecturer at the University of Birmingham and the UK
who researches personal relationships and the philosophy of emotions. I
asked how popular monogamy is these days, like who's doing
it and where. I'd say that as an ideal, monogamy
is kind of spread around the world, so it's practiced
fairly widely. There are some exceptions, but even in countries
(15:38):
in the Middle East or some parts of the African continent,
monogamy is increasingly taking hold as a romantic ideal am
I think of it sort of as a as one
of many cultural exports. You know, is it like the
new Drake record spreads around the world, or is it
the fact that you have communities that are landing on
this form independently of one another. I think the answer
(15:59):
would be a bit of It's certainly something that's been exported.
Christian miscenaries and colonizes in general have done a lot
to help promote this as an ideal. I don't spend
a lot of time kicking it in missionaries circles personally,
but while monogamy is an ideal may be spreading around
the world. In practice, Americans anyway, may be more likely
to try other models. Researchers from the Kinsey Institute and
(16:23):
Chapman University in the US surveyed single Americans about polyamory.
One out of six people expressed a desire to engage
in polyamory, and what out of nine said they've done
it at some point in their life. But in trying
to sort stuff out with the X who handed me
that book, I remember wondering if a predilection for monogamy
(16:45):
was just sort of baked into some people and not others,
and if so, asking someone to change seemed at best
feudal and at worst like proselytizing. Luke says that modern
lifestyles may have something to do with the kind of
relayation ships who find attractive. Today. For example, many young
people are living less settled lives than they used to.
(17:06):
They don't live in the same place for a very
very long amount of time. The idea of owning a
house with a picket fence and a garden full of
you know, goats and vegetables and the and their their
single partner is something that many people just find very
hard to envisage at all, Right, And that's not because
they can't imagine it, but because they think it's inaccessible
(17:29):
for them. People are much more sort of networked individuals
these days, drawing sources of kind of emotional, social, cultural
satisfaction and stability from all kinds of different people in
their lives. I just want to make sure that there
was one moment that I heard correctly. Did you say
a house with a picket fence and a garden and
a goat? Yes? Okay, cool, thank you. That says a
(17:54):
lot about me. I gotta up my own. I gotta
up my own fairytale game. Monogamy is embedded in the
very first stories we learned about love. I think fairy
tales Cinderella is essentially monogamy as foot fetish. But are
(18:17):
those norms as relevant and resonant for someone like sexpert
Dan Savage in the same sex relationship in heterosexual land?
I think like commitment and monogamy are often like this
two for one bundled package. Does that work similarly in
the gay world? No, and it never has. I'm fifty
(18:38):
six years old. I came out when I was sixteen
seventeen years old. And monogamy was always the conversation, it
was negotiated, it was opt in, and for straight people,
monogamy has always seemed to be a default setting from
the very first night a couple spends together. Dan says
that gay relationships necessarily involve a lot of talking. When
(19:00):
a man and a man are going to bed together
for the first time, they don't get to consent and
stop communicating. They get to consent, yes, let's have sex,
and then they keep talking because what's going to happen
next isn't obvious, can't be assumed. You have to talk
about what you want to do, what your desires are.
Straight people avoid that conversation. Straight couples might just presume
(19:23):
they agree with sex should be what a relationship should be,
whereas gay couples don't have the same scripts to lean on,
so they got to negotiate every step. What do you
actually want out of this? What should we build together?
Dan Savage is one man leading one life who has
not been elected official representative of gay people around the globe,
(19:44):
but in his worldview, monogamy is just not the gold
standard of romantic connection. I don't think gay men are
failing at monogamy. I think gay men are succeeding at
relationships and non monogamy. Okay, enough about love for a minute,
let's talk money. It's time for econ. I'm Marina at Shade.
(20:04):
I'm assistant professor at the Vancouver School of Economics at
the University of British Columbia, and my specialization is the
economics of sex and love. So from the economic vantage points,
what are the incentives for monogamous relationships? Well, throughout history,
there's been a lot of incentives for monogamous relationships, particularly
from men. Men in general historically haven't been big fans
(20:28):
of putting their resources into children that are not their own,
and so there's been a lot of incentive for women
to be monogamous so that men are raising other men's children.
And then the idea of like institutionalized monogamy, like living
in a society that really really frowns upon people having
multiple sexual partners, That really comes out of the idea
(20:48):
that you know, you can't supervise somebody all the time,
So what you do is you set up a system
that is either system of just like social norms or
religion or laws. The great that structure so that when
you're not around the other person, mostly the woman here
is not off having sexual relationships with other people. Marriage,
it's worth noting, hasn't always been considered a fundamentally romantic endeavor.
(21:16):
In the past, marriage was much more of an economic relationship.
People got married to produce a household, essentially to produce children.
But in much of today's world that's changed more hallmark
less labor forced marriage started to being about other things.
It started being about more about love and companionship and
(21:37):
about the joy of spending time with another person. And
then once you make marriage more about those things, then
it opens it up to other possibilities because it's no
longer and economic relationship. If it's just about love and companionship,
then why not have a triad? Right dang Marina, quick
turn on that one. Also, technological and inss have changed
(22:01):
our attitudes about how sex and relationships fit together, and
so as birth control technology comes better and better, then
the incentives change. Right, You're less concerned that your partner
is going to go off and have a baby with
someone else if she is sexually active with another man,
and so that will erode away some of the incentives
to enforcing monogamy and relationships. If our incentives for sexual
(22:25):
exclusivity of a rooting, does that mean that monogamy is
on its way out and rom coms are dead and
Cinderella just stays out all night barefooted and abisa phone party.
M h, not yet. I know. We see a lot
of studies where we say that young people, you know,
the next generation that's coming up, is kind of less
tied to the idea of monogamy. They're more open to
(22:47):
having relationships with multiple people. Um, it's gonna be really
interesting to see once they get a little bit further
on in their lives and their children become involved, whether
or not they'll be as receptive to those ideas, and
that I think we still have to wait and see.
When I took honest stock of my own resistance to polyamory,
(23:09):
at least a part of me was concerned about being judged.
I worried what people might think, which is allows you
a way to make big and fundamentally personal choices, and
I want my decisions on who and how to love
to be based on the gossip at in neighbor's house.
But people do pass sweeping judgments on other people's love
lives Roy was worried about it. Dan Savage, the Love
(23:31):
and Sex columnist, says his relationship has been dismissed out
of hand for not adhering to convention, like it just
wouldn't count. It used to only be people who are
monogamous telling those of us who are not a monogamoust
that we were doing love wrong, or that we weren't
in love, and that if we were in love, we
couldn't do this. I don't look at monogamous people and
(23:51):
say you're not in love, because if you were really
in love, you'd be having three ways. I never say
that to monogamous people. It's the mixing monogamy love that
that really harms, not open relationships like mine, but monogamous relationships.
Dan suggests that monogamous arrangements actually de emphasize the sexual
aspect of a relationship and in doing so, can strengthen
(24:13):
the emotional connection that so many of us seem so
concerned about. And as for him and his husband Terry,
they are salad. We've been together almost thirty years now,
and yet despite having been together for three decades, I
have been in the position a numerous occasions where someone
will look at me and say, as we're talking about relationships,
(24:34):
I could never do what you and Terry do because
I value commitment too highly. All of my marriages have
been monogamous. Unpack that, like Terry and I've been gether
for three decades, we aren't committed to each other. And
you have been married multiple times and each one of
those marriages was monogamous. So you were committed to monogamy.
You never committed to a human being, to a person,
(24:57):
you committed to that to an idea, I committed to
Terry and he committed to me. I have no idea
where that copy of the Ethical Slut is now. Wasn't
quite my cup of gasoline. These many years later, I
(25:19):
still generally regard myself as a monogamist, though I'm single
at the moment, so maybe a nonpracticing monogamist an aspiring monogamist.
But I find myself less surprised and less scandalized by
the array of romantic arrangements. Even falling hard for someone
doesn't mean that they're the only one. Polyamory might even
(25:39):
alleviate some of the intense pressures and stresses imposed by
expectations of perfect fidelity and I'm personally more eager to
design a relationship based on the specific desires of the
people in it, rather than a blind allegiance to a
societal script. Meaningful commitments can be made with or without
monogamous agreements. It's some of us might skip the romantic
(26:01):
buffet altogether, and some of us still queue up to
board the relationship escalator hoping for their goat. There's a
lot of people, you know, one love might not fitt all.
Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American public
media co production with I Heart Media. It's hosted by Mesa.
(26:26):
Find me online at Dessa on Instagram and Dessa Darling
on Twitter. We humans are real sensitive to power dynamics.
We key into one another's body language, vocal register, patterns
of eye contact, all possible cues as to who is
Alpha at this particular business meeting or birthday party or
(26:47):
whatever next time on deeply Human. Why do we form
social hierarchies
Years ago, a man I loved very much handed me
a book called The Ethical Slut. It's essentially a how
to guide for non monogamous relationships. This title was emphatically
not on my Christmas list. This man and I had
been struggling for a long time to try to sort
out a viable relationship. We were on again, off again tears, ultimatums,
(00:29):
and I could not believe he had the goal to
hand me this book. Weren't we working through trust issues already?
Hadn't we just started to see a therapist, and with
so much work to do, he's out here looking for
permission to get something on the side. I felt like
I'd gone to a tea party and been served a
Molotov cocktail. The man, on the other hand, seemed to
(00:52):
think this book could actually help us. When my temper cooled,
which it did at geological place, I reassessed the situation.
I had several well adjusted friends in non monogamous arrangements.
Some cultures even expect people to have more than one
mate at a time. Okay, I got ahead of myself. High. Hello,
(01:18):
I'm Dessa. This is deeply human and together we are
going to rummage around your intuitions about romantic love, monogamy,
and its alternatives. For the word Nerds in the room ahead,
(01:39):
put your hands down, I see you. Yes. Monogamy strictly speaking,
describes being married to only one person, but we're using
it here as we do in casual conversation to describe
having a sexual relationship with only one person at a time.
Monogamy is definitely the norm where I grew up, But
why should romantic relationships be exclusive when other relationships don't
(02:03):
have to be? Like, we can love more than one sibling,
more than one parent, and if we run into a
friend having lunch with someone else, we don't flip the
table over. So why was I so reluctant to even
consider a more open relationship? If you're committed loving relationships
have been exclusive. Is that the product of a conscious
(02:23):
choice or just social conditioning? Why do our relationships have
to be one at a time? First, let's talk about monogamy.
We need to talk about it the way we talk
about sobriety. You can fall off the wagon, sober back up,
and get back on the wagon. And I'm here to
tell people, and I'm often in the position of having
to tell people in monogamous relationships, that it's the person
(02:47):
you were with for forty years only cheated on you
once or twice. They were good at it, not bad
at it. They were good at it, good at monogamy.
My name is Dan Savage, and I write Savage Love,
which is syndicated sex and or relationship and ice column
that I've been writing for thirty years, and I also
host the Savage Love Cast. And a lot of people
are interested in what Dan has to say on this
(03:08):
stuff because podcast is crazy popular. He's written a best
selling book, and what he says is that our understanding
of monogamy is in serious need of an overhaul. Western
convention usually presupposes that love and monogamy go hand in hand,
like if you love someone and the relationship is serious,
you're exclusive and if someone cheats, well, that's grounds for
(03:32):
media termination. We ask for perfect fidelity, but we don't
expect perfection from our partners and other aspects of the relationship.
And Dan thinks that's sort of absolutism about monogamy, sort
of heartless. If you're with somebody for ten twenty years, kids,
you merged finances, social networks, families, and it comes out
(03:54):
of your partner has cheated on you five years ago
and you find out about it, maybe that's something you
should be able to get past. By placing so much
weight on sexual fidelity, monogamists might set themselves up to
throw away a good thing if somebody misses up. Dan
himself is married and he's been with his husband, Terry,
for a very long time, and over the course of
(04:16):
their relationship, they revised the terms of their arrangement. My
relationship with Terry twenty years ago, we were mostly monogamous.
When we were having sex. It was almost always usually
with each other, but sometimes, you know, when the planets aligned,
we could have sex with other people together or separately.
But as an out gay couple in the middle of
(04:38):
the marriage equality debate and as parents, when we told
people we were in, you know, not monogamous, people made
assumptions about troops of men, strange men coming in and
out of our house at all hours of the day
and night. You know, it feels like like the mainstream
popular imagination we conceptualized like the opposite of monogamy as
(04:59):
either jact loneliness or NonStop promiscuity. Oh my god. Yeah,
that's why I coined the term monogamoush I kept saying
mostly monogamous, and so I just thought we were monogamous
with some squish. There are so many terms for the
(05:21):
many ways to have a modern relationship. If you found
yourself referencing a dog eared copy of Urban Dictionary to
decipher the acronyms on Tinder, you might have also run
across E n M or ethically non monogamous, or words
like polyamory or open relationship where everybody's got permission to
see other people. When Dan talks about non monogamy, he
(05:42):
doesn't sound like a hedonist throwing weekday orgies. He sounds
kind of prim When will we stop pretending that relationships
have to be defined by the sexual connection that may
have brought that relationship together at the start? When will
we stop putting so much emphasis on sucks? But I
feel that you do you due diligence to say, like,
(06:04):
you know, I'm a favor of monogamy if you choose that,
and I wanted to work for you, But then I
I don't believe. I feel like you talk about monogamy
like a needle exchange program, like if you can't quit it,
then here's the way to try to do it safely. Yeah.
I guess if you're going to do this dangerous, stupid,
reckless thing, you should do it as safely as possible. Yeah.
(06:26):
I mean, I can see that there are advantages in
a monogamous relationship. Also myself having been in monogamous relationships,
you know a certain amount of emotional security, definitely, you
know sexual safety. The monogomous relationship I was in for
five years was high to the HIV AIDS epidemic. It
kept us safe. It's probably one of the reasons I'm
(06:48):
alive now. Even though we weren't perfectly monogamous, or I
wasn't the entire time we together. Dan since built a
life where important relationships can be plural rather and strictly singular.
The first person I knew to really commit to a
non monogamous lifestyle, let's call him Roy. We've had an
(07:10):
actor voice up his bits and will explain why in
a second. Roy met his now wife when they were teenagers.
We've been together since we hugged in a play in
high school. Wait did you hug in a play? Because
that was like written into the script of the play. Yes, okay, cool,
And then you were like I think also off stage,
(07:31):
we should also just hug until um we're dead. Right.
Somewhere near the end of our college years was when
we decided to be non monogamous, and maybe two years
after that is when we got married. The decision to
open up their relationship was sparked by a request from
(07:53):
a female friend of Royce. She was lesbian, looking to
get pregnant, wanted to do with the analog way, and
so she asked if roy would be willing to have
sex with her. Roy said he'd consider it, but obviously
he had to talk about it with this partner. I
shouldn't say as a name, right, all right, my first
(08:14):
big crush was Janine Garoffalo, so I'll say Janine. So
me and Janine were out for dinner. A brief interruption
for a little exposition for those of you who missed
the nineties cult classic reality bites. Janine Garoffalo is a
comic and an actor. Former Saturday Night Live cast member
with dark hair, quick wit, expressive features. A favorite of
(08:37):
progressive bookish boys back in high school. Roy carry on. So,
me and Janine were out for dinner, and I brought up, Hey,
my friend asked today if I could get her pregnant,
what do you think? And it started this whole conversation
and we kind of figured out like, oh, actually, like
(08:58):
the physical part of it as an a comfortable if
we're being honest, The part about cheating that we were
scared of that seems the most harmful was the like
lying and the sneaking about it, and if we erased
that part of it, that the physical part didn't seem
like it would be that much of a challenge. You know,
we'd been together at that point years and years, and
(09:20):
it felt like we had been totally honest with each other,
but one conversation that we had never had was the
honest I'm attracted to other people conversation. We just kind
of pretended that that we weren't. We finally like admitted, like, yes,
as I walk through the world, I notice other people
that are attracted or that are attractive, and I am
(09:44):
attracted to them. And so we started the conversation of like, well,
what would it look like if we got to pursue
some of that attraction And we talked about it and
discussed and wrote and rewrote rule rules and read books
for I mean probably six months or more before either
(10:05):
of us actually went out on a date with anybody.
Slowly and cautiously, they started to see other people, which
at first confused the daylights out of their friends twenty
years ago or whatever. It was like, it was hard
to find information about it, and it was hard to
like to find other people that knew a lot about it.
(10:26):
And most people we were telling would be like, so
you're breaking up and it's like no, and and they're
like I thought things were okay with you guys, and
it's like no, actually, like this is a sign that
things are really good. That were like so comfortable that
we're messing with it and like trying something else. Being
(10:49):
very thinky people, Roy and Jeanine were deliberate about trying
to make connections with people who were already living a
non monogamous lifestyle successfully many years ago. We went to
like a local polyamory meet up and it was at
a Turtle Bread. We were sitting there and this is
(11:09):
like where like a month then, where we haven't even
started dating anyone yet. We're just looking for people to
talk to and listener. I must interrupt here. Turtle Bread
is like a homey, neighborhood Minneapolis bakery slash restaurant place
that makes a subway sandwich shop look like Studio fifty four.
It's just like very mild mannered um like mom jeans
(11:33):
dog bowl out front. It's like norm core with carbs.
So when you kiss on the mouth four people in
a row in the middle of the Midwest at a
turtle bread, you've been noticed at that point by everyone
in the restaurant, right, Like, it's a fairly public display.
That wouldn't tend to happen there, And so we were like,
(11:54):
that's maybe not our vibe. But they did end up
finding other Polly friends that were a better fit and
didn't creet with Tom. We kind of just like talked
about like science and art and politics, and like we
were just kind of we were like, oh, we're just,
you know, fairly like minded and curious and interested people.
In those early years, however, Roy was worried the choices
(12:17):
he made in his private life could be professionally risky.
He's worked in public service for a very long time,
and over his career has been recognized with some significant accolades.
I've been doing the job that I've been doing now
for over fifteen years, and I think when I was
newer and the world was maybe different than it is now.
I was very worried that, like, if this was a
(12:38):
public thing, it's possible I would just get fired or
demoted or shelved in some way, just because like the
place I work wouldn't want that kind of reputation attached
to it. I mean, I think it's anyone who's doing
something not heteronormative, not whatever, can be looked at as perverts.
(12:59):
You know. For me, my life feels very very normal.
But the most immediate motive for discretion. The reason we've
got an actor doing Roy's side of the conversation. His family,
Janine Garofalo's family is very, very conservative. It seems natural
(13:24):
to have strong feelings about our own love lives, but
we've also got such intense emotions about how other people
are loving other people, even if they seem happy. Why
some people react like as if my open relationship is
a threat to their monogamous relationship, you know, not that
like I'm trying to sleep with their partner or anything,
(13:46):
but just like the existence of open relationships or people
that might be happy in those is some sort of
message of danger to the relationship they have. And I
think that's true of like a lot of ways of
living that have been norm When there's an alternative presented,
people can be really uncomfortable with that or feel like
(14:06):
it's an attack when you know it's obvious people are
living their own life. Sexual exclusivity is part of the
predetermined course that a romantic relationship is expected to follow.
So where is this course supposed to be heading exactly?
Philosopher Luke Brunning describes it as the relationship escalator. In
(14:31):
our society, we typically think that relationships ought to deepen
over time. Right that you start off, you meet someone,
you might get to know them a bit, perhaps you
start dating them. Then over time you might become exclusive.
Then you might say, oh, now this person's my boyfriend.
Then people will actually say, ah, you know, when you're
gonna get engaged, when you're gonna get married. Let's say
(14:51):
you get married. Then they might start asking when are
you're gonna buy a house or have children. It's on
and so forth. So the relationship exclated this really simple
idea that once you're in a relationship, that relationship has
to sort of change and involve over time to become
more complicated, more committed in a way that ends up
with your lives practically and often legally. Entwined Luke is
(15:16):
a lecturer at the University of Birmingham and the UK
who researches personal relationships and the philosophy of emotions. I
asked how popular monogamy is these days, like who's doing
it and where. I'd say that as an ideal, monogamy
is kind of spread around the world, so it's practiced
fairly widely. There are some exceptions, but even in countries
(15:38):
in the Middle East or some parts of the African continent,
monogamy is increasingly taking hold as a romantic ideal am
I think of it sort of as a as one
of many cultural exports. You know, is it like the
new Drake record spreads around the world, or is it
the fact that you have communities that are landing on
this form independently of one another. I think the answer
(15:59):
would be a bit of It's certainly something that's been exported.
Christian miscenaries and colonizes in general have done a lot
to help promote this as an ideal. I don't spend
a lot of time kicking it in missionaries circles personally,
but while monogamy is an ideal may be spreading around
the world. In practice, Americans anyway, may be more likely
to try other models. Researchers from the Kinsey Institute and
(16:23):
Chapman University in the US surveyed single Americans about polyamory.
One out of six people expressed a desire to engage
in polyamory, and what out of nine said they've done
it at some point in their life. But in trying
to sort stuff out with the X who handed me
that book, I remember wondering if a predilection for monogamy
(16:45):
was just sort of baked into some people and not others,
and if so, asking someone to change seemed at best
feudal and at worst like proselytizing. Luke says that modern
lifestyles may have something to do with the kind of
relayation ships who find attractive. Today. For example, many young
people are living less settled lives than they used to.
(17:06):
They don't live in the same place for a very
very long amount of time. The idea of owning a
house with a picket fence and a garden full of
you know, goats and vegetables and the and their their
single partner is something that many people just find very
hard to envisage at all, Right, And that's not because
they can't imagine it, but because they think it's inaccessible
(17:29):
for them. People are much more sort of networked individuals
these days, drawing sources of kind of emotional, social, cultural
satisfaction and stability from all kinds of different people in
their lives. I just want to make sure that there
was one moment that I heard correctly. Did you say
a house with a picket fence and a garden and
a goat? Yes? Okay, cool, thank you. That says a
(17:54):
lot about me. I gotta up my own. I gotta
up my own fairytale game. Monogamy is embedded in the
very first stories we learned about love. I think fairy
tales Cinderella is essentially monogamy as foot fetish. But are
(18:17):
those norms as relevant and resonant for someone like sexpert
Dan Savage in the same sex relationship in heterosexual land?
I think like commitment and monogamy are often like this
two for one bundled package. Does that work similarly in
the gay world? No, and it never has. I'm fifty
(18:38):
six years old. I came out when I was sixteen
seventeen years old. And monogamy was always the conversation, it
was negotiated, it was opt in, and for straight people,
monogamy has always seemed to be a default setting from
the very first night a couple spends together. Dan says
that gay relationships necessarily involve a lot of talking. When
(19:00):
a man and a man are going to bed together
for the first time, they don't get to consent and
stop communicating. They get to consent, yes, let's have sex,
and then they keep talking because what's going to happen
next isn't obvious, can't be assumed. You have to talk
about what you want to do, what your desires are.
Straight people avoid that conversation. Straight couples might just presume
(19:23):
they agree with sex should be what a relationship should be,
whereas gay couples don't have the same scripts to lean on,
so they got to negotiate every step. What do you
actually want out of this? What should we build together?
Dan Savage is one man leading one life who has
not been elected official representative of gay people around the globe,
(19:44):
but in his worldview, monogamy is just not the gold
standard of romantic connection. I don't think gay men are
failing at monogamy. I think gay men are succeeding at
relationships and non monogamy. Okay, enough about love for a minute,
let's talk money. It's time for econ. I'm Marina at Shade.
(20:04):
I'm assistant professor at the Vancouver School of Economics at
the University of British Columbia, and my specialization is the
economics of sex and love. So from the economic vantage points,
what are the incentives for monogamous relationships? Well, throughout history,
there's been a lot of incentives for monogamous relationships, particularly
from men. Men in general historically haven't been big fans
(20:28):
of putting their resources into children that are not their own,
and so there's been a lot of incentive for women
to be monogamous so that men are raising other men's children.
And then the idea of like institutionalized monogamy, like living
in a society that really really frowns upon people having
multiple sexual partners, That really comes out of the idea
(20:48):
that you know, you can't supervise somebody all the time,
So what you do is you set up a system
that is either system of just like social norms or
religion or laws. The great that structure so that when
you're not around the other person, mostly the woman here
is not off having sexual relationships with other people. Marriage,
it's worth noting, hasn't always been considered a fundamentally romantic endeavor.
(21:16):
In the past, marriage was much more of an economic relationship.
People got married to produce a household, essentially to produce children.
But in much of today's world that's changed more hallmark
less labor forced marriage started to being about other things.
It started being about more about love and companionship and
(21:37):
about the joy of spending time with another person. And
then once you make marriage more about those things, then
it opens it up to other possibilities because it's no
longer and economic relationship. If it's just about love and companionship,
then why not have a triad? Right dang Marina, quick
turn on that one. Also, technological and inss have changed
(22:01):
our attitudes about how sex and relationships fit together, and
so as birth control technology comes better and better, then
the incentives change. Right, You're less concerned that your partner
is going to go off and have a baby with
someone else if she is sexually active with another man,
and so that will erode away some of the incentives
to enforcing monogamy and relationships. If our incentives for sexual
(22:25):
exclusivity of a rooting, does that mean that monogamy is
on its way out and rom coms are dead and
Cinderella just stays out all night barefooted and abisa phone party.
M h, not yet. I know. We see a lot
of studies where we say that young people, you know,
the next generation that's coming up, is kind of less
tied to the idea of monogamy. They're more open to
(22:47):
having relationships with multiple people. Um, it's gonna be really
interesting to see once they get a little bit further
on in their lives and their children become involved, whether
or not they'll be as receptive to those ideas, and
that I think we still have to wait and see.
When I took honest stock of my own resistance to polyamory,
(23:09):
at least a part of me was concerned about being judged.
I worried what people might think, which is allows you
a way to make big and fundamentally personal choices, and
I want my decisions on who and how to love
to be based on the gossip at in neighbor's house.
But people do pass sweeping judgments on other people's love
lives Roy was worried about it. Dan Savage, the Love
(23:31):
and Sex columnist, says his relationship has been dismissed out
of hand for not adhering to convention, like it just
wouldn't count. It used to only be people who are
monogamous telling those of us who are not a monogamoust
that we were doing love wrong, or that we weren't
in love, and that if we were in love, we
couldn't do this. I don't look at monogamous people and
(23:51):
say you're not in love, because if you were really
in love, you'd be having three ways. I never say
that to monogamous people. It's the mixing monogamy love that
that really harms, not open relationships like mine, but monogamous relationships.
Dan suggests that monogamous arrangements actually de emphasize the sexual
aspect of a relationship and in doing so, can strengthen
(24:13):
the emotional connection that so many of us seem so
concerned about. And as for him and his husband Terry,
they are salad. We've been together almost thirty years now,
and yet despite having been together for three decades, I
have been in the position a numerous occasions where someone
will look at me and say, as we're talking about relationships,
(24:34):
I could never do what you and Terry do because
I value commitment too highly. All of my marriages have
been monogamous. Unpack that, like Terry and I've been gether
for three decades, we aren't committed to each other. And
you have been married multiple times and each one of
those marriages was monogamous. So you were committed to monogamy.
You never committed to a human being, to a person,
(24:57):
you committed to that to an idea, I committed to
Terry and he committed to me. I have no idea
where that copy of the Ethical Slut is now. Wasn't
quite my cup of gasoline. These many years later, I
(25:19):
still generally regard myself as a monogamist, though I'm single
at the moment, so maybe a nonpracticing monogamist an aspiring monogamist.
But I find myself less surprised and less scandalized by
the array of romantic arrangements. Even falling hard for someone
doesn't mean that they're the only one. Polyamory might even
(25:39):
alleviate some of the intense pressures and stresses imposed by
expectations of perfect fidelity and I'm personally more eager to
design a relationship based on the specific desires of the
people in it, rather than a blind allegiance to a
societal script. Meaningful commitments can be made with or without
monogamous agreements. It's some of us might skip the romantic
(26:01):
buffet altogether, and some of us still queue up to
board the relationship escalator hoping for their goat. There's a
lot of people, you know, one love might not fitt all.
Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American public
media co production with I Heart Media. It's hosted by Mesa.
(26:26):
Find me online at Dessa on Instagram and Dessa Darling
on Twitter. We humans are real sensitive to power dynamics.
We key into one another's body language, vocal register, patterns
of eye contact, all possible cues as to who is
Alpha at this particular business meeting or birthday party or
(26:47):
whatever next time on deeply Human. Why do we form
social hierarchies
Popular Podcasts
1. Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
2. Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
3. Crime Junkie
If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people.