Rebecca Woolf of Girl’s Gone Child says
I never got around to posting the following Momversation _[article that sparked this episode perpetuates paranoia, guilt and “omg I touched my friend’s knee and he was a dude and I’m a chick and it totally turned me on I SHOULD CONFESS TO MY HUSBAND because I’m an awful CHEATING CHEATER!”
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I personally stand by the following when it comes to marriage and monogamy be it physical, emotional et al: Animals stray because they feel caged. People cheat because they feel trapped. There is nothing more attractive to a caged bird* than an open sky. Remove the cage? There’s no need to fly away. (*Please pardon the cliché)
Yup. I’m pretty sure of two things. First, that the rate of extra-relationship activity in “open” relationships isn’t significantly higher than in “closed” ones. (Or, to put emphasis where it belongs, the rate of extramaritality doesn’t appear to be any lower in closed relationships.) Second, though, is that I’m pretty sure most affairs aren’t the direct cause of most relationship breakups, I’m also pretty sure that obsessiveness derived of guilt, jealousy, and/or anxiety can lead to the alienation that does cause a lot of breakups. (For instance both guilt and suspicion lead to possibly unnecessary distancing.)
Which leads to another apt clichés “don’t let yourself drown in knee-deep water” There’s a strong tendency to panic about what you think you’re most supposed to worry about, with the result that the panic about a situation does more damage than the actual situation would have.
Submitted by 3055 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-07-11 11:11.
Excessive jealousy is bad - I think everyone can agree on that. Similarly having one partner force a set of behavior on the other so they feel caged is also bad. On the other hand, I think the closed relationship as cage metaphor over looks the real possibility that for many people happiness/comfort comes from setting boundaries and walling off areas of privacy/intimacy.
Most humans I know don't actually live outside under the stars on a daily basis. Cages limit our view of the sky but so do houses (they generally come with locks as well). Of course a house unlike a cage allows you to go in and out when you chose - but for most people there are things they are most comfortable doing in their own home.
Submitted by 3055 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-07-11 16:55.
Some people are strictly monogamous - there can only ever be one person for them. Some are polyamorous - one person can never be enough. Some are in between - they'd be best off with a few short-term romantic and/or sexual flings over their lifetime even if they happen to be in a long-term relationship with someone else at the time. Some are "serial monogamists", who only have a relationship with one at a time but lose interest when someone else comes along. (It's questionable whether this is actually normal or whether most are really dysfunctional polyamorists.) Everyone is different. It's assuming that everyone is a strict monogamist that causes problems.
reCaptcha: washroom orgy
Submitted by 3055 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-07-12 21:47.
It's all tremendously complicated.
I know people who can't deal with closed relationships (the 'feeling caged' thing) but who are happily in long-term relationships with a single partner and have no other interests or prospects, because it's the hemming that gets them.
I know people whose serious attractions shut down when they hit a certain number of stable relationships - for several varying numbers. (I am one of these people, which means I get royally pissed at poly people who insist that there are no really monogamous people; if I shut down at 2, I see no plausibility reason that someone else mightn't shut down at 1!)
I know people who want strong lines between stable relationships and just for fun ones, and really want to have both in their lives.
Lots and lots of different varieties. I could go on.
Captcha: 'plain panty'
Submitted by 3055 (not verified) on Mon, 2009-07-13 21:33.
I'm pretty sure serial monogamy is not dysfunctional polygamy; for one thing, it's really not the case that everyone's serial monogamy takes the form of one relationship ending when a new interesting person shows up. Sometimes relationships just end due to other mismatches. A whole lot of people I know are largely serially monogamous until they meet the person they're more long term monogamous with, and, while serially monogamous, follow a pattern of finding new people only after they've broken up with the old ones for whatever reason.
To a degree, I'm one of those who says that no one's naturally monogamous - but when I say that kind of thing, I have ideal "traditional marriage" monogamy in mind - the kind where you only ever sleep with one person, till death do you part (at which point you can pick another till death do you part), and are theoretically not supposed to even be lusting in your heart after anyone else. And where you'd just naturally find it easy to be faithful always for life and in every circumstance, even if, say, the two of you are seriously on the outs, or if, say, you're stuck living miles apart for a long time, or if, say, one of you is gravely ill and you have no sex life for a long time. That kind of monogamy, I'm skeptical of (even though, when I've been significantly attracted to more than one person at all, I've tended, like Dw3t-Hthr, to max out at two), and even the most traditionally monogamous don't seem to much believe in, since such monogamy tends to be treated as "every man's battle" (though without always much acknowledgement that it can be a woman's battle, too). I think, mostly, even monogamous people are capable of desiring someone else, or of finding some circumstance, in the course of a whole lifetime, where monogamy might prove difficult.
But, that said, I don't really agree with figleaf about "the rate of extramaritality doesn't appear to be any lower in closed relationships." I've seen lots of widely varying estimates of how much sex people are supposedly having outside "closed" marriages, everything from most such marriages involving cheating to most such marriages not involving cheating (with a huge gap between the high and low estimates, and no one using anything remotely like random samples). But even the very highest estimates for cheating on closed relationships involve large percentages, both of husbands and wives, not cheating - I'd be really surprised if you'd find such high percentages as that of people in open relationships never taking advantage of said openness.
I'd also be really surprised, given that people vary a lot in their desire for monogamy vs. variety, if people's sorting of themselves into open vs. closed relationships didn't track at all with their desires. Sure, some people may promise fidelity who have little desire to deliver, and some people may be in open relationships who got prodded by a partner into an arrangement that they really don't want, but is it really likely that people who choose closed relationships have exactly the same desire for multiple partners as people who choose open ones?
Submitted by 3055 (not verified) on Mon, 2009-07-13 23:36.
Side note: open relationship/closed relationship is not the same as polyamory/monogamy; there are closed polyamorous relationship systems.
(I say 'systems' rather than 'relationships' because some polyfolk, like me, do not have 'a relationship' containing multiple people, but multiple relationships ....)
As to cheating - I know of a fair number of poly people whose response to the concept of ethical nonmonogamy was "You mean I don't have to cheat?!" I also know of a fair number of poly people who were cheated on under a poly ruleset -- who basically then had to deal with the extra trauma of "And they didn't have to lie to me."
Cheating is complicated. Some people get off on it itself. Some people find it more acceptable than honest multiple relationships (I ran into someone once who declared that it was totally fucked up that someone asked me for permission to pursue my husband). Some people don't know how to maintain boundaries in the face of the "I was swept away by events" mythos. I honestly don't know how the rates might differ between monogamous and nonmonogamous communities.
The psychology of the whole thing is beyond my kenning.
Submitted by 3055 (not verified) on Tue, 2009-07-14 05:56.
"Cheating is complicated. Some people get off on it itself."
In a way, I can even relate to this; though I don't get off on actually cheating myself in itself, I do tend to find movie sex scenes hotter when they're adulterous. I suppose it's my version of liking to watch other people breaking the rules.