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These stories make a critical point—many affairs are less about sex than about desire: the desire to feel desired, to feel special, to be seen and connected, to compel attention. All these carry an erotic frisson that makes us feel alive, renewed, recharged. It is more energy than act, more enchantment than intercourse.
When we channel all our intimate needs into one person, we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.
Monogamy used to mean one person for life. Now monogamy means one person at a time.
Never before have our expectations of marriage taken on such epic proportions. We still want everything the traditional family was meant to provide—security, children, property, and respectability—but now we also want our partner to love us, to desire us, to be interested in us. We should be best friends, trusted confidants, and passionate lovers to boot. The human imagination has conjured up a new Olympus: that love will remain unconditional, intimacy enthralling, and sex oh-so-exciting, for the long haul, with one person. And the long haul keeps getting longer.
Hence we no longer divorce because we’re unhappy; we divorce because we could be happier.
The constant awareness of ready alternatives invites unfavorable comparisons, weakens commitment, and prevents us from enjoying the present moment.
6 For many, love is no longer a verb, but a noun describing a constant state of enthusiasm, infatuation, and desire. The quality of the relationship is now synonymous with the quality of the experience. What good is a stable household, a good income, and well-behaved children if we are bored? We want our relationships to inspire us, to transform us. Their value, and therefore their longevity, is commensurate with how well they continue to satisfy our experiential thirst.
We used to get married and have sex for the first time. Now we get married and we stop having sex with others.
When marriage was an economic arrangement, infidelity threatened our economic security; today marriage is a romantic arrangement and infidelity threatens our emotional security.
(It is uncanny how the fear of loss can rekindle desire.)
envy relates to something you want but do not have, whereas jealousy relates to something you have but are afraid of losing.
Sex trades on the thrill of discovering, over and over again, that we are unknown to ourselves. . . . What makes for adventure is not only the novelty of the Other, although that helps, but the Otherness of the self. —Virginia Goldner, “Ironic Gender, Authentic Sex”
Spot on
it’s more about feeling sexy than having sex.
Human beings have a tendency to look for things in the places where it is easiest to search for them rather than in the places where the truth is more likely to be found.
Morin’s now-famous “erotic equation” states that “attraction plus obstacles equal excitement.”6 High states of arousal, he explains, flow from the tension between persistent problems and triumphant solutions. We are most intensely excited when we are a little off-balance, uncertain, “poised on the perilous edge between ecstasy and disaster.”
“there is always a suspicion . . . that one is living a lie or a mistake; that something crucially important has been overlooked, missed, neglected, left untried, and unexplored; that a vital obligation to one’s own authentic self has not been met or that some chances of unknown happiness completely different from any happiness experienced before have not been taken up in time and are bound to be lost forever if they continue to be neglected.”
Modern romance makes a new and tantalizing promise: that we can satisfy both needs in one relationship. Our chosen one can be at once the steady, reliable rock and the one who can lift us beyond the mundane.
Reconciling the erotic and the domestic is not a problem to solve; it is a paradox to manage.
The prominent sexuality researcher Robert Stoller describes this kind of objectification as an essential ingredient of sexuality—not treating the other as an object, but seeing the other as an independent sexual being. It creates the healthy distance that allows you to eroticize your partner, which is essential if you want to remain sexual with a person who becomes family.
Sexuality is the sanctioned language through which men can access a range of forbidden emotions. Tenderness, softness, vulnerability, and nurturance have not traditionally been encouraged for men.
The great gifts of contemporary Western culture—democracy, consensus building, egalitarianism, fairness, and mutual tolerance—can, when taken too punctiliously in the bedroom, result in very boring sex.
when one partner unilaterally decides there will be no (or very little) sex, that is not monogamy—it’s enforced celibacy.
Commentators on sexless marriages have decided that fewer than ten times a year might as well be nothing. Who knows how they came up with that number? Fifteen to 20 percent of couples apparently belong to this category. So if you have sex eleven times a year, consider yourself blessed.
up to 20% have sex less than once per month!
Consensual nonmonogamy means that both partners have equal say in the decision to take unfulfilled hankerings elsewhere. In contrast, infidelity is a unilateral decision, in which one person secretly negotiates the best deal for themselves.
Neither of them wants a divorce, so we engage in a dialogue on commitment and trust that expands the definition of loyalty and fidelity beyond the narrow frame of sexual exclusivity.
To this day, emotional and sexual rejection don’t get the same press as lascivious wanderings. When we treat infidelity as the mother of all betrayals, we collectively resist a necessary reckoning, as couples and as a culture, with the complexity of marriage.
negotiated freedom is not nearly as enticing as stolen pleasures.
I see the conversation about ethical nonmonogamy as a valiant attempt to tackle the core existential paradoxes that every couple wrestles with—security and adventure, togetherness and autonomy, stability and novelty.
Sex with others isn’t only about being with others. “It is perhaps more accurate to consider it a rather intricate, perhaps dangerous, method of teasing and arousing the primary partner.”
Consensual nonmonogamy requires both sexual diversity and intimacy, crossings and barriers.
Freedom saddles us with the burden of having to know what we want.
“Couples who successfully negotiate sexual nonexclusivity,” he wrote, “are, whether or not they are conscious of it, being genuinely subversive, in one of the most constructive ways possible . . . by challenging the patriarchal notion that there is only one ‘proper’ and ‘legitimate’ (hetero-normative) way that loving relationships should and need to be conducted.”
Their first marriage was over, and they could never get it back, but they chose to have a second one.
Katherine Frank argues persuasively that the “marital safety narrative” creates its own demise. When a couple tries to safeguard their relationship through various forms of surveillance and self-policing, they risk setting themselves up for the exact opposite: the “enhanced eroticization of transgressions.”4 The more we try to suppress our primal longings, the more forcefully we may rebel.
The more we try to suppress our primal longings, the more forcefully we may rebel.
Our romantic ideals are too entangled with the belief that a perfect marriage should deafen us against the rumblings of eros.
Moreover, when we acknowledge the existence of the third, we affirm the erotic separateness of our partner. We admit that as much as we may want it to, their sexuality does not revolve solely around us. They may choose to share it only with us, but its roots are far-reaching. We are the recipients, not the sole sources, of their unfurling desires.
Domestic deadness is often a crisis of imagination.
