| SOPi_Jawbreaker |
11-22-2005 04:46 PM |
Sort of along the lines of what you're saying about changing what faithful means, this is an excerpt from Dan Savage. He's a sex columnist. He's gay but he answers questions from gays and straights. I actually really like a lot of what he says. He's pretty liberal but I think he gives good advice. Anyways, I thought he has some really interesting things to say about monogamy.
Quote:
"I think that gays, especially gay male couples, have a sense of realism about male sexuality that it would benefit the whole country to adopt which is, and I promote this in my column all the time, which is that monogamy is not easy or natural," Savage continued. "I say this to women in my column, to straight women, if a guy is your partner, monogamous for 40 years, and only cheated on you a half a dozen times, he was really good at being monogamous. Because monogamy is hard. And you know, we've set up our relationships and our expectations that not only should monogamy be easy, but it's proof of love and devotion: you are successfully effortlessly monogamous. And for most men monogamy is a struggle and I think it puts a strain on a relationship." That's not to say that Savage is advocating sleeping around or cheating on your partner. "I think there needs to be all sorts of controls in place if you're going to build in a little outside sexual contact, as it's called, to protect the primacy of your relationship and your emotional bond, the primacy of your sexual relationship, your physical health and safety," he said.
Savage has such an arrangement with Terry. "Terry and I found [outside sexual contact] a really effective way to bottle the lightening that usually strikes and destroys many relationships. And it doesn't threaten us," he said. "Having that off the table and having that bottled and controlled in this way that allows for it under certain rare circumstances, makes our relationship stronger and likelier to last in the long run."
Monogamy can work for some couples, he said, but the couple has to agree on the definition.
"I've had many instances where I've met a monogamous couple and later been speaking with one of them and said, 'So you're monogamous?' and the guy will look at me and go, 'Well, yes and no.' And what that means is 'yes he is, no I'm not.' And I prefer things above board than not above board. But then the monogamous guys freak out when you say this because you're basically accusing everybody who's in what they believe is a monogamous relationship is either lying or they're being deceived."
But statistics show, said Savage, that many long term relationships will have outside sexual contact. "Do you want to set up your relationship in such a way that when that near inevitability occurs you're destroyed and your relationship falls apart? Or do you want to set it up in such a way that when that happens it's something you can either work through or survive because you don't place too much importance on it, or, you know, in the case of Terry and I, it's something that you did together and you had a blast and you still like to talk about, and, you know, it actually was fuel for your own sexual connection."
While he may be skeptical about monogamy, he is in favor of restraint.
"I think that one of the things that gay men particularly need to borrow from straight people is, whether you believe it's genetic or your believe it's culture, heterosexual women and female sexual reserve acts as a check on male heterosexual licentiousness," he said. "Women won't go to bath houses. If they would there would be straight bathhouses. But women won't do that. Women won't go to the park in the middle of the night and have sex with men they can't see."
"[Gay men] have to find that check within ourselves and we have to find that check within our relationships, too, particularly if we're going to allow for a little outside sexual contact so it doesn't spin out of control," he continued. "Straight people need to have more sex than they do, gay people need to have less sex than they can. And you lesbians need to stop having lesbian bed death. You're letting down the team."
A healthy and active sex life, said Savage who has been with his partner over 10 years, is essential for relationship longevity. "Sex is the cement that you put in place, you know, in the first 10 or 20 or 30 years of a relationship so the last 10 or 15 years of changing Depends happens. It's just the glue that holds you together during your physical dissolution in old age," he said.
|
|
