So-called “open marriages,” involving sanctioned extramarital sex and relationships, are having their moment in the spotlight.
Let’s hope it passes.
In the last week, Vice, New York magazine and, for some reason, Bride magazine have all opened up on open relationships. There was the piece in The Post titled “It’s time to rethink cheating in marriage.” Barcroft TV in April brought us “POLY TRIAD: I’M DIVORCING MY HUSBAND SO WE CAN MARRY OUR GIRLFRIEND.” And The New York Times Magazine had an extended exploration of the subject called “Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?”
Not to ruin the ending, but no one who read that article came away thinking the answer was yes.
The Times piece focused mostly on a couple named Elizabeth and Daniel. He asked her to open their marriage; she said no. Years later, she became attracted to another man and decided she was into the open marriage thing after all. Without discussing it with Daniel, Elizabeth started a full-on affair. When Daniel expressed pain over the arrangement, she refused to end it.
Sounds amazing. Why aren’t more people into this?
Daniel eventually acquiesced and took up with a woman on the side as well, though the relationship didn’t last. Elizabeth continues to see her boyfriend — who, by the by, has a wife who isn’t even aware she’s involved in this postmodern marriage experiment.
That’s really the issue — with the Times piece and with open marriages in general. The consent makes it seem like it’s a victimless crime, but there always seems to be someone on the margins who either doesn’t know or isn’t strong enough to resist the arrangement, and ends up getting predictably hurt.
New York magazine takes a slightly different tack with the borderless marriage: It’s a feminist issue, you see.
Writer Kim Brooks interviews Claire Dederer, who has a new book out called “Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning.” Brooks writes: “Dederer tells the story of what happens when a devoted wife and mother in her 40s, a woman in a basically loving and healthy marriage, stops taking care of everyone, stops subsuming her own needs to those of her children and husband, stops repressing her unruly sexual desires, and starts acting like, well . . . a man.”
Which man is that, exactly? A man who stops caring about the needs of his wife and children is a role model now? Yes, men have midlife crises where they act out, get a fast car and a new girlfriend and, often, get divorced. But we don’t look at him and say, “That’s who I want to be.”
And what girl doesn’t dream of someday being in a marriage that’s “basically loving.”
In conversation, Brooks and Dederer conclude that men get to cheat without it being a referendum on their marriage while women don’t. Dederer says “For men, that’s the story of an affair, a story of his animal urges being served outside his marriage, and I don’t think the automatic assumption would be, Oh, his wife must be awful.”
That’s a straw man, but when trying to explain why sex outside your marriage is just the best, it’s hard to not go out on a limb.
In fact, we don’t give men who cheat a pass at all. In the 2008 book “Lust in Translation: Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee,” Pamela Druckerman explored how cheating is treated in cultures around the world. She found that Americans are among those most vehemently against outside relationships.
Adulterers in America are often in therapy to work through their cheating. Encouraging women to have outside relationships is one thing, but pretending it’s because we let men do it is absurd.
There are many different paths to happiness, and if yours involves agreeing with your spouse to sleep with other people, fine. But stop selling the rest of us on how society or the patriarchy made you do it or how monogamy isn’t a normal reflection of human nature. The fact is, you’re in a minority that manages to fight back evolutionary urges of possessiveness and expressions of jealousy.
But for how long? We are designed to protect what is ours from the outside world, and it’s entirely primal for a couple to shield their relationship from other people. Which is why the insistence that this break with history is what’s really normal, and that traditional families are the weird ones, is so unconvincing.