Relationships

Sexual relationships of a positive sort can broadly be divided into three categories along an axis of intimacy:

• Impersonal:  This is when you hardly know the person you're interacting with, and don't connect with them except to take pleasure in the physical experience of sex.  It's much like masturbating with the other person's help, and like masturbation, it can be powerful and beautiful, but also disappointing if what you really want is something more.  Still, there's nothing wrong with such interactions as long as both parties understand what's going on, want to participate, and take responsibility for avoiding any transmission of disease or unintended pregnancy.  Quite often, impersonal relationships develop into friendships, and even sometimes pair bonds. 
• Friendship-based:  This is a diverse category of relationships that involve both sex, affection, some level of intimacy and a bond of friendship and trust.  It includes everything from casual "fuck-buddy" relationships on the one hand to deep, abiding, lifelong loves on the other.  What it does not include is the mating commitment of a pair bond. 
• Pair-Bonded:  These are primary mating relationships, the emotional infrastructure of "marriage," usually formed with one other person at a time.  While it's certainly possible to enter into multiple pair bonds simultaneously, the emotional investment in each is large enough that many people find it hard to sustain more than one at a time. 

In mainstream American culture, marriage is the dominant model for sexual relationships, and friendship-based interactions are generally regarded in the context of mate-seeking — as failed marriage opportunities or stopgap measures on the way to finding the perfect match.  Before discussing friendship-based relationships, then, it may be helpful to look at marriage more closely. 

Marriage: a Cultural Institution

Although marriage is often regarded as an almost universal cultural overlay on humans' biological propensity to pair-bond, this is not always the case — in some cultural contexts, marriage is simply an arrangement to have procreative sex with as little intimacy as is needed to get the job done, or even with hostility.

Classical Athens stands as an example — marriage frequently involved little or no friendship between the partners, and marital relations between the sexes were generally poor.  In that situation, men's urge to pair-bond commonly expressed itself in relations of relative equality with courtesans, and in relationships that combined sex and parental nurturance with pubescent boys.  Wives also presumably found surreptitious ways to pair-bond, but little information comes down to us about how they commonly went about it. 

In 21st-century America, things may be better, but our marriage institutions still too often result in unnecessary misery, desperation and heartache for large numbers of people.  This is increasingly widely recognized, but rather than trying to understand what's wrong with the institution, many of the groups trying to "save marriage" think the solution is to conform more rigidly to rules that have never worked in the first place. 

Marriage: Essentially a Pair Bond

Just to clarify where I'm coming from here, I myself have been married twice, once for twenty years, and once for over thirteen years and counting.  Although marriage as traditionally practiced in America has always seemed to me wrong-headed, I've enjoyed and treasured the two long-term committed primary relationships I've been in. Also, of all the many wonderful things I've experienced, one of the most amazing, fun and miraculous has been to have children.  In those respects, I'm pretty traditional. 

To me, however, the essential part of marriage has had nothing to do the social institution — instead, it's all about the deep attachment that forms over time when two people live together intimately.  It feels as if you gradually put down roots into each others' hearts over the years, becoming bound to each other more and more strongly as time goes on.  Then, if you ever have to pull those roots up, the process is incredibly painful. 

A marriage counselor once told me that when a couple breaks up, the grieving process generally requires around a month for every year they've been together.  This rule of thumb certainly held for me — getting divorced after twenty years was the most painful thing I've ever been through, and I was an emotional mess for a year or more.  Certainly it was at least 20 months before I felt reasonably healed. 

I suspect, incidentally (though I have no evidence for this), that orgasm helps mediate the growing of those deep emotional roots.  I've always felt much closer to my partner after orgasm, in that deep way that I associate with the pair bond. 

So if you're "just living together," you should be aware that although you may be escaping the immediate social consequences of marriage, you're still quite likely to form a pair bond that will effectively leave you married in the end.  That's a good argument for making a conscious decision and a conscious commitment rather than slipping into the bond without meaning to. 

Pair-Bonds are Blind to Gender

The idea that marriage only occurs between men and women makes no sense to me, since gay relationships result in pair-bonding in exactly the same way straight ones do.  To deny this seems highly discriminatory, grossly ignorant, and quite ridiculous — it's comparable to asserting that only Southern Baptists can really marry, or only polygamists, or only young people. 

All the fear-filled fuss over gay marriage also assumes that marriage is a sacrament that religious authority can grant or withhold, which has not always been the case even in Western Europe.  In fact, Christian churches didn't get directly involved in marrying people until the fierce competition of the Reformation made a more intrusive presence in people's lives a marketing necessity.  Before the Council of Trent in 1572, marriage was regarded by the Catholic Church as a sacrosanct private contract between two individuals.  Church courts did uphold the contract much as civil family courts do today, and people celebrated their unions with public declarations and parties just as we do, but marriage itself could occur in the privacy of the bedroom simply by the agreement of the parties involved. 

You might ask why gay people care, since the mainstream institution of marriage in America is so often a failure.  If your private marriage is working, why would you align it with an institution that routinely causes so much damage?  On the other hand, though, wouldn't you want to be treated equally and fairly — wouldn't you want your private marriage to be accorded just as much respect as anyone else's? 

One thing for certain is that gay people do marry all the time, whether mainstream society acknowledges those marriages or not.

Marriage: Make Sure You Own the Archetype

Given that most of us find ourselves in a pair bond at some point during our lives, often for an extended period, it's useful to have a way of thinking about the situation, a model, an intellectual form that helps us make good decisions about it.  This is surprisingly important.  Even within the very flawed form that American culture offers, publicly and consciously acknowledging a pair bond can be a transformative and significant step.  It's part of maintaining your integrity, of keeping your heart and mind aligned and allied with each other. In this sense, marriage as an archetype can be very valuable. 

At the same time, the mainstream American marriage archetype has a tendency to isolate and frustrate couples — it's rigid, simplistic and unrealistic.  It still has overtones of inequality, in which one partner or the other has to "wear the pants" and run the show, instead of an explicit premise of equal responsibility, equal contribution, and equal commitment.  It insists on a lifelong duration, which allows it to dispense with adequate safeguards against the devastation that divorce often creates.  By ruling out sex outside of the marriage, it stimulates jealousy and encourages deceit.  It comes along with all kinds of economic expectations that often trap its participants in careers they hate.  It makes no provision for time for yourself.  It has no concept of renegotiating commitments that aren't working.  It doesn't come with useful instruction manuals or troubleshooting guides, and there aren't many free support groups where you can go to find out you're not alone when you're struggling with difficulties.  It's a mess. 

So whatever you do, don't settle for the mainstream American archetype!  Take full ownership of your own pair bond and of the archetype you choose to associate with it.  Do the work to figure out exactly what you want your relationship to look like and what you hope for it.  Leave a lot of room to change that vision with your partner in a mutual way as you both grow and change.  Make real commitments to each other and stick to them, but don't commit to things that stand between you and your dreams.  Make your marriage real, on your own terms! 

Marriage: Staying Faithful

The most important single factor in making a long-term (or short-term) relationship successful is creating and maintaining trust. 

One of the things that happens in a pair bond is that the two partners become intensely and increasingly vulnerable to each other.  In order to stay intimate in the face of this vulnerability, they have to work hard both not to hurt each other, and also not to blame each other for old hurts that arise that the other person is really not responsible for. 

The kind of pain that almost inevitably comes up as a pair bond matures is pain left over from relationships with parents and siblings.  The closer you get to your partner, the more some deep part of you starts expecting the same things to happen as happened in your family when you were a child.  Although there's not a lot you can do to prevent this expectation, you can at least recognize it, and work together to protect yourselves from getting caught in negative patterns of your respective childhoods. 

One of the most common and painful wounds that couples can inflict on each other is to break trust because of attraction to another person.  Our culture has a whole vocabulary of betrayal around this: if you have sex with someone other than your partner, you're being "unfaithful," you're "cheating on" them.  At the same time, married people are constantly engaging in extra-marital sex.  Helen Fisher in Anatomy of Love has documented that this is the norm not only in human cultures but also in many "monogamous" animal species. 

As a result, it's worth making a very clear distinction here:

• Breaking trust in any important way, by being unfaithful or undependable or disloyal or by cheating or lying or not keeping your commitments, is about the most destructive thing you can do to your pair bond.  Once lost, trust is very hard to regain, and its loss often takes good sex away with it.
• Having friendships, flirting, and even having sex outside of your pair bond does not have to break trust in any way provided that the agreements and commitments you and your partner have made do accommodate this, and provided you continue to conduct yourself in an honest, open, dependable and loyal fashion. 

So, when you create your own archetype of marriage, you might want to ask yourself whether it would be better to leave the door open for attraction and/or sex with other people in an honest fashion rather than forcing it to happen as a breach of trust.  At the very least, create a context within which this issue can be discussed and re-examined over the years, so that you both continue to know where you stand on it.  Jealousy is hard, but if your partner is really pair-bonded with you, outside relationships are unlikely to threaten your marriage nearly as much as a single real betrayal and loss of trust would. 

However, establishing an open relationship isn't something you can easily do at the last moment, when one of you has suddenly become infatuated with somebody else.  Neither can it work if it's a one-sided thing — as, for instance, when one partner feels dissatisfied with the relationship and is trying to use outside sex as an exit strategy.  Protecting and emphasizing the primary commitment to the pair bond is essential.  You have to maintain that trust in order to make outside relationships safe. 

One reason it's hard for a lot of people to set up an open relationship is that our society tends to be so repressive about sex that when you open the prison doors, people tend to think there are no boundaries at all to what they can do.  Because they're used to having all their decisions in this area made for them by repressive social norms, they don't realize how many real-life constraints on behavior there are.  In fact, of course, once you do start making your own decisions, you quickly discover that a lot of self-restraint, patience, generosity, kindness, honesty and courage are required — all that stuff nobody ever told you was essential to great sex. 

Yet another problem is that we all have unconscious expectations and patterns within us, usually from our teenage years, that kick in once we start courting again.  This means that many people initially find themselves trying to create a new pair bond, which of course threatens the one they already have.  It's hard to figure out in your own emotional body how to have a sexual friendship with someone that can become very deep and lasting, but that doesn't involve commitments that threaten your marriage. 

Also, traditional masculine roles in our culture tend to make it more comfortable for a man to have sex with someone he doesn't care about as much, and traditional feminine roles tend to make outside sex look like a threat to a woman's material security. 

Of course, once you get past the traditional fears, women like the excitement of courtship at least as much as men do, and once women realize how much fun it can be to have a lover after being married for a while, they start acting much more like guys about it.  Similarly, men usually realize after screwing around a bit that even though sex with someone you really care about may seem dangerous, it's a lot more interesting than impersonal sex. 

All that said, more and more people have found that they can have successful marriages that aren't hermetically sealed.  Allowing each other to have attractions, flirtations and even sexual relationships with other people can strengthen rather than erode the marriage bond, especially when you realize that your partner is with you not out of necessity but by free and happy choice, and that other friendships don't diminish that at all. 

An open relationship is not easy, but neither is any other approach to maintaining a pair bond.  If you're willing to commit to being honest, communicating openly without holding back, and hanging in there through the scary bits, you may want to consider trying it. A wonderful book on the subject, if you're interested, is Dossie Easton's and Catherine Liszt's, The Ethical Slut (see links for this and other resources). 

Impersonal Sexual Relationships

One of the big advantages of impersonal sexual relationships is that they require little emotional investment.  If you're dipping your toes in the water of relationships outside of a pair bond, the safety of impersonal relationships can look quite attractive. 

The swinger lifestyle, for example, which caters primarily to straight married couples, protects primary bonds by encouraging relatively impersonal interactions that involve little non-sexual intimacy.  This can be very exciting from a fantasy standpoint, and quite liberating too.  People who were reluctant to have sex with the light on can become comfortable not only being naked but even having sex in public.  Body issues and embarrassment about sex tend to go away once you see other people doing it.  Breasts and genitals turn out to be just parts of the body, in spite of how much we fetishize them, not so different from hands or feet.  Everyone turns out to look good naked, whether they're thin or fat, big or small.  It's really nice to understand these things. 

(A footnote on swinging: not all swingers practice safer sex, apparently on the theory that it's not that big a deal.  Well, it is that big a deal — once you have herpes, for example, you have it for life, and once you have AIDS, you generally die of it!  It's worth always practicing safer sex with anyone outside your pair bond, just as a matter of course.  That way, you can both feel more secure that you won't catch anything from each other.) 

The good news is, experiencing "orgies" and other forms of impersonal sex can let you see how innocuous and innocent physical sexual interactions generally are. 

The bad news is, you may also see that they're not nearly as wild and exciting as you thought they must be.  These sweet, sensuous, wonderful fields of fantasy are in the end limited by their impersonality to being forms of masturbation, and while masturbation is an important ongoing part of almost everyone's sex life, we do generally want more as well (see the masturbation page for more discussion of this). 

Friendship-based Sexual Relationship

What never fails to make sex wild and exciting is the danger that love brings.  Learning to love outside of a pair bond without threatening it is a big challenge in our culture, especially since the only model we have is the clandestine "affair," which seems a sad and unsatisfying paradigm for everyone involved. 

Also, as long as you're in the market for a pair bond, you tend to measure every sexual interaction you have against that goal.  You become accustomed to size up every lover as a potential soul mate.  You develop courtship habits that are goal-oriented. 

Things look very different when you've established a pair bond that allows for sex outside of it.  Now you can have sexual friendships that don't have to live or die based on their soul-mate potential.  Sex can now become a kind of binder of friendships, and friendship a basis for love. 

Where pair bonds tend to look somewhat alike and follow similar patterns, friendship-based relationships are much more diverse.  Some last a short time, some a long time, some are very intense, some are light and casual.  This is an area where people's experiences differ widely.  For me, the sexual part of such relationships often has a relatively short duration, while the resulting friendships are intense and lasting.  Other people have very different patterns. 

One thing that's clear is that we'd do well to have more and better paradigms for conducting love relationships which are not intended to become pair bonds.  So far, most of the people exploring this territory are pioneers who have no trouble creating their own private archetypes, but it'd be nice to have some public ones too.