The relationship ended soon after.
I told Savage that my fear in trying to have an open relationship with someone is that it would become a dangerously slippery slope. Maybe it wouldn’t venture into Raina territory, but I could still see things easily getting out of hand. Anytime I hear about couples experimenting like this, they eventually break up.
Savage didn’t accept that explanation.
“When a nonmonogamous relationship fails, everyone blames the nonmonogamy; when a closed relationship fails, no one ever blames the closed relationship,” he said.
Savage also explained that the nonmonogamous relationships that did work were built on a strong foundation.
“From my observations of many, many years and my personal experience, the relationships that are successfully monogamish or that have an allowance of an understanding were monogamous for years,” Savage told me. He also said both participants need to really want an open relationship and neither party can be wishy-washy. If it’s clearly a one-sided desire, it isn’t going to work.
The model ultimately seems built to address the fact that passionate love cannot last long-term, and that the foundation of a strong relationship is not perpetual excitement and intensity but a deep, hard-earned emotional bond that intensifies over time. In other words, companionate love.
Savage’s argument for more honesty about our desires is compelling. But for most people, in the United States at least, integrating outside sexual activity into a relationship is difficult to imagine. When I’d bring it up in casual conversations or in focus groups, there was massive skepticism. Some people were afraid that even bringing up such notions to their partner could lead to trouble in a relationship.
“If I brought up something like that to my wife,” one man said, “it would be a game changer in the relationship. If she wasn’t into it, I couldn’t take it back and say, ‘Oh no, I was just kidding, I don’t think about having sex with other people. That doesn’t appeal to me at all.’ Instead, the seeds of doubt would be planted, and I’d be screwed. It would open up a shit can of issues. And they would never go away.”
Others understood the rationale behind wanting an open relationship in theory, but they doubted that they could pull it off. “For me personally, I couldn’t be cool with it,” one woman at a focus group told us. “I want to be, but I couldn’t roll with it.”
Many women we met said if their boyfriend asked if they were willing to have a more open relationship, they’d start to doubt how serious he was. “At that point, why even be with someone?” one woman asked, with apparent disdain for the monogamish idea. “If you don’t want to be committed, just go jerk off.” (To be clear, she was talking to her hypothetical partner. She wasn’t telling me to leave the interview and go masturbate.)
Experts, even those who agree with Savage in theory, have also voiced concern about how realistic these arrangements are in practice. “I can certainly see the appeal of suggesting we try and make this an open, mutual, gender-equal arrangement,” said Coontz, the marriage historian. “I’m a little dubious how much that is going to work.”
Barry Schwartz, our authority on choice and decision making, also worried about the idea of trying to make choices and explore other options on the side. “When I was your age, open marriages became the vogue,” he told me. “All these high-powered, intellectual types were convinced they could have loving relationships with their partners and also sleep with other people. They were above the petty morality of their parents. Every single one of them ended up unmarried within a year of starting. So, at least back then, it couldn’t survive. Monogamy could not survive promiscuity.”
Maybe the person who puts this whole issue in perspective best is rapper Pitbull. In perhaps my favorite discovery in all of the research I’ve done for this book or life in general, I found an interview where he discussed how he has an open relationship with his girlfriend. Pitbull lives by the words Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente, or “What the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t feel.”
“People are stuck on what’s normal, what’s right, what’s wrong,” Pitbull said. “Maybe what’s right to you is wrong to me . . . What counts at the end of the day is everybody being happy.”6
I wish you knew how psyched I am to end this chapter on a deep, insightful thought from Pitbull.
CONCLUSION