Hi. I wrote this angry. I’m not sure if, like driving or masturbating, it was a bad idea to do so. A friend shared this article (Do Friend’s With Benefits” Work?) from Salon.com’s sex page. I have already written about Friend’s With Benefits relationships and why dumb people are doing them poorly. (Why Your “Friends With Benefits” Relationships Keep Blowing up in Your Face) on SexIsFun.net (I originally titled it “How you are fucking up your Friends With Benefits Relationship.” Really, something about this topic makes me irrational.
The Salon article highlights a number of casual sexual relationships in which one partner is lying to another about their intent, their needs, or their emotions surrounding the relationship. Predictably enough, the relationships did not end well, you know, because they were casual.
Movies, forever and always, seem to reflect less a reality about human instincts and happiness and more an easily digested concept or a skewed version of what a healthy relationship really is. In every movie made before 1997 (this is fact, I checked), all the work done in a relationship done by a film’s protaganist is done finding the perfect person, or in committing three felony-level stalking offences in the name of romance. Once the two people get together (and the fifty-year-old woman with the perm and red bead necklace sitting in front of you in the theater gets the chance to lean to the woman next to her and whisper, “I knew it”), a sigh of deepest relief is breathed and a real or implied “happily ever after” is delivered to the audience to be devoured with their “not a lot... but more than that" fake buttered popcorn. So, now that the kids who grew up watching Disney’s The Beast domestically assault Disney’s “The Beauty” into marrying him, it’s time to ask the question: Does it work?
For some, sure. Chad, a 28-year-old gay guy living in... oh wait. He’s not allowed.
For some who have been legally deemed capable of committed partnerships, sure. My great-grandparents, for one, successfully (so far as I know) maintained a single, committed relationship from the time of their late-teens to their 90’s. They died within two days of each other and had a joint funeral, only a few weeks after celebrating their 75th wedding anniversary, and 75 years of walking to the mailbox together, every day, holding hands. They lived the fairy-tale. However, given that in German-Catholic Wisconsin culture placed such an emphasis on no-escape-baby-factory marriage, it was just more feasible, especially in largely rural areas where small children’s hands were constantly needed to fix delicate farm machinery. The couple, however, always maintained on strict boundary: no sex for fun. With all the procreating and raising of offspring going on, it was deemed that sex just for pleasure’s sake would add undo stress on the couple. It would just be too tiring.
No doubt. By the time your number of kids hits double digits, sex has to be just another chore to be fit between feeding chickens and scraping mud from the tracks of your work boots. When you talk to people who have been there and done that-- and even those who are continuing to engage in long-term monogamous relationships-- the response is overwhelmingly negative. As my own father told me when I was about six, “getting married was the largest mistake I’ve ever made, and I’ve made a lot of big mistakes.” Sure, I’m married now, and was even monogamous for the first five year of mine and Jenny’s relationship. I got married just a few months after my father’s cancer death, and now there’s even talk of a kid or two. There’s something comforting about the thought of procreating when faced with the reality of death. When you’re in a crisis of your own finality, there’s something comforting about someone who would have to go through a whole heck of a lot of paper work before they got to leave you to your panic attacks. Of course, when the married couple both rather proudly refer to themselves as “sluts” and invite their boy-and-girl-friends to the wedding -- there’s no ambiguity there.
Except in a lot of marriages, there is. My friend Mark, in his late twenties and married to Jen, has never for a moment intended on staying monogamous during his marriage. He believes that his wife and him have “an unspoken agreement,” based on a conversation in which she said, “If you ever cheat on me, I’d rather not know about it.” So, Mark cheats, Jen doesn’t know (except that she probably does), though Mark is very happy coming home, seeing artsy black and white wedding pictures on the wall, curling their sweat-pants-clad bodies pressed against each other on the couch on a Wednesday night -- their first names pressed together in conversation like they were conjoined twins. He realized he likes the idea of being married. Jen enjoys presenting the two of them as a team and maintaining their joint Facebook profile and constantly writing status updates about how “perfect” their relationship is, though everyone and the moon knows she’s lying.
As with any human relationship, there is deception of self and other, there are fantasies that go un-explored and emotions that much be avoided. (Yikes, I sound cynical. Oh, wait, I am cynical! There is no law of land or human condition that dictates that relationships be based on lies and deception. Yikes!) Mark tells me he really wants to have sex with lots of people, but can’t talk to his wife because, “it would get really dramatic.”
Of course, Mark’s marriage is far from unique and these long-term relationships are hardly new: I’m living proof, seeing as in the mid 70’s my parents felt obliged to settle down and have kids right out of college and ended up with four kids and all-encompassing distrust of people for the rest of their lives.
I could give you ten more examples of people in long-term-committed relationships -- I could use them all as proof that the structure of their relationship, colored with their drinking, working, or emotional state was at fault for their collapse --- and not their common denominator: lying. I could use lots of dashes and colons too. I could wrap everything up in a neat little bow at the end with a short shoulder-shrug “but I guess it works sometimes, right?” I could give you as examples a “gay guy” who pulls it off, you know, because he’s gay and that’s what gay guys do, and a couple that was monogamous until things got complicated and they started dating other people (oh wait, that’s me). I could keep trying to tear this article apart because relationship articles almost always bug the shit out of me, and because I live in an age of writers and commentators where it’s more important to be witty than right, and where a piece of a story is always easier to digest than the complexity of human relations. Well, if simple is what we like, simple I can do.
Let’s be honest here. Seriously... that’s it. Monogamous or not, casual or committed, let’s just be honest here. No one needs anyone (and me least of all) to tell them if something will or won’t work for them, or if something is right or wrong. Be honest to yourself, be honest to everyone involved. That’s it -- and don’t tell me honesty is too hard. Honest is the easiest option that works.
The Salon article highlights a number of casual sexual relationships in which one partner is lying to another about their intent, their needs, or their emotions surrounding the relationship. Predictably enough, the relationships did not end well, you know, because they were casual.
Does “Committed Monogamous Relationship” work?
As monogamy has gotten five generations of the Hollywood Treatment, I’m not alone in seeing them suck in the real world.
Movies, forever and always, seem to reflect less a reality about human instincts and happiness and more an easily digested concept or a skewed version of what a healthy relationship really is. In every movie made before 1997 (this is fact, I checked), all the work done in a relationship done by a film’s protaganist is done finding the perfect person, or in committing three felony-level stalking offences in the name of romance. Once the two people get together (and the fifty-year-old woman with the perm and red bead necklace sitting in front of you in the theater gets the chance to lean to the woman next to her and whisper, “I knew it”), a sigh of deepest relief is breathed and a real or implied “happily ever after” is delivered to the audience to be devoured with their “not a lot... but more than that" fake buttered popcorn. So, now that the kids who grew up watching Disney’s The Beast domestically assault Disney’s “The Beauty” into marrying him, it’s time to ask the question: Does it work?
For some, sure. Chad, a 28-year-old gay guy living in... oh wait. He’s not allowed.
For some who have been legally deemed capable of committed partnerships, sure. My great-grandparents, for one, successfully (so far as I know) maintained a single, committed relationship from the time of their late-teens to their 90’s. They died within two days of each other and had a joint funeral, only a few weeks after celebrating their 75th wedding anniversary, and 75 years of walking to the mailbox together, every day, holding hands. They lived the fairy-tale. However, given that in German-Catholic Wisconsin culture placed such an emphasis on no-escape-baby-factory marriage, it was just more feasible, especially in largely rural areas where small children’s hands were constantly needed to fix delicate farm machinery. The couple, however, always maintained on strict boundary: no sex for fun. With all the procreating and raising of offspring going on, it was deemed that sex just for pleasure’s sake would add undo stress on the couple. It would just be too tiring.
No doubt. By the time your number of kids hits double digits, sex has to be just another chore to be fit between feeding chickens and scraping mud from the tracks of your work boots. When you talk to people who have been there and done that-- and even those who are continuing to engage in long-term monogamous relationships-- the response is overwhelmingly negative. As my own father told me when I was about six, “getting married was the largest mistake I’ve ever made, and I’ve made a lot of big mistakes.” Sure, I’m married now, and was even monogamous for the first five year of mine and Jenny’s relationship. I got married just a few months after my father’s cancer death, and now there’s even talk of a kid or two. There’s something comforting about the thought of procreating when faced with the reality of death. When you’re in a crisis of your own finality, there’s something comforting about someone who would have to go through a whole heck of a lot of paper work before they got to leave you to your panic attacks. Of course, when the married couple both rather proudly refer to themselves as “sluts” and invite their boy-and-girl-friends to the wedding -- there’s no ambiguity there.
Except in a lot of marriages, there is. My friend Mark, in his late twenties and married to Jen, has never for a moment intended on staying monogamous during his marriage. He believes that his wife and him have “an unspoken agreement,” based on a conversation in which she said, “If you ever cheat on me, I’d rather not know about it.” So, Mark cheats, Jen doesn’t know (except that she probably does), though Mark is very happy coming home, seeing artsy black and white wedding pictures on the wall, curling their sweat-pants-clad bodies pressed against each other on the couch on a Wednesday night -- their first names pressed together in conversation like they were conjoined twins. He realized he likes the idea of being married. Jen enjoys presenting the two of them as a team and maintaining their joint Facebook profile and constantly writing status updates about how “perfect” their relationship is, though everyone and the moon knows she’s lying.
As with any human relationship, there is deception of self and other, there are fantasies that go un-explored and emotions that much be avoided. (Yikes, I sound cynical. Oh, wait, I am cynical! There is no law of land or human condition that dictates that relationships be based on lies and deception. Yikes!) Mark tells me he really wants to have sex with lots of people, but can’t talk to his wife because, “it would get really dramatic.”
Of course, Mark’s marriage is far from unique and these long-term relationships are hardly new: I’m living proof, seeing as in the mid 70’s my parents felt obliged to settle down and have kids right out of college and ended up with four kids and all-encompassing distrust of people for the rest of their lives.
I could give you ten more examples of people in long-term-committed relationships -- I could use them all as proof that the structure of their relationship, colored with their drinking, working, or emotional state was at fault for their collapse --- and not their common denominator: lying. I could use lots of dashes and colons too. I could wrap everything up in a neat little bow at the end with a short shoulder-shrug “but I guess it works sometimes, right?” I could give you as examples a “gay guy” who pulls it off, you know, because he’s gay and that’s what gay guys do, and a couple that was monogamous until things got complicated and they started dating other people (oh wait, that’s me). I could keep trying to tear this article apart because relationship articles almost always bug the shit out of me, and because I live in an age of writers and commentators where it’s more important to be witty than right, and where a piece of a story is always easier to digest than the complexity of human relations. Well, if simple is what we like, simple I can do.
Let’s be honest here. Seriously... that’s it. Monogamous or not, casual or committed, let’s just be honest here. No one needs anyone (and me least of all) to tell them if something will or won’t work for them, or if something is right or wrong. Be honest to yourself, be honest to everyone involved. That’s it -- and don’t tell me honesty is too hard. Honest is the easiest option that works.
4 comments:
I'm not sure how much I can extrapolate into America, because frankly, I don't live there...
But here in Australia at least, I get a sense that at least a small majority of the population is not quite so outraged about non-monogamous or alternate lifestyles. Most people just don't feel comfortable voicing that opinion for fear of being judged for it (I tried to write something insightful in http://www.lustandconfused.com/2010/10/complex-sex-society.html).
I think there is a strong disconnect between the way people talk about these subjects and what they actually themselves believe. And what stops them from being more open-minded is fear of being judged by their peers for something that ironically most of their peers probably think exactly the same way about. It's just that nobody dares be the first to admit it.
On the positive side, I (very subjectively and anecdotally) get the sense that things are slowly moving in the right direction. Every year people are a little less judgmental about the next taboo, and perhaps it'll take a decade, but I don't think it will be forever. Too many people just like too many hot and kinky things.
- Arthur
(And, keep up the good work!)
You do sound angry. I didn't realize how much until I actually read the Salon article and realized you were Mad-Libbing it with the, ahem, correct completion phrases. :)
Regardless, being angry is a good time to have crystal-clear insights (just like fucking is), and I thank you for yours. Honesty is the only thing that really matters. Not long ago I was reading on this topic and the writer (shit, may have been you) said that lies, or lies of omission, are told by people who don't want to deal with the other person's feelings and reactions. That seems to make lying exponentially more selfish than just not being real with yourself, but still sounds true.
I thought that the Salon article overall was pretty thoughtful, WITH the notable exception of the author's statement about "overwhelmingly negative," which is just a pure judgment and probably given to get herself and her readers off the hook from having to seriously consider these relationships. "I'm really curious, and can see myself in these stories, but it looks like in the end they don't really work out, so I guess I can scrap the discussion with my significant other. Whew!"
"No one needs anyone ... to tell them if something will or won’t work for them, or if something is right or wrong."
THAT. Right there. Is true.
A. and I are in agreement that you should post more often! We love your writing so much, and we are always checking our blogger feed for a new John Stark post!!!
-S. of onsexandnightskies.blogspot.com
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