Divisible Love

Hadn't we just started to see a therapist, and with so much work to do, he's out here looking for permission to get something on the side. I felt like I'd gone to a tea party and been served a Molotov cocktail. The man, on the other hand, seemed to think this book could actually help us. When my temper cooled, which it did at geological place, I reassessed the situation. I had several well adjusted friends in non monogamous arrangements. Some cultures even expect people to have more than one

mate at a time. Okay, I got ahead of myself. High. Hello, I'm Dessa. This is deeply human and together we are going to rummage around your intuitions about romantic love, monogamy, and its alternatives. For the word Nerds in the room ahead, put your hands down, I see you. Yes. Monogamy strictly speaking, describes being married to only one person, but we're using it here as we do in casual conversation to describe having a sexual relationship with only one person at a time.

Monogamy is definitely the norm where I grew up, But why should romantic relationships be exclusive when other relationships don't have to be? Like, we can love more than one sibling, more than one parent, and if we run into a friend having lunch with someone else, we don't flip the table over. So why was I so reluctant to even consider a more open relationship? If you're committed loving relationships have been exclusive. Is that the product of a conscious

choice or just social conditioning? Why do our relationships have to be one at a time? First, let's talk about monogamy. We need to talk about it the way we talk about sobriety. You can fall off the wagon, sober back up, and get back on the wagon. And I'm here to tell people, and I'm often in the position of having to tell people in monogamous relationships, that it's the person you were with for forty years only cheated on you once or twice. They were good at it, not bad

at it. They were good at it, good at monogamy. My name is Dan Savage, and I write Savage Love, which is syndicated sex and or relationship and ice column that I've been writing for thirty years, and I also host the Savage Love Cast. And a lot of people are interested in what Dan has to say on this stuff because podcast is crazy popular. He's written a best selling book, and what he says is that our understanding

of monogamy is in serious need of an overhaul. Western convention usually presupposes that love and monogamy go hand in hand, like if you love someone and the relationship is serious, you're exclusive and if someone cheats, well, that's grounds for media termination. We ask for perfect fidelity, but we don't expect perfection from our partners and other aspects of the relationship. And Dan thinks that's sort of absolutism about monogamy, sort

of heartless. If you're with somebody for ten twenty years, kids, you merged finances, social networks, families, and it comes out of your partner has cheated on you five years ago and you find out about it, maybe that's something you should be able to get past. By placing so much weight on sexual fidelity, monogamists might set themselves up to

throw away a good thing if somebody misses up. Dan himself is married and he's been with his husband, Terry, for a very long time, and over the course of their relationship, they revised the terms of their arrangement. My relationship with Terry twenty years ago, we were mostly monogamous. When we were having sex. It was almost always usually with each other, but sometimes, you know, when the planets aligned, we could have sex with other people together or separately.

But as an out gay couple in the middle of the marriage equality debate and as parents, when we told people we were in, you know, not monogamous, people made assumptions about troops of men, strange men coming in and out of our house at all hours of the day and night. You know, it feels like like the mainstream popular imagination we conceptualized like the opposite of monogamy as

either jact loneliness or NonStop promiscuity. Oh my god. Yeah, that's why I coined the term monogamoush I kept saying mostly monogamous, and so I just thought we were monogamous with some squish. There are so many terms for the

many ways to have a modern relationship. If you found yourself referencing a dog eared copy of Urban Dictionary to decipher the acronyms on Tinder, you might have also run across E n M or ethically non monogamous, or words like polyamory or open relationship where everybody's got permission to see other people. When Dan talks about non monogamy, he

doesn't sound like a hedonist throwing weekday orgies. He sounds kind of prim When will we stop pretending that relationships have to be defined by the sexual connection that may have brought that relationship together at the start? When will we stop putting so much emphasis on sucks? But I feel that you do you due diligence to say, like, you know, I'm a favor of monogamy if you choose that, and I wanted to work for you, But then I

I don't believe. I feel like you talk about monogamy like a needle exchange program, like if you can't quit it, then here's the way to try to do it safely. Yeah. I guess if you're going to do this dangerous, stupid, reckless thing, you should do it as safely as possible. Yeah. I mean, I can see that there are advantages in a monogamous relationship. Also myself having been in monogamous relationships, you know a certain amount of emotional security, definitely, you

know sexual safety. The monogomous relationship I was in for five years was high to the HIV AIDS epidemic. It kept us safe. It's probably one of the reasons I'm alive now. Even though we weren't perfectly monogamous, or I wasn't the entire time we together. Dan since built a life where important relationships can be plural rather and strictly singular. The first person I knew to really commit to a

non monogamous lifestyle, let's call him Roy. We've had an actor voice up his bits and will explain why in a second. Roy met his now wife when they were teenagers. We've been together since we hugged in a play in high school. Wait did you hug in a play? Because that was like written into the script of the play. Yes, okay, cool, And then you were like I think also off stage, we should also just hug until um we're dead. Right.

Somewhere near the end of our college years was when we decided to be non monogamous, and maybe two years after that is when we got married. The decision to open up their relationship was sparked by a request from a female friend of Royce. She was lesbian, looking to get pregnant, wanted to do with the analog way, and so she asked if roy would be willing to have sex with her. Roy said he'd consider it, but obviously

he had to talk about it with this partner. I shouldn't say as a name, right, all right, my first big crush was Janine Garoffalo, so I'll say Janine. So me and Janine were out for dinner. A brief interruption for a little exposition for those of you who missed the nineties cult classic reality bites. Janine Garoffalo is a comic and an actor. Former Saturday Night Live cast member with dark hair, quick wit, expressive features. A favorite of

progressive bookish boys back in high school. Roy carry on. So, me and Janine were out for dinner, and I brought up, Hey, my friend asked today if I could get her pregnant,

what do you think? And it started this whole conversation and we kind of figured out like, oh, actually, like the physical part of it as an a comfortable if we're being honest, The part about cheating that we were scared of that seems the most harmful was the like lying and the sneaking about it, and if we erased that part of it, that the physical part didn't seem

like it would be that much of a challenge. You know, we'd been together at that point years and years, and it felt like we had been totally honest with each other, but one conversation that we had never had was the honest I'm attracted to other people conversation. We just kind of pretended that that we weren't. We finally like admitted, like, yes, as I walk through the world, I notice other people that are attracted or that are attractive, and I am

attracted to them. And so we started the conversation of like, well, what would it look like if we got to pursue some of that attraction And we talked about it and discussed and wrote and rewrote rule rules and read books for I mean probably six months or more before either of us actually went out on a date with anybody. Slowly and cautiously, they started to see other people, which at first confused the daylights out of their friends twenty

years ago or whatever. It was like, it was hard to find information about it, and it was hard to like to find other people that knew a lot about it. And most people we were telling would be like, so you're breaking up and it's like no, and and they're like I thought things were okay with you guys, and it's like no, actually, like this is a sign that things are really good. That were like so comfortable that

we're messing with it and like trying something else. Being very thinky people, Roy and Jeanine were deliberate about trying to make connections with people who were already living a non monogamous lifestyle successfully many years ago. We went to like a local polyamory meet up and it was at a Turtle Bread. We were sitting there and this is like where like a month then, where we haven't even started dating anyone yet. We're just looking for people to

talk to and listener. I must interrupt here. Turtle Bread is like a homey, neighborhood Minneapolis bakery slash restaurant place that makes a subway sandwich shop look like Studio fifty four. It's just like very mild mannered um like mom jeans dog bowl out front. It's like norm core with carbs.

So when you kiss on the mouth four people in a row in the middle of the Midwest at a turtle bread, you've been noticed at that point by everyone in the restaurant, right, Like, it's a fairly public display. That wouldn't tend to happen there, And so we were like, that's maybe not our vibe. But they did end up finding other Polly friends that were a better fit and

didn't creet with Tom. We kind of just like talked about like science and art and politics, and like we were just kind of we were like, oh, we're just, you know, fairly like minded and curious and interested people. In those early years, however, Roy was worried the choices he made in his private life could be professionally risky. He's worked in public service for a very long time, and over his career has been recognized with some significant accolades.

I've been doing the job that I've been doing now for over fifteen years, and I think when I was newer and the world was maybe different than it is now. I was very worried that, like, if this was a public thing, it's possible I would just get fired or demoted or shelved in some way, just because like the place I work wouldn't want that kind of reputation attached to it. I mean, I think it's anyone who's doing something not heteronormative, not whatever, can be looked at as perverts.

You know. For me, my life feels very very normal. But the most immediate motive for discretion. The reason we've got an actor doing Roy's side of the conversation. His family, Janine Garofalo's family is very, very conservative. It seems natural to have strong feelings about our own love lives, but we've also got such intense emotions about how other people

are loving other people, even if they seem happy. Why some people react like as if my open relationship is a threat to their monogamous relationship, you know, not that like I'm trying to sleep with their partner or anything, but just like the existence of open relationships or people that might be happy in those is some sort of

message of danger to the relationship they have. And I think that's true of like a lot of ways of living that have been norm When there's an alternative presented, people can be really uncomfortable with that or feel like it's an attack when you know it's obvious people are living their own life. Sexual exclusivity is part of the predetermined course that a romantic relationship is expected to follow. So where is this course supposed to be heading exactly?

Philosopher Luke Brunning describes it as the relationship escalator. In our society, we typically think that relationships ought to deepen over time. Right that you start off, you meet someone, you might get to know them a bit, perhaps you start dating them. Then over time you might become exclusive. Then you might say, oh, now this person's my boyfriend. Then people will actually say, ah, you know, when you're gonna get engaged, when you're gonna get married. Let's say

you get married. Then they might start asking when are you're gonna buy a house or have children. It's on and so forth. So the relationship exclated this really simple idea that once you're in a relationship, that relationship has to sort of change and involve over time to become more complicated, more committed in a way that ends up with your lives practically and often legally. Entwined Luke is a lecturer at the University of Birmingham and the UK

who researches personal relationships and the philosophy of emotions. I asked how popular monogamy is these days, like who's doing it and where. I'd say that as an ideal, monogamy is kind of spread around the world, so it's practiced fairly widely. There are some exceptions, but even in countries in the Middle East or some parts of the African continent, monogamy is increasingly taking hold as a romantic ideal am I think of it sort of as a as one

of many cultural exports. You know, is it like the new Drake record spreads around the world, or is it the fact that you have communities that are landing on this form independently of one another. I think the answer would be a bit of It's certainly something that's been exported. Christian miscenaries and colonizes in general have done a lot

to help promote this as an ideal. I don't spend a lot of time kicking it in missionaries circles personally, but while monogamy is an ideal may be spreading around the world. In practice, Americans anyway, may be more likely to try other models. Researchers from the Kinsey Institute and Chapman University in the US surveyed single Americans about polyamory. One out of six people expressed a desire to engage in polyamory, and what out of nine said they've done

it at some point in their life. But in trying to sort stuff out with the X who handed me that book, I remember wondering if a predilection for monogamy was just sort of baked into some people and not others, and if so, asking someone to change seemed at best feudal and at worst like proselytizing. Luke says that modern lifestyles may have something to do with the kind of relayation ships who find attractive. Today. For example, many young people are living less settled lives than they used to.

They don't live in the same place for a very very long amount of time. The idea of owning a house with a picket fence and a garden full of you know, goats and vegetables and the and their their single partner is something that many people just find very hard to envisage at all, Right, And that's not because they can't imagine it, but because they think it's inaccessible

for them. People are much more sort of networked individuals these days, drawing sources of kind of emotional, social, cultural satisfaction and stability from all kinds of different people in their lives. I just want to make sure that there was one moment that I heard correctly. Did you say a house with a picket fence and a garden and a goat? Yes? Okay, cool, thank you. That says a lot about me. I gotta up my own. I gotta up my own fairytale game. Monogamy is embedded in the

very first stories we learned about love. I think fairy tales Cinderella is essentially monogamy as foot fetish. But are those norms as relevant and resonant for someone like sexpert Dan Savage in the same sex relationship in heterosexual land? I think like commitment and monogamy are often like this two for one bundled package. Does that work similarly in the gay world? No, and it never has. I'm fifty six years old. I came out when I was sixteen

seventeen years old. And monogamy was always the conversation, it was negotiated, it was opt in, and for straight people, monogamy has always seemed to be a default setting from the very first night a couple spends together. Dan says that gay relationships necessarily involve a lot of talking. When a man and a man are going to bed together for the first time, they don't get to consent and

stop communicating. They get to consent, yes, let's have sex, and then they keep talking because what's going to happen next isn't obvious, can't be assumed. You have to talk about what you want to do, what your desires are. Straight people avoid that conversation. Straight couples might just presume they agree with sex should be what a relationship should be, whereas gay couples don't have the same scripts to lean on, so they got to negotiate every step. What do you

actually want out of this? What should we build together? Dan Savage is one man leading one life who has not been elected official representative of gay people around the globe, but in his worldview, monogamy is just not the gold standard of romantic connection. I don't think gay men are failing at monogamy. I think gay men are succeeding at relationships and non monogamy. Okay, enough about love for a minute, let's talk money. It's time for econ. I'm Marina at Shade.

I'm assistant professor at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia, and my specialization is the economics of sex and love. So from the economic vantage points, what are the incentives for monogamous relationships? Well, throughout history, there's been a lot of incentives for monogamous relationships, particularly

from men. Men in general historically haven't been big fans of putting their resources into children that are not their own, and so there's been a lot of incentive for women to be monogamous so that men are raising other men's children.

And then the idea of like institutionalized monogamy, like living in a society that really really frowns upon people having multiple sexual partners, That really comes out of the idea that you know, you can't supervise somebody all the time, So what you do is you set up a system that is either system of just like social norms or religion or laws. The great that structure so that when you're not around the other person, mostly the woman here

is not off having sexual relationships with other people. Marriage, it's worth noting, hasn't always been considered a fundamentally romantic endeavor. In the past, marriage was much more of an economic relationship. People got married to produce a household, essentially to produce children. But in much of today's world that's changed more hallmark less labor forced marriage started to being about other things. It started being about more about love and companionship and

about the joy of spending time with another person. And then once you make marriage more about those things, then it opens it up to other possibilities because it's no longer and economic relationship. If it's just about love and companionship, then why not have a triad? Right dang Marina, quick turn on that one. Also, technological and inss have changed our attitudes about how sex and relationships fit together, and so as birth control technology comes better and better, then

the incentives change. Right, You're less concerned that your partner is going to go off and have a baby with someone else if she is sexually active with another man, and so that will erode away some of the incentives to enforcing monogamy and relationships. If our incentives for sexual exclusivity of a rooting, does that mean that monogamy is on its way out and rom coms are dead and Cinderella just stays out all night barefooted and abisa phone party.

M h, not yet. I know. We see a lot of studies where we say that young people, you know, the next generation that's coming up, is kind of less tied to the idea of monogamy. They're more open to having relationships with multiple people. Um, it's gonna be really interesting to see once they get a little bit further on in their lives and their children become involved, whether or not they'll be as receptive to those ideas, and that I think we still have to wait and see.

When I took honest stock of my own resistance to polyamory, at least a part of me was concerned about being judged. I worried what people might think, which is allows you a way to make big and fundamentally personal choices, and I want my decisions on who and how to love to be based on the gossip at in neighbor's house. But people do pass sweeping judgments on other people's love

lives Roy was worried about it. Dan Savage, the Love and Sex columnist, says his relationship has been dismissed out of hand for not adhering to convention, like it just wouldn't count. It used to only be people who are monogamous telling those of us who are not a monogamoust that we were doing love wrong, or that we weren't in love, and that if we were in love, we couldn't do this. I don't look at monogamous people and say you're not in love, because if you were really

in love, you'd be having three ways. I never say that to monogamous people. It's the mixing monogamy love that that really harms, not open relationships like mine, but monogamous relationships. Dan suggests that monogamous arrangements actually de emphasize the sexual aspect of a relationship and in doing so, can strengthen the emotional connection that so many of us seem so concerned about. And as for him and his husband Terry,

they are salad. We've been together almost thirty years now, and yet despite having been together for three decades, I have been in the position a numerous occasions where someone will look at me and say, as we're talking about relationships, I could never do what you and Terry do because I value commitment too highly. All of my marriages have been monogamous. Unpack that, like Terry and I've been gether

for three decades, we aren't committed to each other. And you have been married multiple times and each one of those marriages was monogamous. So you were committed to monogamy. You never committed to a human being, to a person, you committed to that to an idea, I committed to Terry and he committed to me. I have no idea where that copy of the Ethical Slut is now. Wasn't

quite my cup of gasoline. These many years later, I still generally regard myself as a monogamist, though I'm single at the moment, so maybe a nonpracticing monogamist an aspiring monogamist. But I find myself less surprised and less scandalized by the array of romantic arrangements. Even falling hard for someone

doesn't mean that they're the only one. Polyamory might even alleviate some of the intense pressures and stresses imposed by expectations of perfect fidelity and I'm personally more eager to design a relationship based on the specific desires of the people in it, rather than a blind allegiance to a societal script. Meaningful commitments can be made with or without monogamous agreements. It's some of us might skip the romantic buffet altogether, and some of us still queue up to

board the relationship escalator hoping for their goat. There's a lot of people, you know, one love might not fitt all. Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American public media co production with I Heart Media. It's hosted by Mesa. Find me online at Dessa on Instagram and Dessa Darling on Twitter. We humans are real sensitive to power dynamics.

We key into one another's body language, vocal register, patterns of eye contact, all possible cues as to who is Alpha at this particular business meeting or birthday party or whatever next time on deeply Human. Why do we form social hierarchies