Modern Romance (26 page)

In her case, however, having an open arrangement was not exactly ideal. When we asked why she and her partner did it, she explained that it wasn’t because she wanted more variety and sexual adventure in her own life. It was more of a protective mechanism, so that she didn’t risk her boyfriend straying from the relationship because of his interest in sleeping with other people. “I feel like he’ll probably cheat anyway,” she said, “and at least this way I’m controlling it.”

We met other people who had entered open relationships in which the two partners were not equally enthusiastic about the arrangement. A gentleman on the subreddit told us that he had agreed to an open relationship with a woman who wanted one because he didn’t want to lose her altogether. But, as he explains, that just turned out to be a long, painful way to get hurt:

I was so into her that I decided that being with her in an open relationship was better than nothing. Because I wasn’t really interested in anyone else it was mostly me being with her, and her being with a few other guys until she found someone she liked more than me. It was a weird situation. I’d call her up and be like, “Hey wanna go see a movie or grab dinner?” and she’d be like, “Oh. Awkward. I’m actually with Schmitty Yagermanjensen tonight.” Or she wouldn’t answer at all, which was even worse, because then I had to guess what she was doing . . . Being a placeholder sucks, and that’s pretty much how it was for me.

Another woman wrote that entering into an open relationship was “the worst decision I’d ever made.”

“When the going got tough, I was the one who got screwed over. Under the guise of ‘we all love each other and care about each other, primary and secondary come first,’ he slept with a third woman that I wasn’t comfortable with yet, and basically told me to f--- off. We don’t talk anymore,” she said.

Sometimes both parties are equally into creating an open arrangement—at least in theory. In practice, though, they soon discover that sleeping with other people can be a messy affair.

We met Raina, a woman who tried to strike such an agreement with her new husband. They moved to Hong Kong after getting married and agreed to allow outside sexual partners with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. They both were enthusiastic about entering an open relationship, but at a certain moment Raina found things had gone far beyond her expectations:

I thought I was being realistic. So I once had a conversation, and said I’m not gonna divorce you if there’s an indiscretion or two, but you have to be like the CIA about it. I don’t want to know about it. I don’t want to sniff it. You’ve got to be that level, so that it’s invisible.

But we had the secondary policy that if I ever wanted to know, that he had to tell the truth.

And so, we were on vacation for my birthday in Kyoto, and I asked.

He said, “I don’t think I want to tell you this on your birthday.”

And I thought, “Okay, so now I know that he’s doing something.”

And I said, “Well, why don’t you just tell me how many people?”

And then he said, “Give me a second.”

He needed to calculate it.

He came back with the following number.

And I want you to notice that at this point we’re 13 months into our marriage.

26.

26 individuals.

I was expecting one, maybe two.

I did not expect 26.

Well . . . happy birthday, Raina!

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.

WHEN I STARTED THIS BOOK,
I had a lot of burning questions about modern romance. The shenanigans we all have experienced often left me confused, frustrated, and angry. Trying to find love (or even something casual) in a romantic climate filled with endless scheduling texts and hurdles like Tanya’s “silencing” of 2012 can be a stressful experience.

Then, even after finding a great, healthy relationship with a loving partner, a whole new set of questions arose. I worried about settling down. Should I close all the exciting doors of today’s single world? If things start to feel routine and less exciting, is sexting going to make our romantic life any better? If I suspect that my partner has something going on the side, what are the ethics of looking at her Facebook or phone messages to find out? And if passionate love fades eventually, should I be seeking a long-term, monogamous relationship anyway?

I wrote this book because I wanted to better understand all the conundrums that come up in modern romance. So, after teaming up with an eminent sociologist, interviewing hundreds of people, consulting the world’s foremost experts on romance and relationships, conducting fieldwork in five countries, and reading a mountain of studies and books and news articles and academic papers, what exactly have I learned?

A lot, actually.

Here’s what I took away from this entire experience:

Finding someone today is probably more complicated and stressful than it was for previous generations—but you’re also more likely to end up with someone you are really excited about.

Our search for the right person—and even our idea of what “the right person” actually means—has changed radically in a very, very short amount of time.

If I had been a young person a few generations ago, I would have gotten married pretty young. Most likely, I would have wound up marrying some girl who lived in my neighborhood in my hometown of Bennettsville, South Carolina, around the time I was twenty-three. She would have been even younger, which means she would have been going straight from her father’s arms into mine, with no time to develop or pursue her own interests.

Let’s say her family owned the local Hardee’s franchise.
*

Her parents would meet me early on and decide I was a decent guy with a decent job who wasn’t going to murder anyone. We’d set off on a brief period of dating and then get married.

I’d run the Hardee’s and probably be pretty good at it. Maybe I’d catch wind of a guy who was running a huge “biscuit extortion” scam to smuggle biscuits across the border to Georgia. The scam would work like this: The guy and his partner would steal biscuits from our store and then sell the stolen biscuits at a lower cost on the biscuit black market. After getting suspicious of his frequent trips to Georgia, I would hide in the bed of a Ford F-150, under a bunch of biscuits, and when they reached their destination, I’d dramatically pop up and go, “GIMME BACK MY BISCUITS.”

The family would be proud.

Ideally, my wife and I would grow together and have a happy relationship. But maybe, as we grew, we’d become different people and realize the relationship wasn’t working. Maybe my wife would resent her homemaker role and have desires and goals beyond those afforded to women of the era. Maybe I’d be a dissatisfied grump who eventually joined Alfredo in a retirement home where we schemed for doughnuts on the reg.

But I don’t live in that era. When I hit twenty-three, I wasn’t thinking about marriage at all. Instead I got the chance to experience “emerging adulthood” and grow as a person. I met people from all over the world in this part of my life. I wasn’t limited to just the folks I knew in my neighborhood in Bennettsville. So as I grew older, I figured out my career, I dated people in New York and Los Angeles, and eventually I started dating a beautiful chef from Texas whom I met through friends of friends in New York.

We would have never met in previous generations, because I would have been married to the Hardee’s girl and she would have probably been settled down in Texas with some guy she met in her neighborhood, maybe a hot-sauce king named Dusty.
*
And who knows if we would have even hit it off if we did meet? I became a very different person between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-one.

The situation I have now is probably a better deal for me than the one I would have had a few generations ago. If you are a woman, forget about it. With all the cultural advancements, middle-class and professional women of this era have gained the freedom to have their own lives and careers without the need for marriage. Having a husband and kids isn’t a prerequisite to having a well-rounded, fulfilling adult life anymore. To be clear, I’m not saying that filling that traditional housewife role over being a professional is a bad thing to do today, and I know that the decisions women make about work are complicated. Also, I’m not saying that women who do choose careers hate their kids, etc. Am I clear here? I’M NOT SHITTING ON ANYONE’S LIFE CHOICE (unless the choice is to smoke crack and treat your kids like the Mo’Nique character treats Precious in the movie
Precious
). But what’s important is that more women than ever are able to make that choice for themselves.

Even if women do make the choice to pursue their careers, the research shows that they still do way more of their share of the domestic work than men (step it up, dudes), but overall they are closer to being equitable partners than they were a few generations ago. They don’t have to settle down at twenty with some bozo who their parents think will be a good match because he has a good job or whatever.

The “good-enough marriage” is definitely not good enough for today’s singles. We’re not content to marry someone who happens to live down the street and gets along okay with our parents.

Sure, there were lots of people in previous generations who met someone in the neighborhood and grew to have a deep, loving soul mate–level bond. But there are many others who didn’t. And the current generation won’t take that risk. We want a soul mate. And we are willing to look very far, for a very long time, to find one.

A soul mate isn’t just someone we love. As for our grandparents, there are probably lots of people out there whom we could settle down with and, in the fullness of time, grow to love. But we want more than love. We want a lifelong wingman/wingwoman who completes us and can handle the truth, to mix metaphors from three different Tom Cruise movies.

Historically, we’re at a unique moment. No one has ever been presented with more options in romance and expected to make a decision where the expectations are so astronomically high. And with all these choices, how can anyone possibly be sure that they’ve made the right one?

Get over it: You can’t! So you just have to power through and have hope that as you grow and mature, you’ll eventually learn to navigate this new romantic world and find someone who does feel right for you.

Technology hasn’t just changed how we find romance; it’s also put a new spin on the timeless challenges we face once we’re in a relationship.

One of the strange things that happens in modern
romance is that once you start dating someone, your physical
lives aren’t the only things that get entangled; your phone
worlds also merge.
Today couples have a shared space that they can use for something intimate like sexting. Sometimes this shared phone world is a source of excitement and novelty, but other times the phone world becomes a new source of jealousy. We wind up snooping rather than trusting our special person.

And the fears that make us snoop are valid, because, let’s face it—people cheat. In fact, people make mistakes in relationships all the time. On this issue the United States might be able to learn something from France. I’m not very comfortable with a French woman being forced to live with her husband having a long-term mistress, but I do like that the French are willing to realistically acknowledge the essential fallibility of human nature and the fact that people, despite their best intentions and their love for their partners, do stray. Like Dan Savage (and, to an extent, Pitbull) says, a relationship is bigger than the idea of sexual exclusivity.

Treat potential partners like actual people, not bubbles on a screen.

With online dating and smartphones, we can message people all over the world.
We can interact with potential mates on a scale that simply wasn’t conceivable for previous generations. But this shift to digital communication has a powerful side effect. When you look at your phone and see a text from a potential partner, you don’t always see another person—you often see a little bubble with text in it. And it’s easy to forget that this bubble is actually a person.

As we see more and more people online, it can get difficult to remember that behind every text message, OkCupid profile, and Tinder picture there’s an actual living, breathing, complex person, just like you.

But it’s so, so important to remember this.

For one thing, when you forget you’re talking to a real person, you might start saying the kinds of things in a text message that no person in their right mind would ever say to a real-life person in a million years.

If you were in a bar, would you ever go up to a guy or girl and repeat the word “hey” ten times in a row without getting a response? Would you ever go up to a woman you met two minutes ago and beg her to show you one of her boobs? Even if you are just looking for a casual hookup, do you really think this will work? And if so, do you
really
want to bone someone who responds to this?

Yet people send these kinds of text messages all the time. I can only conclude that it’s because it’s so easy to forget that you’re talking to another human being and not a bubble. And the content of these bubbles can really shape how you, the person, are judged.

We have two selves: a real-world self and a phone self, and the nonsense our phone selves do can make our real-world selves look like idiots. Our real-world selves and our phone selves go hand in hand. Act like a dummy with your phone self and send some thoughtless message full of spelling errors, and the real-world self will pay the price. The person on the other end sees no difference between your two selves. They never think,
Oh, I’m sure he’s much more intelligent and thoughtful in person. This is just his “lazy phone persona.”

If you text something innocuous like “Wsup” to someone you just met and want to go out with, it may not seem particularly dumb. But when you think back on all our interviews and remember how much of that garbage is in everyone’s phones, you realize it makes you seem like a pretty boring, generic person.

Don’t just write a stupid “Wsup” message. Try to say something thoughtful or funny and invite this person to do a nice, interesting thing. Make it personal. Mention that thing you were joking about, like seeing a dog driving a hovercraft—I mean, wow, how lucky were you two to see that together? I wish I could’ve been there. Who knows, this could be the person you spend the rest of your life with! I have many friends who start something with the intention of its being casual, but there is a spark and it ends up being serious. It even happened to me.

Your most casual encounter could lead to something bigger, so treat those interactions with that level of respect. Even if it doesn’t blossom, treating the messages with that level of respect will surely make the person on the other end more receptive as well. There is
no
downside to it.

And if you really want to go nuts, maybe a thoughtful phone conversation wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world?

On another note, I also learned that everyone plays games with texting, like waiting longer than the other person to text, sending replies of equal length, always trying to get the last word, and the like. Even if you say you “don’t play games,”
that
is a type of game—it is the “I don’t play games” game.

Everyone hates these games and no one wants to play them. For the most part, people just want to be honest and say how they feel, and they definitely want others to be honest and open with them. But here’s the thing: Unfortunately those games are actually kind of effective. No matter how much people want things to be different, I don’t think we can defeat the insecurities and tendencies built into our internal psychology.

But let’s all realize we are in the same boat dealing with the same shit. So if you aren’t into someone, before just ignoring them, try to be mindful of how frustrating it is to be on the other side of that and maybe try crafting them an honest message or, at the least, lie and say: “Hey, sorry, working on my debut rap album,
Fantabulous
, so gonna be in the studio nonstop and need to focus, not dating at the moment. I’m very flattered though and you are a great person, all the best.”

 • • • 

In books like this it’s easy to get negative about technology and its impact.
This shift in communication can be very annoying, and hearing older generations bemoan it, you can easily romanticize the past. But I was at a wedding recently where I saw that there is a beautiful side to things as well.

During the toasts, a bridesmaid shared some early e-mails that the bride had sent her years ago when she was first pursuing the groom, who was painfully oblivious to her advances. The initial e-mails showed her being sad that the guy didn’t love her back and worried that she should give up. Her friend even said that she should “hang it up” because she was becoming “that girl.” But she kept on, and months later there was an e-mail saying that she was madly in love.

Hearing those e-mails was remarkable, and it made me realize that digital technology gives all of us the chance to have this very unique record of our romantic relationships.

On our one-year anniversary my girlfriend gave me a huge book that compiled the entire history of our text messages from the first year of our relationship. It was hilarious to look back on all the things we said. For certain messages she wrote out what was going on in her mind, and it was amazing.