Good As You’s Jeremy Hooper—a gay man in a monogamous relationship—is a bit annoyed with Joy Behar. When I was on Joy’s show on Monday night, we were talking about Tiger Woods and I tossed out my position on monogamy (it’s not natural, and people are going to want to sleep with others, even if they don’t, men can be monogamous but it’s long, hard slog). I made these comments to Joy about men generally…
I believe men can be monogamous. But I believe that it’s a difficult struggle. You know, when you’re in love with someone and you make a monogamous commitment, it’s not that you don’t want to sleep with other people; it’s that you refrain from sleeping with other people.
The culture says if there is love there is no desire for others and that makes people—essentially puts them at war with their own instincts and leads to lies and deceit because you’re lying and deceiving yourself.
Joy recounted the conversation on The View…
…and Joy said that I was talking about gay men and gay couples in particular, and that I said gay men placed less value on monogamy, and that I said affairs were much less likely to lead to the breakup of a male couple. But the transcript shows that I was talking about monogamy being difficult for all men, gay and straight, not just gay men, and we didn’t get around to talking about gay male couples on the show (we talked through the breaks though, and it’s entirely possible we talked about gay male couples during a commercial—I don’t recall).
But here’s the funny thing: Joy’s right. Why after the jump.
Gay male couples generally don’t view monogamy as the defining characteristic of a loving, committed relationship. Studies of male couples in long-term relationships have found that most gay male couples do allow for some “outside sexual contact,” as they say, contacts that I wouldn’t characterize as “affairs” or “cheating.” If there are no lies, if there is no betrayal, if neither partner is doing anything that violates the commitment he made to the other, then no one cheated and no one was cheated on.
Which is not to say that there aren’t monogamous gay couples out there. And all gay male couples—monogamous or not—value love, honesty, trust, respect, and commitment just highly as straight couples do. But it is generally true that gay male couples place less emphasis on sexual exclusivity over the multi-decade course of a relationship. I can see why this generalization might annoy a gay man like Hooper—a guy in monogamous relationship—but Hooper’s annoyance doesn’t make this particular generalization incorrect.
For that matter, most of the long-term lesbian couples I know have arrangements similar to this. Also, almost all of my (hetero) co-workers that are younger than me are swingers, in my entirely anecdotal, non-scientific findings.
So what in fact does the term commitment imply then?
D., “commitment” is defined differently by each and every couple. In terms of loving, physical, person/person relationships, there is no one strict definition for “commitment.” It means something to you; it more than likely means something entirely different to me. Neither one is wrong.
Q: So what in fact does the term commitment imply then?
A: loony bin.
It’s basic evolutionary psychology. Men–gay or straight–re programmed to fuck everything in sight to maximize their semination. Women are programmed to try to keep the nest and hold onto the alpha male partner, and cheat on him if there’s another alpha male whose genes smell better.
But of course because we are PEOPLE these are gross generalizations. I do agree that most men submit to monogamy not because they don’t wnat to cheat but because they love their spouse too much to hurt or lose them. What I really disliked about this VIEW was a bunch of straight people sitting around conjecturing about what “those gays” do. Can you even imagine a tv panel of white people talking about what some black person told them and then guessing about what “those blacks” do?
I am a gay woman. If my wife cheated on me there would be HELL to pay and, depending on the fling, it might end the marriage. I don’t think that’s so far off from a straight woman’s stance. But we have an agreed upon commitment of monogamy. It works for us.
@D It generally has some sort of meaning:
I was in a relationship once where kissing someone else was considered okay, but buying them dinner was not. You may think that that is weird, (okay, and I did too,) but it actually makes a certain amount of sense: Kissing has, (or at least can have,) a short term meaning, you can kiss someone once and then not speak to them again, and in any case, it is generally fun for both people involved. Buying dinner is generally something you do because you have feelings for the person, you don’t (usually) buy someone dinner and then ignore them after that, and in any case, the point of dinner is to eat and be social, picking up the check bit isn’t the fun part.
However, like way too many “open” relationships, the rules actually favored one person over another. I’m a pretty nerdy guy, so the odds that I’m going to randomly make out with some stranger are pretty low, (nobody invites me to those sorts of parties in the first place,) but she couldn’t afford to buy anyone dinner anyways, so it that rule wasn’t stopping her from doing anything.