Monogamy is dead! Under this imperative, millions of young adults over the past decade have been trying to conceive new ways of being together, balancing the compelling need not to be alone with the urgent desire to have sex with every form of life. (N.B. In an empowering and ethical way, not in a slutty one.) Under these circumstances, I’m afraid we all forgot to ask ourselves: was monogamy ever alive?
Of course, some could argue that almost none of our parents’ friends were bisexual polyamorists with five partners, three sexual and two platonic. But we could quite easily agree that most of them were having an affair with the person next door or with your kindergarten teacher. So, can we really call that monogamy?
The main difference between then and now is that we have collectively decided to open up the conversation about desire, which has so far been a topic that is difficult enough to understand within ourselves, let alone discuss with our partners. Of course, I’m still attracted to other people while I’m in a relationship, but why should my boyfriend feel the same way? The main problem with the verbalization of desire is that it often kills it.
Younger people are having less sex because they’re too busy talking about it. Maybe we’ve confused transparency with intimacy, and, in trying to be considerate of our partners while still being honest about our selfish instincts, we’ve turned desire into bureaucracy. It’s like playing as a child. Do you remember going to a friend’s house after school, deciding to play with dolls, and then spending hours setting up the environment and the plot? You created elaborate backstories for every character, imagined every possible event that might happen during the game, argued over the personalities, developments, and details of each storyline, ultimately creating a better narrative structure than every TV show produced after 2015. And then, just when it was finally time to play, time was up. Your parents were ringing the doorbell, and you were left begging for five more minutes because, “We just started playing!”
Very often, I have the feeling that this is exactly what is happening with the only real game left in adult life: sex. We become so distracted by setting the rules and boundaries of these complicated relationships that, in trying to simplify how we handle desire outside the couple, we end up complicating everything else. We have lost the fun of simply acting instinctively, replacing it with a giant infrastructure in which the obsession with behaving in the most ethical way possible has destroyed the possibility of fun.
So, since I’m almost young enough to be part of a generation in which everyone has the chance to define themselves beyond the assets they were born with, I’ve finally realized who I identify with: a middle-aged man, averagely successful, in the ’80s. I’ve decided that what I want is not to gently discuss every aspect of my relationship with my partner (Are apps okay? What about people we know? Should we tell each other afterward? Before? Should we FaceTime during it?), but simply to fuck my secretary and happily come back home to my wife (who is also having an affair with the gardener; we are an equal-opportunity family here).
Isn’t it healthier to just admit that we don’t need to know what is hurtful to us, and that maybe we could reconsider the idea that sometimes part of the fun lies in the fact that you should not do what you are doing?
I feel that a major part of the problem is that we have been infused with the idea that those who cheat are always coming from a place of unhappiness within the couple they are in. The most spontaneous question that comes to my mind when I’m gossiping about everyone else’s relationships is always, “Were there any signs? Was it not working somehow?” But I realize more and more often that this had nothing to do with the state I was in when I cheated on someone. We need to dissociate the idea that the unfaithful are unhappy. Sometimes, they are just greedy. Every now and then, people just want to have their cake and eat it too.
And wouldn’t it be so liberating to realize that the person you are with didn’t have sex with their friend from college because something is wrong with you or with your relationship, but simply because they were having fun? And wouldn’t it be even more liberating just not to know anything about it? Haven’t we learned anything from the terrible events of Paolo and Francesca? For those who rightfully fell asleep during high school class, Francesca was married to Gianciotto but fell in love with his brother Paolo, and when they were discovered kissing, Gianciotto killed them both. For sure, Gianciotto is the perfect definition of an overreaction, but I think we can agree that he probably would have preferred to still have a wife and a brother, and that sometimes “out of sight, out of mind” is not just a figure of speech.
strong opinions on weak matterS 