فصل 07

CHAPTER 7

SETTLING DOWN

I’ve never been a “relationship guy.” My first serious relationship happened when I was around twenty-three and lasted three years. It began when I was living in New York, but at the three-year mark I had to move to Los Angeles. I was twenty-five. The girl was ready to move with me to L.A., but it just seemed too much for me to live with another person at that age and especially to have her move cross-country. We eventually ended things after a year and change of trying to do the long-distance thing.

I enjoyed being in that relationship, but I was also very happy being mostly single between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-one. Earlier we discussed how having lots of options makes it difficult to settle on the right person. That’s a real problem, but there’s also an upside: With all these options, being single can be a shitload of fun!

I also had a lifestyle that was pretty bad for maintaining a serious relationship anyway. I was constantly shuffling between New York and L.A. for work and was unsure where my future career would take me.

I had a great time in the casual dating scene, but at a certain point I got tired of the work that went into maintaining a fun single life. Like others we interviewed in the book, the single world had worn me out.

At one point I was the hopeful romantic who would stay out till 4:00 A.M. every morning, worried that if I went home, I’d miss that magical, amazing woman who showed up at the bar at 3:35 A.M. After many late nights and brutal mornings, though, I realized that most amazing, magical women don’t walk into a bar at 3:35 A.M. They’re usually in bed by that hour. Usually the men and women who are going out this hard are less the “amazing/magical” sort and more the “nightmare/train wreck” variety.

As I hit thirty, I started to despise the bar scene. I had experienced every single version of those nights. I knew all the possible outcomes, and I knew the probabilities of those outcomes. When you hit that point, you realize how fruitless trying to find love by barhopping can be; you have enough data to know that statistically the smartest thing for you to do when you walk into a bar is go to the bathroom, jerk off, and leave.

I also started losing single friends. One day I stood alone at a barbecue at my house and saw nothing but couples around me. It seemed like I was the only single dude in the mix. Everyone else was splitting their racks of ribs into halves and sharing. Meanwhile, I had to eat a whole rack by myself like some kind of lonely fatso. I felt like it was time for a change. It was time to settle down a bit.

I decided I wanted to at least try having a relationship. It’d been so long. I started thinking about the advantages. I’d have someone whom I really cared about, who also cared about me. No more texting-back-and-forth nonsense. We wouldn’t flake on each other. I’d always have someone to see a movie with, or go to a new restaurant with, or, as I would describe my dream at the time, “stay home, cook food, and do nothing” with.

It was fun being single, but I had reached what I will describe as a “point of exhaustion.” I had experienced this personally, but when I did interviews for the book, I realized it is quite universal.

At a certain point the cost of the work needed to maintain a fun single lifestyle outweighs the benefits. The nights when you have amazing casual sex start getting outweighed by the times you wander home alone wasted and wake up hungover with a half-eaten burrito sitting on your chest.

The endless string of first dates where you just say the same shit over and over again in the same places starts getting tiresome. The casual scene was fun, but in between the fun, a lot of times there was emptiness.

Settling down offers the chance to fill that void with the dependable, deeper, intimate love of a committed relationship.

Now I had to find the right person. When I was out, I tried to keep an eye out for someone who could be relationship material. At first I had no luck, but then I had lunch with a friend who put it in perspective.

“I want to settle down, but I don’t ever meet anyone I really like,” I said.

“Well, where are you meeting these girls?” he asked.

“Bars and clubs,” I replied.

“So you’re going to horrible places and meeting horrible people and you’re complaining about it? Live your life like a decent person. Go to the grocery store, buy your own food, take care of yourself. If you live a responsible life, you’ll run into responsible people,” he said.

It made sense. I was staying out like a lunatic and complaining that I only met lunatics. I realized if I was going to try to find someone to settle down with, I had to change the way I was going about my search. Instead of bars and clubs, I’d do things that I’d want a theoretical girlfriend to be into. I went to more museums, more food events, more low-key/interesting bars at earlier times, and things got better.

I made more of an effort to date friends of friends and began accepting setups, in the hope of meeting better people who were filtered through my existing social framework. I also decided to really get to know the girls I was dating. As I noted in chapter 4, instead of trying to lock down so many first dates, I tried to go on more fifth or sixth dates.

A few months later I ran into an amazing woman whom I had met years earlier. I had liked her then, but she had been in a relationship at the time. She was beautiful, funny, and a chef!!! If you’ve counted all the food references in this book, you realize what a great thing this is for me. We started dating. Pretty soon we were staying home, cooking food, and doing nothing all the time. It was great.

After a few weeks it started getting serious and I was faced with the decision of whether to truly settle down. Did I really want a girlfriend? Did I really want to give up the single life?

I thought for sure that I wanted a relationship, but when this amazing woman found her way to me, I was still scared. Settling down seemed like a frightening proposition.

I’ve explained how this is the era of the most romantic options and how, when you get in a relationship, you are closing the door on all of them.

Being single is a lot of work, but so are relationships. There were the inconveniences of my touring schedule and the giant hurdle of long distance (I was going back to L.A. and she lived in New York).

Eventually I decided to dive in.

Today we live together in L.A. and cook food and do nothing on a regular basis. She’s amazing and I’m very happy in my relationship, but making the decision to dive in was tough. And it’s tough for many singles out there.

FEAR OF SETTLING DOWN, FEAR OF SETTLING

When the opportunity to settle down presents itself, the glamour of the single life and all the potential options loom over our heads. The continuing fear many singles expressed in our interviews was that by getting into a serious relationship, they weren’t settling down but settling.

In today’s romantic climate, many people are plagued by what we will call “the upgrade problem.” Singles constantly wonder whether there is a better match, an upgrade.

This was especially prevalent in larger cities. In walking cities like Chicago and Boston, people described how it was hard to settle down because every time they turned a corner, they saw more attractive and hypothetically interesting people.

As one woman told us, “For guys and girls equally . . . there’s just so many people. And there’s someone around the corner or uptown or downtown who you might like just a fraction better than the person who’s across from you right now.”

Even without being in a walking city, we all see way more faces in the digital world. And in a strange way, all the faces we see in the world or even on social media feel like real options that we are closing the door on when we settle down. Have you ever aimlessly browsed around on Instagram? It can be like going down a rabbit hole: clicking on friends, friends of friends, people who’ve liked those friends’ photos. You see photos of all these beautiful people. You take a look at a few photos of someone’s feed and you can begin to get a sense of who they are. You start to wonder, Wow, what if this person and I connected?

In a world where you sit around all day in your pajamas and swipe right on the faces of your dreams, the options problem rears its ugly head, making settling down seem so damn limiting. Yes, you have someone great, but are you sure they’re the greatest?

But even for those who overcome this hurdle and commit to settling down, more challenges lie ahead.

PASSIONATE LOVE AND COMPANIONATE LOVE

Common wisdom says that in every relationship there are two phases. There’s the beginning, where you fall in love and everything is new and magical. Then, after a certain point, maybe a few years, things get less exciting and more routine. There’s still love, but it’s just not like the magic you had in the beginning. As Woody Allen says in Annie Hall, “Love fades.”

“Not in my relationship! Everything is great. We peaked and then that peak turned into a plateau and now we’ve been peaking ever since!”

Okay, why are you even reading this book about relationships? So you can see what mistakes sad, lonely people are making to cause them to have so much shittier lives than you? You know, why don’t you just put this book down and go have sex with your partner you’re so into, you asshole?

But wait, hold on a second—science says you are possibly lying. Yeah, I’m talking brain scans and shit. BRAIN SCANS.

Researchers have actually identified two distinct kinds of love: passionate love and companionate love.

In the first stage of a relationship you have passionate love. This is where you and your partner are just going ape shit for each other. Every smile makes your heart flutter. Every night is more magical than the last.

During this phase your brain gets especially active and starts releasing all kinds of pleasurable, stimulating neurotransmitters. Your brain floods your neural synapses with dopamine, the same neurotransmitter that gets released when you do cocaine.

“Carol, I can’t describe how you make me feel. Wait, no, I can—you make my mind release pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters and you’ve flooded my mind with dopamine. If the experience of snorting cocaine and getting so high out of my mind that I want to climb a telephone pole with my bare hands just to see if I can do it were a person, it would be you.”

Like all drugs, though, this high wears off. Scientists estimate that this phase usually lasts about twelve to eighteen months. At a certain point the brain rebalances itself. It stops pumping out adrenaline and dopamine and you start feeling like you did before you fell in love. The passion you first felt starts to fade. Your brain is like, ALL RIGHT!! We get it, we get it. She’s great, blah, blah, blah.

What happens then? Well, in good relationships, as passionate love fades, a second kind of love arises to take its place: companionate love.

Companionate love is neurologically different from passionate love. Passionate love always spikes early, then fades away, while companionate love is less intense but grows over time. And, whereas passionate love lights up the brain’s pleasure centers, companionate love is associated with the regions having to do with long-term bonding and relationships. Anthropologist Helen Fisher, the author of Anatomy of Love and one of the most cited scholars in the study of sex and attraction, was part of a research team that gathered and took brain scans of then-middle-aged people who’d been married an average of twenty-one years while they looked at a photograph of their spouse, and compared them with brain scans of younger people looking at their new partners. What they discovered, she writes, is that: “Among the older lovers, brain regions associated with anxiety were no longer active; instead, there was activity in the areas associated with calmness.”1 Neurologically it’s similar to the kind of love you feel for an old friend or a family member.

So love goes from feeling like I’m doing cocaine to feeling how I feel about my uncle? I don’t want to make companionate love sound like a bummer. It is love, just less intense and more stable. There is still passion, but it’s balanced with trust, stability, and an understanding of each other’s flaws. If passionate love is the coke of love, companionate love is like having a glass of wine or smoking a few hits of some mild weed. That makes it sound a little better than the uncle thing, right? We all like booze and weed more than we like our relatives, right? Great.

It also makes sense that passionate love shouldn’t last. If we could all have lifelong passionate love, the world would collapse. We’d stay in our apartments lovingly staring at our partners while the streets filled with large animals and homeless children eating out of the garbage.

This transition from passionate love to companionate love can be tricky. In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt identifies two danger points in every romantic relationship.

One is at the apex of the passionate love phase. We’ve all seen this in action. People get all excited and dive in headfirst. A new couple, weeks or months into a relationship, high off passionate love, go bonkers and move in and get married way too quickly.

This is like when you do a bunch of cocaine and decide you have a great life plan that you’re ready to put into action.

“I figured it out, bro! I gotta melt old VCRs and mold the melted plastic to make action figures. I’ll sell those and then I’ll use the profit to fund my business that sells reversible clothes! I’ll call them ‘Inside Out Pajamas.’ Think about it! One side is regular street clothes, then at night you turn ’em inside out and BOOM, PAJAMAS! Hey, is my nose bleeding?”

Sometimes these couples are able to transition from the passionate stage to companionate love. Other times, though, they transition into a crazy, toxic relationship and they get divorced and wonder what the hell they were thinking.

“Shit, so apparently the pajama side gets real dirty and gross during the day. Maybe you wear the pajama side the night before you wear the clothes side? Ah, fuck, what am I doing?! Stupid! Stupid! Fuck. I probably shouldn’t have hacked into my parents’ bank account and cleaned out their retirement fund. I’m going to need way more cocaine to figure this out . . .”

The second danger point is when passionate love starts wearing off. This is when you start coming down off of that initial high and you start worrying about whether this is really the right person. A couple weeks ago you were giddy and obsessed. All the new quirks and facts you learned about your lover felt like wonderful little surprises, like coming home and finding a chocolate on your pillow. Now you’re like, Okay, I get it. You like sewing historically accurate Civil War uniforms!!

Your texts used to be so loving:

Now your texts are like:

or:

You conclude there’s something wrong with the person or the relationship since it isn’t as exciting as before. So you break up, without ever giving companionate love a chance to bloom.

But Haidt argues that when you hit this stage, you should just be patient. With luck, if you allow yourself to invest more in the other person, you will find a beautiful life companion.

I had a rather weird firsthand experience with this. When I first started dating my girlfriend, a few months in, I went to a friend’s wedding in Big Sur. I went alone, because my friend did me a huge solid and declined to give me a plus one. Which, of course, is the best. You get to sit by yourself and be a third wheel. Plus you get to constantly squeeze your head in between the heads of various couples and cutely go, “Whatchu guys talkin’ ’bout?” It’s GREAT!

The vows in this wedding were powerful. They were saying the most remarkable, loving things about each other. Things like “You are a prism that takes the light of life and turns it into a rainbow” or “You are a lotion that moisturizes my heart. Without you, my soul has eczema.” It was the noncheesy, heartfelt version of stuff like that.

After the wedding four different couples broke up, supposedly because they didn’t feel like they had the love that was expressed in those vows.

Did they call it off too early, at their danger point? I don’t know, but I too felt scared hearing that stuff. Did I have what those people had? At that point, no. But for some reason I felt deep down that I should keep investing in my relationship and that eventually that level of love would show itself. And, so far, it has.

DO YOU NEED TO GET MARRIED?

In relationships, there’s commitment and COMMITMENT, the kind that involves a license, usually some kind of religious blessing, and a ceremony in which every one of your close friends and relatives watches you and your partner promise to stay together until one of you dies.

What happens to people’s graphs of love once they get past the initial phases of love and power through their danger points?

This graph, which we got from Jonathan Haidt, measures the intensity of love over the course of a marriage.

In the beginning, when you first get married, you get a shot of passionate love. This boost lasts about two years. Then the passion fades and you have various ups and downs. You go through the experiences of living together and raising a family. When the kids finally flee the coop—at about the twenty-five-year mark in the second chart—you and your mate get a rush of loving intensity. You can bask in the romance and maybe even rekindle some of the passion that brought you together in the first place. Then, soon after that, you’re dead.

Whenever I’m at a wedding watching a beautiful couple exchange vows under a tree or at a mountain or a rainbow or whatever, I start thinking about this graph.

The brutal truth is that no matter how much they love each other, how beautiful the ceremony, how poetic and loving the vows, once they finish their wedding, you know their love is going to get less passionate and their life is going to get more complicated, and not in the most fun ways.

The romantic part of the relationship has peaked.

After the rings, the priest should just say, “Enjoy it, bing-bongs. Due to our brain’s tendency toward hedonic adaptation, you won’t feel quite this giddy in a few years. All right, where’s the pigs in a blanket? I’m outta here.”

So why get married at all?

In recent decades, and in most developed nations, marriage rates have dropped precipitously, leading some to wonder whether it is a dying institution. Philip Cohen, one of the leading demographers of the family, has documented the steep and widespread decline in global marriage rates since the 1970s. According to his calculations, 89 percent of the global population lives in a country with a falling marriage rate, and those who live in Europe and Japan are experiencing something more like a plummet.2

In the United States marriage rates are now at historic lows. In 1970, for instance, there were about seventy-four marriages for every thousand unmarried women in the population. By 2012 that had fallen to thirty-one per thousand single women—a drop of almost 60 percent. Americans are also joining the international trend of marrying later. In 1960, 68 percent of all people in their twenties were married, compared with just 26 percent in 2008.3

For the first time in history, the typical American now spends more years single than married.

What are people doing instead of getting married?

As Eric wrote in his book Going Solo, we are living in a time of incredible experimentation with different ways of settling down. Long-term cohabitation with a romantic partner is on the rise, especially in Europe. Living alone has skyrocketed almost everywhere, and in many major cities—from Paris to Tokyo, Washington, D.C., to Berlin—nearly half of all households have just one resident.

But marriage is not an altogether undesirable institution. After all, reams of social-science research show that successful marriages can make people live longer and be happier and healthier than single people. (Admittedly, a great many marriages aren’t successful, and those who divorce or become widows or widowers may not get all these benefits.)

Good marriages also bring people more financial security, and these days one of the things that sociologists worry about is that better-off people are marrying more—and more successfully—than poor people, which increases inequality overall. In the United States, sociologist Andrew Cherlin writes, “marriage has become a status symbol—a highly regarded marker of a successful personal life.”4

When I saw this graph (p. 219), I had a thought. Might it make more sense to forgo marriage and, instead, set out to experience a lifetime’s worth of, say, one- to two-year, intensely passionate relationships? Wouldn’t that be better than toiling through the doldrums of decades of waiting for your rise in companionate love?

Then your graph would look like this, right?

I contacted Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist who drew the passionate/companionate love graphs, and asked what he thought about the hypothetical graph. Here was his response:

There are two ways of thinking of satisfaction. One is the passionate/companionate love hedonic view, that the best life would be the one with the most passion in it. The other is a narrative view, that the best life is about building a story.

If you think the best life would be one with the most passion in it, then yes, that strategy would be much better than getting married. Falling in love is the most intense and wonderful experience—the second-most intense, after certain drugs, which are more intense for a few hours. Short of that, falling in love is the most wonderful thing.

But I didn’t get much work done when I was falling in love with my wife. And then we had kids, we finally had children, and that was totally involving—and it would be weird to be such a romantically involved couple when you’re raising kids. And now that that insanity has passed, I can return to writing books, which I really love doing. And I have a life partner who I think about all day long. And that’s not tragic. That’s not even disappointing. I have a life partner. We work together really well. We’ve built a fantastic life together. We’re both really, really happy.

If you take a narrative view, there are different things to accomplish at different stages of life. Dating and having these passionate flings are perfect when you’re younger, but some of the greatest joys of life come from nurturing and from what’s called “generativity.” People have strong strivings to build something, to do something, to leave something behind. And of course having children is one way of doing that. My own experience having children was that I discovered there were rooms in my heart that I didn’t even know were there. And if I had committed to a life of repeated sexual flings, I never would have opened those doors.

If you think the whole point of life is to gaze into your lover’s eyes all day until you die—well, then, I wouldn’t want your life.

Was he quoting James Van Der Beek in Varsity Blues at the end there? Odd choice. Other than that, though, Haidt’s analysis made a lot of sense to me. Passionate love is a drug that makes you feel amazing. A plan to just repeat that feeling over and over sounds nice in theory but in practice would be kind of dumb. Ecstasy makes you feel amazing too. But if I told you that my life plan was to make enough money to just do ecstasy all the time for twenty years, you’d think I was a lunatic.

Also, it’s nice to imagine that graph being nothing but a series of high peaks with little valleys below, but as anyone who’s been single for an extended period knows, the graph would probably be much weirder:

MONOGAMY, MONOGAMISH

There are many great things about being in a committed relationship. You have a bond full of love, trust, and stability. It’s beautiful. But the excitement and novelty of a totally unexpected romantic encounter? That part of your life is dead.

For many people we interviewed, this creates a conflict that isn’t easily resolved. No matter what their dating situation, people are torn between the benefits of a faithful, monogamous relationship and the novelty and excitement of single life.

Some people, including many prominent evolutionary psychologists and biological anthropologists, say that men and women aren’t even wired to be monogamous.

I spoke at length about this with the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher. Fisher contends that our cave-dwelling ancestors, compelled to spread their genetic material, had many sexual partners simultaneously, and after thousands of years of promiscuity, human brains are still wired to mate with multiple people.

The current norms of faithfulness and sexual exclusivity are actually relatively new even in modern times. According to the marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, in the eighteenth century American men were quite open about their extramarital escapades. She found letters in which husbands described their mistresses to their wives’ brothers and recounted how they contracted sexually transmitted diseases from prostitutes. I wasn’t able to find one of those letters, but I imagine it was something like this:

My Dearest Charles,

I hope this letter finds you in the halest and heartiest of conditions. I’m sure it will, as your constitution, as I recall, was always most impressive for its resilience and fortitude.

What do you make of this so-called “Revolution”? I fear that, win or lose, we shall be feeling its reverberations for decades to come.

In other news, in addition to your sister, I am fucking Tina, this woman I met at the bar last week. I also caught syphilis from a prostitute I met in Boston.

Fondly, your brother-in-law,

Henry

Men, Coontz explains, believed sexual adventure was their birthright, and women basically accepted this as a facet of the relationship. “For thousands of years it was expected of men they would have affairs and flings,” Coontz told the New York Times. “That would be unthinkable today.”5

So what changed?

I spoke with the journalist and sex columnist Dan Savage, who has written at length about the age-old conflict between being faithful and having sexual adventure outside of a committed relationship. Savage contends that the women’s movement during the twentieth century fundamentally changed our approach to the problem. Women, he explains, rightly contested the presumption that men could fool around while they had no outside sexual options. But the decisive shift came when, rather than extending to women the leeway men had always enjoyed to have extramarital sexual escapades, society took the opposite approach.

Men could have said, “Okay, let’s both mess around.” But instead men got preemptively jealous of their wives messing around and said, “What? No, I don’t want you boning other dudes! Let’s just both not mess around.” This, Savage says, is when the monogamous expectation was placed on men and women, and it’s an expectation that neither sex is wired to meet.

“You’re told in the culture that if you want to fuck somebody else you need to do the right thing and end this relationship before you fuck somebody else or you’re a bad guy or you’re a bad girl,” he said. “I think that that’s bullshit. There’s higher loyalty. There’s a greater good. A relationship is more than just not touching anybody else with your penis ever again.”

I put myself to the test with a thought experiment. Let’s say my girlfriend was in Miami for a bachelorette party, and she ran into R&B superstar/actor Tyrese Gibson (Fast and the Furious franchise, Baby Boy). And for some reason they hit it off, and she ended up hooking up with Tyrese. It was a one-night thing. She wasn’t in love with Tyrese. She wasn’t trying to be with Tyrese. She wasn’t trying to get invited to dinner at GibsiHana, the custom restaurant Tyrese had built in his backyard to mimic a Benihana Japanese steak house.*

If that were the case, I think I would be okay with it—if I didn’t know about it.

I posited this hypothetical situation to my girlfriend and reversed the roles, with it being me who took another partner. She didn’t feel the same way. She saw no reason for us to stray from our monogamy and felt that doing so would be a violation of the trust in our relationship. She said if I got drunk and something like that did happen, she would be understanding, but it would be a big deal and she’d want to know about it. However, she also said there was a big difference between me being really drunk and making a mistake and actively pursuing a sexual tryst outside our relationship, hitting bars and texting women to have a quick fling.

Also, probably best if I had this whole conversation at home in private, as opposed to a bar, where I definitely got looks from people who seemed to be curious as to why I was discussing my girlfriend hypothetically cheating on me with Tyrese.

Savage believes that cheating is tempting for just about everyone and that for some people it’s simply too hard to resist. Rather than succumbing to urges we all have, cheating behind our partner’s back, getting caught, and destroying the relationship, Savage thinks we’d be better off acknowledging that we have these desires and deciding how to deal with them—as a couple.

“If you have children together, if you have a history together, if you have property together, if you melded two extended families together, all of that has to weigh more than one blow job you got on a business trip,” he said.

Savage isn’t opposed to monogamy. He recognizes its advantages for those who can sustain it and produce successful relationships. The problem, he says, is that today far too many people are making commitments that they cannot realistically honor.

The idea of trying to maintain a committed relationship while also satisfying our urges for sexual novelty has led to a lot of experimentation over the years with “open relationship”–type arrangements. Couples have tried everything from open marriages to being “swingers” to maintaining “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies.

Just how many people have experimented with these arrangements? The latest survey data show that 26 percent of American men and 18 percent of American women report having engaged in “an open sexual relationship.” Surprisingly, young adults between the ages of twenty-one and thirty are the least likely to have tried this, at only 19 percent, whereas it is most prevalent among those in their forties, at 26 percent. And seniors? Twenty-two percent of them have tried an open sexual relationship. Damn!

“Open relationships? Is that where you fuck other people? Yeah, we do that sometimes.”*

Savage coined the term “monogamish” to describe his own open relationship with his partner. The gist of it is that the couple is deeply committed to each other, but there is room for outside sexual activity.

“Monogamish” is not a one-size-fits-all concept. Each couple works out their own terms and agrees beforehand to what sexual activity outside the relationship will be tolerated. Some demand complete honesty from their partner, while others may prefer a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Some restrict how close the outside person must be—at least a friend of a friend, at least a friend of a friend of a friend, a stranger neither of you will ever see again, someone who lives in a different state, or it can only be Michigan State University provost June Pierce Youatt. (All right, the last one not as much.)

In our interviews and on our subreddit, we met several couples who had set up arrangements in the vein of what Savage discussed. Some of the people were incredibly enthusiastic about their experiences. On the subreddit one woman wrote:

I’ve been in open relationships for the last ten years now, and have been with my husband for 8 years. I chose to be in one when I realized that every boyfriend I ever had cheated on me, and I cheated on every one of them. I finally decided that maybe I need variety, and that I was attracted to sexually adventurous men.

Being in an open relationship is such a relief—no more lies, no more horrible break ups, no more guilt. My husband and I have rules we follow, like he can only see someone else once a week, and if I don’t like the girl he picks I can make him stop seeing her.

The best part is, we can be honest about how we feel without judgement. No more hiding crushes or sexual tension. We are madly in love, and have a daughter together. I know it’s not for everyone but it works for us.

Other couples used these kinds of arrangements to facilitate long-distance relationships. One woman, who had been seeing her musician boyfriend for a few months, told me about the agreement they made when he went away on tour. She understood that he was on the road for months at a time, and in the interest of maintaining the relationship, she would let him have some leeway while on tour—up to a point. They created “tour rules” that he had to follow. “No sex, just blow jobs. That’s as far as it could go,” she said.

And she didn’t want her boyfriend maintaining contact with anyone this stuff happened with. “I don’t want to be in bed and look over and seeing him texting some girl from Cincinnati,” she explained. “And while he’s away, I have the same privileges.”

We also met a woman from Brooklyn who had just starting dating someone who made it clear that he wanted to occasionally hook up with other people. They entered into an agreement where they could have sex with others, but only under the following conditions: The person had to be at least two degrees outside their friend group (a friend of a friend), it was “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and if they were out hooking up with someone else, they had to make a good excuse that didn’t let on that they were out messing around. It was an “out of sight, out of mind” type of arrangement, and it was working.

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, coraz?n 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.