I was arguing with my friend S at a bar this weekend when I found myself blurting out, "I could be in an open relationship." I wasn't expecting that statement to come storming out of my mouth. It's something that sounds like it could be true. But I'm not really sure if I could manage it without imploding.
I've never felt a strong need to sleep with someone new while in a relationship. I don't think I would begrudge a partner for having those feelings. It's impossible to distill sex down to any one thing. It's everything in a relationship. It's the intimacy and the love. It's the athletic silliness. It's the indulgence and pleasure. It's something new every time. Even when the form and rhythm becomes repetitive there is something new happening. It doesn't always point to good things, but every encounter is particular and irreplaceably its own.
When I think about it rhetorically, the idea of a girlfriend wanting to sleep with another man seems fine. If sex is the proverbial glass of water, an act of physical exuberance and exploration, then there's nothing at all threatening about a girlfriend sleeping with someone else. Statistics suggest a huge percentage of people, close to half depending on whose study you believe, cheat during long-term relationships. It's shocking, but I think of all of my friends and it doesn't seem quite so improbable. Close to half of the people in my circle of friends have cheated on their partners at one time or another.
Most of those were random one-night encounters and not the drawn out affairs we secretly fear will be the end of us all. It was sex in the moment. Drunk and alone for a night, flushed with body and feeling, they decided to indulge themselves with some new stranger or a secret crush. Thinking about sex in those terms makes it seem like a body function. It's not pissing or shitting. It's a deep urge for affection and physical expression and little more than that. In that rhetorical vacuum, monogamy seems like a product of insecurity and antiquated social norms.
But the more I think about it in specific terms, relative to real women that I've dated, the more squeamish I become. The most uncomfortable thing is that I don't think I could cheat on someone else. I am probably monogamous to a fault. I'm single-minded in the same way that a dog is. There's only one voice that cuts through the rabble, one smell that pulls me away from a momentary curiosity. One hand whose touch settles me instantly.
A few years after I graduated from college I went home for Christmas. On Christmas Eve I went downtown with my parents to an old Spanish hotel that had stood in their town for almost a hundred years. Every year it was lit up with thousands of small lights, poinsettias, and flannel drapery in a show of old time ostentation.
When we got there it was dark. There was a sea of people spilling out onto the sidewalk and down the street in front of the hotel. My mother and father pushed into the back of the crowd and I followed after them maintaining a disinterested orbit, trying to ignore the holiday cheer.
The group moved forward, inch by inch. Small shuffling steps created a tidal pull that eventually drew us into the middle of the crowd. I was alternately staring at my shoes and out into the empty sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. I noticed that my parents had moved ahead of me a little bit. Three or four people separated us. They looked like a little sphere of familiarity in the swell of strange faces and foreign smells; all their bitter fighting and incongruities tucked into their wool jackets and forced public smiles.
A few minutes later, I looked up and saw that they were still further away. I was mulling in the crowded courtyard and they had been sucked up to the front entrance twenty feet away. The courtyard was draped with small white lights overhead. The light of the hotel lobby was a loud yellow blare. I saw my dad turn around on the threshold. He grinned at me and nodded his chin. I could see the shadows in the pits of his eyes; the gray of his hair and the harsh lighting made his face look old and fragile.
He turned around and kept moving forward with my mother. After a few more minutes they were so far away that I could barely tell where they were. The backs of their heads were almost indistinguishable from any other couple in the sea of people. I felt terrible and alone.
Everything changes with time. Everything goes away. Sex is like a life jacket against that inevitable pull. Every new moment of sex with someone you love is a small victory of togetherness, a reminder that the other person is still there, for a while longer. Thinking about them out there, clinging to some other body, I wouldn't feel jealous. I think I would just feel terribly, horribly sad, reminded of the fact that one day they'll have gone out so far that they won't come back. And then what will I be?
Previous Posts:
Sex Machine: I'm Not That Kind of Girl
Date Machine: Civil War and Sex on a Toliet
Date Machine: Living Like a Bachelor
Sex Machine: Chest Hair, or the Shaved Eunuch
Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men
Date Machine: Sex in the Office
Sex Machine: Lying Lovers; or the Padded Bra
Sex Machine: Premature Ejaculation
Love Machine: Can You Be Friends With an Ex?
Sex Machine: How Soon, Sex Toy?
Date Night: Kissing in the Rain
Sex Education Machine: Abstinence, or Waiting is Easier Because...
Sex Machine: The Funny Thing About Handjobs
Love Machine: The Three-Year Itch
Sex Machine: Show Me Your Penis
Date Machine: The Gun Show or Is That All You Got?
Love Machine: Morning Breath Kisses
Date Machine: Making Your Online Dating Profile
Sex Machine: Sex with 19 Year-Olds
Love Machine: Making A Scene
Hooksexup Confessions: Oh Hai, You're Pregnant
Sex Machine: Don't Forget to Masturbate