"If my girlfriend falls in love with another guy, I want to know," says Serdna, a twenty-two-year-old painter from Queens. "If she goes on a date with a guy, or if she kisses another guy, I don’t want to know. If she sleeps with another guy, assuming she uses protection, I definitely don’t want to know. But if there ever comes a time that she can’t do this anymore, I want to know. And then we would work it out from there."
Serdna is sitting across from me at a café in Manhattan’s East Village. Soft-spoken and calm, his large, boyish eyes contrast the scruff of his barely-there beard. What he’s telling me goes against all the conventional relationship wisdom I’ve ever heard. Even the most liberated, iconoclastic couples I know agree: total openness needs to be maintained in a healthy relationship. If you make the mutual decision to have an open relationship, fine, but you and your partner should practice complete transparency when it comes to the whos, wheres, whens and hows of your sexual activities.
But is this really the best way to do it? Or has it simply become gospel via hundreds of advice columns? The concept of "communication" is often defined as full disclosure. But people like Serdna think this rigid interpretation is illogical. For the past three years, he’s been in a "don’t ask, don’t tell" relationship with his girlfriend, a twenty-one-year-old fashion student we’ll call Leslie.
Though "don’t ask, don’t tell" (DADT) relationships brush the sexual fringe, the story of how Serdna and Leslie met sounds like a Dawson’s Creek plotline. The high-school sweethearts were introduced at a dance, online chatting led to a first date, prom led to a two-year monogamous relationship and, somewhere in the middle, they lost their virginity together.
But by Serdna’s sophomore year at Parsons art college, he felt two years had sapped the relationship of its passion. "We would go out, see a movie, eat, then go home." And because he’d spent his entire adolescence at an all-boys school, his new coed campus — with its overwhelming majority of flirtatious female peers — was rife with temptation.
Serdna didn’t want to risk slipping up and cheating, so he called off the relationship. But a week later, they were hanging out again, and having sex.
"What do we do?" they asked each other. Serdna felt conflicted. He didn’t want to lose Leslie or the freedom to experience other women.
Then, while reading about different types of open relationships online, he stumbled upon the concept of DADT, and realized he could have it both ways — the girlfriend and the casual sex — without the trauma of hearing about her sleeping with other men. "[The website] explained that if you want the freedom to do whatever you want, it’s better not to know," Serdna says. "So, when I read about it, I thought, that’s it."
There’s nothing new about couples not asking and not telling. Even good old-fashioned infidelity reaffirms a component of DADT when someone knows their partner is cheating but looks the other way.
The difference with true DADT relationships is that both partners conform to a mutual, verbal agreement that stipulates they can both do what they want, so long as they don’t talk about it. This arrangement serves two major purposes: it removes the stigma of cheating, and it allows the couple to operate in semi-ignorant bliss. Serdna didn’t want to break up with Leslie, and he felt that keeping their relationship too open could create a friends-with-benefits situation, something neither of them wanted.
So the couple mutually agreed that during the times they weren’t together, they were free to flirt with, date, kiss and sleep with other people. The only rule was that they keep quiet about it — neither one wanted to know anything about the other’s secret sex life. Yet they considered their lines of communication open and fully functional. "We have to talk about how we feel, and there are rules," Serdna says. "I know guys who lie and cheat on their girlfriends, and I swore I would never turn into one of those guys."
But after Serdna kissed another woman for the first time, he felt so shaken that he broke the cardinal rule: he called Leslie and told her. She was so distraught that she hung up on him. The next time they talked, she was angry, not because of the kiss, but because he had told her. "I don’t know if I can do this anymore," she said. "Why did you tell me?"
Still, they plunged ahead, and that was the last time Serdna told Leslie about a tryst with another woman. "If it’s going to work, I can’t tell her these things that happen," he said. "That was the first step toward accepting the reality of what we were doing."
For something based on the absence of questions and answers, people in DADT relationships spend a lot of time talking. "It needs to be on the table," says Michael Shernoff, a New York City-based psychotherapist. "Is it just tricking? Can you see somebody more than once? Can you bring them into your house? There have to be certain rules, and both people must feel that they have the ability to revisit those rules any time they need to."
"Withholding information does not equate dishonesty," says Helen Fisher, an anthropology professor. "I don’t tell my girlfriends they’re fat. Am I lying? No."
But for some couples, DADT is not primarily about damage control. George Olds, a fifty-five-year-old equal-marriage advocate in Toronto, has been with his partner Ian for so long that they consider what they do outside their bed to be a non-issue. "I already know after living with him for twenty-two years what kinds of people he goes for," says George, "or what he chats about online or what he likes to do in person. So there’s not much for me to ask or for either of us to tell." Still, the constant exchange of details can feel harmful and awkward, and DADT allows George to bypass the psychological bruises of knowing who Ian is with, and when. "There’s that envy thing: ‘That could’ve been me,’ or, ‘You could’ve done that with me.’ There’s no point in shoving it in his face. And I wouldn’t want it shoved in my face because that might make me feel inadequate."
George met Ian, who is fifty-six, in 1985 through a classified ad, but a month later, Ian moved to another city for a job. For two years, they kept their long-distance relationship open. When Ian returned and moved in with George, they never considered becoming exclusive, even after they tied the knot in Toronto in 2004. "I would never limit him if he felt he wanted to have some fun with somebody else," says George, "so long as he realizes that I’m his other half and he comes home to me."
This attitude was common among the couples he met back in 1969, soon after he came out of the closet. "Sometimes they played together, and sometimes they played apart," he says. "But it was just a very healthy relationship with respect and love and total honesty."
Like any couple, DADTs sometimes trip up, and occasionally one partner — out of curiosity, jealousy or masochism — will ask. When this happens, George feels obligated to fess up if Ian wants to know. "He doesn’t always ask of the details," says George, "but I always tell when he asks."
And this is where DADT relationships begin to skate thin ice: justified dishonesty. Serdna has lied in the past when Leslie asked about other women because he felt that, technically speaking, he didn’t need to tell. And when he asks her? "When she says no, I trust that she’s telling me the truth," he says. "Maybe."
The term "don’t ask, don’t tell" is most commonly associated with the 1993 U.S. military policy signed by former President Bill Clinton that allowed gays and lesbians to serve so long as they kept their sexual orientation under wraps. Charles Moskos, the military sociologist who penned the policy, said on NPR in 2004, "The most important justification for the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy is the respect of people’s privacy." Opponents, however, argued that DADT punished servicemembers for being out in the workplace.
The pros and cons of DADT relationships echo those of the military policy. In a DADT relationship, a couple may agree that it’s better to keep things quiet in the interest of not disrupting the whole. On the flipside, being tight-lipped implies that one’s sexual behavior is secretive or shameful.
Most in the polyamorous community (the go-to experts on open relationships) believe such a policy can only lead to catastrophe. DADT "creates way too much room for wishful thinking, denial, and make-believe," an anonymous poly wrote to me in an email response to a call for opinions. "Experience has drilled into the community that honesty and transparency — and the ‘communicate, communicate, communicate’ mantra — are, for most well-meaning people, essential to avoiding misunderstandings and crackups."
Valerie White, executive director of the Sexual Freedom Legal Defense and Education Fund, thinks DADT couples are deluding themselves. "[They] don’t actually have an understanding," she says. "It’s just sort of a line to use to convince another person to get involved with them. If you don’t know what your partner is doing, you can’t consent to it in any meaningful sense. There’s this black hole of mystery, and if there is a mystery in your partner’s life, I don’t think there is trust."
But viewed another way, DADT requires a kind of trust that could be seen as even stronger. The idea is that these couples have so much confidence in their relationship that they’re not threatened by what isn’t known. "It’s because we trust each other so much that there’s less of a need to talk about it," says George of his relationship with Ian. "Trust is built up over time into honesty and respect and not wanting to hurt anybody’s feelings. Because of that, it can’t be anything but healthy, so long as everybody is playing safely."
Why does a person choose DADT? Ask Serdna, and he’ll muse about life being short and options to be seized, while for George, it’s about his conviction that monogamy is a myth. Ask A.G., a twenty-one-year-old New Yorker, and he’ll say, "Because I wanted to visit a prostitute."
A.G. lives with a girlfriend almost twice his age. Their sex life began to dwindle after six months — she heads to bed early because of exhaustion from her job, and she just isn’t that into sex. "When she is, she can do it herself and gets off and it’s almost like a release," says A.G. "It’s not a big romantic experience." On a good week, they have sex once, though they’ve gone several weeks without it.
A month ago, A.G. asked his girlfriend if he could see a prostitute. She laughed. "She told me I could do what I want, but that she didn’t want to know about it," he says.
A.G. has visited the same prostitute twice, a woman in her mid-thirties he found on Craigslist. She was fake and so business-like that he didn’t even feel turned on. "It was distracting and awkward and it felt like what it was: a cheap prostitute," he says.
The experience sent him practically running home to crawl into bed with his girlfriend. And that, he says, is why DADT has actually improved their relationship. "When I get home, I’m happier about my relationship and feel more respect for my girlfriend. I even see her as prettier, but somehow, still not sexy. But I’m so love with this person. It’s odd."
Even if A.G. asked, he’s convinced that his girlfriend would have nothing to tell. But he admits that if he did find out she had sex with someone else, it would be enough for him to drop DADT all together. "I wouldn’t want that to happen," he says. "That would be the beginning of the end." Therein lie the early warning signs that can bring down a DADT relationship: A.G. takes advantage of the agreement, but can’t imagine his girlfriend doing the same. "I recently asked her if we should break up," he says. "Because is this something people break up over? Should we go to therapy? But I don’t want to break up. And I don’t want to deny myself sex. I made the decision to be in this type of relationship, but I don’t really want it to be this way."
DADT couples say it’s better to be candid than to cheat (a harsh reality of many monogamous relationships), and that it’s more practical to be discreet than to provoke jealousy (a potential crisis among polys). In the end, DADT casts a new light on honesty by curbing the too-much-information highway.
"Withholding information does not equate dishonesty," says Helen Fisher, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University who studies marriage, divorce and adultery. "We make contracts with people all the time. I don’t tell my girlfriends that they’re fat. Am I lying? No. I’m simply trying to sustain a relationship. The world does not agree with the American attitude about honesty that everything should be said."
Serdna, the painter from Queens, eventually wants to return to a monogamous relationship with Leslie. But the tables have turned. "It’s at a point where I don’t want [to sleep around] as much, and I thought about committing to her this winter," he says. "But I want to give her the space she gave me. If I want my freedom, she has to have the same thing. If I want to go out with another girl and have fun with another girl, she has to have the same right. I can’t take that away from her."
He hopes DADT serves as a temporary necessary evil. "I can’t do this forever, and neither can she. Monogamy is a goal for me. I want to be with only one person one day, and hopefully, it will be her." But that’s exactly why DADT appealed to him. He knew that hearing details about the men his girlfriend saw on the side could destroy their ability to be monogamous in the future. "I just don’t want to know anything about what she does," he says. "I do want to end up in a monogamous relationship with her, but if she told me all those things, it would just be harder to be with her in the end."
It’s this ambivalence that lies at the core of DADT: the exhilarating ability for two people to maintain secret sex lives, while knowing that the details of those lives could destroy the one thing they’re trying to sustain. Though DADT comes with this unique cost, these relationships attempt to take the brutality out of honesty. Whether they’re realists or delusional, these couples have created a little world of their own where the rules don’t apply, they don’t have to compromise and the secret to having it all is just that — a secret.