#25. Sexual proliferation

This essay will take you 6 minutes to read

Let’s take a break for a second from my favorite format of defining things, and instead dive into another genre, also popular among psychologists: wild generalizations from anecdotal evidence, also known as “clinical experience”. The topic of today’s generalization will be deviations (in the literal, not moral sense) from the traditional Judeo-Christian monogamic form of relationships, at least in bed.

And right off the bat, I’ll have to narrow the focus even more, by cutting off the cases of mid-relationship realization of their homosexual orientation by one of the parties, and the cases of one-sided infedelity, aka affairs. Those are two separate topics, worth separate texts, and I don’t have the expertise to write about the first one, to begin with. So we’re talking about a heterosexual couple of two heterosexual or bisexual people, who agreed to have sex with other people. This kind of arrangement goes by many names, starting with old-school polygamy (along with lesser-known polyandry), polyamory, open relationships, sexual non-exclusivity, and others.

It also comes in a variety of forms. Sometimes it’s a swing, when couples meet and exchange partners, sometimes they go together to sex parties, or look for threesomes, or orgies. Sometimes these couples look for a unicorn—a mythical bisexual woman, equally appealing and equally drawn to both in a couple, making it a throuple. Sometimes they use professionals, hiring escorts or going to brothels for a short fun, or hiring long-standing sugar babies. Sometimes, quite often, actually, one side is more interested in this topic than the other, so only one partner goes around (pardon my puns), while the other either tolerates it or doesn’t care.

The point I’m going to make with the solid evidence of “I think so”, based on my experience as a counselor, is that these couples, however you want to call them, generally fall into three categories: the doomed, the curious, and the dedicated. Allow me to unpack.

Starting strong with the doomed, I’d like to propose to you the idea that sexual liberation is a lesser-known cousin of the famous triplets of the worst ways to try to fix broken relationships: having a child, a mortgage, or immigration together. The logic usually goes like this: we suffer in our relationship and want to change it to be more like the relationships of people who have a good time. What do people in good relationships do? Well, they have children, they buy houses, and they move to new places together. So we’re going to do the same thing and expect the same result. It’s a not-so-well-disguised cargo cult, pure magical thinking based on sympathetic magic: we make A look like B, so that A will adopt properties of B. Let’s just say it doesn’t usually work with those three: a child, a debt, and the stress of adapting to a new place can take a toll on even healthy relationships, let alone those that were already miserable. The same goes for sexual experiments outside of the couple itself.

There is no biological reason people should be monogamous, by the way. But there is also no biological reason for us to have the ability to speak or walk upright. Those traits are purely social and learnt—real-life Mougly children don’t have them, and if discovered past the sensitive periods of development, never gain them. So saying that something in our behavior “isn’t biological” is a very low bar to clear. If you grow up in a society that treats monogamy and sexual exclusivity as a baseline standard, and any deviation from it as sin and a sign of a fallen human, it becomes entrenched, whether you like it or not. No amount of self-soothing logical assertions about the arbitrariness and artificiality of that standard will wipe that baseline from your subconscious. Which means that for everyone born and bred in the first world, having sexual contact with someone that is not your primary partner, while having a primary partner, will create tension both in the psyche of the one doing it and in the relationship between them and their partner. Healthy, strong, and resourceful relationships can bear that strain, and even see it as a price worth paying for the fun you get in return. Not-so-strong or unhealthy relationships... well, you get the point.

So how do people end up in this doomed kind of sexually open relationships? Well, there are a few scenarios. Maybe one side feels inadequate (whether it’s for a good reason or not is a separate topic) and offers this to the other side as compensation. Which, of course, only works as a signal to the other side that they should literally look for someone else, which they usually promptly do. Maybe both sides are tired and don’t know where to go next, but they aren’t ready to admit that this relationship has no future, so they cover up the failure by first spending time not relying on their partner for their needs, and not losing the status of being a couple. Which doesn’t last long. Maybe one party has already decided that they don’t want this relationship, but they either want to find the next one before leaving this one (in which case they ask for an open relationship) or they want to have an excuse to break up (in which case they hint or offer it to the other side).

Bottom line here is that openness to other sexual partners isn’t a new step in their relationship, neither with each other, nor with their own sexuality. It’s a half-measure towards a break-up. A cop-out, a way to delay the inevitable, the fig leaf to cover the real reason they are breaking up. And this is the kind of open relationships that gives the word a bad rep, making people think couples fall apart after going open.

Which brings us to the next kind, which is—the curious. The curious couples aren’t halfway broken up; they are often either at the beginning of relationships, looking to start big, or the opposite—a long-established alliance of people very fond of each other, looking to bring even more joy and fun into their lives. It’s usually not a deal-breaker in their relationship, unlike the doomed ones, who frequently position opening their relationship as a non-negotiable item. They usually approach the topic slowly, which doesn’t mean much in absolute terms: “slow” might mean “months” for some and “hours” for others. But the point of “slow” isn’t that it takes a lot of time; it’s that they want to be in this together, they take time to communicate, discuss expectations, limits, boundaries. They start small, maintain contact with each other, ask for feedback, and are more anxious to harm what they have than to miss an opportunity to score.

The curious thing about the curious (yeah, I’m on a roll today) is that they don’t usually last long. As mentioned before, non-monogamous relationships are strenuous for the psyche of a modern Western person, and since the curious are usually a good couple by themselves, and unicorns aren’t called unicorns because they are easy to find, they quite often find that all that sexually proliferate life is just so tiresome. The usual trajectory goes like this: they think about it, they Google it, they are anxious, but aroused by it, they do a few experiments, they pick up the pace until something goes awry—an std happens, an emotional bundle with a third person, a reputational issue, a social consequence among their circle, they slow down. And then they live the next decade or so still claiming to be sexually non-exclusive, and maybe even occasionally having a threesome, but eventually slowing the non-monogamous endeavors to once per months, and eventually once per years. Sometimes, still maintaining the venire of an open relationship, which is frequently enough: the very understanding that “I could if I wanted to” is sufficient for people far more often than they care to admit.

Which, of course, leaves us with the dedicated ones. Despite what you might think, they don’t usually grow out of the curious ones. Sometimes they grow out of the doomed ones—but not as a couple, as individuals, who got on that train in a doomed relationship, but then found themself liking it. The dedicated meet already knowing they are dedicated. They don’t start in this relationship—they announce their dedication from the jump, as a prerequisite for their lifestyle. They have bodycounts in triple, sometimes quadruple digits, they know fifteen non-standard hygienic procedures and rules for safe sex, they’ll tell you why tantra is over-rated and what the latest statistics of marital infidelity are. They know which sex shop has the latest issue of the new ultra-thin condoms, which sexual positions are better and worse with which chronic condition, how to have sex in a cast, on crutches, on a waterbed, in a foam pit. They have spent more hours learning stuff about sex than the average blue-collar worker spends learning their craft. They know themselves very well—they know how sleep, food, drugs, sauna, and sport affect their arousal, vaginal secretions, sperm count, and orgasm. You won’t misunderstand a person dedicated to a sexually prolific life if you try to date them. They’ll tell you in plain, explicit language about their tastes, their consent or lack thereof, their boundaries, and their safe word. If they form a couple—which, surprisingly to some, they do, it’s usually a pretty average in other regards couple, that can be successful or fall apart for any number of normal reasons, including sexual ones, but usually not because of the issue of sexual non-exclusivity, because off all the things, this one is usually resolved in the very beginning.

Until next week,
Konstantin Kunakh

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