I don’t want my partners to wish for or to practice monogamy.
Alien concept.
Married folks: is it enough that your partner BE monogamous, or must they also WANT to be monogamous
This pretty much matches my feelings. I don’t think monogamy is “the right thing to do”, its not a moral issue for me. Honesty and openness are though. I think it’s fine to sow your oats while you are single, and get some taste for variety, it’s an important experience. And even in a relationship its fine to look at attractive people, or porn, or have fantasies. And open relationships are fine, and have their own benefits, and are right for some people, its just not what im interested in pursuing.
But I feel like monogamy is a way to experience an intensely intimate, deep, long lasting relationship and partnership, and that’s something that is rewarding rather than restrictive. If my partner didn’t feel the same, it would mean we had different goals for our relationship, and I don’t see how that could work. They don’t have to believe monogamy is the ideal or only valid relationship form, because I don’t believe that either, but it should be what they are actively seeking to explore at this point.
I love the line from a movie I think “The Breakup” where the woman tells her boyfriend “I don’t want you to do the dishes, I want you to want to do the dishes”. It doesn’t really help if your partner makes some concessions if you still have a fundamental difference of viewpoint on something that affects your daily life. That just leads to dissonance and often resentment on both parts.
I wouldn’t want to be with someone who is monogamous just to please me, I want to be with someone who wants to for the same reasons.
See, that’s where I was able to pit some of the blame on Jennifer Aniston for the failure of the relationship. It’s a ridiculous standard.
Yes, Vince Vaughn was a jerk for never doing the dishes or only doing them grudgingly when badgered. He should have done the dishes, not because he should want to do the dishes, but because being in a relationship or just having a roommate successfully means you have to do a ton of stuff that you don’t want to do.
Same with monogamy. What matters is your action, not whether you are a sinner in your heart.
How would that work exactly?
I have no interest in controlling his thoughts. As long as he practices monogamy, I’m good. He’s a sexual being, and I like him being a sexual being.
That is ridiculous. So all attractive people should be looked at like they are pretty paintings in a museum?
I have no desire to be the thought police to my girlfriend and she has no desire to do the same to me.
My ex-wife would get mad at me for purposely not looking at pretty women in public. My now girlfriend will point them out to me if I miss them. There was no infidelity in either relationship. Guess which one is a healthier relationship?
Exactly right.
I just don’t fundamentally see it as a morals issue, but like its been said, a shared values issue. It’s not that I’d want my partner to change their feelings, it’s that I wouldn’t want to be with a partner in the first place who didn’t share some of my core values. What would be the point? I mean, difference of opinion about certain things can make for interesting conversation and spice up things, but difference of opinion about things like the purpose and form of your relationship, whether and how to raise kids, and even to an extent how to cohabitate are basically a non starter.
It’s like any partnership.
Which begs the question, in the modern era all sorts of relationship forms are gaining acceptance. If you don’t value or want to experience monogamy, why would you choose to be monogamous?
But at some point, insisting on “shared values”—especially when it’s something as fundamentally genetic as the urge to have sexual variety—is perverse and excessively limiting, and also setting yourself up for repeated disappointment.
At some point it becomes necessary to face facts—most normal people are going to feel urges to not be monogamous. So what matters really is how they handle those urges, and not trying to look into their minds or hearts to figure out what their “values” truly are.
Yes, and like any partnership, at some point you have to let go of the idea that you can truly get into another person’s head and like everything you see there. Partnership isn’t really about making the perfect match. It’s about compromise and acceptance. You compromise to reach an accord about important things about your relationship, and the rest, you just accept.
To the extent you can’t reach that accord, yes, of course, you have a failed relationship. But insisting on adherence to a set of core values that insists that you must feel or think a certain way, rather than just behave in ways that are conducive to maintaining a relationship—you’re sabotaging yourself and setting yourself up for failure.
Because monogamous relationships—we’re talking about marriage here, essentially—are still often the best sources of a lot of benefits that people want—family, stability, security, partnership, companionship, long-term caring and loving relationships, etc.
I think “wanting” to do the dishes in that case doesn’t mean he changes his DNA and suddenly enjoys doing dishes, it means he cares enough about her that he wants to meet her needs, and having a clean kitchen is important to her, so he would naturally “want” to keep it clean for her.
And the assumption is that she would be doing things that meet his needs because she cares about him, for example, going to hockey games with him even if she doesn’t naturally enjoy hockey.
This is wonderfully complicated subject. My opinion is based on the premise that both parties enter into the relationship with the same view and commitment of monogamy. If there are differing views, it’s destined for trouble. Even if you both have the same view going into the relationship, you will still have trouble - it’s the way of it.
On that note, I guess I’m pretty old school - I was raised with the concept that marriage is a covenant, commitment and a mutually monogamous relationship - for its own merit. One can never fully trust their feelings because feelings can be deceptive and can change back and forth depending on myriad situations and cycles of life. So something stronger has to be the binder or catalyst to get you through the rough times.
Also, you can never feel “in love” all the time either, yet that commitment and covenant brings a sense of security and stability to the marriage knowing that through thick and thin, good times and bad, the other will always be there - if you honor your vows. It’s an anchor in a sometimes very stormy sea of life.
Another thing - monogamy (to me) isn’t just a sexual thing - it’s also a monogamy of the soul - meaning that not only my body, but also my heart belongs to my wife. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have eyes, etc. but it does mean that my heart is my wife’s - it’s a matter of choice. I have found in our lives that when the choice is made, the heart will follow.
Me and Mrs. R have had ample opportunities to see this work throughout the last 30 years with each other - and there’s absolutely been times where we nearly didn’t make it. We haven’t always been the easiest personalities to live with. But it’s the commitment and faith that has gotten us through. And interestingly, we adore each other more now than we did when we first married.
I think choosing not to act on those urges, or redirecting them, because you value your relationship, and not because its “wrong” or to placate your partner, fundamentally sets up a different kind of dynamic. Which is fine. But it should be a dynamic both people are looking for.
The point is, there is no right or wrong reason to have a relationship, or form of relationship, but it is important that both parties are aware of and consciously choosing the dynamic.
What could be more fundamentally important than how you see the relationship, to the relationship?
Look at it another way, is it OK to tell someone you love them if you don’t, to keep the relationship going, if it works for you?
It seems to me that if you enter into a partnership half heartedly, you are setting yourself up for failure, or at least disappointment and resentment.
I guess this is quibbling over the definition of want. The point is not to not have any desire for non monogamy, the point is to prefer non monogamy at this point.
But then I’m also the sort of person who would rather get one spontaneous gift from someone actually thinking of me, then thirty gifts from people because it’s my birthday or Christmas.
If you just want to have a strict barter, where you trade your partner’s desire for monogamy for your own desire for some of the “goodies” of marriage, I guess that’s fine, if both parties are amenable and they both just want to get something out of the situation. I don’t think it’s right to hide that fact from them.
But if you are someone who is getting married because one of the things you are having a relationship for is to experience a deep authentic experience of connecting with another human being, then that doesn’t really work.
If someone says they will literally die before breaking an agreement, and they back this up with their behavior, you’re a fool if you second-guess their motivations. Honoring your agreement is the only thing that matters.
Of course, this means not being a martyr about it. If you find yourself complaining about how burdensome the agreement is, that’s just a subtle way of trying to either escape it or extract more concessions from the other party. That’s a breach of faith in my book, even if there’s no unfaithful behavior.
So I don’t expect someone to “want” to be monogamous, but if that’s the agreement, then they had better do it and wear their game face at all times.
No offense to you, I hope, Loach, but that is crazy-making.
Not that I haven’t done worse things myself, but that kind of a no-win situation is part of what I find objectionable about the “it isn’t enough if you do what I want - you have to want to do it” construction. It’s like the dish-washing thing in The Break-up mentioned above. My wife can certainly expect me to stuff just because she wants me to do, and I should do that stuff without nagging or feeling like a victim. But if I did the stuff, and still got criticized because I didn’t feel a certain way while I was doing it, there is nothing more that I can do and it would piss me off royally. Thank God the Lovely and Talented Mrs. Shodan doesn’t pull that kind of crap, which may explain why we have managed for the last thirty-one years.
I have never cheated on my wife, mostly because I am old and clueless and it doesn’t occur to me that it might happen. But it didn’t happen even when I was young (and clueless). Maybe because we try not to put each other into those kind of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t kinds of dilemmas.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m going to both agree and disagree with you.
The problem might be in the phrasing. If what she meant was, “I just don’t want to have to be the one who always does the dishes or have to badger you into doing it grudgingly.” Okay fine. But, to me, “I want you to want to do the dishes” is not going to get that message across to me. It says to me “I want to control your inner thoughts.” So, hell, that’s a losing proposition. (I wonder if this is a Venus/Mars thing.)
So, as far as that goes, I totally agree with Jennifer. Come on, just relieve her of being the one of doing the dishes all the time or having to be the scolding mom about it, because that’s just not fun.
On the other hand, I would say this: If Vince really was going to do the dishes in the morning (and there’s plenty of reason to believe that he wouldn’t, but let’s leave that aside for now), Jennifer should maybe just accept that—okay, he’s going to do the dishes, jut not right now.
I’m much more on board with Jennifer Aniston’s complaint about the ballet. She wanted him to take her to the ballet, and he never did it because he doesn’t like watching ballet. Well, hell, if you love someone, you can suffer an evening’s worth of entertainment that you don’t prefer, just because it pleases you to make her happy.
Now, here’s where I see the difference between the two situations: The ballet is a treat that he can participate in at most a few times a year (or, really, just once ever in the context of the story).
But dishes are something that always have to be done. And if that’s the case, maybe in exchange for Vince just doing the damn dishes, Jennifer should concede that he gets to do them in the morning instead of right now.
Now, of course, this wasn’t the only problem in their relationship, and, face it, Vince was not going to do the dishes at all, but just taking this in isolation, I think there is some degree of give and take.
I that this is overly idealistic and denies some basic truths about human beings. Yes, you can have this standard for some things — are we going to raise our kids as Jewish or Catholic. But those are things that are fundamentally outside the person.
When it comes to what two people think, I think it’s a fundamental mistake to (1) believe that you can really understand comprehensively what a human being thinks, even often if that human being is yourself, and (2) to believe that what a person thinks is of that degree of importance.
Fundamentally, you’re going to spend your life wondering what the hell is going on in your own brain. Forget trying to think that you have have a comprehensive understanding what your partner thinks about your relationship from his or her actual point of view. Perspective, self-knowledge, emotions, thoughts … these things are way too complicated.
And when it comes to something as base and instinctive as sexual urges, it becomes even worse. So, if you’re going to have a relationship that gives you peace of mind, I think you should concentrate on what your partner does instead of worrying about whether you have a fundamental agreement at the level of thought.
I think this is all very idealistic and romantic, but I also think it is modernist, self-delusional claptrap. The institution of marriage—as well as the institution of infidelity—have existed as long as human beings have existed, and it has always been a compromise between emotional attachment and practical considerations, including things like emotional security and materialism.
Remember, when the idea of romantic love began to arise as a virtue in Western society, it was always in the context of betrayal of marriage—Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, etc.
I’m not saying that love and emotions and the intellectual accord of two minds isn’t or shouldn’t be or can’t be a part of marriage, but that marriage is and always has involved a balancing of, and a compromise among, many different considerations—material, practical, emotional, etc.
And I think it’s also self-limiting and a mistake to think that unless my partner’s deepest inner thoughts are exactly in accord with mine on X, Y, and Z, then our relationship is fundamentally false. You can strive for that level of interpersonal accord, but you might also be sabotaging yourself by denying the ability to enter into fully satisfactory long-term affectionate, loving, respectful, etc., relationships, based on this level of strict standards-setting.
In short, don’t think you can really know another person’s mind. Be satisfied with some level of superficial satisfaction.
I imagine there are folks who want to be faithful but still stray. The same way I want to lose weight but continue to eat too much and not exercise.
I regard the promises laid out in my marriage vows as something I *choose *to do.
There would be very little point in vowing to do something that happened to be entirely consistent with my nature anyway. I expect it to be a challenge at times, but I also have committed to face those challenges.
I’m not sure what that really means in terms of ‘want’ - I suppose I’m saying that there is a greater ‘want’ that overrides all the others - that of wanting to remain faithful to the path I have vowed to follow, regardless of any transient, smaller ‘wants’ that may arise.
I think the dishes thing can be broken into four scenarios, not two:
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Doing the dishes because it’s part of the deal with your partner, but you don’t understand, appreciate, or share the idea that it’s a worthwhile task.
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Doing the dishes because it makes your partner happy and you want them to be happy, even if you can’t understand why it matters.
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Doing the dishes because you just love doing the dishes so damn much and wish they’d be dirty more often.
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Doing the dishes because you value having a clean kitchen, and you would, in fact, do the dishes regularly even if you lived alone.
I think the gap between (2) and (4) is the issue. There are things I do for my husband (and he for me) even though I really don’t understand why he cares, but whatever, if it makes him happy. I don’t want anything as big as monogamy to be in that category. Things that big–whether or not we are monogamous, whether or not we have children, the fundamental structure of our family, the guiding principals of our financial decision making–those things need to be things we independently reached the same conclusions about, because that is what defines compatibility.
I wouldn’t accept the burden of a gift as big as monogamy from someone who was only giving it out of love, any more than I would want to have a child with someone who didn’t get why I wanted one, but wanted to make me happy, or let someone supported me while I worked full time for a charity they thought was useless just to see me smile. That sort of favor turns into contempt too easily. My husband doesn’t really “get” why I like him to make me coffee, but he does it anyway: that makes me smile. Anything bigger than that needs more backing it.
Well put, Jo!