Is Monogamy Dead? by Rosie Wilby

Author:Rosie Wilby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Is Monogamy Dead?
ISBN: 9781786154521
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

In much the same way that lesbians hint at some universal truths about women, so gay men provide a fascinating insight into instinctive male behaviour. They reveal something about what all men want and how straight men might behave if they could. What I really needed to do to immerse myself in a bit of testosterone-packed action would be to hang out with the gay boys.

Dominic Berry points at the fact that being gay in the first place provides an alternative framework for thinking about relationships. ‘Perhaps if people are doing something so widely viewed as deviant, making another deviance from the norm isn’t too big a jump.’

When I asked my friend and fellow performer Nick Field about the prevalence of open relationships within the queer male community, he could only think of one long-term couple he knew who didn’t have such an arrangement. Given gay men’s low divorce rate, the pragmatist in me is pretty convinced by this seemingly brilliant model. American sex columnist Dan Savage says, ‘Every gay male couple I know in a serious and successful long-term relationship is non-monogamous, even the ones who were monogamous the first ten years.’ One of my gay male survey respondents said, ‘My partner and I don’t have sex very often but we are very lovey-dovey, tactile and romantic. I have sexual satisfaction from other people and the Internet.’

I get it. Why break up a great team and go through all the upheaval we lesbians were periodically subjecting ourselves to for something as simple and available as sex? And boy, any glance at the sex-focused ads in the free gay boys’ mags makes it feel like it’s pretty available.

My occasional radio co-host, the DJ and writer Stewart Who, has long-term female platonic friends whom he talks to for hours every day. These are his love relationships through which his emotional needs are met. Yet he likes his sexual partners to turn up, have sex and then leave ‘before the sweat cools on my body’. Some of these lovers become regular partners for many years. Yet if any of them ever suggest going to an exhibition or social event together, he can immediately sense his desire wilting.

As I found myself being ridiculously turned on by the twenty-minute opening scene of French film Theo and Hugo, I felt a pang of envy at gay men’s apparent freedom and ease around their most animal instincts. I had always found it a struggle even to admit to a partner what really got me going. Surely gay men were the ones who were being honest about their basic needs and, on some level, had got it right.

A survey carried out in February 2016 by FS Magazine and health charity GMFA found that forty-one percent of their sample of 1006 UK-based men had experienced, or were in, an open relationship. Of those, three-quarters believed it to be a ‘great’ relationship model. However twenty-one percent admitted to breaking the rules they and their partner had agreed.

After recording my

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