Monogamy can't fix insecurity

(Part 1)

Why One Piece of Relationship Advice Doesn’t Fit Everyone

I was listening to Dan Savage being interviewed on the podcast 10% Happier when the conversation turned to his “monogamish” relationship.

The host asked a familiar question:

How do you deal with jealousy in a non-monogamous relationship?

We love him, or did...? but Dan Savage over simplifying advice again and his response was essentially that jealousy exists these relationships too. It’s something you work through. And if you’re unwilling to do that work, maybe non-monogamy isn’t for you.

So vague, and are you asking you partner to change their behavior or is this on you to, "work through"

Granted, the nature of a podcast interview isn't always set up for a deep dive. But instead of just posing a few questions that the listener might ask themselves and come up with better answers.

What bothered me was how quickly the conversation moved past the jealousy itself.

Essentially citing, it's very existence as a reason it won't work for them.

As if he and his husband had been in agreeance and open from the start... and not the years of monagamy that was first their relationship. Based off what I wonder and couldnt we benefit from that five year stint as well?

This is why I started the Leveled Up Queers podcast.

The dialogue from sources like our ground-breaker freind Dan Savage, once trusted and trend setting, now feeling out of touch for many of us…

This now over simplified information…

It isn’t enough.

Thin, watered-down answers—even when they’re well intentioned—often leave the people with t anything other than the most simple of questions, feeling even more alone.

As this gets used as another piece of the fiction where we can tell ourselves, we are more fucked up than everyone else.

Sometimes I think the people with the biggest platforms are just the ones with the most palatable, personalities or responses, but don't ask people to question very much or dive very deep.

Dan got our attention by speaking openly about things that others were skirting around. But then just the other day he completely retracted his entire advice to a man who was masturbating with other men, and didn't know if he could open up to his wife. I'm just because of listener feedback he completely just caved and withdrew his entire statement. That's a bummer.

No thanks. I think we deserve better and can handle way more.

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Again, Dan wasn't always in this version of polyamorous marriage.

Dan and his partner started their relationship monogamously.

They spent years:

• Building trust.

• Creating a home together.

• Adopting a child.

• Growing into a solid partnership.

Only after all of that did they begin exploring what non-monogamy might look like for them.

They created boundaries that felt honest, safe, and mutually understood.

I think that’s beautiful.

It’s a blessing to reach that stage of a relationship together.

But…

What about the majority of the rest of us especially the gay relationships?

Real Life Story

The 23-year-old couple who’s been together for six months.

The couple whose relationship was built on chemistry before it was built on history.

Maybe six months ago they were having sex every day.

Sometimes twice a day.

Now it’s once a week.

Their foundation isn’t decades of shared experiences.

It was powerful, lust and attraction.

Discovering sexual natures of themselves and exploring now in a safe and stable relationship.

That very security, its reliabilty, is turning into sexual aversion.

They have yet to learn how to grow deeper, to allow an evoltion of the relationship. Appreciating the new. Potentially even more satisfying aspects available in their maturing sexual and romantic relationship.

They are still trying to figure out what love even looks like. They are the only ones of their friends actually openly sane there in a relationship. I'm not just "hanging out "I'm the only ones they know are older couples in their mid to late 30s his relationships they don't actually feel drawn to emulate.

I have this saying that their generation doesn't dream of Prince charming or white picket fences. They want a best friend that's going to fuck their brains out and not require much of them like all the hook ups have grown accustomed to or no one asks much of each other because they don't truly know each other.

And then her boy Dan pours out some stock advice that I feel like just came from my parents essentially because if it's not their way, it doesn't deserve much introspection and let's move on.

Advice coming from someone who’s spent decades building one of the healthiest long-term open relationships in public may be incredibly valuable…

…but it also comes from an exceptionally rare perspective.

Applying that advice equally to every relationship can unintentionally become dismissive.

It reminds me of something my ex-fiancé’s parents once told us:

“If you’re not going to be in a monogamous, committed marriage, then don’t do it. It’s not going to actually mean anything.”

The implication was that a thirty-year sexless marriage somehow held more value than the honesty and communication we’d built in our own relationship.

I don’t believe that’s true.

Monogamy does not automatically creates intimacy by turning blind eyes to the totality of our partners and the changing nature of attraction.

I don’t think non-monogamy automatically destroys it, and surely does not have one defenition even between your own relationships or the same over time like Dan's.

I think both relationship structures simply expose whatever likely exists underneath, and what may be easier not to address aat first but will be dealt wth one way or the other eventually.

Bringing us back to jealousy.

Because maybe jealousy isn’t the real problem at all.

Maybe it’s trying to tell us something.

In Part Two, I explore what jealousy can teach us if we sit with it—and why learning to understand it developed the way I saw myself, and my relationships.

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