Our culture believes in love. Sure, people are getting divorced left and right, but we still believe in love. Love is in our stories, and our dreams. Love is in song and prose, in our poetry and art. It makes people feel more intense feelings than anything else does in this world, barring the feeling when you lose someone. But ever when you lose someone, the reason you hurt so much is because you loved him. Love is still the reason. Love is the reason for reasons.
So, again, San Francisco. A lot of people here try and fail at open relationships, just like they do in monogamous relationships. Some succeed. I hear stories all the time. One couple has been together ten years, and open in the last three years. Some couples break up and get back together over and over again. I know a woman who has two kids with her partner, and gets her “night out” every two weeks so she can hook up. I know a couple where the woman is permitted to sleep with other women, not men, just because they see that as something totally unrelated to their marriage. I know another woman who is in a relationship of over ten years, who talks longingly about the time her and her partner had their husband living with them. Apparently, they took him home one night, and he didn’t leave for two years. The three of them slept in a king size bed together.
But no matter what I hear, I still don’t see that any of them are actually happier than couples in monogamous relationships. And I don’t see them staying together longer than their monogamous counterparts. And even if a true-love-non-monogamy thing was possible, why would we even want it? If we see and believe the connection between sex and emotions and love, why would we want to toss it around so casually?
Again, love, people. We are obsessed with it. It’s everywhere, all the time. Everyone wants it. Love is beautiful, all we need is love, (insert the millions of sayings about love here), love is a much splendored thing. Not even death can stop true love, Wesley says in the classic and hilarious The Princess Bride. Death can only delay it. It is the only reason Wesley lives, and the only reason he is brought back from the dead. Love transcends everything. Even the Christians agree—God is love.
