As they explained the role of love in their marriage, they quoted the Apostle Paul and the Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards. (Edwards: “The most benevolent, generous person in the world, seeks his own happiness in doing good to others; because he places his happiness in their good.”)
I hadn’t found many non-monogamous love stories, though there seemed to be lots of instruction—in books and online—about how to approach it thoughtfully. I told Bobby and Roxanne that though I considered myself pretty monogamous, what I liked about the few non-monogamous stories I’d been able to find was the emphasis on communication. You had to decide what your boundaries were, what your desires were, and you had to communicate those things to your partner/s in a way that monogamous love stories rarely acknowledge. Most monogamous love stories (which is another way of saying “most love stories”) tell us that if you find the right person, you won’t need to communicate your boundaries or desires, because that person will just get them, intuitively. I also liked how there was less emphasis on finding “the one” in non-monogamy, and less of a sense that finding the right person will somehow make you whole.
But Bobby and Roxanne pointed out that they often encountered people in the non-monogamous community who were looking for wholeness: “They’re trying to change their relationship to fit their reality,” Bobby said. In other words, they hoped non-monogamy could fix something in their marriage that was broken.
I asked what kinds of stories they’d relied on when they began opening their marriage, but they didn’t have any. “There was no model for this,” Roxanne said. “You can’t look to what your parents did.” They described most depictions of non-monogamy they encountered in songs or on TV to be problematically moralistic (“There’s always some sort of tragedy without monogamy”) or sensational (Playboy made a show that “depicted swinging as a kind of free-for-all”). They were doubtful about finding stories that presented a version of non-monogamy that looked like theirs—a part of a happy marriage. “These narratives don’t exist in the culture,” Roxanne said.
“You know what’s a great example of non-monogamy?” said Bobby. “The Bachelor.”
I laughed.
“Seriously. The Bachelor is trying to achieve monogamy through an entirely non-monogamous method,” he explained. “All the drama, all the angst, is rooted in forced monogamy. Last season, Ben [Higgins] actually fell in love with two girls and couldn’t decide between them. Really, I think he has the capacity to be polyamorous. But that’s not the narrative.”
Bobby and Roxanne are doubtful about ever seeing more complex depictions of non-monogamy in the mainstream media, saying they’d prefer an absence of stories to the lazy, sensational ones you’re likely to come across.
There are good narratives out there about non-monogamous love—like a recent Walrus article, “Love, Additionally,” by the writer Natalie Zina Walschots on her polyamorous Valentine’s Day celebration—but they aren’t easy to find.2 Dan Savage’s version of non-monogamy, what he calls “monogamish,” seems to have gotten some traction in the media and I suspect this has a lot to do with the fact that it is, as the name suggests, pretty close to conventional monogamy; Savage and his husband are socially monogamous with the option of pursuing occasional sexual relationships on the side.
I wonder if, when it comes to depictions of love, nonmonogamy—and especially polyamory—will remain the final taboo. It’s not that we are, as a society, totally rejecting the possibility of loving more than one person. My poly acquaintances are quick to point out that both Twilight and The Hunger Games have protagonists who are technically polyamorous, in that they have strong romantic feelings for two people at the same time. I like imagining an ending where Katniss has an ongoing relationship with both Gale and Peeta (and many fanfic writers have), but I guess a love triangle without a conflict doesn’t make much of a story.
The practice of non-monogamy isn’t entirely different from casually dating more than one person—something plenty of us have experienced. But long-term non-monogamy upends one of our most basic assumptions about love: that it is exclusive and that exclusivity is part of what gives it value. For me, this exclusivity, and the domestic arrangements that come along with it—sharing a bed, a home, Sunday morning dog walks, making a family—is still seductive. But it’s useful to remember that it is only one way to practice love.
• • •
I spent two whole days reading Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts because I wanted to immerse myself in a queer love story. It isn’t long but it’s dense.
I told Mark about one of the first scenes in which Nelson sends her partner, the gender-fluid artist Harry Dodge, a passage from Roland Barthes in which Barthes compares a lover saying “I love you” to the Argonauts repairing their ship. Though the Argo’s parts are slowly replaced throughout the voyage, it is still the Argo. Likewise, each “I love you” has the same form, though its meaning is renewed with each use. Barthes says, “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”3
We looked up the passage in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes: “A frequent image: that of the ship Argo (luminous and white), each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form.”4
As we sat on the floor with the dog, we tried to catalogue the ways we use I love you with others and ourselves.
“Sometimes you say I love you when I am annoyed,” I tell him. “And sometimes we say it as a kind of ritual.” (When we go to sleep at night he asks, “Do you want to talk about anything else?” before putting in his earplugs and then, when we settle under the covers he says, “I love you” and I say, “I love you, too” and he says, “No, for real” and I say, “Yes: for real.”) I tell him that sometimes I say I love you because it is an exclamation that I need to get out of my body.
Mark says that when I am frustrated his I love you means it’s okay for me to be frustrated—a reminder that my feelings are situational and temporary. “And because I love you even when you are annoyed and I want you to know,” he adds. I look away, embarrassed by how this pleases me.
“All the I love yous come from the same place,” he says.
“But they are different and we should acknowledge that difference,” I say. I guess Barthes would have it that every I love you both is and is not the same vessel.
Mark and I agree that the vessel the Argo and the vessel I love you have some things in common: not just nomination and substitution, as Barthes points out, but also direction, utility, the capacity to carry us somewhere or nowhere. Each is a human construction made meaningful by the human intention it bears.
I say that sometimes I text my mom I love you because I miss her and because I know it pleases her to hear it. And I tell the dog I love him because his gait on the sidewalk or the way he rips out the fresh grass with an enthusiastic, focused gnashing of his teeth pulls the phrase out of my mouth before I even realize I am speaking.
Kevin’s I love yous always landed softly despite their weight—because he was someone who bothered to say exactly what he meant. No I love you between us was ever offered out of a sense of obligation. I was grateful for this, though maturity has taught me that even obligation can be a form of love.
As we review love’s connotations, its inflections, I am mesmerized by its sheer capaciousness. Romantic love is capacious. And I mean that not in the mystical sense—it cannot contain anything or everything and it is never without conditions—but rather it is capacious in the daily way that any expression of love might also express trust, doubt, regret, resignation, humor, self-congratulation, or sacrifice. Love can contain all of this, but love stories rarely do.
I was really struck by something Bobby said at the end of our long conversation about polyamory: “There’s this idea that what love is is altruism—the less I get out of it, the more loving it must be.” But, he said, you don’t have to
suffer in love: “You need to enlarge yourself to find joy in others’ joy. And opening up our marriage has given me so many opportunities to do this.”
Maybe we need more stories that model the capacity of love—all this vessel might contain.
• • •
Mark and I first started talking about living together a year before we actually moved in. My roommate was moving out and I panicked and Mark offered himself as a potential solution to the problem of the empty room.
We’d only been dating about six months at the time, which felt early for that level of commitment. But I’d known people who’d gotten engaged after six months. Maybe we were like them, I thought. We’d found the right person and there was no reason for caution. The possibility was exciting.
But then, over breakfast the next day, Mark wavered.
“So should I take down my Craigslist ad for a roommate?” I asked.
He hesitated. “I know I’m the one who suggested moving in, but I woke up worrying about it.”
He liked his apartment, he confessed. He wasn’t sure he was ready to give it up.
I interviewed a potential roommate later that day. I liked her, and so did Roscoe, so rather than pushing things with Mark, I invited her to move in.
I’m glad we didn’t end up living together then. I remember having this incredible sense of closeness, but now I look back and think: I barely knew him.
That was the first real challenge of our relationship. I had a lot of anxiety about finding a roommate and the cost of living in Vancouver—but mostly I was anxious about what it meant that my boyfriend wasn’t ready to live with me.
A year later, we gave the decision to move in a lot of thought. There were late-night conversations with long, uncomfortable pauses. I spent one Saturday-morning breakfast trying to hide my crying from our server. I’d given a talk on love the night before, and afterward I couldn’t sleep, thinking about whether we should live together. It’s weird being someone who gives a talk about love at night and then, the next morning, can’t quite figure out how to practice it. I had this sense that I was supposed to know—with real clarity—what was best for our relationship. But I didn’t. And neither did Mark.
Friends counseled that maybe we were taking our decision a little too seriously. And maybe we were, but I had worked hard to make a life of my own, and I was unsure about giving it up.
Even after we finally decided to live together, we wanted to go into it with our best intentions, so we drew up a contract. This idea, which I borrowed from a book called The New “I Do”: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels by Susan Pease Gadoua and Vicki Larson, turned out to be the thing that gave us a sense of control over the process of merging our lives.5 Our relationship contract covers everything from cleaning to dog walking, expense splitting, and sex. It isn’t legally binding or particularly technical, but it’s intentional. It makes the nuances of sharing a life more explicit.
Even within our fairly conventional relationship, the contract is a way to reject the dominant narrative about how love goes, specifically the idea that the work of love is in finding the right person and that this person will already know what you want, what you need, how you feel. They will take out the recycling before it’s full and do that sex thing you like without you ever having to mention it. The idea of a right person and a right way to practice love is so deeply rooted in our love stories that it’s really hard to let go of—or it has been for me. The contract was the best way we could find to make our relationship ours.
• • •
The human impulse to simplify and classify—to fit our lives into preexisting narratives instead of making narratives that represent our lives—is well documented. Often when queer stories enter the mainstream, our first impulse is not to accept them on their own terms, but to try to fit them into the dominant narrative.
In 2008, Brenda Cooper and Edward C. Pease examined 113 reviews of the film Brokeback Mountain, a movie that has often been credited with helping to shift mainstream attitudes about homosexuality.6 They found that despite “glowing reviews and widespread praise,” the discourse focused on the “universality” of the love story, thus “obscuring the ‘queerness’ of the film’s narratives.” In other words, our dominant script for love is so powerful that it has the capacity to absorb and heteronormalize queer stories. The study’s authors suggest that “by normalizing their relationship and congratulating Ennis and Jack for being just like two heterosexuals in love [. . .] the overall discourse of these reviews works to keep the two men in the closet.” I’m sure that when I saw the movie in the theater back in 2005, I, too, marveled at its universality. I remember crying at the end, heartbroken by Ennis’s inability to ever really express his love for Jack.
I have often bought into the sentiment that “love is love is love.” I like the intention of the idea, but the more diverse love stories I encounter, the more I’ve come to resist this.
For some time, there was a video that kept popping up in my Facebook feed. It features a giant X-ray screen on which two skeletons dance and embrace and kiss. In front of the screen stands a crowd of curious onlookers. The skeletons separate and walk to opposite sides of the screen where real people emerge: Both are women. The camera cuts to the crowd; they are surprised, some are even shocked, by the revelation that it wasn’t a heterosexual couple back there. “Love has no gender,” the screen reads as the women meet in front, in the flesh, for another kiss. The onlookers applaud and nod in approval. The next pair of skeletons turns out to be an interracial heterosexual couple, with the words “Love has no race” appearing behind them. There are more scenes, more captions: “Love has no disabilities,” “Love has no religion.” Though I can appreciate its sentiment of acceptance, this video has always annoyed me.
When it comes to love, I’m no longer interested in annihilating differences. I want to engage with alternative love stories without co-opting them, without heteronormalizing, and without saying, “Here’s what we (straight, monogamous, cisgendered, able-bodied people) have to learn from them”—even though I do think there is a lot to learn. Love may not have a gender, a race, a religion, a (dis)ability, but people who love have all of these things, and I am interested in how these things inflect love. I want to resist the impulse, however well intended, to universalize.
I have been wondering how the legalization of same-sex marriage in America will impact queer love stories. So far, it feels too soon to tell, though it appears to have made the “love, marriage, baby carriage” trajectory a little more widely available. But some people have expressed wariness. An article in Salon quotes a twenty-six-year-old gay man, Michael Amico, who is studying the history of sexuality at Yale. “Ever since marriage was the gay issue, the diversity of types of gay relationships has narrowed,” he said.7 A gay friend joked that now all his mother wants to know is when he’s going to find a nice young man to marry.
Just before the Supreme Court decision, Mariella Mosthof wrote an article for Bustle arguing that the movement to legalize same-sex marriage allowed the public to feel good about supporting the LGBTQ+ community while ignoring more immediate concerns: “namely protections regarding the right to basic human safety.”8 I tend to agree with Mosthof. It is good—necessary—that same-sex relationships are treated with the same dignity and legitimacy as heterosexual relationships. But love is marketable. It is an easy sell, and maybe, in a way, it obscures other fundamental rights that are going unmet. Love is love, but some forms of love come with more political, social, legal, and ethical complications than others. And we owe these complications our attention.
When a woman I met at a party asked if I was going to write about homosexual love stories, my first impulse was to respond by saying that it didn’t make sense to write about homosexual love stories because “they aren’t the problem.” Just recalling this conversation embarrasses me now. Is there really any subgenre of love story that doesn’t present a trope or an assumption or an exclusion that i
s problematic for someone?
• • •
I don’t think anyone really needs me to prescribe a solution to the problem of love. The dissemination of alternative love stories is happening without any special urging from me; some of these narratives are nuanced and complex, and others still alienate.
But what I, personally, want from a love story has changed over the course of writing this book. These days, the stories I like best don’t spend too much time taxonomizing love. They often don’t distinguish between the various modes of love (romantic, erotic, familial, compassionate, platonic) at all. They make suggestions about what is possible when you offer yourself, with generosity, to another person.
Maybe what I mean is that I no longer think romantic love is as distinct as I once imagined it to be.
• • •
After Mark moved the last of his things in, we spent one bright Saturday afternoon cleaning his old place. I stood on the kitchen counter, head bowed against the ceiling, scrubbing greasy residue from the top of his cabinets and listening to a podcast.
“The Accidental Gay Parents” is an episode of The Longest Shortest Time.9 It is ostensibly a show about parenting, though host Hillary Frank admits, “The premise that it’s about parenting is just a way to get at all kinds of stories.” This particular episode is the story of Trystan and John, a gay couple in their twenties who “spent their weekends clubbing, partying in Vegas, and making out on the beach” until a social worker called John one day to say she had to put his sister’s two young kids into foster care unless he could come take them immediately. “I don’t know if we’re keeping them forever,” John said to Trystan during the car ride to his sister’s place, “but I want you to know that this is not something we do halfway.” After only a year together, Trystan says, he had two hours in the car to decide whether he was ready to commit to John and father these children. John said to him: “We’ve never talked about forever. We’re not really forever kind of people, but this is more important than getting married. If they stay with us, you are agreeing to be with me for the next eighteen years.” The story gets more complicated from there. They have to make difficult decisions about what’s best for the welfare of the kids. They have to navigate a court system that isn’t particularly friendly toward gay couples. Trystan, who is trans, considers the possibility of going off testosterone to conceive and carry a biological child. John isn’t sure he wants another child. It’s the first of what are now four episodes about the couple.
How to Fall in Love with Anyone Page 19
