Yeah, absolutely we need to rethink love and
commitment.
You know 60 years ago was when we decided
that men had to be monogamous too.
Men were not monogamous.
For all of recorded human history men had
concubines and whores, and 60 years ago straight
relationships began to become more egalitarian
and it was less of a property transaction—a
marriage had been a property transaction for
most of recorded human history—and it became
a union of two equals.
And at that moment instead of deciding to
allow women to have the same sort of freedom
and leeway that men did we decided to let
men have the same limitations, impose the
same limitations what women had and we put
monogamous sexual commitment at the heart
of all relationships, all long-term commitments,
all marriages and we have watched.
We should now be able to recognize the consequences
of that, which are a lot of short-term relationships,
a lot of divorce.
Because monogamy is ridiculous and people
aren’t any good at it.
We’re not wired for it.
We didn’t evolve to be.
It’s unnatural and it places a tremendous
strain on our marriages and our long-term
commitments to expect them to be effortlessly
monogamous.
Because what we said is "If you’re in love
you shouldn’t... you won’t want to have
sex with anybody else and what we need to
tell people is that if you’re in love you
can make a monogamous commitment and you will
refrain from having sex with other people,
but you will still desperately want to fuck
the shit out of other people."
But people understand love means I don’t
want to fuck other people because of these
misconceptions pumped into people’s heads
about romance, love and what it means.
And so they meet somebody else that they’re
attracted to and they’re attracted to this
other person.
They go "Well, I must not be in love with
my partner anymore otherwise I wouldn’t
be attracted to this person."
Or they feel threatened when their partners
are attracted to other people because it makes
them feel insecure and we just need to get
passed that and we talk about monogamy the
way we talk about virginity, that you’re
monogamous until you fuck somebody else and
they’re you’re not.
You’ve ruined it.
You popped your monogamy hymen and destroyed
your monogamous relationship.
We need to talk about monogamy the way we
talk about sobriety, which you can be monogamous
and fall off the wagon and then sober back
up.
You can monogamous back up and get back on
the wagon.
And the truth of the matter is that if you’re
with somebody for 40, 50 years and they only
cheated on you a few times they were good
at being monogamous, not bad at being monogamous.
They were good at it.
So I do think there needs to be some leeway.
And a lot of really good loving relationships
are destroyed because somebody wants a little
variety or isn’t getting a need met and
feels they have to step out and it explodes
the relationship.
I'm conservative.
I think that we should do what we can to preserve
marriages and long-term relationships, and
one way to do that is to encourage people
to have more realistic attitudes about sexual
exclusivity.
