MALE-MALE COUPLES AND COMMITMENT: Mark Barton replies to David Benkof

David Benkof: Certainly there are some gay men who are totally faithful to each other. But does it matter that most are not? In deciding whether to change the definition of marriage, I think it does.

Mark B.: First, I can't cooperate with this usage of "faithful." Certainly many gay couples (and of more stable gay couples, probably most) are consensually non-monogamous, but that's a very different thing from being "unfaithful." The primary meaning of "faithful" is not about monogamy, it's about fulfilling commitments. Sleeping around within the terms of a sexual compact is not infidelity.

Second, David seems to be inviting us to conclude that consensual non-monogamy cautions against allowing SSM, but I suggest he needs to spell the argument out because it's by no means obvious. If anything it seems backwards. The claim I keep hearing is that the main goal of marriage is to ensure that parents stick together for long enough to help raise the kids they bear. Gay experience by no means automatically translates, but to the extent it does, it says that a bit of realism about sexual temptation and a bit of communication and negotiation about expectations does wonders for the stability of a relationship. Why is David not jumping at the chance to bring some of these insights inside the tent?

Of course, fifty years ago there was a passable answer to this question: there was no reliable contraception, so the only workable way of ensuring that kids were brought up by their biological parents was to force heterosexual sexual activity to be confined to marriage, and moreover, exactly one marriage per person. Sexual compacts would have run significant risk of producing unwanted children. But that conception of marriage as a licence to have sex is a dead horse, and David certainly doesn't have my support for trying to flog it back to life again.

I don't oppose it because it's stuffy responsibility that unnecessarily spoils people's fun--I oppose it because in the modern world it's actively irresponsible. In this day and age, when couples get married according to the traditional script, with no intimate and domestic experience of one another but an expectation of having kids, they're not being noble, they're being stupid. Precisely because raising kids optimally requires a sustained commitment by two people, I can't support a system that says, even just symbolically or with greatly reduced practical force, that the point of no return is a point of grossly inadequate information.

The proper point of no return is the point of choosing to have kids. After that there's a responsibility to try to make a stable environment for the kids, not at infinite personal cost, but still at significant cost. Therefore, before that point there's a responsibility to be realistic and frank about forces that may arise later and produce intolerable conflict, including sexual and domestic incompatibility, and adultery. Open relationships are by no means for everyone, but they should certainly be a possibility to be considered.
posted by Eve at 6:38 PM | link

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