Episode 17 - Open Relationships

Transcript

Ellie: 0:07

Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,

David: 0:09

And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:12

The podcast where two friends,

David: 0:14

who are also professors,

Ellie: 0:16

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

David: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. Ellie, I recently read that only 50% of millennials want to be in a monogamous relationship. So many people in our generation still want a primary intimate relationship, but they also want to explore connections with others. So they want open relationships.

Ellie: 0:49

Yeah, the uptake of this seems relatively recent. It's starting to get adopted more and more by a variety of people. I think even in my exposure to college students, by virtue of being a professor, students seem to be having a lot more discussions about open relationships than they were say when I was in college, when it was like not talked about at all. Open relationships are also starting to get adopted more by mainstream heterosexual relationships after having been predominantly a queer phenomenon for a long time. So for instance, 32% of gay men are consensually non-monogamous. And I think an increasing number of other groups are as well.

David: 1:25

Yeah. It almost seems like a return to, you know, that moment in the 1970s when suddenly everybody was a swinger.

Ellie: 1:31

The swingers era.

David: 1:33

Yes, exactly. It- it's just that it's not happening in the same way.

Ellie: 1:37

I mean the seventies swinger thing was more about just like having sex with people, right. It followed directly from the free love hippie movement. And I think one thing that is really different about our era is that our generation is less interested in distinguishing sex from love and intimacy. We tend to see them more intertwined. So obviously our generation believes that casual sex can be distinct from love, of course, but we don't necessarily think that that means that there are no feelings involved. We also have less sex than our parents' generation, which is a statistic my dad literally refuses to believe, despite evidence.

David: 2:18

Well, I kind of refuse to believe that, because the typical story that is pushed around, especially by baby boomers, is that the horny millennials and gen z-ers were just slutting it up all over the place whereas they were in committed, loving relationships.

Ellie: 2:32

Wait. So you're refusing to believe the fact that my dad refuses to believe it, or you're refusing to believe the statistic because you agree with my dad, that millennials and gen Z-ers are more horny than boomers.

David: 2:43

No, no, I believe that your father refuses to believe and I can see why, because other people like your father believe this other narrative.

Ellie: 2:54

I see.

David: 2:55

Yeah. And I think, whereas maybe older generations would ask themselves, why would you want to be in one of these open relationships, a lot of millennials and gen z-ers are turning that question upside down and asking, "Well, why wouldn't I to be in an open relationship instead of a more traditional relationship?"

Ellie: 3:14

Oh, yeah. I mean, having your cake and eating it too sounds pretty great, right? The idea that you could have all of the benefits of an intimate couple relationship that is socially sanctioned in all sorts of ways, perhaps results in marriage, and yet also have emotional and/or sexual, et cetera, connections with other people seems pretty appealing on the face of it, right?

David: 3:38

Yeah, that's a good cake to have and to eat. Yeah. And when we think about the benefits, I think for a lot of millennials, it injects an element of flexibility into the relationship and it also seems to be a more earnest way of approaching a relationship, especially when you think about some of the statistics that we discussed in our previous episode on monogamy, about the extent to which people in monogamous relationships are not, in fact, monogamous.

Ellie: 4:09

On the flip side, I feel like a argument could be that, "Oh, see, millennials are just so terrified of commitment. They're always changing jobs or they don't have any at all. They always want to be special snowflakes breaking the rules." And so I think it would be very easy for someone to be like, "Yeah, millennials are just living in this naive, solipsistic world where they want to have it all."

David: 4:33

Yeah. It's just, "There go the millennials would their avocado toast and their side booty, never knowing what they really need."

Ellie: 4:40

Exactly. Well, David, both you and I are millennials, and we're rigorously committed to feminist critiques of mainstream relationships. And we both live that open relationship lifestyle. For me, that decision came directly out of my study of philosophy, especially feminist philosophy. And so while I certainly wouldn't want to try and convince anybody to be in one form of a relationship over another, I can say that from my own experience, I think open relationships as a structure of intimacy have tended to lend themselves to living out my feminist commitments more than traditional monogamy would.

David: 5:19

Yes. And I'm also in an open relationship my partner. So I have a primary partner, but the relationship is open and I don't know how much of that decision, and of that commitment, I can attribute to philosophy. But like you, I also feel like this is the relationship structure that makes the most sense for me. it comes to sexuality and relationships, I think Plato was right when he said in the Laws that this is a place where you can't really legislate, right. You cannot tell people the way they ought to conduct their relationships. It's very difficult.

Ellie: 5:51

Yeah, I do think at the same time, that it's important for us to be able to subject the structures of our intimate relationships to philosophical critique. Because I think sometimes there's a dangerous ideology that Carrie Jenkins, the philosopher, calls the romantic mystique, which is the idea that the realms of intimacy and romance are totally separate from the social and political realms and therefore they are not subject to philosophical inquiry.

David: 6:20

Yeah, and I think we've learned this from the feminist motto that the personal is political. And we know that the political reaches into the most private realms of human experience, including desire, including intimacy, including relationships relationship structures, therefore, I agree with you, Ellie, to be subjected to philosophical critique, that's what we want to do today.

Ellie: 6:44

if we can't tell people what sorts of relationships they should be in or shouldn't be in. Because that's not our job, luckily.

David: 6:53

Today, we're talking about open relationships.

Ellie: 6:56

Do open relationships permit people to avoid some of the problems with monogamy, while holding onto some things they might like about it?

David: 7:03

And what unique challenges they bring with them?

Ellie: 7:06

We'll also discuss the case of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous existentialists who were in an open relationship.

David: 7:13

Sartre and Beauvoir were doing it before millennials decided that it was cool.

Ellie: 7:19

Open relationships are a form of consensual non-monogamy. Consensual non-monogamy means that individuals freely consent to permitting partners to pursue other relationships, as opposed to non-monogamy that is sort of by force, like cheating on somebody else. Partners agree about the parameters of these relationships outside of the primary one. So for instance, are they sexual? How far can you go with other people besides your primary partner? In some cases, they might be just sexual. So you can't date or form substantial relationships with other people, you can just explore the physical sides of things. Also how much do you tell the primary partner about your other experiences, right? Do you tell them everything? Do you tell them some things? Do you tell them nothing, et cetera?

David: 8:07

Yes. And I have a lot of friends, really the majority of my friends are in open relationships. And the one thing that becomes very clear as soon as you start talking to them about their open relationships is that there is no one stick fits all approach. There is just a lot of diversity in these relationships, one thing that most open relationships have in common, and that they have in common with traditional monogamous relationships, is that they tend to be dyadic, meaning that they occur between two individuals who are deemed each other's primary partners. And so, open relationships retain at some of the rhetoric and some of the structural scaffolding monogamous relationships, but maybe in a new and in a more flexible way.

Ellie: 8:52

Why do you think somebody might choose this kind of relationship as opposed to a traditional monogamous relationship?

David: 8:58

Well, I think for a lot of people, monogamy implies a level of possessiveness over the other person they're not comfortable with, that just makes them feel like there's a power dynamic here that they don't want to cultivate. And speaking from my own relationship, see my function in this relationship not so much as having my partner all for myself, but as helping, in whatever way that I can, that my partner flourish and to be a part of their flourishing. And that requires, for me, opening up the boundaries of a traditional monogamous relationship. And the analogy with friendship that we talked about in our episode on monogamy really drives my interpretation of open relationships. In the same way that I don't enforce rules about how many friends my partner can have, what he can do with his friends, where they can go, what shape the relationship must take, so too I don't see myself wanting to enforce rules about their number of sexual partners and, uh, what those relationships need to look like.

Ellie: 10:06

Okay. So David, you and your partner don't have an explicit agreement on the parameters of the open relationship? It's a little bit more fluid, would you say?

David: 10:17

No, we do have some parameters that we have negotiated over time. It's just that those parameters are on the more minimal end of the spectrum.

Ellie: 10:25

Yeah. Okay, because it is very common for open relationships to have specific parameters, say around, you can sleep with somebody, but you can't sleep over with them. Or you can go on so many dates a week. And I think that's a way that sometimes people in open relationships will exert a sense of agency around the relationship. I do think you're absolutely right that when we love another person, presumably we want what's best for them. And if you think that what's best for them is having the freedom to pursue other relationships outside of your relationship, then of course it would make sense that you would permit them to pursue them. That's actually something that Harry Chalmers talks about as we discussed in the monogamy episode.

David: 11:09

I think you're right, because virtually everybody that I know that is in an open relationship began by identifying those points around which there had to be negotiation, right. What makes your primary partner comfortable? What makes them uncomfortable? And how to talk about the shape that the relationship must take order for the two partners to really feel like they can not just be comfortable in this relationship, but actually flourish. And I think the analogy with friendship that we discussed in our previous episode on monogamy, it really applies here because I don't enforce rules about how many friends my partner can have or about what he can or cannot do with those friends. And so in the same way, why should I be policing whether or not he can have other sexual partners? And why should I get too involved in the details of those relationships?

Ellie: 12:04

Yeah, I tend to really agree on this. I also find that open relationships help to avoid some of the problems with traditional monogamous ones, because they allow you to find self-expression outside of a primary relationship. So I think we live in a society where intimate relationships are very closely tied with self-development and self-expression. We tend to put a lot of time and energy into our intimate relationships, but that places a ton of stress on the relationships themselves, especially once we start to imagine that a single other person is going to be able to be it all for us. So for instance, I might be in a relationship with somebody that I share a lot of interests with, but I can't connect with them over a particular interest of mine that's relatively central to who I am. So say, you know, I have intense political commitments that I can't really talk about with a partner, or I have a particular passion that I love to share with somebody. And so having the flexibility of exploring relationships elsewhere with somebody who might have those interests is not only a benefit to me, but it's also a benefit to my partner because it means that I'm not seeing them as having a shortcoming; it's rather, I'm seeing them as a whole person unto themselves who gives me so much in life, and then I can also pursue different passions with different people.

David: 13:27

I would add that it's even a source of change and dynamism for the relationship itself, or the primary relationship, because it's in the nature of human that over time, our relationships into certain modes of repetition. We fall into habits with one another, and I think

Ellie: 13:47

yeah.

David: 13:47

openness at the center of a relationship can keep that primary relationship on its feet, because it introduces novel elements and it allows the two partners to grow together.

Ellie: 14:00

Yeah. I think that's such a good point here, David, because oftentimes our narratives of intimate relationships focus almost exclusively on the initial period of falling in love, and then they jump, if they jump at all, to a period of monotonous dissatisfaction with another partner. And I think open relationships disrupt that narrative because if you're never confined to a single person, then you're unlikely to ever reach that period of monotony. And so if I think about this, you know, in my own experience, when I'm falling for somebody and maybe this is just like my own shortcoming, maybe I'm not open-minded enough on this, I tend to be focused pretty closely on them. And so even if I'm in an open relationship, there usually is a period where I'm more or less monogamous with another person. And then, over time, that might sort of change as the dynamics flow, given the simple fact that as you said, relationships transform over time anyway. And so I think that's one useful way of thinking about open relationships, as a kind of stop-gap that prevents the creation of a monotonous, and frankly really gross, dynamic to me where you're just like, "Oh yeah, the old ball and chain."

David: 15:18

Well, I- I think, uh, you know, fast-forward to episode 100 of Overthink, I will be your ball and chain, Ellie, but- but we've been opening it up with interviewees. No, but I mean, so two things come to mind here. Um, the first one is that it's not only the relationship that changes, your primary relationship, but it's you who changes, because we change

Ellie: 15:41

Yes.

David: 15:42

the relationships that we enter into. Let's say that I meet people who are not my primary partner and they exposed me to new aspects of life, to new things, they introduce me to a new restaurant, whatever the case might be. It can be big, it can be small. I change as a result of that interaction and come back into my relationship with a novelty that maybe wasn't there before, and at least in my experience, that can be a really positive and enriching aspect of our primary relationship. And the second thing that I was just gonna say is that, in my case, began my open relationship as open from the very beginning, so there's never been a period of that then transformed into a period of openness. so I've never actually had that chat a romantic partner about opening up a relationship. Um, And I assume it's a very different dynamic, or at least it's a different conversation, you have

Ellie: 16:39

Yeah.

David: 16:40

at the start or in the middle.

Ellie: 16:42

Well, I think in my experience you have the open talk always at the beginning. It's just more of a matter of how active you are about that open dimension of the relationship, especially early on. And I think COVID really throws a wrench into this too, because a lot of us who are in open relationships find ourselves, for safety purposes, default monogamous at the moment.

David: 17:02

I guess we're not being COVID hoe-vids.

Ellie: 17:06

Oh my God. That's amazing.

David: 17:08

You've not heard that term? A hoe-vid?

Ellie: 17:10

No.

David: 17:11

Yeah. It's people who've been hooking up a lot during COVID, breaching social distancing protocols. Okay.

Ellie: 17:17

Oh my God, no, I have not heard that term. Well, I think what you put your finger on though, David, in talking about how our own transformations can affect the relationship, but they're also outside of the primary relationship, is something that I find really interesting about open relationships, which is that, let's say I transform in such a way that I now have this new interest that my partner doesn't share with me. If I were in a monogamous relationship, I might start to get dissatisfied with the fact that my partner doesn't share that with me. And I might start to wonder if we're growing apart simply by virtue of this new interest. Now of course, people can grow apart in open relationships in all sorts of ways, but the pressure is off the monogamous narrative that, "Oh my goodness. My partner doesn't share this thing with me, therefore they must have some shortcoming or we're not compatible." The discourse around compatibility changes a lot when you're in an open relationship.

David: 18:18

Yeah. And I think it takes the pressure off precisely because it takes the kick out of that ideology of conjugal love that we've inherited from the past, which

Ellie: 18:28

Hmm.

David: 18:30

has to satisfy every need that you might have. You know, I think that's- that's a very high bar. That's an impossible bar to set for somebody. And so it sets people up for failure. And as a result, people are constantly wondering, I make a mistake in choosing the one? Is this relationship good enough or not good enough?" To some extent, relationships can ameliorate concern.

Ellie: 18:57

Those questions are unintelligible, from the standpoint of an open relationship. Did I make a mistake? If you're not choosing one person, forsaking all others, then that question just doesn't even get off the ground.

David: 19:10

I think it doesn't get off the ground in polyamorous relationships, which we will talk about in the future, but even in open relationships, right, insofar as you have a primary partner that can still be there. Oh, am I dating the right person? Is this person the right fit for me? Should I break up? I don't know.

Ellie: 19:24

Yeah. If you have a primary partner. Yeah, that's true.

David: 19:27

Yeah.

Ellie: 19:27

What do you think, David, about the idea that I think sometimes people have that if you're in an open relationship, you're comparing your primary partner to other lovers. That sounds pretty awful, right? You don't want to be doing that.

David: 19:40

The last thing you want to do is put your partner through like the romance Olympics, in which you are choosing between competitors. And so I don't think that that actually happens, but I agree with you that this is something that people say about why open relationships might be a problem. if anything, I think it really is the other way around, that you only start comparing people you feel this immense social pressure find choose your one and only, your other half.

Ellie: 20:10

Yeah. And so open relationships actually permit you to consider each individual relationship on its own terms. Of course, I think some element of comparison is likely to exist just by virtue of the structures of human understanding, where we're often comparing, but you're not comparing, hopefully, in a way that is evaluating or this one is better than that one, therefore I should go ahead and be with this other person. And I'll say from my own experience, I've never had an open relationship end because I met somebody else that I wanted to be with more. Anytime when has ended, it's been for reasons that have been internal to that particular relationship.

David: 20:47

Here, would slightly disagree. Well, not about your personal experience that you've never had a relationship end in-

Ellie: 20:54

Mansplain my experience to me, David.

David: 20:56

Yeah. Your rel- here's why your relationship ended. We- I've been waiting to have this discussion. No, but I I want to recognize the following point, which is that in an open relationship, you don't have this ban on seeing other people, there is that you will meet people that, you could say, maybe this is a better match than my primary partner." I don't think it happens all that much, but I do think that that risk is there and I think it's important to recognize it, because that's the thing about open relationships, right. That when you open it up, it's- it's so that other people can come in.

Ellie: 21:35

Yeah, I do think that's important to highlight, David, is that, yeah, it's not that there's a risk elimination. And in fact, it reminds me of French philosopher Alain Badiou's claim that there is no risk-free love. I do think nonetheless that a lot of times what happens in open relationships is that somebody will develop a desire or feelings for somebody else and, if they were in a monogamous relationship, that desire or those feelings might sort of drive them wild and lead them to extreme measures, such as breaking up with their primary partner, whereas in many cases, the ability to act on that desire or those feelings sort of just runs its course, and doesn't actually affect the primary relationship all that much, except to relieve pressure from it and maybe to enrich it because it's allowing the individuals to come back with new life experiences.

David: 22:25

Yeah, and I think Badiou is right that there is no risk-free love. And in the same way, I would say there is no repression-free relationship, right. In every relationship, there's going to be an element of repression happens. But I do think open relationships mitigate that, you can act on desires, on wants, on impulses, that under a traditional monogamous relationship, you would have to number one, not openly recognize, cause that would already be a violation of the monogamous ideal, and second, shove them down and not act on them, in an open relationship, you would be able to talk about them and to act on them in a way that allows you to live them and therefore process them.

Ellie: 23:14

Absolutely. One other risk I just want to point out here though, is that I think it is sometimes easy to lapse into a sort of possessive mindset where you kind of imagine your little collection of people that you're dating and it's like, so and so brings out this side of me. I've got the artsy partner, I've got the intellectual partner, I've got the physically agile partner, right? That's a gross way of thinking about people and that's a gross way of thinking about relationships.

David: 23:43

As

Ellie: 23:44

and Exactly. But I think because of the way that we tend to extend capitalist metaphors to our intimate relationships, that is one risk that open relationships bear.

David: 23:56

But do you see that in practice or is that more of a conceptual concern?

Ellie: 24:01

I'll let listeners come to their own conclusions about that. Yeah, no, I do think it is a practical problem for people in open relationships sometimes. It's so easy because we're conditioned to think about intimate relationships in terms of possession from an early age to get back into that idea, that people should be filling predetermined roles in your life. They're a cast of characters. And even if you have more than one leading man, maybe you have a few leading men and they're playing different roles. And I think that's a major issue to- to be avoided. Open relationships push the boundaries of traditional monogamous ones, but they don't explode them entirely. We've articulated some reasons why somebody might choose an open relationship over a monogamous one, but why might someone choose an open relationship over polyamory?

David: 24:59

Now somebody might wonder, Ellie, if you're into open relationships, then why not go for the highest expression of an open relationship, might be polyamory. What reasons are there for being open, but not polyamorous?

Ellie: 25:17

Yeah. I think this is a really important question. To be cynical, I think part of it is just a sheer desire for social acceptance. Our intimate desires for people, romantic, sexual, and the like are so deeply coded, socially by scripts that we received from a very young age that it's hard to just sort of jump out of them altogether. It takes a lot of work for many people to be open, let alone to be polyamorous. And in addition to those sort of an affective or emotional obstacles pertaining to social scripts, it's easier to be in an open relationship and have a nuclear family. It's easier to be an open relationship and be socially recognized by friends who might be more mainstream than it is to be polyamorous. Certainly that's the case for me and my own experience. I have a lot of friends who are not in open relationships. Certainly within academia, I mean, people are pretty left-wing and pretty, experimental in a lot of different ways, but many of my friends who are non-academics think it's like a little weird that I'm not monogamous. It's like a cute thing to mention at parties. But I will say that it's convenient to have the limits of the quote weirdness or the quote abnormal dimension of my experience be that I have relationships that sort of look standardly monogamous from the outside, but that once you look a little bit deeper, are actually non-monogamous.

David: 26:43

Yeah, and I think this a really difficult problem, a conceptual problem, not as much a practical problem, concerning open relationships, which is that deep down. I do believe that those of us who are in open relationships, and so I am including myself in this critique, just to be clear-

Ellie: 27:00

You can include me too.

David: 27:02

I thought that was kind of implied. I do think that we are half-assing it, because we have these principles about challenging traditional norms around love and intimacy, and yet whatever reasons we might come up with against monogamous script really would be reasons polyamory, and whatever

Ellie: 27:23

yeah.

David: 27:24

we give against polyamory for open relationships would in fact also be reasons for monogamy. So open relationships occupy this bizarre middle ground between monogamy and polyamory I think it's not entirely clear.

Ellie: 27:40

Yeah, no, I agree with you that there's not a lot of philosophical ground for asserting the validity of open relationships over monogamy without going the full polyamorous route. I will say that one argument for open relationships over polyamory that I find to be interesting is the importance of building a life together in a sort of couple form. And I will say this argument may only make sense from the perspective of a mono-normative society, where building a life together is traditionally associated with the form of a couple. But when you imagine living with somebody, building a life with somebody, sharing things with them, there is a benefit to having a hierarchical relationship where one person is your primary partner, where you can share the most with them, where you can build a life the most with them. So you're still having this dyadic emphasis in your everyday life and also in your relationship, like you're spending the most time with this person, just even from a practical perspective, you're sharing the most with this person, that sort of thing. Do you- what do you think of that, David?

David: 28:47

I dissent actually on this point because I agree that it's important to build a life together, right? That seems like an objective human good, but together it's spelled to, not two.

Ellie: 28:59

Like your there's "no I in team" version of open relationships.

David: 29:03

Yeah, there's no w into together. could build a life together with three or with four. So I think that you're correct that this argument makes sense only given the constraints of a mono-normative because there's no reason why you couldn't build a life together, arguably even a richer and more dynamic, more multifaceted, multidimensional life, under a polyamorous And again, whatever reasons we give for the dyadic structure, like the legal benefits, et cetera, then would be arguments simply for marriage, for monogamy.

Ellie: 29:39

There is an argument for open relationships that comes out of the existential philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, which I want to mention here, and in mentioning their relationship, I also have to tell some of the fun details about their lives, because it's just very juicy. Beauvoir and Sartre both grew up in Paris and they were more or less philosophy prodigies. In France, there's this big exam that everyone has to take if they want to be a philosophy teacher, the Agrgation, and it's this like super hard, intense thing. And when Sartre and Beauvoir took it at the same time, Sartre came in first and Beauvoir came in second.

Essential caveat though: 30:14

Sartre had already taken exam before and failed, and Beauvoir was the youngest person ever to pass the exam to that date. So in a way, perhaps she sort of won. Also, it was apparently really dramatic. The judging of it, deciding between who had won, was like a big deal. So anyway, at the end of this exam, Sartre's like, "Who's this random girl," right? Cause it's like a sexist situation in 1920s Paris, who almost beat me at the Agrg. "I gotta meet her because she seems interesting and smart." She was also very beautiful, which kind of helps things. They became life partners from 1929 until his death in 1980. So they spent basically their entire adult lives together. Sometimes, they were living in the same city, although they interestingly never lived in the same apartment, other times, they were living in different places. They decided to have an open relationship. Sometimes that meant that they would bring on another person in a sort of throuple situation. And there's a lot of debate about the ethics of this, because sometimes these people were, say, Beauvoir's students, um, and major abuse of power going on. So like, I'm not trying to say this is the ideal open relationship, but I'm gearing up to say why they thought an open relationship was the best form of relationship in their view, as opposed to something like polyamory. And the reasons for this have to do with the nature of recognition. And I'm talking specifically about Beauvoir's own justification of the relationship, which comes out in some of her books. There's this book She Came to Stay, where she describes an open relationship sort of gone wrong. It's like a throuple that ends in tragedy. I highly recommend.

David: 31:54

She wouldn't leave. She came to stay.

Ellie: 31:59

Basically Beauvoir and Sartre say that there are two kinds of loves. There's necessary love and contingent love, and necessary love is the kind of love that the primary partners have for each other. They need this kind of love in order to get recognition of each other as essential. So basically when you have a primary partner, you are seen as essential to that other person, and that makes you feel justified. Sartre and Beauvoir will say, look, you should probably also have your own life and your own projects, but nonetheless, there's something really beautiful about being recognized as essential by another. Then in addition to that, you can have what they call contingent loves. So they actually had this pact where they said we are each other's necessary lovers. And they decided to initially have a period of monogamy actually, and then open it up to contingent loves, which were sort of passing and more fleeting loves. These loves themselves were often very important. For instance, Beauvoir was in some senses more in love with her American lover, Nelson Algren, than she was with Sartre. She also lived with another lover, Claude Landsman, who is the director of the famous film Showa, and she never lived with Sartre. But, there was something particular to the kind of recognition that Sartre and Beauvoir got from each other that they, at least according to Beauvoir's own description of this in her memoirs, did not get from other partners.

David: 33:20

Yeah, and I think this is how a lot of people in open relationships think about open relationships, as having something akin to an anchor. that anchor is not just sexual and sometimes it's not even romantic, it's existential, it's that person without whom your sense of self doesn't make as much sense as it used to. And the interesting thing for me is the way in which Beauvoir and Sartre talk about this in terms of necessary love. that worries me because I wonder what exactly is necessary about it. Of course, the term necessary is very strong, it's that which cannot be otherwise, given the ways in which both of them write about the contingency of human existence and human freedom, I wonder how reconcilable this notion of a necessary love really is, and why not think of every love as contingent, as having finitude written into it from the very beginning. Now, I agree that having a relationship and cultivating it over a time makes its roots reach deeper into the soul than if you had one and then another, but again, there is no reason, at least as far as I can see right now, that relationship needs to be hierarchical. to be honest, I wonder to what extent they land in this position about the necessity a kind of love that is between two people largely because their understanding of recognition is based on the writings of the 19th century philosopher, Hegel. His-

Ellie: 34:55

Check out our marriage episode.

David: 34:57

Hagle, Um, and Hegel talks about intersubjective recognition through a two person model in which one person recognizes the other and is recognized by them in turn. And so it's a mirroring relationship,

Ellie: 35:10

Hmm.

David: 35:12

It's not only a model that we have for love in our culture, it's also a model that we have for recognition in philosophy. And in both cases, I wonder how objective it is.

Ellie: 35:23

Yeah. So maybe their view is more historically localized following the expectations we have already that love happened between two people than it is about the essential features of love. Although I have to point out, David, I just love the phrase you used a little bit earlier, existential anchor, like that is just glorious. But I think one thing that often comes up here in terms of Sartre and Beauvoir's relationship as well is the idea that they might not always have been that happy. And in particular it seems like Sartre was kind of a crappy partner in some ways.

David: 35:58

Oh, yeah. I think he was a really shitty partner actually.

Ellie: 36:01

But I think this is an interesting point for us to segue into thinking about whether open relationships can be harmful for your partner, right? Some will say that open relationships are actually deceitful.

David: 36:12

Yeah. So I recently read a study that was conducted by a group of psychologists at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, which they define the terms polyamory, swinging, and open relationship to a bunch of people and then they ask them to describe their emotions. And interestingly enough, the vast majority of people had much more negative views open relationships than about polyamory. The people had this feeling that if you're polyamorous, you're really driven by love and it's fully equal. you're in an open relationship or in a swingers relationship, you're just fucking around. And so there is this assumption these relationships can be harmful it's just people basically trying to get laid and not taking any responsibility for the emotional wellbeing of the other person. Now, of course, I agree with that, but this is a very common view.

Ellie: 37:10

Yeah, I think that's maybe the most damaging misconception about open relationships is that people are just doing it to get laid. That's often not the motivation for people being open relationships at all. I mean, who knows, maybe it is in some cases, in which case, you know, whatever that's perhaps fine, but a lot of people will talk about being in an open relationship more as a mindset. It's a matter of an attitude shift, an attitude shift away from thinking in terms of exclusivity and possessiveness and more in terms of thinking about the other person as somebody you share a lot with, but who essentially is not you and is not yours. They are a separate being who's able to have their own freedom of experience, even as they may share some of those dimensions of experience with you, a lot, perhaps. I also think the promiscuity narrative is particularly damaging for women in open relationships because it's very easy to get into this mentality that monogamy is something that women want. And so if they don't want it, they're either quote, sluts, or they're just desperate women who are allowing themselves to be an open relationships because they want to hold on to their man. This was often leveraged against Simone de Beauvoir. And I think, you know, can't it be that women want open relationships and that they don't necessarily want those open relationships because they're accepting them.

David: 38:38

yeah. And the Dutch gender theorist, Tony Coelho, has written about this in connection to cisgender gay men who will often justify the open relationships that they're in by appealing precisely to these sexist narratives about how it's an innate desire for men to want to sleep around with as many people as possible. And so in an attempt render socially legitimate the kinds of relationships that they're in, appeal to outdated and damaging, as you say, Ellie, narratives about, you know, what men want and what women don't want.

Ellie: 39:12

Yeah, because in rendering legitimate gay men's open relationships, those narratives are rendering illegitimate women's open relationships, regardless of their sexuality.

David: 39:22

No. That's exactly right. And just this notion that in an open relationship, you're just, again, fucking around and instrumentalizing the people that you meet, in order to fulfill whatever sexual needs or sexual fantasies you might have, as if people who are in an open relationship not mindful the needs of the people that they bring into their open relationship, or don't cultivate relationships that combine sex with friendship or sex with intimacy.

Ellie: 39:51

Absolutely. Perhaps Sartre and Beauvoir's term contingent is not the most felicitous for showing that people in open relationships don't instrumentalize other partners. Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review Overthink on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We mentioned communication earlier and how it's really important for open relationships to undergo practices of negotiation. They tend to have a lot of communication involved.

David: 40:37

Yeah. And in some ways, we could say that this level of communication is demanded by the form of the open relationship itself, because one way in which open relationships really differ from more traditional monogamous relationships is that they have to be crafted from scratch, right? Like they're to the particular bodies that are going to be occupying it because when it comes to monogamous relationships, whether we admit it or not, we have grown up in a culture that gives us certain scripts for what they need to look like. So when people enter into a monogamous relationship, you know, sort of get a sense of what people expect. Not that they have to replicate that, but that script exists and we understand it. We don't have cultural scripts for open relationships. We don't know what they're supposed to look like, so every relationship has to be created essentially ex just from scratch, from the very beginning.

Ellie: 41:36

Well, not necessarily from nowhere because they are quasi-monogamous in some ways, but in any case.

David: 41:42

Yeah, fair enough. exactly. We've talked about the weird middle ground that open relationships occupy, but nonetheless, the point being here that in open relationships, more so than in monogamous relationships, perhaps, partners have to negotiate the very boundaries of that relationship explicitly, and not just at the beginning, but throughout the whole relationship, because it doesn't matter

Ellie: 42:06

Yeah.

David: 42:08

you land on, what rules you set for your relationship, there will always be cases test the limits of those rules that bring out the ambiguity of those boundaries.

Ellie: 42:20

And this of course can be painful a lot of times, but I think from my perspective, any relationship that lasts a long time is going to have issues, right? Like there's always going to be things you're going to need to negotiate. There are going to be painful moments. There's going to be heartache. But what I like about non-monogamous relationships is that the kinds of problems that arise are a lot more interesting and unique to the individuals involved than the ones that arise in monogamous relationships, right? I can imagine, based on social scripts, what problems emerge in long-term monogamous relationships. People get sick of having sex with each other. People get jealous of each other. Somebody starts to have a crush on another person, probably a coworker, right. And then acts on it. And then the whole relationship blows up or somebody forgives them. That narrative to me is so dull that I think part of the promise of non-monogamous relationships is that they allow individuals to experiment in such a way that they're investigating the bounds of human experience that go beyond what our social narratives tend to offer us.

David: 43:25

Yeah. And one way to think about this is in terms of the transparency that comes with open relationships. Now, of course, it is possible to cheat in an open relationship. It's

Ellie: 43:35

Yes.

David: 43:36

in an open relationship. Nobody denies that. No open relationship is inherently better, than any one non-open relationship. But one thing that we can point to that differentiates open relationships from most closed relationships is that that danger crossing the boundaries openly acknowledged. It's a discussion about what boundaries we feel comfortable with or not. my interpretation, part of the value of open relationships is simply that, that they force a conversation that a lot of people in monogamous relationships don't have, because that conversation is not part of the traditional script of monogamy.

Ellie: 44:18

This resonates with Beauvoir's ethical philosophy in general, where she thinks that there is no recipe for correct actions, but only methods. And the method that an ethical perspective should follow is a method of respecting another person's freedom. And so in crafting her relationship pact with Sartre, they were trying to create a unique pact that would respect their freedom throughout the course of their lifetimes.

David: 44:44

Yeah. And part of that respect, according to Beauvoir, would be admitting and embracing the ambiguity, even, of pact between those two people. not just because you have a contractual agreement you suddenly become a rule follower in the context of a relationship. And so I'm here thinking about her book, The Ethics of Ambiguity, the importance of attending to those gray areas that are there all the time.

Ellie: 45:09

One thing that comes up a lot here is questions about transparency. How much detail do you give the primary partner about your relationships with other people? Sartre and Beauvoir, for instance, decided that they wanted to tell each other everything. But how does this work in practice? I mean, do you think it's important to tell the other person everything?

David: 45:29

I'm very torn on this. I have a friend who is in a relationship that is open he wants to talk about everything, but his partner doesn't. So there is a, uh, a slight asymmetry in how much information they want to share. Um, and my own view about this has changed over time. Initially, I was more on the, "Well, we don't really have to talk about it as long as we're acting within the bounds of our relationship." And now I find myself wanting to discuss things more than before, whereas my

Ellie: 45:59

yeah.

David: 46:00

wanted to be more transparent from the very beginning. And so that was something that we had to negotiate. It was not so much the time, or the who, or the when, it was: does this translate into our communication space?

Ellie: 46:14

Yeah, I think it's a really complex issue because for instance, if you decide not to share the details of what happened with your other partners, then you can easily get into a situation where you're sort of lying to your primary partner because they ask you what you did that night and you can't tell them. But then on the other hand, I am very concerned about the way that total transparency and complete communication and open relationships can actually not only be damaging, but can be deceiving. For instance, I think a lot of people, if they were to hear that their partner had slept with another person, even if they're in an open relationship, would be initially hurt by that. It might trigger a response of jealousy or inadequacy. But from the perspective of the partner who slept with somebody else, they're like, "Hey, this doesn't have anything to do with my love for you. I still feel just as strongly about you as ever." And that's true for them. This is where I think the human imagination trips us up, especially because the human imagination is coded by scripts.

David: 47:15

I want to hear you say more about that. What role does the imagination play here?

Ellie: 47:19

When I hear that somebody I'm in a relationship with has slept with another person, what am I going to start doing? I'm probably going to start imagining it. I'm probably going to start imagining it in great detail. I'm going to start fixating on it, ruminating over it, obsessing about it. And when I do that, I'm likely to start misinterpreting the nature of my partner's relationship with that other person, because I simply don't have access to that experience. More importantly, and this is actually something that I was writing about back in grad school, this was one of my major research areas, the desire of the other person is in principle something I cannot experience. It is unfathomable. So I think a lot of times, in our relationships with each other, we tend to have this fantasy of sharing everything, and the situation that most clearly reveals that that fantasy of sharing everything is a fantasy is when the person I love experiences desire for another. Their desire is a complete gap in my imagination and my understanding.

David: 48:27

Well, that's fascinating because now it's making me think that open relationships not only force you to be maybe more dynamic and transparent, but they also force you to be a lot more introspective because you have to know yourself in order to know what you need of that open relationship. So for instance, you, Ellie, are more prone to that kind of reaction, then you might approach your partner and say, "Look, I don't think we need to talk about all the details

Ellie: 48:55

Yeah,

David: 48:55

know myself well enough to recognize that might have this reaction."

Ellie: 49:00

Yeah,

David: 49:00

requires a kind of self-critique and self-analysis that goes beyond the surface.

Ellie: 49:07

yeah.

David: 49:08

I'm on the other end of that spectrum where I am not prone to that kind of flight of imagination where my mind starts running off. And since I am not prone to that particular reaction, maybe I am okay talking more things, but but I might get triggered by other aspects of the relationship. And so I need to be aware of what those are, so that I can actually make my open relationship work.

Ellie: 49:32

Yeah. And I think Beauvoir's novel She Came to Stay really shows the dangers that are involved here because it revolves around a couple that's been together for a very long time, and they have this fantasy of complete union. They think they're just like basically the same person. And they think that they know themselves well, right. But it becomes clear over the course of the novel that they don't. And what I find among the most interesting aspects of this novel is how the woman in the relationship responds to the threat of her lover's desire for the other woman by trying to wrap her head around that desire. She imagines what it's like to be in love with the woman herself. They actually end up having a physical relationship themselves, but it's unclear whether it's coming from a genuine place of desire or just like a possessive place. And I don't know that that actually really matters, but either way, there are these passages where she talks about putting herself in the position of her lover and imagining what it is like to be him desiring her, which I take it is a way to compensate for the fact that her illusion of union with him is disrupted by his desire for the other woman. She can't understand it. She can't feel it, directly.

David: 50:47

Yeah. And I mean once you triangulate desire where the third term can be one person or multiple other people, so we're just talking about going beyond the dyad. It introduces a novel ingredient into what is normally a mirroring relationship. So for example, your reference to how this woman starts desiring this woman, not because she felt the need, but because she kind of wanted to mirror her primary partner. uh,

Ellie: 51:12

Yeah, it's ambiguous, but that's my reading. Yeah.

David: 51:14

And I think something kind of like that can happen in a lot of open relationships, in a slightly different way. So for example, I know of people who might say, I know my partner is acting on the openness, so should

Ellie: 51:29

Hmm.

David: 51:31

on the

Ellie: 51:31

Yep.

David: 51:32

Not because I the to do so or because I wanted to do so, but because if my partner is, then so should I and conversely, "Oh, well, my partner is not acting on that openness. Is it because he or she is not happy with the open relationship, in which case, should I also withdraw from acting on this openness?" does triangulate desire in this interesting way where you sometimes are no longer entirely certain you're doing something or not doing something because you want to do it or not do it as opposed to your relationship to your primary partner.

Ellie: 52:09

No. And I think, it's not always clear, right? Because the boundaries of self and other, while present in many cases, are not hard and fast. I do think it's important on the whole though, that in open relationships, people don't determine their behaviors outside of the primary relationship around trying to have a kind of equity between themselves and their partners. Like, I think it's perfectly reasonable that there could be an asymmetry, whether a temporary asymmetry to who's dating, you know, whom or how many people, or there might be a permanent asymmetry, like maybe somebody's partner likes having many more partners than the other person. Maybe they have more of a social bandwidth for that or a sexual desire or whatever it might be. And I think in principle, there's nothing wrong with an asymmetrical distribution of who's dating whom, when.

David: 52:58

And so learning to trust your partner around these very nebulous issues can itself be part of the challenge of being in an open relationship.

Ellie: 53:08

Yeah, the dimension of trust is essential here, and that trust is developed in a reciprocal relationship I would say to communication, right? You have to initially trust somebody in order to successfully communicate with them, but you also need to communicate with them in order to trust them. And so that can build over time. And so it seems like what we're seeing here, David, is the idea that open relationships can be just as honest as other forms of relationships, and perhaps in some cases even more so, because they can't rely on the social scripts that allow you to make implicit judgements about whether somebody's behavior is moral or not.

David: 53:45

And another thing that's come out of this discussion is the way in which open relationships have some built in structural features that allow us to change not only in relation to the people that we bring into that relationship, not only in relation to our primary partner, also in relationship to ourselves, because again, they force us a position of thinking about who we are, what we want, what we really need from a partner, and then having to articulate that. I think there's a lot of value that.

Ellie: 54:16

Sounds like you and I have drunk the millennial Kool-Aid, David. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts

David: 54:32

You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice

Ellie: 54:40

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.

David: 54:54

Thanks so much for joining us today.