Marriage is not, and should not be a religious issue. If marriage is to be a religious issue than only churches should be allowed to issue marriage licenses, not the State, and only spiritual leaders of those religions should be allowed to marry people. Justices of the Peace, judges, police officers, and other public officials should not be allowed to marry people. Otherwise marriage remains a legal contract between two people regardless of gender orientation that any particular religion can decide to recognize or not.

I read and hear all the time: “Every polyamorous relationship I’ve ever known failed.” or “Every couple I’ve known that started swinging got divorced.”

Question: How many monogamous relationships fail?

I’m not simply talking about marriages, but all monogamous relationships, including those leading-up to the marriage.

For example, if someone has five long-term relationships (say of a couple of months or more) and then gets married to the sixth long term relationship they had, than 83% of their monogamous relationships failed. If their marriage fails they have a 100% failure rate of monogamous relationships.

Now I’m no math wizard, but doing the simple math if 100 people average 5 real relationships before they marry their 6th, and 50% of those marriages end in divorce, than the math looks something like this:

5 relationships X 100 people = 500
1 marriage X 100 people = 100
50% of those marriages end in divorce means 100 X .50 = 50

So we have 550 failed monogamous relationships to get 50 successes, or about a 91% failure rate of monogamous relationships.

So how can anyone really hold up monogamous, one man one woman relationships as the benchmark by which to measure alternative relationships, like polyamory, swingers, other styles of open relationships and same-sex relationships?

So when I hear people like 2012 presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee say things like:

“I don’t have to prove that marriage is a man and a woman in a relationship for life, they have to prove that two men can have an equally definable relationship called marriage, and somehow that that can mean the same thing.”

Based on the numbers above, I think Mike Huckabee has to prove that one-man-one-woman monogamous relationships should be the yardstick that all other types of relationships are measured with.

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Again recently I have had to sit back and think to myself why many monogamists think as they do.  Try to understand what make them tick and what makes them think I am weird or “wrong” and their way is normal or “right”.  What happened to make me ruminate like this was a woman.  Yes, the thing that makes many men think for a moment, touch themselves, then turn-on SPEED Network to watch monster trucks.  But what really got me today was a woman I know who is a single mom of three, works two jobs and who I’ve been good friends with for months now, told me that I “need to take a step back because all this was just getting to weird.”

Now she knows that I’m in an open relationship.  We’ve also talked of our mutual attraction and that as other women have said:  she’d love to have a relationship with me, but she’d just be putting time into someone else’s husband.  Which I can respect if getting married is the be-all-end-all of her existence right now.   So all this is nothing of a surprise.

So what spurred that response from her?  Lucretia MacEvil invited her to dinner, with her children, since her middle daughter is the same age as our youngest daughter and they would probably get along fabulously.  To her, this just seemed too strange.  The wife of a man who she’s attracted to is inviting her to break bread with her, not kill her.  She really couldn’t wrap her brain around that.  In fact she even said to me: “Doesn’t that just seem a bit strange to you?  To normal people it is.”

What seems strange to me though, is that for over a year she was dating a married man who was cheating on his wife, and one of her children is the result of that relationship.  Of course, he never left his wife and has no contact with her, or his child today.

So dating a married man who is cheating on his wife is not weird, however dating a married man who is honest with his wife and who’s wife would like to meet her and feed her and get to know her because her husband likes her, is weird.

Dating a cheating husband: Good

Dating a husband in an open and honest relationship: Bad

As mentioned in an earlier post, we’ve seen this with men, too.  Many men want to have something with Lucretia, however they don’t want to meet me, her husband.

Fucking a married, cheating woman: Good

Fucking a married woman with her husband’s permission and knowledge: Just fucking freaky

So to many monogamists cheating is “normal” whereas honesty is not.  Or at least that is how it seems.  Cheating is expected, if not acceptable, but an honest open relationship is not.  It’s okay to have sex with other people besides your spouse as long as your spouse doesn’t know about it, but it’s just wrong to do it if your spouse knows about it and consents willingly to it.  Of course they will tell you that’s not the case, that they don’t approve of it, but the numbers that do it (by all reasonable estimates 50% to 70% of all marriages experience cheating) show that their actions in no way support their words.

Just another reason why it’s very difficult, if not downright impossible to make a monogamist into a polyamorist.

Lucretia MacEvil and I have a good friend that although isn’t in a open relationship has been to several swinger parties over the years with us.  After the first party she went to she commented:

“Swinging is like the icing on the cake of marriage.  But if the cake underneath doesn’t have all the ingredients to make it solid, all the icing in the world won’t keep it from crumbling.”

Wiser words have seldom been said about an open relationship of any kind.

Compersion: When your wife tells you another man makes her feel like a giddy 16-year old girl and you’re happy for her.

• Friday Q & A. (confessionsfrommyopenmarriage.blogspot.com)
• Jealousy, Envy, Compersion, A Mish Mash of Thought. (polygrrl.blogspot.com)
• Personal Stories on Polyamory and Compersion on Radio Netherlands Worldwide (practicalpolyamory.blogspot.com)