On "polyamory," "ethical non-monogamy," and all the other depressing ways to pretend you aren't just cheating

I read about this wannabe trend so you don't have to

After Tuesday’s piece on how the United States is headed down the greased pole to the hell that was 1972, only with electric cars and stronger drugs, I decided I’d better read up on the current version of free love.

Aka wife-swapping. Or swinging. Or dropping ‘ludes and balling each other’s old ladies, man.

Spoiler alert: it’s all nonsense.

Nonsense dressed up in fancier names this time, as nonsense will. With a side of what’s good for the gander is good for the goose nonsense this time too. Progress!

But you probably already had figured all this out.

I must confess: I had to cut my research short because the nonsense is so tiresome. I couldn’t even get to the book by the Brooklyn lady who improved her marriage by having sex with lots of guys who aren’t her husband. Yay for her! I’m sure her kids are very proud. (The book’s called More. I’m not linking to it. Find it yourself, if you must.)

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(Sifting through the muck so you don’t have to, for 20 cents a day.)

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But here’s what the New Yorker (not exactly the heart of conservative ideology) had to say about More:

The memoir takes a long time to finish, not unlike a bad Ashley Madison hookup, but not before [Molly] Roden Winter offers closing remarks in defense of open marriage. She echoes the common refrain expressed by proponents of polyamory that the life style represents an abundance-oriented mind-set, whereas monogamy is a symptom of scarcity culture.

Scarcity culture. Huh.

I say again, huh.

Look a half-inch deeper, eliminate the gobbledygook, and three factors appear to be driving the swinging trend among our wannabe cultural elites (who, as usual, then spend tons of time and effort pushing everyone else to follow along, so they can feel better about themselves).

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(The good old days, when you didn’t need Google Calendar for a foursome.)

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The first is cultural. By cultural I mean drug-related.

A lot of these folks now use a lot of pot (normally I call it cannabis, its proper name, but I just can’t in this context). Worse, what most of them use is not really pot anymore. It’s extracted, purified THC, tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in cannabis, which they vape or ingest in edibles or liquid drops. Near-pure THC can have quasi-hallucinatory effects and lead users to prioritize sensation over emotion.

In other words, being super-high leads to bad decisions.

Shock, I know.

An increasing number of our cultural vanguard are now moving into psychedelics, mushrooms in particular. Like cannabis, ‘shrooms have been marketed as medicine, a quick and easy (and natural) mental health fix. They’ve been tested in clinical trials, I swear it. Psychedelics and polyamory go together like Jack-and-Coke. Hey, they both start with P, and that must mean something!

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Second, many of these couples are childless. (The husband and wife in More are a notable exception.)

Yes, of course, childless couples can fall in love and get married and stay married until death do them part.

But having children raises marriage’s stakes, both economically and more importantly because of the harm divorce can do to children. Being a good parent means not taking reckless risks with your kids, including with their emotions - which means not taking reckless risks with your marriage. And having sex with strangers while making sure your spouse knows about it pretty much defines a reckless risk to your marriage.

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(Yes it is. And so is polyamory.)

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Third, we come to what makes the world go ‘round.

Money, that is.

Women now make up most college graduates, and the percentage is rising.

In rich blue urban neighborhoods like Park Slope, Brooklyn, women are the primary earners in many marriages. (Not so much in the truly gilded precincts of San Francisco or Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The top levels of tech and finance where billions are made are still mostly male. But one floor down there are a lot of ladies bringing home the bacon as creative directors and whatnot while daddy stays home.)

And when shove comes to push, the golden rule is that (s)he who has the gold makes the rules.

Including the rule that she’s going to do whoever she likes.

In a striking number of polygamy stories, the woman is the one pushing to open the marriage. Maybe she’s dissatisfied sexually. Maybe she’s just bored.

What man would put up with this? What man wouldn’t walk out the minute his wife told him she was headed out to the local watering hole to find some strange?

One whose wife pays the mortgage.

Of course, rich men have pulled the same game on their stay-at-home wives forever. But they usually try to keep their affairs secret, at least secret enough not to be embarrassing to their wives. The polyamory version of this seems particularly cruel: insisting on your spouse’s buy-in while pretending you’re offering equal cheating rights to the other partner, who never asked for them in the first place.

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What’s striking about the polyamory articles is how cringey they are, all of them, how forced. The language is as tortured as the justifications. No one is ever honest enough to come out and say,

I want to screw around on my partner, and I don’t care if they like it or not, this is for me: He doesn’t fuck me right/she’s frigid as an igloo/I work my ass off while he stays home playing Fortnite/She’s gained a hundred pounds/I want to prove I still have it/I want something different/I’m bored, plain and simple.

And I have the juice in this relationship, she loves me more than I love her/I make the money and he’s not leaving. So I’m gonna use it.

No wonder they won’t be honest, though. Because all those justifications are just selfishness wrapped in a big burrito of me-me-me. No matter how anyone tries to dress it up, making sure your partner knows you’re with someone else is about the most toxic game you can play in a marriage. Far more toxic than simply cheating.

And only two kinds of people are likely to accept it: those who don’t have a choice (and will hate you for shoving yours down their throats), and those who no longer care what you do (and thus are no longer your partner at all).

But hey, the Brooklyn lady made it work. So maybe I’m wrong.

Take the under.