Sunday Read(s): Modern Life, Marriage and Infidelity (Go Together Like Paparazzi and Celebrity?)
“One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.”
– Oscar Wilde
From New York – which recently legalised same-sex marriage – three reports on matrimony and its modern permutations. We begin with a lively take on Dan Savage – a Books LIVE favourite, the USA’s premier sex columnist, who, as a married man, makes a strong case for infidelity:
Marriage, with Inifidelities
[Weiner]‘s visage was insisting, night after night, that we think about how hard monogamy is, how hard marriage is and about whether we make unrealistic demands on the institution and on ourselves.
That, anyway, is what Dan Savage, America’s leading sex-advice columnist, would say. Although best known for his It Gets Better project, an archive of hopeful videos aimed at troubled gay youth, Savage has for 20 years been saying monogamy is harder than we admit and articulating a sexual ethic that he thinks honors the reality, rather than the romantic ideal, of marriage. In Savage Love, his weekly column, he inveighs against the American obsession with strict fidelity. In its place he proposes a sensibility that we might call American Gay Male, after that community’s tolerance for pornography, fetishes and a variety of partnered arrangements, from strict monogamy to wide openness.
Next, we enter the realm of the lukewarm marriage – not so cool as to necessitate divorce, but far from any kind of passionate ideal. There’s now a book about it:
The Not Quite Unhappy Marriage
How does one write a whole book on the boredom of marriage without becoming boring oneself? Pamela Haag’s “Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules” can, in spite of its exceptionally boppy subtitle, only partly answer that question.
The book examines the contemporary matter of what Haag variously calls “semi-happy” or “low-conflict” or “melancholy” marriages — that is, marriages that are not unhappy enough to break up, but not exactly happy, either. She writes: “Often, in my own case, I really can’t tell if my marriage is woeful or sublime. Maybe I’m just so profoundly content that it feels like unhappiness, because nirvana is dull in this way, it lacks frisson.”
Last, the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, elaborates on the next steps for nuptials:
It Gets Better (aka The Future of Marriage)
In the summer of 1963, six years before the uprisings at the Stonewall Inn, a writer named Randy Lloyd published a startling cover story in ONE, the first American magazine about homosexuals and politics. The article was headlined “LET’S PUSH HOMOPHILE MARRIAGE.” Among New York’s gay cognoscenti, marriage between two men or two women was not completely unknown—the historian George Chauncey writes of “elaborate” same-sex weddings in storefront churches in Harlem as early as the nineteen-twenties—but these were underground, unsanctioned ceremonies. They affirmed a relationship to a small circle, but did not assert the legal and moral equality of the participants.
Book details
- It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living by Dan Savage
EAN: 9780525952336
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- Savage Love: Straight Answers from America’s Most Popular Sex Columnist by Dan Savage
EAN: 9780452278158
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- The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family by Dan Savage
EAN: 9780452287631
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- The Kid: An Adoption Story, (What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant) by Dan Savage
EAN: 9780452281769
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- Skipping Towards Gomorrah : The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America by Dan Savage
EAN: 9780452284166
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- Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses, and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules by Pamela Haag
EAN: 9780061719288
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- The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick
EAN: 9780330519984
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