Wide Open: The New Marriage

Living Together

“I got a phone call from her two weeks ago. ‘Well, Daddy, I know you’ll be happy to hear that Tommy and I are going to get married.’ Happy? The hell I was happy. He hasn’t got a dime, and he’s got no ambition, and his mother’s an alcoholic, and his father’s been in and out of mental institutions all his life; and she wants to marry him. I said, ‘Listen, why rush into anything? You’ve been living together, you’ve got a good thing going, what’s the rush?’ I don’t mind her living with the bum, I don’t mind supporting them, but why should she ruin her life by marrying the son-of-a-bitch?”

JWW: The speech quoted above is the virtually verbatim outburst of a middle-aged man who could hardly be further removed from the mainstream of the New Morality. He is utterly conventional, and not a liberal in any sense of the word. He lives in a suburb in the industrial Midwest, owns his own business, belongs to the local Rotary Club, attends church irregularly, tries to remember to fly the flag on national holidays, and in short reflects the traditional values of his generation. If his sex drive finds any extramarital expression, he keeps it a closely guarded secret. If any of his friends and neighbors are swingers, he doesn’t know about it and doesn’t want to know.

His daughter lives openly with her lover, and has done so for over a year, with his acquiescence if not his approval. And he desperately wants her to continue to do so rather than marry the man.

I would be hard-pressed to supply a better metaphor for the extraordinary attitudinal change in our thinking concerning premarital cohabitation. Ten years ago it would have been utterly inconceivable for this man to have entertained such a desire, let alone voice it. Ten years ago he would no more have countenanced his daughter’s living with a man without benefit of wedlock than she would have dared let him know about it. And if he did find out about such an arrangement, he would have done everything possible to terminate it, preferably by inducing the couple to marry.

Yet he now takes the position that, bad as it is for his daughter to live with a man he considers unsuitable, it would be infinitely worse for her to marry him.

Other parental attitudes are similarly revealing. A woman told me that her son had recently announced his impending marriage. She liked and approved of her future daughter-in-law, but not without reservations.

“They’ve only been living together for a little over a month. That’s not nearly enough time for two people to get to know each other. They’re still in the honeymoon stage. I’d feel easier about it if they would live together for a few more months.”

JWW: A thoughtful, enlightened, modern attitude. And had this thoughtful, enlightened, modern mother lived with her own husband before marriage? Why, no, she had not. As a matter of fact, she had been a technical virgin on her wedding night. And was her attitude now a reaction against difficulties which had characterized her own marriage? No, not at all. Her own marriage had been spectacularly successful.

“But things are different now. We were lucky, but if I were that age now, oh, I’d never marry a man without living with him first. And for more than a month, too.”

JWW: Another mother’s daughter also lives openly with her lover, and has been doing so for nearly three years. Before this she had lived with another young man for a shorter period of time. The mother, herself divorced, is completely at ease with her daughter’s living arrangement, while drawing wry amusement from the reactions of some of her friends.

“You see, they worry about Sheila. It doesn’t bother them that she’s living with Hal, or if it does, they keep it to themselves. Their attitude is that it’s all well and good, so long as the two of them get married sooner or later. And as the years go by, they grow concerned. If he hasn’t married her by now, they figure he never will. Well, it’s very possible that the two of them will never get married. They may separate, they may just go on as they are. That’s their business, not mine, and the fact that they’re happy now is all that’s important to me. I suppose they’ll want to get married if and when they want to have children. But they may decide not to have children. Or they may decide to have them without going through a marriage ceremony. All I can say is that they’re lucky they have these options. I never did.”

JWW: Nor did anyone a generation ago have the option of public cohabitation. This is not to say that unmarried couples did not live together. They did, but to a substantially lesser degree, and only under certain circumstances. The typical cohabiting couple consisted of persons living in a large city with no relatives residing nearby. Living arrangements were kept a secret — not only from parents, but also from employers, business associates, and all but close friends. Those more adventurous souls who aggressively let the world know that they shared a bed without sharing a last name usually turned out to be considerably less aggressive insofar as parents were concerned.

With the exception of bohemian free spirits, and such special cases where one party to the relationship was unable to obtain a divorce, these alliances were typically of short duration; the partners usually separated or married before very much time had elapsed.

(None of these remarks applies to common-law-marriage, which should be excluded from the category of non-marital cohabitation. A common-law marriage is simply a marriage without a marriage ceremony, and is so regarded in most jurisdictions. While arrangements of this sort are more or less acceptable in various social strata, they remain basically marital in nature.)

Both attitudes and practices in regard to non-marital cohabitation have changed so thoroughly that one hardly knows where to begin in enumerating them. College students share living quarters quite openly; a decade ago it was not impossible to be expelled from a majority of American colleges for having sexual relations. (This is not to say that students were much inclined to be virginal ten years ago, but that they had to be discreet; what was then called “discretion” is now called “hypocrisy.”)

For some couples, cohabitation is an end in itself. It is either considered a permanent situation, or permanence itself is rejected as a concept. “I don’t like to think in terms of a future,” one young man put it. “I think in terms of an extended present.” For other couples, a majority, cohabitation is regarded as a preliminary stage designed ultimately to resolve itself in a presumably monogamous marriage. Its role seems closer to that of engagement than anything else. Like an engagement, a cohabitational arrangement can be terminated before marriage with no stigma attached. And, again like an engagement, cohabitation becomes a concern if it endures for too long without resolving in marriage — a concern to parents and friends, if not to the participants.

Who lives together? The young, obviously. But also an increasing number of their elders. When one or both members of a couple have been divorced, a period of premarital cohabitation is almost always undertaken. The formerly married are generally inclined to approach remarriage warily, and by living together they are able to approach a marital relationship without making a commitment to each other for which they are not yet ready.

“My first wife and I never knew each other. We thought we were completely intimate because we went to bed a lot. All that told us was that we were sexually compatible. Marriage would be hell without sexual compatibility, but just because two people can get along in bed doesn’t mean they can spend the rest of their lives together. Living together entails a hell of a lot more than sleeping together.”

JWW: The speaker, a man in his late thirties, was divorced six years ago after ten years of marriage. Two years ago he began living with the woman who is now his wife of six months.

“I knew that I wanted to marry Betty before we started living together. I wouldn’t have wanted to live with her unless I felt that seriously about her. As far as we were concerned, sharing an apartment implied a commitment on both our parts. It didn’t mean we were definitely going to get married someday. It was no declaration of intent. It did mean that we were serious about each other and serious about our relationship. We lived together for a year and a half until we were more than certain that this was going to be a permanent thing. At that point we were closer to each other and knew each other far more profoundly than most of the married couples we know. Certainly far more than I ever grew to know my first wife, or Betty her first husband.”

And why, if their living situation was so good, did they ultimately marry?

“Not to start a family. I had had a vasectomy during my first marriage, so that wasn’t a consideration. Why did we get married? Because marriage is also a commitment, I guess, and we felt that we wanted to make that commitment to each other. We’re both basically very conventional people, you know. We never felt uncomfortable about living together before we were married, but I think we would have both been uncomfortable at the thought of going on that way forever.”

JWW: Had I written this same chapter only a few years ago, I would have had to deal at length with the ways in which partners in a non-marital cohabitational relationship dealt with guilts and anxieties attendant upon such a relationship. That such an approach is no longer warranted provides some measure of the change in our normative and existential mores.

The underlying causes of this change are much the same as the causes of change in our general views on the institution of monogamous marriage.

Certainly oral contraception has played a key role. “What if you get pregnant?” might be an inadequate argument against premarital intercourse, but became more powerful as an argument against living together. With the pill readily available, “I don’t intend to get pregnant” emerges as a valid answer. And more recently, with legal abortion increasingly obtainable, pregnancy has become a far less ominous prospect.

Too, the increasing capacity of females for independent lives has reduced the need for a woman to think in terms of immediate marriage. In part, these changes have developed out of the women’s liberation movement, but I suspect they have been more a cause of that movement than a result. A woman can earn a living; though her opportunities are somewhat proscribed, and though inequities exist in her relative earning power, she knows that she does not require a husband for her support.

Divorce is another factor. Just as it’s unarguable that marriage is a prerequisite for divorce, so has the increasing incidence of divorce made a generation of the young very wary of entering into matrimony. We have already heard from a man whose unsuccessful first marriage engendered a period of cohabitation prior to his second marriage, but it is not only the formerly married who display this sort of wariness. Virtually everyone coming of age today has had some second-hand experience with divorce. One’s parents may be divorced, or the parents of friends, or other relatives.

It’s interesting to speculate on those factors which produce social change. I could fill quite a few pages with such speculation, and no doubt the reader can supply other elements of contemporary living which have served to make living together less perilous while rendering it increasingly attractive for a substantial portion of the population.

Now, though, let’s take a look at some individuals who have elected to live together, in order to see the different ways in which these relationships develop and the manner in which they define themselves for their participants.

“When I was living with Les, it was really just a matter of convenience. Before then I had been in New York for about eight months. I started off at a residence for single girls, then took an apartment with one of the girls I met there. She moved out after two months. Then I advertised for a roommate and got one, but it didn’t work out. She was into drugs and wasn’t working, and it was a hassle to get her to move out, a real mess, so I decided not to try that again. There wasn’t much of my salary left after I paid the rent, but I was able to get by. I was sort of looking for a smaller place, but I couldn’t find anything decent, and I wasn’t looking too hard.

“I had met Les through a friend, and we went to bed together after we had known each other a few weeks. I had been seeing other guys, but there was nobody else I was balling at the time. We enjoyed each other’s company, and the physical part was good. Actually, I wasn’t particularly orgasmic at that stage in my life. I enjoyed sex but didn’t always come. Most of the time I wasn’t quite sure whether I had come or not.

“For the next month or so Les and I would see each other a few times a week. If it was a Friday or Saturday he would sleep over at my place, or I would stay over at his. On week nights I would go back to my place afterward, or vice versa, so that we could put on clean clothes for work. I also was going out to dinner with other guys during this time, although nothing ever got started sexually. That was how casual our scene was. I suppose I would have avoided balling anybody else, or if I did, I might have felt I would want to break off with Les. I think I’m basically monogamous. I’ve had casual sex — one-night stands — but I’ve never been really involved with two men at the same time, and if I’m involved with one man, I won’t let anything happen with anyone else, casual or heavy. Sometimes I consider this a moral standard on my part, and other times I wonder if it’s just a hang-up.

“One night I was complaining about what the apartment was costing me, and saying that maybe I should try to find another roommate, and Les suggested that he move in so that we could both save on rent. Of course, I had thought of this myself as a possibility. I couldn’t see any reason not to, and the next night we moved his stuff into my apartment.”

JWW: Ruth is twenty-five. Her father is an architect, and her parents live in a North Shore suburb of Chicago. Ruth graduated from a Midwestern college and is currently employed as a secretary and editorial assistant at a New York publishing house. She lives in a small but comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side. She is living with a man now, but not with Les; that relationship, her first of that sort, did not turn out successfully.

“It was a mistake from the start, although I didn’t realize it at the time. We didn’t really care that much about each other. We cared for each other enough to sleep together, but not enough to live together. The thing is, I didn’t know enough at the time to draw a distinction. I knew it would have been absurd for us to get married, but I thought living together would simply be convenient; I didn’t realize that it’s closer to being married than to having an affair.

“The whole thing was very strange. Of course, I stopped seeing other men, and I resented having to do this, although it was never stated openly between us that we wouldn’t go out with others. It was more or less taken for granted. At the same time that I resented his having this hold on me, I became very possessive myself. Like expecting him to call me if he was going to be late at the office, and at the same time being annoyed at having to call him when I was working late.

“The experience of living together was valuable in a way, if only because I learned how wrong we were for each other. I felt uncomfortable with his friends, and he didn’t like my friends, and the result of that was that we were both cut off from everyone except each other. The few friends we had were couples we got to know after we had started living together, and in those cases neither of us much cared for any of them, but we latched onto them in the hope that they would give us something in common.

“We had very little in common. This doesn’t show up when you’re not living together. For one thing, it’s easy to mask a lot of your feelings when you know you can go home and be by yourself in a few hours.

“We separated after a few months. The break was nothing spectacular. By the time it came, we were both relieved. There were no hard feelings. He just moved out. We would still call each other from time to time. We had friendly feelings toward each other, and still do, although I haven’t seen him in a long time. Just the other day someone was talking about Les, that he had a new job and was doing very well. I’m happy for him, because I know material success is very important to him. That was another thing I found out, that he was more hung up on material things than I was.

“If anything precipitated the split between us, it was my pregnancy scare. I wasn’t pregnant, I was just a few days late, but I had always been regular, and I was convinced this was it. I even showed up with some psychosomatic symptoms — sore breasts and so on. I didn’t say anything to Les and took it for granted that I would get an abortion, and then I realized that nothing on earth would induce me to marry Les, and from that point it became obvious to me that we were going to break up before very long.”

JWW: Although the split was not a painful one for Ruth, it left her wary of quick involvements, the same sort of wariness characteristic of the recently divorced. She began dating extensively, feeling a real need to diversify her social life, which had shrunk during her relationship with Les. She purposefully avoided serious involvements.

“I was more casual about sex than I had ever been before. I didn’t sleep with everyone I dated, not by any means, but I stopped using the potential seriousness of a relationship as a criterion. If anything, I found it easier to have sex with a man when there was no chance of anything heavy developing. I was especially drawn to married men during this period, probably because I knew nothing could develop. This period was very good for me in terms of sexual growth. I became orgasmic and dropped a lot of inhibitions, especially in regard to oral sex. You would think this would have happened during the time I was living with Les, because we were together so much and had sex over an extended period of time, but the sexual relationship between us never really evolved. It had seemed good at the beginning, but it never improved, and it was during this period of more casual sex that I really came to terms with my body, with my sexuality.

“With Barry, I don’t know which of us suggested that we might start living together. It just came up in conversation, and we talked it over a lot before we made our decision.

“We were in love with each other before either of us would admit it to ourselves, let alone to each other. Barry had almost gotten married in college — he was informally engaged when he realized he was getting in over his head and broke things off. Since then he had lived with two girls for brief periods of time. With one girl and then with another girl, not both at once.

“So we were both a little careful about not getting involved too deeply. Without even discussing it, we found that we had stopped seeing other people, stopped dating, and this was before we ever spent a full night together. We had sex quite frequently for, I think, a month before we ever literally slept together.

“Then things gradually evolved. I would keep some clothes at his place, and he kept some things at mine. On the weekends we were often together from Friday night until Monday morning. Still, we didn’t rush into making it a regular arrangement. We talked it over, and we realized that we already felt about each other as if we were living together. We had that degree of closeness. In fact, the only thing we didn’t have was the convenience. We were paying double rent, and one of us was always rushing from one apartment to the other, and it was silly to go on like that. My lease was up first, and his place was a better value, so I moved in with him. He had a roommate at the time, but the roommate was hardly ever home, since he spent most nights at his girl’s, so when I moved in with Barry, the roommate moved in with his girl in a sort of chain reaction. They got married recently, as a matter of fact.

“I’m sure Barry and I will get married sooner or later. My parents don’t exactly know that I’m living with him, but I’m sure they realize it. I mean, they’ll call here on Sunday mornings, and he’ll answer the phone and talk with them before he hands it to me. They’ve met Barry several times. I know they’ll be relieved when we get married, although I must say that they’ve never put on the slightest degree of pressure.

“I guess we’ll ultimately marry for the same reason we began living together, that it’s more convenient and because we already feel married. I’m not sure if we want children or not. Not for the time being, certainly. As far as that goes, I don’t see anything wrong with having children without going through a marriage ceremony. I probably wouldn’t actually do it, though.

“It’s simpler to be married, actually. When I meet neighbors, they’ll say to give their regards to my husband, and I don’t bother to correct them. There’s no word like ‘husband’ to describe a man you live with. ‘Lover’ doesn’t work. It just means someone you have sex with.

“Barry’s parents know we’re living together, and it’s all quite open between us. They live on Long Island, so we see them a great deal more frequently than my parents. They’re really great; they treat me like a daughter and seem completely cool about our relationship. I don’t know whether they’re more liberal than my folks. It may just be the geographical thing, the proximity, and my parents would be the same way if they lived closer to us. Or it may be a double-standard thing; Barry’s parents might be a little less cool if it was their daughter instead of their son. That’s just a guess. I don’t really know if the double standard is that much a part of their attitude.

“When I think about Les, I don’t have any real regrets. I don’t think I would have been capable of the relationship I now have with Barry if I didn’t have that experience behind me. What scares me, though, is the idea that I could have gotten married to Les if we hadn’t been in a position to live together. If I had stayed in my hometown after graduation and dated a local boy like Les, I’m sure I wouldn’t have lived with him, and we could have jumped straight into an impossible marriage. I would probably be divorced by now. Or I might still be trapped in a rotten marriage, and we might have had kids in the hope of keeping the marriage together, the way so many people do, and... I don’t even like to think about it. I know girls back home in that situation. I know some who are divorced and others who aren’t divorced but should be. What a stupid way to throw your life away.

“Things are changing, though. I knew girls who lived with boys in college, although I never did, and they aren’t making the kind of marriage mistakes other girls are. From what I understand, living together in college is a lot more common now than it was when I was in school. And I know more and more couples are living together not only in cities like New York but also in smaller towns. It’s a major change, and I guess it’s happening a little at a time, faster in some places than in others, but I think it’s going to make for better and more honest relationships all around, and it should do for a lot of people what it did for me; it should tend to keep the wrong people from marrying each other.”

“A friend of mine told me I was the only girl he knew of who was living with a guy without having sex with him. I told him there are lots of other people like that, but they’re married.”

JWW: Sue is distinctly atypical, but nothing could persuade me to leave her out of this chapter. She is twenty-one, fat, freckled, and radiantly cheerful. She graduated a year ago from a junior college not far from her home in the Adirondack region of New York State. She works as a dental receptionist, lives in an incongruously immaculate apartment on a particularly grungy block on the Lower East Side. Her hobbies include designing her own clothes, macramé, decoupage, reading tarot cards, and sex.

“I’ve been told I have a man’s attitude toward sex. In other words, take it where you find it, enjoy it for what it’s worth, and don’t get hung up on heavy romantic scenes. I don’t know why men should have a permanent claim on that attitude. Anyway, I think that’s changing as more and more women get into the lib scene.

“Not that I’m really into it myself. I’m all for it, but I don’t feel any personal need for it. I went to a couple of consciousness raising sessions, and they seemed unreal to me. The girls were all older, some of them were married, and they talked about turning their heads around and avoiding artificial exploitative relationships with men, and it was as if they were just getting into where I’d been all along. I felt embarrassed about mouthing off to these women who were older and more experienced than I was, and I couldn’t see that I could get anything out of a scene like that, so I think it’s good for them, but it has nothing to offer me.

“Actually, I haven’t had all that much sexual experience, and I haven’t been sexually liberated for very long. The college I went to was a quick century behind the times. I mean, they were still into fraternities and sororities and like that. I was an outcast, of course. I’ve always been an outsider, as far back as I can remember. I used to think it was my size. I’ve always been fat. But that’s not it. It’s that my head is different. Some people are basically outsiders; they feel more comfortable living part of their lives inside their own heads. Even here, in New York, I’m very much an outsider. The difference is that you can be an outsider here without feeling uncomfortable about it. I really dig this neighborhood. It’s scummy and rotten, and I love it. Maybe it’s a reaction to growing up middle-class. I suppose I’ll get older and want the same kind of security and creature comforts as everybody else. Not now, though. Right now I like my life the way it is. The only thing that bothers me is the fucking pollution; you can’t get a deep breath in this city. I may quit my job in June and spend the summer in the mountains. Not back home — I have no desire to go back there — but maybe out west somewhere.

“College — I was an outcast there, no sorority rush, no dating popularity. The first year was pretty horrible, but toward the end of that first year I got in with some of the other outcasts. The hippie element. We weren’t very hip by New York standards. But we got into grass and sex a little.

“The first boy I balled, I was convinced I was in love with him. He liked me, but the way I came on scared the hell out of him. I can’t blame him. We were just friends, you know, not even terribly close friends, and we started messing around, and I never even thought about stopping him. I was fantastically passionate. Then I convinced myself I was in love, and it scared him off, and I wanted to kill myself. It’s the only time in my life I really thought about suicide. I wasn’t really that miserable. I didn’t have this great sense of loss, but I guess I was being theatrical and thought suicide was the dramatically correct thing to do in my position. I never tried to do anything about it, just had these thoughts for a couple of days.

“Then I was rapping with another guy, a friend of the one I balled, and he helped me see where everything was at. That sex was a fun thing and all. He was bisexual, which was a horrible hassle around there. He wasn’t a student, but he lived in the town and hung out with the hip element from the college. He was very sensitive and drew things out of me I never knew were there. He made me see that I got into this love bag because I was unwilling to enjoy sex on its own terms. That I was trying to build a fence around my own freedom. He also made me realize that I’m sexually attractive. I had more or less assumed that it was impossible to be attractive and fat at the same time, and I would alternate between starvation diets and food binges, and never get any thinner, and by thinking I was unattractive I made myself unattractive. Since then I’ve found out that being fat doesn’t keep men from wanting to fuck you. As a matter of fact, a lot of men prefer fat women, even though they don’t want to admit it for some reason.”

JWW: I mention an Arab proverb: Thin women for show, fat women for pleasure.

“I never heard that one, but it’s exactly where it’s at. I heard another one. It goes something like, ‘There are three things men like more than they admit: sweet wine, fat women, and the music of Tchaikovsky.’ I don’t know about the wine and the music, but the other is true. But men who aren’t sure of themselves, you know, they’re a little uptight about being seen with a fat girl. They want to be able to wear a fashionable type of chick on their arm the way they wear clothes. Maybe there ought to be a men’s lib scene for dudes like that.”

JWW: The simultaneous discovery of sexual pleasure and of her own physical attractiveness led directly to the development of Sue’s personal sexual ethic. She determined that she wanted to learn about sex, wanted to enjoy sex, and wanted to do so without the requirement of emotional ties between herself and her partners. Although her opportunity for experimentation was limited on the small campus, she had had sex with half a dozen males by the time she graduated. She does not hesitate to characterize herself as promiscuous, feeling that the word is descriptive and need have no pejorative connotation. Indeed, she draws a distinction between good and bad promiscuity, arguing that a girl can be promiscuous without being a tramp. A tramp, in her eyes, is a girl who sleeps with anyone who asks her and who does so because of a low estimate of self or for some other neurotic reason.

During her last year in college, her relationship with her parents deteriorated markedly. It had never been good in the first place. Sue sees her parents as puritans and hypocrites, maintaining a poor marriage for social reasons. Immediately upon graduation she moved to New York. She has not been in contact with her parents since.

“I wanted to drop out of college, but I thought I would stay and get my diploma. Not that a diploma from a two-year cow college is worth much. The one good thing about the place is that nobody ever heard of it, so when you apply for a job they assume it’s a four-year school. As far as that goes, I could just say I graduated from there. Nobody ever bothers to check. Or I could go all the way and say I graduated from fucking Radcliffe and really impress them.

“New York — God, I couldn’t wait to get here. I just felt completely at home from the minute I got off the bus. I gravitated immediately to the Village and started rapping with some people and wound up a couple of blocks from where I live now, smoking grass and talking until morning.

“The first couple of weeks I just let myself go. I didn’t bother getting a place to stay. I just crashed wherever I happened to be. I smoked a lot and drank wine and had a lot of sex. There was nothing too freaky. The most far out thing was sitting around with two dudes, and they were both horny and started messing around with me both at the same time. I was having my period at the time, so I wound up sitting there and giving them hand jobs. Both at once, one in each hand, and they made a game out of it to see who could hold out the longest. They wanted me to give them head, but I didn’t want to. I don’t remember why. I usually enjoy that. Maybe I didn’t like them that much, or maybe it was the idea of doing something that intimate with someone else watching. I honestly don’t remember.

“Actually, that’s still about as close to an orgy as I’ve ever come. I’ve been invited to swings from time to time, but the vibes were never right. I’d like to try it when the right scene comes along. Though I don’t think I would enjoy it. I think I prefer really getting into one other person.

“After a couple of weeks I was loose enough to straighten my head out and put things together. I got a job and found this apartment. I didn’t have that need to keep going all the time. It was a kind of compulsive thing while it lasted. I think it was largely a reaction to being in New York and free at last and having this appetite to do everything all at once.

“I’m sorry about one thing, and that’s that I didn’t keep my sex diary during that time. I had started it at school and brought it along, but it was with my things in a locker at Port Authority, and I didn’t get it until I had a place of my own. I tried to bring it up to date, but it’s only really good if you can write things down as they happen.”

JWW: Sue’s sex diary is what its name implies, a day-by-day record of her sexual experiences. It is a remarkable document, and I hope one day to publish it in full. A brief extract should convey style and content:

“Mark H. Says thirty-eight but I’d guess five years older than that. Had his usual two-thirty appointment. Root-canal work. Flirted as usual, the type who flirts as a reflex, not expecting anything. Bald in front, flaring sideburns touched with gray. Very mod dresser. Bells yet! Thank God no toupee. I flirted back for first time. He gave me speculative look. I came back with wide-eyed look, said I got off work at five-thirty. ‘We can have dinner or something,’ he said. ‘Or something,’ I said. Don’t know what appealed about him. Not my usual type. Change of pace? Maybe. Dinner — little Italian place where we wouldn’t run into his friends. Food so so. Kept urging more wine on me. Stockbroker, Aquarius, wife, kids. Vetoed my place when he found out the address. Hotel instead. No luggage hassle, must go there often. Nice body, hairy chest. Very powerful erection. Circumcised. Cock not too long but quite thick. Used a cologne. Always put down men who wear cologne, but really dug the smell. Fit the luxury of the hotel... Ate me like a maniac. I wanted to wait and come with him inside me. Finally faked it or he’d be spending the winter down there. Point of honor or something, girl must come before he’ll fuck. Good fucker, long slow strokes, then fucked really hard, bang-bang-bang. Only thing that bothered me was feeling he was performing and I was audience, proving how good he was. Feeling interfered a little, but I came good... Sent me home in a cab. Seemed relieved I was so cool about things, seemed unwilling to believe it. Guessed he thought coolness meant he hadn’t satisfied me, so felt sorry for him and said something about doing this again sometime. Wonder if he’ll want to. Wonder if I’ll want to. Vibes — that he wasn’t sure whether or not he ought to give me a quick twenty dollars. Did give me ten for the cab, insisted he had nothing smaller. Don’t think he was trying to make me feel like a whore like Kurt W. Well, don’t feel like one anyway. I know where my head is. Still, gave the cab change to some street people. Otherwise might be broke sometime and start hoping for money, and don’t want that scene. No way.”

In both her diary and her conversation, Sue notes with amusement that many men are taken aback by her own casual sexual attitudes. They seem to resent her for being able to take sex like a man, and worry that it is a reflection on their performance. Some pursue her and desire involvement simply because she does not. This last is as true of her hip young sexual partners as it is of others. Although this did not precipitate her decision to live with Roger, she has learned that the fact that she has a male roommate serves the function of discouraging unwelcome pursuit.

“Roger and I are very good for each other. At first I wasn’t too sure how it would work out. It was my idea. I suggested it. I hadn’t even planned to, hadn’t thought about the possibility. We had known each other for a few weeks and were very easy with each other without knowing a whole lot about each other. Originally I took it for granted that he was gay. Tall and slender, pretty features, and a certain amount of gay mannerisms, and also he had some friends who were obviously gay.

“It turned out that he was sort of asexual. He couldn’t make it with girls or boys. He had had some homosexual experiences, but he didn’t really enjoy them, or if he did, the idea of being gay disturbed him so much that he couldn’t get into it. He said that his problem was that he couldn’t really relate to anybody. And he had to be alone all the time, he was a loner, but he needed to have a crowd around him, people nearby who could be there without touching him. I’m not getting this exactly right...

“We rapped about what a bitch it is to live alone, and I said that one particular guy was trying to get me to live with him, and why I wasn’t ready for that, and how I had been thinking about getting a roommate but I didn’t really think I would like to live with another girl. And he said he couldn’t live with a girl because he wasn’t into sex and didn’t want to live with a guy because of the whole gay scene, and that even living with a straight guy would probably be a hassle. So then I said something about how we ought to team up, and we both laughed our heads off over the idea, and then talked about it some more, and to make a long story short (if it isn’t already too late for that), we decided that he would move in with me on a trial basis. The apartment was perfect for privacy. The door leads into the kitchen, and there are two rooms leading off it, one on either side of the kitchen, so I could have anybody in my room without Roger being in the way. He could have company, too, but as far as I know, he’s never brought anybody home with him. I don’t know if he ever has sex or not. It’s possible he would do things and not tell me about them. Actually, we don’t really have that much communication.

“People always are struck by the strangeness of it. I know it’s strange in that very few people live this way, but all it amounts to is that we’re roommates who happen to be of different sexes.

“It’s particularly good because we can each play out our sexual roles the way two roommates of the same sex couldn’t. For example, I do the cooking and the light cleaning and take care of decorating the place. Roger does the shopping and the heavy cleaning and goes out for anything we need at night, which is an important safety factor in a neighborhood like this one. I think it’s basically more healthy for a man and woman to live together, and it’s a much easier relationship to maintain when there’s no sexual feeling between you.

“Occasionally we joke about sometimes going to bed together, but those jokes seem to make us both uncomfortable lately. I’ve never had any desire to ball Roger. If he’s had any desire for me, he’s kept it a secret. If the desire came about, I think I’d suppress it. I suppose Roger would react the same way. Out of fear that anything sexual might screw up what we’ve got going.

“If Roger really wanted to ball me, I guess I would go along with it, however I felt about him. Because I like him — I would have to say I’m closer to him than to anybody else at the present time — and so I would want to do it for his sake. I don’t think he’ll want to, though.

“Also, I have the feeling that if we ever did go to bed together, it would be something that wouldn’t happen more than once. Whether it was good or bad for both of us, I can visualize us getting up the next morning and acting as if nothing had happened and going back to the way things are. Maybe this is a fantasy of mine. Maybe I do have a desire to ball Roger and would want it to work out that way...

“In a way, he and I are very much alike. I’ve just begun to realize it lately. I always thought our getting together was a perfect example of the attraction of opposites. The promiscuous girl and the asexual boy. But we’re both outsiders, and neither of us is very good at relating to other people. My reaction is to spread sex around, while Roger’s is to shut it off entirely. I think that’s nothing but two sides of the same coin.

“I know he’s worried about being gay. I don’t think I’m worried about becoming a lesbian, or being a latent lesbian or anything. I can’t remember ever being attracted to a girl. I see girls and regard them as attractive, but not as attractive to me the way I do with men. Sometimes I think about having sex with another girl because it’s something I haven’t done. I imagine if the right girl made the right play for me at the right time, I might give it a try. I’ll probably never know — no girl has ever made a pass at me in all my life.

“I can’t imagine myself kissing a girl on the mouth. I could imagine going down on another girl, but not kissing her on the mouth...

“If my folks had any idea of my life style, it would utterly freak them out.”

JWW: I won’t comment on Sue’s personality here; I find the way she has resolved her sexual and emotional nature fascinating, but in this context we are more specifically concerned with her particular living arrangements.

It certainly seems to work for her, and for Roger as well. She is able to play a female role with Roger, while she is unable to play such a role with her male sexual partners, preferring to “take sex like a man” and drawing amusement from their confusion.

I doubt that living arrangements of this sort are common. Young persons frequently live in communal arrangements of one sort or another, often without any of the commune members being sexually involved with any of the others, but such communes function either as extended sibling groups or off-campus coed dormitories. I presume the platonic cohabitation of one male with one female is rare; this is the sole instance of which I have firsthand knowledge. But I would not be astonished to see such unions become more common in the future. If society is prepared to accept unmarried couples living together and having sexual relations together, surely society would be equally willing to accept a similar liaison with the sexual element omitted. God knows there are enough married couples around who cohabit without having sex together!

Through Sue, I met Roger and expressed a desire to discuss their living arrangement with him. He was acquiescent, if not enthusiastic, and we talked together one afternoon. He was not able to talk about his background or his sexual orientation, and his observations on his life style with Sue were limited to an abbreviated version of the facts she had already discussed with me. So it goes.

“There’s something my father said to me once before I went away to school. He was always very open with me about sex. He didn’t question me about my own experiences — which spared me a lot of embarrassment, since most of my experience at that time was with Mother Five Fingers — and he didn’t lay down rules. He would just sort of make observations. One of the things he said that summer was that he thought it was unwise to have sex with any girl unless you were prepared to marry her if you had to. No, I got that wrong. Not ‘unwise.’ I don’t remember the word, but the idea was that this was a moral thing rather than a pragmatic one. ‘Unethical.’ That was the word. He didn’t mean that you had to do the gentlemanly thing and marry a girl if you knocked her up, but that you shouldn’t fuck her in the first place unless that was how you felt about her, not that you would want to marry her but that you would be willing.

“I’m afraid I didn’t take his advice. When I was in college, my criterion was that I wouldn’t have sex with a girl unless she was willing. If she had a vagina and if she would hold still for a second, I was game.

“There was another thing he told me. He said I should try not to mistake an erection for love. I’m afraid I wasn’t too brilliant at following that bit of advice, either, but the line would come back to me from time to time and help me put some of my furious love affairs in proper perspective. Or a little closer to proper perspective, anyway. When you’re that age, it’s hard to be very balanced about sex.

“Lately I’ve thought about my father’s main sexual ethic, though. I think it made more sense years ago, when pregnancy was not only more of a possibility but more of a disaster. Between the pill and legal abortion, pregnancy just doesn’t seem like a legitimate line for determining whether or not a girl is one you should sleep with.

“Sexual ethics interest me. A friend of mine was very pleased with himself when he made the decision that he would never ball a girl unless he wanted to go down on her. He felt that if he didn’t like her that much he had no business getting in bed with her. I can relate to that...

“My own sexual ethic is that I don’t really want to have sex with a girl unless I want to live with her. I’ve had enough one night stands and short-term affairs so that I’m honestly not interested in them anymore. That sounds phony as hell when you say it out loud, maybe because I used that line on girls before it happened to be the truth. I was very good in the bullshit department at one time. I did a Mr. Sincere number that could really make you puke.

“But now it happens to be true. I’m past thirty, and I want to get married and yet don’t want to get married, to the point where I’m very unclear as to just what it is that I do want out of life. I’m not a success, I’m just starting in private practice, but after all those years of no free time and not much money, I’m on level ground for a change. Unless I suddenly turn into someone who spends money hand over fist, I’ll never really have to worry about money for the rest of my life. That’s one of the most attractive things about being a doctor, you know. You don’t get rich, you can’t possibly accumulate real wealth, but you can be sure of making a decent living to the point where you don’t have to think about money. And I’d prefer to go through life without thinking about money. I’m more interested in two things — my work and my emotional life.

“Thank God I never got married. That’s such a fucking temptation. Marry a coed and let her work your way through med school for you. Marry a nurse, she’ll support you through your internship, and you’ll support her for the rest of your life. I’ve known guys who literally marry for that immediate money. I was never that broke, and I’m sure I’m constitutionally incapable of marrying someone for money anyway, but there are other pressures. Especially during an internship. You put in these incredible hours, like twelve or sixteen hours a day under intense pressure, and your shifts keep changing, and it gets impossible. You need something stable, you need a home, you need a woman you can get into whenever you happen to have the time and the strength to throw her a fuck. This is an enormous temptation, and there are tons of guys who swear they couldn’t have hacked the whole thing without a wife.

“Trouble is, the marriages usually go to hell. Doctors have the worst marriages of any vocational group in the country. They have a sky-high divorce rate, a high suicide rate, a high coronary rate. Believe me, it’s not that they work themselves to death. An established doctor can take it very damned easy, and plenty of them do. As far as I can tell, the ones who take it easy don’t do any better than the ones who lose themselves in their work.

“During all the early years of marriage they neglect their wives because they have to — their work has to be their whole life, their time isn’t their own, let alone their wives’. And they generally turn out to have married the wrong girls for the wrong reasons, and by the time they realize it, they’ve got kids, and... Christ, I don’t want to get started on this. I spent all last night drinking with a buddy who’s going through a marriage crisis, and I’m just playing back everything that came out of that conversation.

“Ultimately I want very much to get married. I don’t think it’ll be to Anne. I want to go on living with her for the time being, but I don’t think we’ve got the kind of thing going that could have any real future. In fact, I think she’s beginning to feel confined, and I’ve got a feeling she’ll want to split before the year is out.

“With the right girl, and at the right time, I want very much to get married. I want a wife, I want children. These things are very important to me.

“Very important. But I’m damned glad I decided to wait for them.”

JWW: Lewis, an earnest and evidently dedicated ophthalmologist, provides a good illustration of yet another facet of non-marital cohabitation. Ruth was careful not to live with anyone unless she felt close enough to him to marry him; Lewis, on the other hand, was interested only in sexual relations in a cohabitational context. It does not matter much to him if such a relationship has no future; indeed, although he is now on the verge of marriage (admittedly to a woman as yet unknown), one of his chief satisfactions is that the living arrangements he has had in the course of the past several years did not lead to marriage, and that he thus avoided what he regards as an enormous pitfall for a doctor, an early marriage.

Lewis’s history is not particularly relevant in the context of this book. Indeed, the several conversations we had were not formal interviews in any sense, and centered more upon certain physiological aspects of sexuality, on the sex lives of physicians in general, etc. (He believes that there is a particularly high incidence of impotence among members of the medical profession, and what I’ve read on the subject seems to bear him out.)

Some of Lewis’s experiences in living with sexual partners, and some of his views on that general subject, deserve inclusion here.

“Of the doctors I know, the ones who do the most chasing are the married ones. Not all of them, of course. But the majority of the guys who play grabass with the nurses are the ones who got married in med school or shortly afterward.

“I don’t think it’s just that their marriages are in bad shape, although I’m sure that’s a big part of it. I think it’s because they didn’t have that great a variety of sexual experience before they were married. It’s easy to say that hit-and-run sex is a drag, but it’s hard to be sure of it if you’ve never had your fair share of it. It’s a little difficult to get tired of something you never had.

“I’ve gotten to the point where I literally can’t imagine myself knocking off a quickie with a student nurse or pitching a stewardess in an East Side bar. I’ve done these things, and I remember them with a good deal of pleasure. But they’re not consistent with the sort of person I am today. I can’t even flirt with any real enthusiasm. There’s a constant sexual patter that you hear with any hospital staff, propositions and innuendos and all of that, and probably ninety percent of it is not serious at all. If a nurse doesn’t hear a dozen lewd remarks a day, she runs to a mirror to make sure her face is still there. It generally doesn’t mean anything more than a kind of sex-oriented camaraderie.

“I can’t even get very interested in that sort of scene anymore. I guess what it amounts to is that I’ve evolved into a wholly monogamous personality. I don’t want to fuck a girl unless I know her. Otherwise it’s masturbation. As a matter of fact, I prefer masturbation under such circumstances. It’s honest, it’s not exploitative, you don’t have to put on masks with each other.”

JWW: And, I say, you don’t have to look your best.

“That’s Boys in the Band, isn’t it? I never saw it, but I must have heard half the lines in it at one time or another... A friend of mine finds it as incomprehensible that I don’t want every stray piece that comes along as I do that he does. Each of us keeps telling the other that he’s going through a temporary phase. I’ve considered that possibility. Naturally, I prefer to think that my attitude represents maturity, but people always think that whenever they go through changes. It’s possible that once I go through the commitment of marriage I may find monogamy stifling. Right now I’m monogamous without having any formal commitment to it. That may make a difference. Maybe I find sexual relationships with just one girl satisfying because I know that I’m not going to spend the rest of my life with her, and maybe that would change after marriage. I can’t say one way or another until I go through the experience...

“The first girl I lived with was a grad student in botany. I was going to med school at the time. She was enormously interested in medicine herself, had majored in biochemistry and wanted to go to medical school, but couldn’t make the cut. If she wasn’t going to be a doctor, she damn well wanted to marry one. And, incidentally, she succeeded. She’s married right now to an orthopedic surgeon. I think they’ve got two kids.

“I came very close to marrying her myself. I would have, if we hadn’t shacked up. I would have married her out of a desire for permanence and stability and security and all the rest of it. Fortunately, I managed to talk her into living with me. That gave me what I needed at the time without tying me up. After about a month I knew I was never going to marry this girl. Not because she wasn’t right for me — I didn’t really learn that for some time — but because once I had the relationship, I knew I didn’t need to make it legal.

“I’m not talking about sex. We had been fucking our brains out long before we were living together. I didn’t live with her for sex, but so that we could be, I don’t know, call it a temporary family...

“I didn’t tell her I wasn’t going to marry her. Not at the time. If I had, she would have split. As a matter of fact, our breakup came when she finally realized that we were never going to find our way to the altar. I suppose from her point of view she made a mistake living with me, in that she wasted time she could have used finding a husband. That’s being a little hard on her, makes her sound like a calculating bitch. She was calculating, but not a bitch. She just sincerely wanted to get married. I’m sure she’ll make a good doctor’s wife, better than most.

“Ever since then, I’ve been very honest in all my relationships with women. For purely selfish reasons, too. I’m just not comfortable playing games. I’m too old for that routine. I don’t want it. The few girls I’ve lived with have always known in front that I’m not looking for a marriage thing. That I personally cannot afford to be future-oriented in my emotional relationships. They accepted it and were comfortable with it...”

JWW: Couples who live together ultimately marry or separate in a majority of cases. Any of a number of motives may propel two people who have cohabited for an extended period of time into marriage. The most obvious pressure is that of convention; however extensively non-marital cohabitation may be accepted, eventual marriage remains the norm. As an extension of this, marriage often follows upon a mutual desire for a change in life style; when a couple decides to have children, or to move from an apartment to a house, marriage suits this new life style better than “living together.” In much the same fashion, marriage occurs when the partners reach a particular plateau in the maturation process — when they graduate from college, when they become self supporting, etc.

Marriage may be elected because of a change in the nature of a couple’s relationship. Paradoxically, the change may be for the better or for the worse. When a cohabitational relationship seems to be deteriorating, the partners may get married in order to bond themselves more closely together, just as married couples may attempt to resolve their difficulties by having a child. On the other hand, a couple may marry because their relationship has improved to the point where they wish to express a deeper commitment to each other.

Does a marriage have a greater chance of success if the partners have lived together beforehand? An absolute answer cannot easily be supplied, and any data offered would perforce be suspect because of the difficulty of a qualitative judgment of marital success. A survey might determine that such couples were more or less likely to get divorced within a specific period of time, but few of us would be likely to call a marriage successful simply because it has endured. Additionally, it’s theoretically possible that persons likely to live together have a greater or lesser propensity to achieve successful marriages.

Almost invariably, couples who have married after having lived together believe that their marriages have been better as a result. And persons who did not live together before marriage frequently comment that they wish they had done so, either because it would have saved them from an unhappy marriage or because it would have made their marital adjustment easier. This sort of hindsight may not be too significant, but it is interesting for what it reveals of attitudes.

My own opinion is that premarital cohabitation greatly increases the possibility of marital success. But it is no more than opinion.

JWW: Those who do marry after an extended period of living together are sometimes apt to aver that marriage has not changed their relationship, that it constitutes no more than a legal formalization of an existing state. I doubt that this is ever absolutely true. However little importance one attaches to a marriage ceremony, the change in status it conveys inevitably carries connotations of increased commitment, of societal recognition, of implied permanence. By becoming husband and wife, a couple will change in the way that they perceive themselves and their relationship and in the way that they and their relationship are perceived by others.

“After we were married, people reacted to us differently. In subtle ways. Other men who might have come on to me while we were living together weren’t as likely to consider me fair game. Other women were less apt to flirt with my husband than when he was my ‘old man.’ This was along the same lines that we had noticed before when we started living together, and the same thing happened. In each case we were recognized as having deepened our mutual commitment, and people recognized this in their reaction to us.”

JWW: Sometimes there is an immediate urge to rebel against the new relationship. A situation which was quite comfortable beforehand may suddenly seem confining:

“A funny thing, in the year and a half we were living together, I never really had an urge to make love to another woman. I don’t mean that the thought never crossed my mind. When I saw an attractive girl, I would think of her in sexual terms. I think everybody does that, but I never really wanted to do anything about it. Almost immediately after we went through the wedding ceremony, I got a classic case of the seven-year itch. It wasn’t even a desire for a specific girl. I just had a yen for someone besides her. I never did anything about it, although I’m sure I would have if there had been a really ideal opportunity thrown in my face.

“Ultimately I got over it. Probably because I got used to being married. I had wanted to have sex with someone else because I felt I had given up a portion of my freedom and wanted to assert myself. What’s weird is that I knew my motives at the time. That didn’t change anything, the desire was just as strong.”

JWW: Does marriage make it more or less likely for a couple to stay together? At first glance, the answer seems perfectly obvious. Divorce, however readily obtainable it may ultimately become, will always be a more complicated process than simply packing a suitcase and getting new stationery printed. The actual mechanics of separation and divorce, added to the implied commitment of marriage, make the dissolution of a marriage more difficult than the breakup of a non-marital union.

“During our second year of marriage, we went through a very bad time. I was trying to get pregnant and couldn’t, my husband was in a bad situation at work, and we actually did separate for several weeks. He went to a hotel. If we had gone through that bad a time when we were living together, I doubt that we would have stayed together.”

JWW: This statement is typical. But it is also true that, for some people, a marriage is harder to hold together than an informal arrangement. I’ve known several couples who lived together for periods in excess of five years, got married, and were divorced or permanently separated within the first few years of marriage. As one man explained:

“We weren’t as flexible after we were married. When we were living together, we could have a hassle and one of us would walk out and then walk back in a few days later, and it worked itself out. When the same kind of thing happened after the wedding, there was this feeling that the break had to be permanent. I can’t really explain it, but it was there.”

JWW: This particular couple lived together for five years, were married for slightly over two years, then separated permanently. Interestingly, they have not divorced, neither of them seeing any point in a divorce other than the freedom to make the same mistake all over again. Both are living together with other people now, and have been for several years.

JWW: Living together is not so much an alternative to the traditional monogamous marriage as are the marital forms we shall encounter in the following chapters. It is relevant here more in terms of the way it reflects so many changes in our perception of proper sexual behavior, of courtship, of marriage.

Twenty or forty years ago, college sophomores and Greenwich Village free spirits used up a great many man-hours talking about the desirability of free love. Just what this term meant depended upon the speakers and the circumstances, and perhaps in the majority of cases the phrase was employed largely as an intellectual argument for premarital intercourse. (When I went to college, it was said that there was no such thing as free love, not so long as you had to pay tuition.) In ideal terms, however, the phrase often pointed to a sexual utopia wherein people would live together without being married, retaining all their individual rights and unregimented by the dictates of society.

Implicit in the advocacy of this sort of free love was the understanding that it would (or should) ultimately replace marriage.

Couples who live together today practice free love to an extent that those old bohemians would not have deemed possible. If this tells us a great deal about the institution of marriage in contemporary society, I would submit that the continuing perseverance of marriage and its evident ultimate appeal to so many of these same couples tells us even more about marriage.

Again, this chapter is different in another way from those which follow it. The practice it concerns is one which is rapidly becoming the norm, much as premarital intercourse became the norm some years before.

Group marriages, swinging marriages, open marriages — these alternatives to traditional monogamy are not the norm, nor is there much likelihood that they will become the norm in the foreseeable future, the visionary statements of their staunchest advocates notwithstanding. Their significance lies less in the number of people experimenting with them than in the fact that they exist at all.