Wide Open: The New Marriage

Going Separate Ways

“Let me tell you, folks, my wife and I have discovered the secret of a happy marriage. It’s the double bed. Yes, the double bed — one in her house and one in mine.”

The bit of nightclub shtick quoted above has led a venerable life. In an East Side cheaters’ joint the other night I heard it again for the first time in ten years. It got as good a laugh as ever, perhaps because it was so well suited to its audience.

For a substantial number of American married couples, the line’s humor is underscored with truth. In the permissive marriage, the secret of marital success is, if not double beds in separate houses, the ability to go separate ways and lead separate lives. The options open to partners in a permissive marriage include but are not necessarily limited to that of engaging in extramarital sexual relations. Such relations are undertaken not jointly, as in swinging, but individually.

It is difficult to define the permissive marriage precisely. While swinging represents a distinct social movement, permissive marriages represent individual accommodations worked out by individual pairs of husbands and wives. Perhaps we can best approach a definition by first looking at some marriages which do not fit this category.

“Am I married? Let me put it this way. My wife is married. She knows I have to be able to live my own life. I don’t throw it up at her all the time, but she knows I get around on my own.”

JWW: This, in one form or another, has been for years the pattern of standard American adultery. The husband engages in extramarital affairs to whatever extent he wishes, veiling his activities from his wife and from the friends they have in common. If questioned, he will explain that he and his wife have an understanding, that she is aware of his extramarital activity but prefers to ignore it. He may add that his wife is equally free to express herself sexually outside of marriage. The less likely it appears to him that she will ever do so, the more likely he is to be magnanimous in this regard.

This sort of unilateral “understanding” may or may not exist to the extent the husband implies. Often he merely assumes that his wife knows of and tolerates his infidelities, with such an assumption greatly diminishing his own guilt. In other instances the understanding is pure fabrication; the husband knows that his wife has no knowledge of his infidelities, knows too that she would disapprove violently, but has found that other women are less reluctant to have an affair with a married man if they are led to believe such an understanding exists.

In still other cases, the understanding may be real enough. It will usually have been arrived at after a marital crisis in which the wife learns of her husband’s penchant for casual adultery. He convinces her that this need for extramarital sex does not impinge in any way on his love for her, and that it does not constitute a threat to their marriage; she at once forgives the infidelities of the past and facilitates the infidelities of the future by ignoring such evidence of his affairs as may later come to her attention. The understanding, such as it is, consists of her recognizing the need to overlook what she cannot accept, and of his exercising due caution to avoid her being presented with anything too vivid to be easily overlooked.

The understanding is almost always unilateral. It is almost always the wife who understands, the husband who behaves in a manner which must be understood. This fact surely reflects the double standard, but it is simplistic to argue that this sort of husband would invariably be appalled if his wife behaved as he does. Most men insist that they would grant their wives the same degree of freedom they demand for themselves. Certainly some of them are insincere, but I believe the majority are honest in this regard. Some actively wish their wives would have affairs, not merely to alleviate their own guilt, but out of the feeling that extramarital sex would be for their wives, as it is for them, a source of pleasure and satisfaction.

Why, then, is the understanding so one-sided? Two factors have traditionally helped make it so. The wife, her world centered upon home and family, simply has less opportunity for extramarital involvement. While her husband meets interesting women through his work, she sees only those men who come to her house, and unless she is capable of enjoying the cliché of casual sex with an appliance repairman or a door-to-door salesman, she has no chance for a real extramarital relationship. In addition, women have long been taught, whether socially or biologically, that they can enjoy sex only in the context of an emotional relationship. Even when the opportunity for such a relationship presents itself, they are more apt to feel that it will pose a threat to their marriage.

(All of this is changing, with more and more women leading lives extending beyond the boundaries of kitchen, children, and church, and with that redefinition of female roles which at once feeds and feeds upon the women’s liberation movement, I suspect that we will see an increasing number of women who, like Sue in the chapter on living together, take their sex like a man. I would doubt, though, that all of the differences between male and female sexual attitudes will abruptly wither away.)

The understanding, then, does not fit the definition of the permissive marriage which we are trying to formulate. It represents a compromise. The wife agrees, probably by closing her eyes, to live with her husband’s unfaithfulness. The husband also compromises by keeping his affairs under wraps. Whether the compromise is ultimately successful depends on a number of things. The wife may suffer extreme ego damage, may retreat into neurotic behavior, may turn to alcohol or drugs, may fall out of love with her husband. The husband may find that a long-term pattern of casual deception makes him cease to love and respect his wife. He may become more seriously involved in an affair than he had intended, to the point where he wishes to divorce his wife for the sake of his mistress. Or, on the other hand, the understanding may endure throughout the course of the marriage, and may represent the best possible accommodation for all parties concerned.

“We have a marriage in name only. We haven’t been in love with each other for years. We’re only staying together because of the children/for religious reasons/because we can’t get a divorce (choose one). We care about each other and don’t want to make each other unhappy, but we have to have outlets outside of marriage. Hell, I’m not a priest, and I haven’t been in the same bed with her for years.”

JWW: Like the understanding, the marriage in name only may or may not actually be as it is described. Often it represents a conscious exaggeration designed to lessen the guilt of a prospective extramarital partner. One is less apt to experience anxiety at the prospect of breaking up a marriage if the marriage is perceived as a legal fiction.

Discounting those cases in which the statement quoted above is an out-and-out lie, there remain many cases in which it is at least an improvement on the truth. It is only natural for a person discussing his marriage with his mistress to emphasize all of the marriage’s weaknesses and minimize all of its strengths. This is partly a matter of telling one’s mistress what she wants to hear, certainly, but it may also come about with no ulterior motive; a man’s marriage honestly seems far less significant to him when he is in bed with another woman, and takes on far greater significance when he is sitting in front of his own hearth, digesting a good dinner and playing with his children.

Nevertheless, the marriage in name only certainly does exist. It has probably become less common than it was in years past, because such marriages are far more likely now to end in divorce. The bars to divorce have given way greatly, and the legal dissolution of marriage has become easier to obtain and carries less social stigma in almost all strata of society.

But people still do stay together “for the sake of the children.” (Whether children are better off under such circumstances is a moot point. The obvious answer is that they are not, that a broken home is preferable to a loveless one, that parental honesty is superior to parental deception. Obvious as this may be, I am by no means certain that this is true, as there is an indisputable correlation of parental divorce and emotional difficulties. The world could do with a sound study of this subject.)

An interesting result of maintaining marriage for the sake of children is the phenomenon of divorce after twenty or thirty years of marriage. The union is preserved for the children’s benefit; the children grow up, complete their education, and marry; and the parents are finally free to dissolve their unsuccessful marriage. Just a week or so ago I read a rather startling letter in “Dear Abby.” The writer reported attending a large party to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of a couple she had known intimately for many years. At the height of the festivities the husband called for silence. Then, with his beaming wife at his side, he announced that he and his wife were taking this opportunity to let all their friends know that they were about to get divorced. Their children were grown and married, he explained, and there was no longer any need for them to live a marital lie. Thus they were going to go their separate ways while they still had time to enjoy life. And while the guests stood gaping, the band played the “Anniversary Waltz” and the prospective ex-spouses danced together.

(No, I am not making this up. No, “Dear Abby” didn’t make it up either. And yes, I’d give long odds that husband and wife went to bed together after the party broke up. And yes, yes, yes, this is a hell of a strange world we live in.)

The marriage in name only is not as likely to be unilateral as the understanding, in terms of extramarital sex. Either the husband or the wife or both may have sexual relations outside of marriage. Nor are these relationships necessarily casual. The husband may have a mistress or the wife a lover, and such relationships may constitute sexual and emotional monogamy.

This sort of marriage may or may not be permissive. Either party may be either open or secretive about extramarital affairs, depending on particular attitudes and circumstances. But however permissive such a situation may be, marriages of this type are not what we mean here by permissive marriage.

“Sex just isn’t important to my wife. She’s willing to go through with it, but she doesn’t enjoy it, doesn’t seem to have needs the way I do. I love her very much, and our marriage is important to me, but I’m a very sensual kind of a guy and I have to be able to express this side of my nature.”

“My husband can’t satisfy me sexually. He can’t get it up/ejaculates prematurely/lacks tenderness (choose one). We love each other, but I have to have sexual satisfaction.”

JWW: Again, we’re dealing here with statements that are not always entirely true. Often a desire for sex outside of marriage will make one unduly aware of one’s partner’s sexual inadequacies. Many men justify visits to prostitutes on the grounds that their wives will not perform certain sexual acts which they crave, most commonly fellatio. In many cases one learns that they never attempted to induce their wives to fellate them, but use this as an unconscious rationalization for their behavior.

This reservation aside, there are quite a few marriages in which the sexual uninterest or inadequacy of one partner leads to the sexual infidelity of the other. Occasionally an understanding between husband and wife will exist. Sometimes it is voiced; more often it is unspoken. A wife who does not enjoy sex, who regards it as dirty or improper, may be pleased that other women will relieve her of her marital chores. A husband is less likely to accept such an arrangement with equanimity, as it reflects rather obviously on his manhood, but there are cases enough on record of husbands, either possessed of low sex drives or fundamentally homosexual in orientation, who relinquish with pleasure the burden of satisfying their wives.

“One night our fantasy was listing all the guys she balled, and we stopped at sixty, including the hound dog that she screwed for years.”

JWW: Another form of marital relationship that is distinctly permissive, without constituting a permissive marriage as defined here, is that in which the extramarital activities of one partner are a source of excitement and pleasure to the other partner as well. The acts of one provide strong vicarious gratification for the other.

Esquire recently ran what was ostensibly an interview with the “world’s greatest lover,” an apartment building watchman who evidently has devoted his entire life to refining his skills at seducing and satisfying an enormous number of women. The interview was pretty terrible, and like so many items in that magazine, it could as easily have been a spoof on such articles as not. One could not be sure, and one could not much care, either.

The most interesting aspect of it was that (according to Esquire) the article came about because of the single-minded determination of the man’s wife to see her husband’s prowess recognized in print. She hounded the editors until an interview was arranged, then stood at her husband’s side during the interview, backing up his story. Assuming that all of this actually happened, the wife obviously derived considerable satisfaction from the knowledge of her husband’s extracurricular activities.

I’ve had more firsthand familiarity with relationships in which the husband delighted in his wife’s promiscuity. The quote above is from a letter I received some months ago chronicling the sexual career of the writer’s wife in the course of thirty years of marriage. During this time the husband states he has had little extramarital sex himself — “Maybe I’m nuts or something, but I can count on my right hand the number of stray pieces I’ve had” — And obviously gets maximal satisfaction from his wife’s behavior.

Letters of this sort, in which a husband boasts of his wife’s sexuality, are fairly common. In most cases they are sheer fantasy, with the writer purposely making the letter as colorfully pornographic as possible. This particular letter was similar in tone and style to others, but in this case I was able to establish its literal truth. There is no point in reproducing it here, but interested readers may find it printed almost in full in Doing It!, a collection of ten of my Swank Magazine columns in book form.

Such marriages represent little more than an adaptation of matrimony to suit at once the particular sexual idiosyncrasies of husband and wife.

JWW: Hmmmm. So far, we’ve done little more than formulate some negative definitions of the permissive marriage, examining a variety of marital relationships with permissive aspects that fall short of our chapter’s subject.

Now let’s look at a few genuine permissive marriages to see just what forms they’ve taken and just how they managed to evolve into those forms. Our first speaker is Helene, a tall and attractive woman in her late thirties, well-dressed and self-possessed. She is a statistician employed by a market research corporation. Her husband, Maurice, is a tax lawyer.

“My first marriage broke up because of my husband’s possessiveness. I’m sure there were other factors as well, but this was the most important one. He was the ultimate male chauvinist pig, although the term hadn’t come along at the time. He wanted me to stay home and cook and clean and make babies. He wanted me to be a wife first and person second, if at all. It was at his instigation that I quit my job, although I wanted to go on working, and we could certainly have used the income. During the day, he expected me to be home. He got very upset if he called and I wasn’t there. He had me so thoroughly intimidated that I rarely left the apartment except to do the marketing or get my hair done, and I would even set specific times for that, so I would be home when he called.

“I had no male friends during the course of the marriage. That was absolutely out of the question. He even resented my female friends, but was willing to tolerate them...

“For all his jealousy, I never did have an affair. I don’t think it really occurred to me that an affair was an option of mine. He was upset if I talked to other men at parties, for God’s sake. He preferred parties where the men stood on one side of the room and talked about cars and football, while the women stayed on the other side and talked about babies and exchanged recipes. That man had one of the keenest minds of the twelfth century.

“After the divorce, I found out that for all his insane insistence on my fidelity, he was Mr. Cheater in person. He didn’t have affairs as such, he wasn’t geared for that sort of thing. Instead he spent a couple of afternoons a week with call girls. Paid money for absolutely passionless sex. He did a lot to screw up my life, but I can’t really resent him for it anymore. I can only pity him. His whole attitude regarding love and sex and marriage was genuinely sick.”

JWW: Once her first marriage had ended, Helene returned to work, took an apartment of her own, and began to become socially active once again

“I had had several affairs before Maurice and I met. He was also divorced, and had just broken up with a girl he had lived with for almost a year. We met through mutual friends and saw each other several times before we got around to going to bed together. Eventually we began living together and found ourselves considering marriage.

“We were both very apprehensive about taking the plunge again. Maurice said he seriously doubted that any woman, whoever she was, would be able to fulfill him completely. He had had affairs during his marriage and admitted he had become slightly involved with a girl while he and I were living together. For my part, I was determined to avoid anything at all like the situation I went through during my first marriage. My job was an important part of my life, and I intended to continue with my career. He agreed completely on that point, saying that a woman with a stimulating job was a more stimulating companion than a woman who spent her days in front of a television set. Besides that, though, there were certain friendships I had with men that I did not desire to give up. There were men I frequently had lunch with, one man who shared my enthusiasm for chamber music and used to take me to concerts, and so on.

“Once we had started living together, I stopped having evening dates with other men. I did this automatically, but it began to bother me. It seemed wrong, for example, that I should have to give up chamber music concerts because Maurice didn’t care for them. It seemed even worse to drag him along to them when he didn’t want to go. And it annoyed me that having a deep relationship with one man meant I had to forgo having meaningful friendships with other men.

“Until we started to discuss it, I had not thought of this aspect in sexual terms as such. I had never had simultaneous affairs in the past, and thus I had never contemplated having sex with another man while I was involved with Maurice. But in the course of discussing our mutual concern about marriage, I began to discover within myself a capacity for enjoying an extramarital affair. It seemed to me that if I could enjoy a man’s friendship and companionship, I might also be able to enjoy him sexually while still living with Maurice, or being married to Maurice.

“It would be wrong to give the impression that all of this worked itself out in a series of level-headed conversations. But I’m afraid we didn’t reach a plateau of Instant Maturity. What kept happening was that one of us would rebel against the confines of our relationship, would throw that rebellion in the other’s face either to inflict pain or to exorcise guilt, and the fight that followed would eventually resolve itself in discussion, with the two of us moving a little bit closer to our own definition of the proper structure of a marriage.

“As an example, I called Maurice at his office one afternoon and said I would be having dinner downtown and would then go to a recital at Town Hall. I didn’t specifically state that I was going by myself, but that was the implication. When I got home afterward, I confessed that I had gone to dinner and to the concert with a man I was friendly with, adding that I had kissed him good night when he put me in the cab for home. I don’t remember just what form our argument took, but through this and other arguments we gradually came to see that it was possessiveness and exclusivity that makes so many marriages an unendurable proposition for the people involved in them.

“Another time, Maurice said he was working late at the office. Several nights later he admitted he had spent the hours from five to ten with a girl who worked as a receptionist for one of his clients. They had dinner and then went to bed in her apartment. He added that she had wanted him to stay the night. I asked him why the hell he felt compelled to come home, that I wasn’t his jailer, and suggested he go to her then and there. He left the house but came back within fifteen minutes. I said something like, ‘What’s the matter, isn’t she home?’ He said he hadn’t called her, that he really just wanted to be with me. We worked things out, and in the process learned a little more about ourselves and our needs and what we could give to each other as well as what we expected from each other.”

JWW: This redefinition of attitudes and roles was a drawn-out process for Helene and Maurice. Both realized that they could not possibly be comfortable with a conventional marriage, and so they literally had to invent a form of marriage which would work out to their mutual satisfaction, uniting them as a couple without infringing upon their rights as individuals.

“I don’t suppose it would have taken us so long to get around to marriage if we hadn’t both taken marriage so seriously. For a variety of reasons, each of us felt that marriage was a necessary state for lasting happiness. And each of us had been married before, and we shared a real determination not to fail at marriage for a second time. This is not always the way it works for people who have been divorced. I’ve known quite a few who rush into a second marriage very lightly — they were divorced before, and feel that if things don’t work out, they can always get divorced again. We went to the opposite extreme, dead set on getting married only if we were determined to make it last a lifetime.

“Marriage held several attractions for us. The prospect of children was one of them. We both agreed that we would prefer to adopt. There are so many children without homes, and the last thing the world needs is more babies, and also I felt I was a little old to be giving birth to a child for the first time. Nor did I relish the prospect of two years of dirty diapers and all of the limitations involved in raising an infant. I have nothing against women who want that kind of life, but that doesn’t make me one of them. We’re right now in the process of adopting a beautiful little biracial boy two and a half years old. If it works out as we hope, we’ll think about adopting a little girl in two or three years.

“More than the desire for children, we wanted to be married out of a desire for permanence. An unshared life is a very lonely life, and New York is overflowing with lonely old men and women who have no one in the world but their own selves for company. You see them on the streets talking to themselves. I used to think they were all crazy, but you don’t have to be crazy to talk to yourself. All that’s required is for you to have no one else in the world who will listen to you. Maurice and I wanted to grow old together, we wanted to spend the rest of our lives with each of us as the other’s best friend.

“What we worked out finally was the idea of marriage as a relationship in which neither party owned the other and in which each of us was free to come and go as he desired. There would be no strings except one — that we would make sure our marriage survived. We would be honest to each other and considerate of each other, and each of us would gladly accept the fact that the other had his own individual life to live.

“This meant that I wouldn’t say I was going to a concert alone and then go with a male friend. I could still go with my friend, but I would say in advance that I was doing so, and I would feel free to bring him home for a drink afterward. I would also feel free to have an affair with him, but not if I was going to bring him home for a drink. We both agreed that those aspects of our individual lives which involved sexual intimacy ought to be kept private.

“We’ve also found that it’s best to keep extramarital sex not only private but not to discuss it. At first we had the feeling that we had to be honest and open and tell each other what we did, and we learned that we were getting a distasteful childish pleasure about bragging about what we had done sexually, and that it was lowering our mutual self-esteem. Now, I’ll generally know when Maurice is having an affair, and I’m sure he knows whether my dates are purely platonic or not — they almost always are — but we don’t tell each other about it, nor do we ask each other questions.

“I’m not at all jealous of Maurice, and I don’t believe he’s jealous of me in any way. On two occasions he’s called me at night to tell me he’ll be staying out overnight. I’ve never done this myself. The first time he did this, it bothered me, although I don’t think the feeling was jealousy exactly. It was more that I felt I wanted him to be with me while we both slept. When he did it the second time, I told him how I felt, and we talked it over, and he said he’d felt uncomfortable himself waking up in a bed without me. Interestingly, the second time had not been a sexual occasion, but an all-night poker game...

“Jealousy is an immature emotion, as I see it. There’s no way in which one person can belong entirely to another person. People have to have time away from each other, and they have to have parts of themselves which can’t find expression within marriage. If you give up those parts of your life which your husband or wife can’t share with you, you’re only making yourself smaller and more limited as a result, and your partner doesn’t gain anything from this; in fact, he loses, because you become stifled and less exciting and wind up resenting him for the change in your life.”

JWW: I asked how friends and acquaintances feel about their version of permissive marriage.

“Most of the friends we have in common are the sort who have little trouble understanding our relationship. The majority of them are couples in which the wife works, and they also have found it necessary to allow themselves a lot of independence within the framework of their marriages. I don’t know that we’ve actually discussed our concept of marriage at any length. They know that one of us will attend a party without the other, and that we have that kind of freedom.

“The men I’m friendly with are usually taken aback to learn that Maurice knows I’m going out with them. For instance, one man whom Maurice and I both know socially has taken me to lunch maybe half a dozen times. He’s in a lot of personal difficulty right now, unsure whether or not to quit his job, up in the air over a lot of things, and what he needs is a sympathetic ear. Evidently my ear was the sort he was looking for, so once a week or so he buys me a lunch and tells me his troubles.

“The last time I saw him, I mentioned something to the effect that this was a favorite restaurant of Maurice’s and that he would wish he could have joined us. He went white and asked if Maurice knew we had lunch together. I said of course he did, and why? He said he hadn’t told his wife, that she would be very upset, not just at the idea of his having lunch with another woman, but that the woman was one she was friendly with. He obviously thought I would be in the same position with Maurice and wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t let anything slip in front of his wife.

“Now, this struck me as so utterly ridiculous! Because there could be nothing more innocent than our lunches together. He has never made the most embryonic pass at me, and I’m sure one of the reasons he feels comfortable seeing me this way is that I don’t happen to turn him on sexually. Nor does he appeal to me sexually. But by keeping something so innocent a secret, he’s actually taking a big risk. If some mutual friend sees us together, and mentions it to his wife, she can’t help but conclude that we’re having an affair. And there’s no logical way he could deny it.

“In contrast, I don’t have to lie to Maurice, nor do I have to hide a part of my life from him. If something comes up in one of our lunchtime conversations, I can share it with Maurice over dinner. My lunch partner has to suppress it, and it builds another wall between the two of them.”

JWW: Would she be inclined to recommend her form of permissive marriage to everyone?

“Yes, definitely.

“Let me qualify that slightly. There’s no denying that a great many people are not ready for this sort of marriage, and that some of them will never be able to make themselves ready for it. And the idea of sexual freedom is the least important aspect of it, Jack. That’s the first thing that comes to everyone’s mind, that Maurice and I can have affairs with a clear conscience, but I doubt that we have any more extramarital sex than we would if we had not elected to permit it. It’s possible we have less. When you know you can do whatever you want to do, there’s no forbidden fruit element to lure you into it.

“No, the point that would be hardest for most people to swallow is the idea that two people can belong to each other without owning each other. That they can have a better life together by virtue of the fact that they have lives apart as well. For a person with a conventional mind and a conventional attitude toward marriage, this would be hard to get down. And for a person with anxieties and insecurities he’s unable to face, I would guess it would be impossible.

“Otherwise, I think it’s the only sensible and realistic and honest and open way for two people to live. I don’t believe the institution of marriage is on its way out. I think that’s a lot of bullshit rhetoric. I do think the concept of marriage has to evolve in order to fit itself to the realities of modern times. And in that sense, yes, I would recommend our style of marriage to all couples who are mature and self-confident enough to handle it.”

JWW: Helene and Maurice have made mutual permissiveness an integral part of their whole relationship. This arrangement suits them both, and they have been able to carry it out with little difficulty. The fact that they live and work in New York City certainly has something to do with this. Were they transplanted abruptly to a small town in the middle of South Dakota, it would be far more difficult for them to lead their lives as they do now.

Faye and Alec do live in a small town in South Dakota, where Alec owns a grocery store. They are in their thirties and have two sons, ages nine and eleven. Their version of the permissive marriage is not constant, as with Helene and Maurice, but intermittent — i.e., they take separate vacations, at which times the usual rules of marriage are suspended.

For Helene and Maurice, a permissive marriage was needed to allow for full self-expression; sexual freedom, while a significant component of this self-expression, was by no means the overriding concern. The separate vacations which Faye and Alec take no doubt facilitate overall self-expression, but they do not hesitate to assert that their motivation is specifically sexual.

FAYE: “We first started to have marriage trouble about five years ago. At that time we had been married just seven years, so you could call it the seven-year itch. It was partly that, and partly on account of my youngest being in nursery school, which left me with more time on my hands. Also, that was just about the time when the business started to do better, and Alec didn’t have to struggle so hard to come out ahead. All of these things came together at once, along with both of us being just out of our twenties and just into our thirties and the feeling of life passing us by.

“We would make love, and even when it was good, I would lie there feeling unsatisfied afterward. I would have an orgasm, the same as always, but it would not do me any good. I would still feel empty. I would find myself daydreaming about boys I went out with before I was married. I had this fantasy of running into one boy or another on the street and the two of us driving off to a motel for a wild afternoon together. Of course, this never happened, and then I found out that Alec was having an affair with another woman, and this just threw me for a loop.”

ALEC: “I was going through the same thing as Faye, but I didn’t know what was on her mind, and she didn’t know what was on mine. I was at a point where all I wanted was to make love to another woman. I don’t know what I expected it to be. Not that it would be better than with Faye, but that it would be different. Everything was the same with us, one day after the one before it, and the years were going by faster all the time. I would get erections constantly waiting on customers in the store. Some of those women made it pretty obvious that they were on the lookout for something, but you don’t dare put a foot wrong in a town this size, or the whole world knows it. Finally, there was one gal, her husband was with the military overseas, and I guess it was hell for her getting along without it. We started dropping little things in conversation when she came around the store, and one thing led to another, and we wound up going to these tourist cabins about ten miles out of town. We went, I guess, no more than half a dozen times before the shit hit the fan.

“I felt badly about it. It was good for me, it made me feel alive again, but I hated having to sneak around like that. She’d come by, and we’d make arrangements, and then I’d find an excuse to get out of the store and drive out there, and she would already have a cabin rented, and we’d get right to it. I just couldn’t get free for more than an hour at a time without drawing suspicion, so I don’t guess we spent more than six hours’ total time in bed with each other. A couple of times we talked about going somewhere for a weekend. There are always things like retail grocers’ conventions in Chicago or St. Paul, and we talked about her going with me, but I think I knew all along that this would never happen. Also, it did bother me that here I was screwing her while her husband was in the service, but I figured she had her needs, and he couldn’t satisfy them from where he was.”

FAYE: “How I found out was, somebody mentioned seeing his car at that place, and when I brought it up, he opened up right away. He was unhappy about keeping things from me. I flew off the handle and almost left him then and there, but he kept swearing he loved me and it wouldn’t happen again and begging me to stay, and at last I calmed myself and realized he had been having the same kind of desires I had. And maybe what had me so upset was his doing what I wanted to be doing myself all along, and envying him for it.”

JWW: The next step for Faye and Alec was the mutual recognition of their desires for extramarital experience. By opening up to each other and confronting their own real feelings, they found that neither of them believed casual affairs would present a true danger to their marriage. Alec had discovered during the course of his brief affair that his marital relations were more exciting than they had been previously, and Faye found that her own knowledge of her husband’s adultery seemed to have an aphrodisiacal effect upon her. Rather than a threat, outside sex seemed to have the potential for enhancing their marriage.

ALEC: “We had a hard time coming to the conclusion, but once we were there, it was like not getting anyplace at all. There was still the question of what were we to do about it. I had broken off with the one girl, and didn’t have any great interest in taking up with her again. Even if I had, it would have been no time at all before we were the talk of the town. Faye might feel it was all right for me to have affairs, but that didn’t make her willing to have the whole town know about it. Not to mention the effect it would have on my business, in a town like this where everybody knows everything about everybody else.”

FAYE: “Then there was the question of how I was to have affairs. That was even more impossible here. We came up with all manner of fool ideas. Like I would take a bus to Chicago and try to pick up a man in a bar. Well, I surely didn’t want to behave like a whore. I’m not the type to do anything of the sort. I didn’t just want straight plain sex. I wanted some kind of, I don’t know, romance? I wanted to feel young and attractive and desirable.”

ALEC: “The first thing we tried was swinging. I read a magazine article on the subject, and it struck me as just the ticket. Here you’ve got two couples in the same situation, and both of them have to be discreet, so you get together and trade wives, and there’s no complications, and nobody gets hurt. I managed to get hold of one of those magazines with personal ads, and we started getting in touch with people.”

FAYE: “But it just never worked out right for us.”

ALEC: “You would meet a couple, and they might not be attractive to you, or you’re not attractive to them. And it would just be sex, with all of the romance out of it. There was no way to get out of your own self — that’s what was wrong with it. I was still Faye’s husband, and the woman I was putting it to was still this other guy’s wife, and after we had tried it enough times to know what it was all about, and had the same reaction each time, well, we knew that wasn’t the answer.”

FAYE: “It wasn’t all bad. We learned things about sex, we got more experimental and liberal in our sex attitudes. But by the time we were used to the whole idea of swinging, we were tired of it.”

ALEC: “Another thing. It would bother me when I was with a woman to worry about Faye being in another room with another man. I don’t mean jealousy. I mean I had to be concerned with whether she was having a good time. I had to go on being her husband, and what I wanted was to take off that particular uniform completely.”

FAYE: “I was embarrassed to be with another man with Alec around. Not even the sex so much as talking with him or just making out, kissing, necking. There was a thrill in it at the beginning, because it was so different, but when the thrill wore off, it was just uncomfortable.”

JWW: The solution, when they hit on it, was so simple that they found it incomprehensible that they hadn’t thought of it immediately. Alec was planning to go to a convention and invited Faye to accompany him. She teased that maybe he would rather take someone else, that he could probably have a better time on his own. It is unclear who thought of the answer — that they would say they were going to the convention, but that he would go to one city while she went to another.

ALEC: “It was just the perfect answer. I went to Chicago for the convention, and of course I was so determined not to waste any time that I had to get laid before I was in town an hour. I got the bellhop to bring a girl to my room, and turned her every way but loose. I just had to do that right away so I could relax. Afterward I found myself wondering about Faye, but I just made myself stop. I decided that as long as I was at that convention, I wasn’t married.”

FAYE: “That’s the attitude you have to have.”

ALEC: “That night I got friendly with a girl who was there to do product demonstrations. We had a few drinks, but it went no further. The next night we had dinner, and I started to romance her. She was divorced and in the mood, and we hit it off well enough, and I brought her back to my room. We were together more or less nonstop for the rest of the convention. She knew I was married. I don’t guess it bothered her. Since then, sometimes I’ll say I’m married, and sometimes I’ll say I’m not. Depending on what I think a girl wants to hear, or on who I feel like pretending to be.”

FAYE: “I went to Kansas City, but I couldn’t tell you why, Maybe because we were there once together, so at least I knew the name of a good hotel. Once I was there, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I thought nothing would happen and couldn’t decide whether to make up a story for Alec or tell him the truth. What I found out is that if you’re a woman there’s nothing easier than finding a man who wants to take you to bed. I had dinner at the hotel restaurant and then sat at my table having a drink afterward, and the bartender brought over a fresh drink and pointed out a man at the bar who had bought it for me. I smiled at him, and he came over, and not twenty minutes later his face was between my legs and I was moaning like nobody’s business.”

JWW: There is a definite element of braggadocio in their talk as Faye and Alec recount their experiences on their separate vacations. They make a special point of describing in detail just what they did and how many times and how great it was. At first I thought this might be a form of one-upmanship or a method of self-assertion. I later came to see that it was more a matter of habit. They capped their vacations by telling each other as erotically as possible of their experiences, with the teller reliving the act while the listener enjoyed it vicariously. This narrative pattern evidently persisted in their conversations with me.

Their first separate vacation was a successful one, and since then all of their vacations have been occasions for permissive extramarital ventures. Each winter they spend a week in Florida, each in a different city. Each summer, while their sons are at camp, each spends several weeks at a resort. The resorts are ideal, I am assured; you can have a regular summer romance with no feeling of cheapness to it, and yet your partner takes it for granted that the romance will end when the vacation does.

This reminds me of a version of swinging developed by a couple of my acquaintances, and I mentioned it to them. This particular couple makes a practice of going to resorts in the Catskills during singles’ weekends. They register individually, the wife using her maiden name, and of course take separate rooms. They then operate sexually as free agents, letting none of their new friends know that they are married. Once they managed to arrange a double date together. Another time, both unsuccessful at finding a suitable partner, they wound up taking each other to bed.

Faye and Alec find the story amusing but agree they would not be interested in such an arrangement. It would conflict with their chief aim of being apart from each other, and also struck them as fundamentally sadistic; they felt the couple was getting special kicks out of deceiving others.

A great many married couples do take occasional separate vacations, feeling that they need a spell apart from each other as well as a break in the day-to-day routine. These vacations do not necessarily involve any extramarital sex, although it is frequently assumed that a dalliance at such a time is a far less serious matter than an affair in the normal course of things. For Faye and Alec, however, these vacations are specifically and unequivocally sexual.

Thus they have rendered their marriage permissive in a compartmentalized sense. Each, I know, would b roundly shocked if the other had an affair other than in the course of an out-of-town vacation, and the likelihood of this happening seems remote.

Similar forms of compartmentalization are not uncommon. The country is full of businessmen who are strictly faithful to their wives except when away from home, and undoubtedly many of their wives take this sort of casual cheating for granted, and can overlook it more readily than the same offense committed on home ground. Certainly, convenience and safety are factors that help to explain the attitude of both the businessmen and their wives, but I’m sure another element comes into play — the feeling that the traditional rules apply less strictly on foreign soil.

Here is Alec’s summary of their general feelings about their permissive marriage:

“Faye and I both grew up with the usual image of marriage. A man and woman met and fell in love and got married and had children and were faithful to each other for the rest of their lives. When you’re brought up to believe that’s how everybody lives, it’s hard to get over it. Even when you know better, there’s a long spell of time when you’ll find yourself worrying that you’re not normal, that what you’re doing is wrong, that if you had a really good marriage you wouldn’t feel the need to go outside it for sexual pleasure.

“But this is just a damn lie. Maybe there was a time when men and women were faithful to each other after marriage. I suppose years ago it was harder to be unfaithful, what with the risks of disease and pregnancy, things you don’t have to worry about today.”

JWW: As both Faye and Alec have undergone surgical sterilization, the possibility of pregnancy as a result of their sexual contacts is nil.

“Even so, I’m sure most people ran around then as they do now. Probably more wives were faithful, while the husbands catted around on them. It’s still that way, and was probably more so years ago.

“Nowadays you have to be blind not to see that it’s a natural thing to want sex outside of marriage. Because everybody is either doing it or wanting to. The fellows I’ll meet on vacation, say, at a convention, nine out of ten them will be hoping to get something before the trip is over. They’ll bring their wives along and send them out shopping and quick get a hooker up to the room and then worry about getting her smell aired out of there before the little woman comes back. It’s just human nature to want it, and how much you love each other isn’t going to change it.

“The arrangement Faye and I have, it gives us a chance to get what we want without interfering in other areas of our lives. Living in a town like this, we have no choice but to work out something like this, but now that we’ve discovered it, I’m sure we’d be the same wherever we live. We have our vacations to blow off steam and get things out of our system, and then when we’re back together again, we have the closeness of marriage with no threats to it and no need for more running around until the next vacation comes along.

“As far as the folks around here are concerned, we are the straightest couple you could hope to find. A nice home and a good business and two clean-cut boys and church every Sunday, and not the slightest breath of scandal. The people who know about that one girl I got together with — if they even think about it — they regard it as the one fling that every man’s entitled to once in his life. They figure I’ve reformed and settled down permanently and am all the better for getting it out of my system. And they know we’re together all the time, and we’ll never flirt around at a party or go in for dirty jokes, so I suppose the more modern element around here would say we were pretty damn square.

“And if you told them what our vacations are like, I don’t guess they’d believe a bit of it.”

JWW: Can the category of permissive marriage embrace a union in which only one of the partners engages in extramarital sex?

At first glance, the answer would seem to be no. Such unilateral permissiveness looks to be outside the bounds of the marriage where each party is free to go his separate way. Surely it is a different matter if the husband has a life of his own while the wife exists only within the framework of marriage. Such an arrangement would seem to be no more than the “understanding” that we discussed earlier and dismissed from consideration.

There are borderline cases, though, in which understandings evolve into permissive marriage. A voiced or silent recognition of one partner’s right to extramarital sexual relations leads in time to mutual freedom for both partners. Yet the expression of this freedom need not take a sexual form for both persons, as the comment of the wife of a college professor shows:

“Before we were married, Douglas was completely open in saying that he did not know for certain whether or not he could be one hundred percent faithful to me. He said it was biologically normal for men to be attracted to other women and that a wedding ring didn’t change this. He said men were different in the way they felt about sex, that it wasn’t always bound up with emotions, as it was for women. He assured me that if he did have other women, he would certainly be discreet about it, and that it would have nothing to do with the love he had for me or the importance of our marriage in his life.

“At the time, I accepted all of this without a second thought. I don’t suppose I really took him seriously. I wanted very much to get married. It was almost a neurotic desire that grew out of my own family situation. I knew he had certain hesitations, and I felt that his saying this was just a way of expressing his general anxieties on the subject of marriage. By saying he wasn’t sure he could be faithful, he was saying that he wasn’t sure he was ready to settle down. Well, I was ready enough for both of us, and I could see that his desire to marry me was greater than his reluctance to take that step, and I was very quick to agree that I would not be drastically upset if he had affairs. It was easy for me to agree with this, since I did not believe anything of the sort would ever happen.

“In our fifth year of marriage, I happened to learn that Doug was having an affair with a college student. The circumstances of finding out were not the best. A former boyfriend of the girl called me, hoping that I would break up the romance, and thus he would get his girl back. The phone call rattled me, and when Doug came home, I blew up all over the place. I must have expected him to come begging for forgiveness, and I was stunned when he very calmly reminded me of our ‘agreement’ that he was entitled to occasional affairs. We hadn’t mentioned the subject since the wedding, and his attitude of being slightly offended that I would even call the matter to his attention knocked me off my feet. (I’ve since realized that his response was a defense mechanism, a way for him to deal with his own guilt over the situation.) I remember feeling like someone who had just read the fine print in a contract she signed years ago...

“Doug managed to calm me. I was too shocked to become really hysterical, and just felt numb. He went on to tell me first of all that the girl meant nothing to him, that he still loved me and only me, and that he certainly had not been neglecting me sexually. This was certainly true; I learned that his affair with the girl had been going on for just over a month, and during that month Doug had made love to me with greater frequency than in the past. He argued that it couldn’t be said that he was cheating on me, since I was not being cheated out of anything.

“In the course of the discussion, it also developed that this was not Doug’s first affair. On a handful of occasions he had had relations on a casual one-night-only basis, both on campus and when he was out of town overnight. He had also had two previous affairs with students, one lasting for a period of weeks, another lasting for almost a full term. I had never had the slightest suspicion in this regard. He insisted he felt he was entitled to behave this way, that I had acknowledged his rights before marriage, and that he had kept me ignorant of what was going on because he felt I would prefer it that way. And he made it perfectly obvious that he would continue to have affairs when the opportunity arose.

“I can’t pretend that I felt at ease about all of this. I felt it was wrong, I felt it reflected badly on our marriage, I felt it indicated that I was not enough for Doug. But there was really nothing I could do about it without losing him. He made it clear he would go on behaving as he had done, and I knew I would rather have him on that basis than lose him altogether. I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind as much as possible and to refrain from thinking about him with the other girl. I remember being glad I didn’t know what she looked like or anything much about her, as I would not have wanted to be able to visualize the two of them together. I would have preferred it if I hadn’t known her name.

“Shortly thereafter, Doug announced out of the blue that the affair was over. I was overjoyed to hear this, but masked my reaction. We did not discuss the prospect of his having future affairs, and my own feeling was that I simply hoped I would not know about them.

“As time passed, I learned to be able to tell when Doug was involved with someone. I can’t pinpoint any specific signs. It was purely intuitive on my part. I just knew.

“My disapproval changed as I began to feel less threatened by Doug’s affairs. I saw that he was still my husband despite his relations with other women. Our own marriage seemed excellent in comparison to the marriages of other people we knew. I felt we were more deeply in love than most other couples, and that we got along better.

“One big factor in my change of attitude was when a chemistry professor divorced his wife after almost twenty years to marry a laboratory assistant. This was a man who had literally never looked at another woman during all the years of his marriage. According to campus gossip — and there was plenty of it, believe me — he had never once been unfaithful to his wife until he fell in love with this young girl. I began to regard Doug’s casual infidelities as a safety valve. If a man was able to have this sort of experience from time to time, he wouldn’t be so likely to lose his head completely and destroy his marriage.

“After that, I was able to discuss extramarital sex with Doug in an abstract way. I didn’t ask him specifically about his affairs nor did he volunteer information about them, but I discussed affairs and marriage in general. I asked him if he didn’t feel that a wife should have the same leeway in marriage. He returned to the point he’d made way back before we were married, that sex had different meanings for men and women, that a woman could not be so casual about adultery. By this time, women’s lib was getting a lot of media attention, and all those aspects of the double.standard were being challenged. We argued about all of this. We both agreed that men and women did have different attitudes toward infidelity, but I held that the difference was socially and culturally imposed, while Doug argued that there was a biological difference between the sexes that oriented women toward sexual monogamy...

“In connection with all of this, I was growing to feel trapped and limited by my role as wife. I couldn’t say how much of this was a reaction to Doug’s affairs, or how much was attributable to the impact of women’s lib on my consciousness, or how much just grew out of the fact that I was trapped and limited, that my self-expression and intellectual growth had atrophied during marriage. At any rate, I was determined to make my life more meaningful. I got politically active — previously I had not done so because Doug had no interest in politics. I began to get around more and to meet new people who did not know me first and foremost as Doug’s wife.

“It’s interesting that Doug’s first reaction to this was disapproval. Standard male chauvinism. His principal objection was that I ought to be satisfied with my life as it was, that it ought to be sufficiently fulfilling to be his wife and the mother of his children. I made him see that it was no more a reflection on our marriage for me to want interests of my own than it was for him to require occasional outside sex. At first he refused to see the connection, but then he got the point. He accepted my new activities, but later on he did say that he felt it would bother him if I had relations with another man. I said this was more male chauvinism, more of the double standard. He answered that he wasn’t forbidding me to do anything, just stating the simple fact that he felt it would bother him.

“It’s funny. I tried to have an affair. Maybe to assert myself, to get even with Doug. I don’t know. What was going through my mind was that I ought to be liberated enough to have an extramarital relationship. I read a very interesting piece somewhere by a woman who had gotten involved in the movement and who had reached the point where she felt it necessary to experience homosexual relations, felt that one had to love another woman physically in order to understand the concept of sisterhood and free herself of male-imposed sexual submission. She actually had sexual relations with three other women before she was able to see that she just wasn’t cut out for it, that she felt embarrassed beforehand and uncomfortable afterward, that the beauty of another woman did not attract her in a sexual way, and that whatever minor homosexual impulses she might have were insufficient to change the fact that her sexual preferences were exclusively heterosexual.

“I tried forcing myself into an affair, and in much the same way. There was a man I met through a political reform group I belonged to, and we hit it off well. He was an attractive man and made it obvious he was attracted to me. He was married, but separated from his wife. I felt that he and I liked each other very much, that no overpowering love could ever come from it, and that it would only be natural and normal and good for us if we slept together. While I didn’t initiate anything, I made myself show enough warmth so that he felt confident in making a pass at me.

“I simply could not respond to him. Twice we were going to go to a motel after having petted in his car, and both times I backed down. He was very patient with me. A third time, we did go to the motel and got undressed and into bed together. The more he tried to make love to me, the more I felt myself withdrawing. I felt that I was in the wrong place with the wrong person. I felt that by going through with this I would be cheapening myself and cheapening sex. I can’t explain all of this, but the point is that I could not respond sexually at all and had only the negative response of gooseflesh and extreme anxiety. I would have let him go on and have intercourse with me — I felt I damn well owed him that — but my reaction turned him off completely, and he gave up. I did manage to convince him that it wasn’t his fault, that I had not done anything of this sort before and thus had been unable to realize I was incapable of it.

“I don’t know that this confirms Doug’s opinion of the difference between male and female sexuality. From time to time I suspect that my personal process of liberation is by no means finished, and that the time may come when an affair will be enjoyable, even necessary for me. One of the problems that time may have been that I tried to have an affair not because I wanted one but because I ought to have one, and a sexual experience for therapeutic purposes can’t be ideal.

“Whatever happens, I think our marriage now is an open one, very valuable to both of us while giving both of us room to be ourselves. In Doug’s case this means asserting himself sexually, while my own self-assertion is expressed in other forms. For both of us, the marriage is a good expression of the ways we feel about each other and our own steps toward self-realization.”

JWW: A special version of the permissive marriage is that in which the partners are either bisexual or predominantly homosexual in orientation. Arrangements of this sort have always existed, and this type of permissive marriage is less a reflection of the changing image of marriage than are the other relationships we have examined.

Male and female homosexuals marry one another for a variety of reasons — as do male and female heterosexuals, as far as that goes. The marriage of convenience is surely no new phenomenon. While one might think that our more liberal sexual attitudes might reduce the need for marriage as a “cover,” sometimes the effect is the reverse.

“People are more aware of homosexuality than they used to be. In a more innocent age, two men could live together for ages, and as long as they were masculine in type and didn’t mince, the straight world persisted in regarding them as eligible bachelors. Nowadays any man who gets much past thirty without having married somewhere along the way is the subject of speculation. I damn well believe in gay lib. I think homosexuals ought to be able to lead the lives they want to lead. But I also love my parents and appreciate the impossibility of their changing attitudes they’ve held all their lives. I’m not sure if they know I’m homosexual. I would guess that they assume I’ve had homosexual experiences, but that I put this out of my life forever by marrying Adelle. It’s made both our parents so much happier, and it’s made life in general a smoother proposition for both of us. Sexually, she goes her way and I go mine, and we take turns comforting each other when a love affair ends badly. We get each other through a lot of bad nights.”

JWW: This last observation plays an important part in many homosexual marriages. While some homosexuals tend to have long-term monogamous love affairs, a great many do not, and a sexless companionate marriage to a homosexual of the opposite sex offers a valuable element of permanence.

Various movements toward sexual freedom have engendered a considerable increase in bisexuality. A great many of these “new bisexuals” are heterosexuals who have come to be able to enjoy homosexual relations as well. Various social forces have made it at once easier for them to recognize bisexual impulses and conscionable for them to indulge these impulses. At the same time, an increasing number of men and women who had previously identified themselves as homosexuals are learning that this does not preclude them from participating in and enjoying relations with the opposite sex.

The marriage of bisexuals, whether their primary orientation is toward their own or the opposite sex, often involves a specific compromise. While marriage is desired for all of the usual reasons — to have children, to form a stable union, etc. — husband and wife will often feel it an unwarranted sacrifice to give up homosexuality after the wedding. For some such couples, one or another form of group sex provides on answer. For others, the solution runs along the lines of the arrangement described here:

“At the beginning, Gordon and I had very conventional expectations of our marriage. We decided to get married at a time when we were both very hung up about the gay scene. We had had some bad experiences and felt that marriage gave us a chance at a normal life. Because we were able to enjoy sex together immensely, we thought we would be able to give up gay sex entirely, that it was a stage we had gone through, and we would have no further need of it if our marriage was a good one.

“There were moments almost from the beginning when I found myself longing for another girl. I would see an appealing stranger and be struck by a wave of dizziness. I think I might have gone to bed with another girl if the opportunity presented itself, but I was away from the old neighborhood and cut off from old friends, and I wasn’t about to proposition a stranger around here unless I had good reason to believe she was gay, so all of this made it easy for me to resist temptation.

“Gordon was out of the house more, and anyway, men have more opportunity for quick pickups. One night he was moody at dinner, and later that night he began to cry. He told me that he had been unable to resist and had gone to a Turkish bath for some impersonal homosexual sex. I remember that my immediate reaction was one of relief; I was glad I wasn’t the only one with those desires.

“We quickly agreed that we did not feel jealous about homosexual relations. Since we were both into the same thing, neither of us was going to be uptight the way a straight person might. I didn’t feel cheated if Gordon had sex with another man, and he felt the same about relations I might have with other women. Yet we had to admit that we would be very uptight if one of us had sex with somebody of the opposite sex, if Gordon went with another girl or I went with another man. A heterosexual affair would be competition, it would be bad for the ego, it would threaten the special feeling we had for each other.

“Ever since then we have felt free to go our separate ways. For Gordon this has meant pickups in gay bars, casual sex in Turkish baths, nothing that demands any involvement. This was the kind of sex he felt most comfortable with before we were married. For me it has meant an occasional one-night stand and one long relationship with a girl I had known but not had sex with before my marriage. There was an awkward situation several months ago when she wanted me to leave Gordon and live with her. I was already pregnant with Gordon’s child, and it was her dream that I would live with her and we would raise the child together. I made it clear that my first loyalty was to Gordon, and she backed off and accepted me on my own terms, but I expect she and I will break things off before much longer, as I have never felt as comfortable with her since that time.”

JWW: As more people come to regard conventional marriage as potentially stifling to the individual, one can only assume that more and more marriages will grow increasingly permissive. Relationships in any society inevitably evolve to better suit the needs of the participants. There is no reason why the institution of marriage should be exceptional in this regard. Simplistic as it is to assert that the nuclear family is utterly outmoded, that marriage will not endure for more than another generation, I find it quite as unrealistic to expect that the nature of marriage will be utterly uninfluenced by the extraordinary changes in our ways of life.

Will the whole concept of sexual fidelity vanish in short order? I rather doubt it, although I suspect a great many people will attach substantially less importance to it than has been the rule in the past. I doubt, too, that the double standard will die out entirely, but recognize at the same time that its distinctions will continue to fade and blur.

The mutually permissive marriage has many aspects beyond the condoning of adultery, as we have seen. Most of the examples we have dealt with have concerned sexual behavior as a function of the permissive marriage, perhaps largely because it is the most clear-cut indicator of attitudinal changes. That a woman escapes the confines of the kitchen, or holds a job, or participates in activities of her own, is a less vivid example of freedom within marriage (and far less a violation of social mores) than that she spends time alone with other men, and has sex with some of them.

Additionally, the specifically sexual aspects of the permissive marriage have given rise to a concept which represents a very new style in love and marriage — i.e., that it is possible to be emotionally involved with, even to love, more than one person at a time. The permissive marriage facilitates the expression of multiple love within the social structure of monogamy. The marital life styles we will examine in the next few chapters extend the concept of love for more than a single partner to the point where monogamy is eliminated and multiple marriage of one sort or another replaces it. In such relationships, one does not merely have sexual relations with more than one partner (as in swinging) or have meaningful emotional relationships with more than one partner (as in some permissive marriages). In addition, one relates to several partners equally with the intention of maintaining such multiple relationships on a permanent basis.