Wide Open: The New Marriage

With These Rings We Thee Wed

I don’t know very much about group marriage. My firsthand access to such unions has been limited to half a dozen cases. Two of these I knew only through correspondence. Of the four with which I became familiar through interviews, two had terminated before I met the participants. One of the other two has ended since then, and the last, while still functioning, has had a substantial change of personnel.

I’d be more apologetic about my lack of extensive information on this subject if it weren’t so widely shared. I don’t think anyone knows a whole hell of a lot about group marriage, and I’m not sure there’s all that much to know.

Earlier, in justifying a distinction between threesomes and plural marriages of more than three persons, I made the point that while threesomes will often derive from circumstances, group marriages are almost always idealistic in origin — i.e., the idea of group marriage is perceived as attractive prior to the selection of members of the group. Furthermore, group marriage is viewed as ideal, as an important if not essential alternative to monogamy, with the capacity to change the lives of its participants.

I suppose it might be possible to discuss the ideas and ideals of group marriage without discussing Bob Rimmer, but I’m certainly not going to try. Rimmer is a successful middle-aged businessman who turned novelist with extraordinary popular success. Most of his books have concerned the concept of plural marriage, which Rimmer advocates with the zeal of the true believer. One comes away from his books with the impression that group marriage not only makes everyone happy and turns the world beautiful, but that it also cures warts and the common cold, banishes flatulence, clears up acne, and straightens crooked limbs.

One cannot be neutral on the subject of Rimmer. The reader either finds his ideas moving and beautiful or recoils in shock from the man’s writing style. I find the experience of reading him something like walking through very deep snow with no destination in mind. His characters talk interminably, talk as if they know someone Out There is listening in, and when they make love it is all so pure and beautiful it makes you want to puke. As a result, I’ve never been able to take Rimmer seriously, and have trouble believing that anyone else does, either.

Ah, but they do. The Harrad Experiment, his most successful book to date, has sold millions of copies, while adding a word to the language. The book, couched as nonfiction (to the considerable distress of many of its readers, who believed Harrad College really existed, wanted to go there, and felt cheated when they learned it was all A Make-Believe Story), concerns a fictional college where students live in group marriage situations as part of the curriculum. Another novel, Proposition 31, involves a movement to amend the California state constitution to legalize group marriage. (Don’t hold your breath until this happens.)

Another book which also seems to have sold well consists almost entirely of letters Rimmer received in response to The Harrad Experiment. The book makes strange reading. The letters do not appear to have been selected for publication with any criteria in mind, nor have they been edited to free them of extraneous matter. Rimmer’s replies are not included. He has not commented on any of the letters. They are all simply there. But the sheer quantity of them, and the intensity of the writers’ interest in group marriage, cannot fail to make an impression. I’m sure only a minuscule percentage of Rimmer’s correspondents will ever become involved in group marriage, but it is overwhelming that so many of them regard it as an ideal improvement on monogamy.

In a recent issue of the magazine Sexual Behavior, Rimmer comments on an article on group marriage by an Alabama sociology professor and marriage counselor. The author of the article concludes that group marriage, while a fascinating phenomenon, does not have much of a future. Rimmer notes his amusement, then goes on to say that since the publication of Harrad and Proposition 31:

I have received hundreds of letters from couples experimenting with various forms of group living, from communes to two- or three-couple economic arrangements... They tend to bear out my belief that emotionally sound group marriages can be a viable and life expanding way of living.

He further notes similarities between those experiments he characterizes as successful: the high educational level of the couples involved, couples who “have been married five years or more and communicate reasonably well in their monogamous lives,” and a tendency to avoid any publicity concerning their participation in a group marriage. He adds that he knows of at least five successful groups, his criterion for success being that they “are going strong after three years.”

Rimmer offers a variety of arguments for group marriage, my favorite being something to the effect that it will come to provide a Final Solution to the problem of senior citizens. (It’s a little unclear to me what he’s getting at here, but I must admit I find the concept of geriatric group marriage quite fetching.) Most interestingly, he restates the premises of both novels, first calling for legalization of group marriage, then arguing that if a real college were to duplicate Harrad’s offer of “a structured form of premarital living,” this would be instantly accepted by “thousands of youngsters and their parents.”

I suppose it would be more gracious of me to hide my prejudices. Well, the hell with graciousness. This particular emperor is stark naked, and I find myself compelled to call attention to the fact. His observations are such utter bullshit that I keep being tempted to dismiss group marriage as more of the same crap.

Five group marriages going strong after three years! Now, what in hell does that prove about anything? I don’t want to launch a personal attack on a man who comes across as decent, amiable, well-meaning and honest, a man with a generally harmless if witless idée fixe. Yet, if it’s impossible to write about group marriage without writing about Rimmer, so is it dishonest to write about him without stating that I consider his views absurd.

Or is all of this a waste of time? No one is neutral on the subject of Rimmer, so it’s logical to assume that some of my readers have already come to the same conclusion about him, while others — his enthusiasts — will by now have stopped reading this book, having reached similar conclusions about my own sensitivity and mental competence. Ah, well. You can’t please everybody, as the hooker said to the regiment...

JWW: There follows an extended discussion of the evolution of the relationship, the eventual sale of the house, and the purchase of a large farmhouse within commuting distance of their jobs. The farmhouse was selected both for the privacy it offered and out of a desire to “get back to the land” by growing their own food, keeping farm animals, and living close to nature. Shortly after the move to the farm, a third couple joined the group. The couple stayed only a month before departing. They were advocates of group sex, and the wife was bisexual; the two couples had not experimented at all with group sex, and found it unpleasant, and the bisexual wife was unsuccessful at making converts of Ellie and Roberta. The separation was without rancor.

JWW: I’ve heard nothing further from Jeremy, and lacking a return address, have been unable to inquire further. Nor have I been able to answer the question which opened his letter. I guess he wrote that part before deciding to remain anonymous. Perhaps he’ll be able to locate this book on his own. If so, I hope he’ll let me know more about the course his group marriage has taken.

I find especially interesting his uncertainty as to whether or not this foursome constitutes a true group marriage. I would certainly say that it does, the special bonds between lawful spouses notwithstanding. In our next case, we’ll examine another group marriage in which no special bonds existed. The subject of group marriage was only one aspect of my several conversations with Daphne. She has been “into” a great many things in her thirty-two years: drugs, encounter groups, therapy, Freudian analysis, promiscuity, group sex, yoga, political activism, marriage, divorce, amateur prostitution, and God knows what else that she may have failed to mention.

She seems a lot more together than her background would indicate. Her varied enthusiasms represent less a devil-may-care willingness to try anything once than a rather desperate striving for utopian solutions to personal problems. But a full look at Daphne will have to wait for some other time and place; here we’ll make do with an abridged edition of her description of her venture at group marriage.

“About that time, Peter and I got back together again. He had been out to the Coast, where he lived in a commune for a few months, and was rapping on and on about the closeness of it. I had had my own mixed experiences with communes and did not want to get into that scene again... He was talking communes with some friends of his, and they mentioned the idea of putting together a group marriage. They had read books on the subject and were very strong on the idea. They had tried living with another couple that way, but it hadn’t worked out, so Peter introduced me to them, and the four of us got along pretty well, and we decided to see what would happen.

“They had a huge apartment on Riverside Drive, so there was plenty of space for us to move in with them. It was better than the communes I had been involved in, because it wasn’t stuck off in the middle of nowhere, you weren’t isolated, you could see other people besides the members of the group. Also, it had more structure, it was less casual than a commune, there weren’t people constantly drifting in and out...

“Everybody was bi, and we were all completely into group sex. This would have been better if I had liked the rest of them more than I did. But I thought the other guy was very pretentious and phony, and the other girl was, I don’t know, bossy. You know, like it was her apartment, it was her kitchen. She had lived there with her husband before they were divorced, and it was still her place. Also, she had a kid, and since she worked and I was not working at the time, it was my job to take care of the kid days. I enjoyed this at first because of the novelty of it, but got to resent it. The kid was thoroughly obnoxious. I took the massage parlor gig largely to get away from the fucking kid. I didn’t really need money at the time, I still had enough to get along and was not expected to pay rent, as this chick’s alimony covered all that.

“Other people would come by occasionally and join us in sex, but nobody else actually lived there but the four of us. I guess we were together for a couple of months. Then Peter split and went back to the Coast, and then another couple joined the remaining three of us but left after a week or two, and then another guy joined up, and we were a quartet again. And I went along with this for a while out of, I guess you would call it inertia. Until one day it hit me that I was living and balling with these three people and I couldn’t stand any of them. I didn’t like either of the guys, and I had come to the point where I literally hated the other chick. Like I wished she would just suddenly die and take her brat of a kid with her. And I thought, Christ, what am I doing with all of these rotten people?

“So I got the hell out. I’ve never been involved in anything like that since. I wouldn’t want to get involved. Just the ordinary day-to-day hassles of who cleans up the mess and who does this and who does that are too much. And you get people who can’t stand the strain of living with a single other person, and they try to solve their problems by living with three other people, and instead of fewer problems, they have more of them. I suppose it’s something to go through, and you learn from it, like anything else, but as a regular way of life, I don’t think it makes any sense.”

JWW: Jeff is twenty-eight, a look-a-like for Rob Reiner, who plays the son-in-law on All in the Family. He does administrative work for a New York hospital, where his wife, Peggy, is employed as a nurse. He and Peggy became interested in the idea of group marriage before they were married themselves.

“We liked the idea but felt it would never work in practice. We had read Harrad and Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and were influenced by both of them, at the same time feeling that they were utopian and idealistic and would not work in the real world. Peggy was somewhat more inclined to think that some version of a group marriage might work. I was more skeptical, but generally speaking, our ideas were quite close on the subject.

“We both agreed that it would be possible to adapt aspects of the general philosophy to our own lives. That our getting married would not mean we would belong to each other in a possessive or exclusive way and that each of us would be free to pursue other relationships. We felt that any outside relationships, if they were honest and open and loving, would enhance our marriage rather than detract from it.

“As it happened, neither of us took any advantage of this freedom. Our sexual relationship was a good one, and we felt fulfilled by it...

“After about a year, our thoughts again turned to the group marriage concept. We tried swinging, with the idea of finding a couple we could get involved with that way. Our experiences with swinging were enjoyable, but purely in a sexual way. At first we found it tremendously exciting. Then the novelty wore off, and we realized that it was completely artificial, just bodies going through the motions. Without emotional sensitivity it was meaningless. It was valuable in that we learned we were able to enjoy sex with other people, that it didn’t unhinge us, and that it improved our sexual relationship together, but there was a point where we realized we had outgrown it.

“After we had given it up, Peggy was talking with a friend of hers, and it came out that that couple had had very similar experiences with swinging at about the same time as we did. Peggy told me about this revelation, and the other girl told her husband, and when we saw them a few nights later, it was unreal the way everybody had the same thoughts but nobody was saying anything. Someone dropped a double entendre, and we all laughed hysterically, and everything came out in the open.

“The obvious thing was to swing with them, but we were all holding back, because there was this feeling of being on the verge of something bigger than swinging. The conversation turned to group marriage, with the general idea being that if only we were in a position to move to the Arizona desert we could really get into a group thing. Then we admitted that we didn’t really want to live in the middle of the desert, even if we could have afforded to, that we liked living in New York. The idea of living together seemed impractical on a. variety of counts. Not just social pressure, but more important, the lack of privacy. We all felt a living situation might be more intimacy than we were really capable of.

“We didn’t swing together that night. Everyone wanted to, but no one wanted to be the one to bring it up. Afterward Peggy and I talked about having wanted to swing with them, and they went home and had the same conversation. We got together the following evening and swung, and it was a very intimate thing, a beautiful experience. It had the excitement we had experienced early in swinging, but at the same time, it was honest and more emotionally close and felt better afterward. In swinging we would occasionally get what I can only describe as sex hangovers, the physical and mental feeling afterward that we wouldn’t want to have sex again for like a year. There was none of this now.

“We decided to consider ourselves as four members of a group marriage. They lived a few blocks away from us, and that seemed to be an ideal distance. We would get together two nights a week. It seemed awkward to make it a scheduled thing, but we felt that otherwise there’d be constant decisions to be made over and over, and worrying that you were seeing the other couple more or less frequently than they would have preferred it, and the artificiality of a schedule seemed a small price to pay to eliminate that aggravation. So we got into the pattern of seeing them every Tuesday and Friday night.”

JWW: One might argue that the relationship Jeff describes is not a group marriage but an arrangement for mutually exclusive swinging. Several elements prompt me to label it a group marriage. Most important is that the participants so considered it. In addition, the underlying philosophy derives from the group-marriage subculture, and the emotional relationship of the partners is consistent with it.

“We grew in a great many ways as a result of all of this. The four of us are at a point now where we’re almost telepathic. It’s uncanny... I was an only child, and I used to wish I had a brother. When I was four or five, I had this invisible friend who was like a brother. I guess it’s common for only children to have that fantasy. Now I had a brother, and it was a beautiful thing. And Peggy had a sister, and everything was really great. I know I’m not being very articulate; it’s hard to find words for all of this...

“The sexual intimacy is easier to explain than what we all went through emotionally. I suppose because it’s more graphic. The girls became fully bisexual almost from the start. They had both been introduced to bi activity during swinging, but neither of them had ever been able to really relax and enjoy it. It was purely physical for them. Now it became emotional as well, it became bound up in the love they had for each other, and they were fully at ease making love to each other.

“He and I had never had any bisexual experience, and both of us had a real thing about physical contact of any sort with another man. We didn’t like people who take hold of your arms, for example. The girls suggested we get into an intimacy building situation, deliberately touching each other in nonsexual ways. It took quite a bit of time before we were able to do this and be relaxed about it.

“Little by little I came to have the desire to perform the sex act with him. Because it was an experience I had not had. Specifically, I wanted to know what it was like to perform fellatio. And to handle his penis.

“He expressed the same desire one night. I think it was Peggy who brought the subject up by saying something to the effect that the husbands were missing something by being heterosexual, and he said he had been tempted to go to a gay bar just to find out what it was all about. He said he would naturally prefer to perform homosexual acts with me, whom he loved and trusted, but he would want it to be a one-time-only affair, because he didn’t think sex between the two of us was compatible with our relationship. I hadn’t gone into my own feelings to that extent, but when I heard him say this, I realized he was expressing what I felt myself.

“We took turns performing fellatio on each other. It was a purely physical thing. I was surprised to find that I was less troubled at the idea of going down on him than of his going down on me. I would have thought it would be the other way around, but I found it harder to enjoy the experience when I was playing a passive role in it... We both did it, and agreed that it was not unpleasant and that we had enjoyed it, and that we would not do it again. And we never have.

“It was a very worthwhile experience. It showed me I had been afraid of something for years for no good reason. That sex between men was not something I had to fear, that I had participated in it without going insane or killing myself or having my cock turn green, and that I also didn’t have to fear being homosexual because I had not the slightest desire to repeat the experience. The love the two of us have for each other was not affected. And we had something else between us now which I can only think of as having gone through battle together, as having shared a common ordeal.”

JWW: I notice in rereading Jeff’s comments that I have him sounding as though he is talking of a relationship which is no longer in existence. At the time I interviewed him, the relationship was thriving. Several months later I wrote him a letter prior to beginning work on this book. I asked him if he would bring me up to date on the group marriage. The letter was not answered. I called his home and was told the number was no longer in service. Since Ma Bell tells you this on numerous occasions when the number is in service, I did not leap to conclusions. I called Jeff at his office and he broke in on me in mid-sentence. “That’s all over,” he said. “Peggy’s getting a divorce. The whole thing is finished. I don’t want to talk about any of it.”

I tried to get more information from him, asked him to meet me for a drink. He insisted again that he had nothing to say to me and hung up abruptly. I wrote him another letter, not really expecting an answer, and didn’t get one.

Which does leave things up in the air. I have no idea why the foursome broke up, nor do I have any idea why Jeff and Peggy broke up, and while one could speculate endlessly, it seems rather pointless. In our earlier talks, I had formed a favorable impression of this particular group marriage, had felt that it seemed to fulfill the needs and expectations of the members, and that it ought to have a reasonable chance to endure.

JWW: I couldn’t help Burton much with the bibliography. I suggested the usual run of professional journals. Then I made a grave tactical error.

I mentioned that Rimmer’s novels were worth a reading because of his extraordinary influence upon people with any sort of interest in group marriage. But I qualified this recommendation with my own opinion of the books, to which you folks out there have already been subjected.

I closed with a variety of questions about the origin and structure of Burton’s threesome-turned-fivesome, extending him an invitation to correspond on the subject at length.

Almost by return mail I got back two single-spaced pages. The first third consisted of personal vituperation of the most colorful sort; if I reproduced it here I’d be tempted to sue myself for libel. “Literary whore” and “cheap insensitive hack” were the gentler epithets. The remaining two-thirds of the letter was a paean of praise to Rimmer, an elaborate discussion of his philosophy, a lot of gushing over his literary style, and stray paragraphs which, cheap insensitive hack that I am, I was hard put to comprehend. I could reproduce that part of the letter, I suppose, but I’m somehow disinclined to bother.

Some you win, some you lose. I laughed a lot, I promised myself to learn from this experience, and then I had a few drinks and wrote Burton another letter. I thanked him for his analyses of Rimmer and me, said I had read his remarks with interest and no doubt profited by them, and was only sorry he had had insufficient time to reply to some of the other points I’d raised. Whereupon I repeated the questions and invitation of my earlier letter.

To which I received this reply:

JWW: There follows a very long and involved explanation of the origin of the original threesome. In brief, Burton commenced an affair with Kitty while in the process of an affair with Nan. Kitty was aware of his affair with Nan. He subsequently made Nan aware of it as well. With both women, first separately and then together, he discussed the impossibility of monogamy and the validity of the “you-can-love-more-than-one” philosophy. The idea of a threesome evolved from these discussions.

JWW: Other sexual possibilities explored by the three are next related in detail. Tone and style are much the same as in the material quoted above, with recurring emphasis of the beauty and love characteristic of each episode. Burton and Nan and Kitty evidently found the whole range of troilistic sexual practices enjoyable and gratifying. If any of the three ever had any qualms about the relationship, Burton does not mention the fact.

JWW: Burton discusses the special added pleasure for the females of being able to make love to two males simultaneously, and adds that he and Sam are strictly heterosexual, feeling that bisexuality on their part would be incompatible with their male roles in the group, although, interestingly enough, both had experienced a certain amount of homosexual activity during adolescence. He suggests that love between sisters lends itself to sexual expression, while love between brothers is strengthened by abstaining from such expression, and presents various arguments for this conclusion.

JWW: My next letter to Burton raised several points which he answered as follows:

JWW: A final exchange of letters in the course of preparing this book brought assurance that the group is still intact and going strong, that Janet is rejoicing in her pregnancy and is the envy of Nan and Kitty, that the group is almost certain to remain permanently at five, and that several other group marriages have begun to take shape in the college community, largely inspired by their example.

JWW: I do know of one group marriage which constitutes more an adaptation to circumstantial developments than the pursuit of a philosophical ideal. It involves three couples who live separately and raise their children separately, which makes it a substantially less tightly knit form of group marriage than Burton’s. The nature of the relationship is such, however, that I feel it is closer to group marriage in structure and concept than a trio of swinging couples.

My personal knowledge of this group is limited by the circumstances under which I acquired it. I was stuck overnight in a Midwestern city when my flight home was canceled because of weather conditions. I took a room at a nearby Holiday Inn and spent the evening in the bar. Somewhere along the way I began drinking and chatting with a fellow who had been similarly stranded and who was similarly morose about it. Conversation established that I was a writer, and what sort of things I wrote about. “I could tell you something you wouldn’t believe,” he said. I told him to go right ahead, but he grinned and changed the subject.

After more drinks and more talk, he began telling me about the relationship he and his wife had with two other couples. We went on drinking until the bar closed, and the next day I nursed a hangover at thirty-thousand feet. It was several days before I got around to jotting down some notes of what I recalled of our conversation. What follows is thus a less precise reconstruction of what I heard than is usually the case, as I can’t recall his conversational style and have no doubt forgotten some minor facts. I never did learn the names of the principals, and while I must have known his first name, I’m damned if I can remember it. For convenience, let’s name the couples alphabetically as Abner and Ann, Ben and Beverly, and Chuck and Cynthia. Abner’s the narrator — if his real name had been Abner, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have forgotten it.

“I might as well tell you this. You don’t know my name, or where I live, and we’re never going to see each other again, so what the hell.

“There are six of us, three couples. We’re all of us the same age, early thirties, and we’ve all been married just about ten years. Ben and Chuck and I work for the same company. We all went with this company shortly after we got married, and we were all from different parts of the country originally. We got to know each other because we were all living in the same apartment complex. This wasn’t a great coincidence — it’s not that large a city, and young couples starting out in our type of situation, young executives, no children, there are only two or three places you’re likely to live.

“The six of us became very friendly. The three guys would drive to work together, splitting the driving. The wives would get together during the day to go shopping or have coffee or look at television. We were all in a new place where we didn’t know anybody and had no ties whatsoever, so we became closer than we probably would have under other circumstances.

“Now, this was the pattern for a matter of years, the three guys going to and from work together, the wives seeing each other days, and our social activity being shared among the three couples. On a week night we might have one or both couples over for dinner. On a weekend it would be the six of us going to a movie or bowling or having drinks at one of our apartments. Our first children were all three born in the space of about eight months, and then we all began talking about moving out of the apartment complex and buying houses. There was a desire to do this at the same time, and to buy houses in the same development. As it turned out, one new housing development offered what we all agreed was the best deal, and we wound up buying a house next door to Ben and Beverly and across the street from Chuck and Cynthia. Our houses were different in trim, but all had the same floor plan, just as our apartments before had had identical floor plans. All along, we made the usual jokes about getting drunk and coming home to the wrong house by mistake, and sleeping with somebody else’s wife and not noticing the difference until morning. Everybody in developments makes this kind of joke.

“I don’t know what this has to do with anything, but early on our wives found out that they had their periods at the same time. Their cycles gradually got on the same wave length. One of the girls said this isn’t that rare, that girls in her dorm at college, roommates, would usually be on the same cycle.”

JWW: It’s not rare; in fact, it’s quite common. I have no idea how or why it happens, but it does. A friend of mine was bemused (and more than a little disappointed) when his wife and his mistress began menstruating simultaneously. Their cycles had formerly been very different, and the two did not even know each other, which particularly baffled him.

“About three, four years ago, some things started happening. First of all, Ben had an affair with Cynthia. I don’t know if you would call it an affair. They had sex a couple of times. Then Bev and I got into a clinch in the kitchen one night when we both had had a few more than usual. Cynthia walked in, and we made a joke out of it, and I kissed Cynthia to even it out, but I don’t think she was fooled, and Bev and I knew that we felt something for each other.

“Next, Chuck found out about Ben and Cynthia, and Cynthia swore she wouldn’t see Ben anymore, and Chuck didn’t let on to Ben that he knew anything about it, but told me privately one night when we were both drunk. I kept having both Bev and Cynthia on my mind, and I made a heavy pass at Bev, but we stopped short of going all the way and agreed to keep it cool, and shortly thereafter I made a pass at Cynthia and slept with her, and about the same time Chuck and Ann were falling in love, not going to bed, but deciding that they loved each other.”

JWW: Well, I guess that’s close enough to the way it happened. I obviously can’t remember precisely who did what and with whom. What it amounts to is that these six longstanding friends suddenly began to become sexually conscious of one another at about the same time, and to do something about it. It might be argued that even before this happened, they had achieved much of the dynamic of the group marriage without the exchange of sexual partners. According to Abner, none of them had ever committed adultery with anyone at all before this point, but he might not have been in a position to know for certain what the others did or did not do.

“For a few months we were going along with everything up in the air and everybody waiting for the shit to hit the fan. Like one day I had two drinks for lunch and called Bev from the office. I said, ‘Look, everybody’s fucking everybody else, so why don’t I come over, and you and I can do what we should have done a long time ago.’ She said she couldn’t see me, and I found out later that it was because Chuck was over there at the time.

“It was all strange. Things seesawed back and forth. Ben put his house on the market and was going to move out of town with or without Beverly, and then he changed his mind and took it back out from under the realtor two days before the closing. There was a lot of drinking, there was a lot of shouting and going nuts, and then finally there was a meeting of all three couples, and we worked things out.

“What it came down to was that all of the guys loved all of the girls, and nothing was going to change this. And none of us really objected to the cheating. None of the husbands really gave a shit if his wife slept with one of the other men. And vice versa. What bothered everybody was first the constant sneaking around, and second the anxiety that marriages would fail, and the uneasiness among people who had grown so friendly.

“So what we do is switch around when we feel like it. There’s no set pattern. The great majority of the time I’ll be with Ann. Or I may call Bev or Cynthia, or they may call me. Or two or three of the couples will get together for an evening, and people will drift off to different bedrooms by twos, and nobody asks questions.”

JWW: As far as I was able to determine, there was no bisexual behavior among any of the six, no sexual acts involving more than two persons, and no commitment to any ideal beyond the standard argument that any activity is all right so long as it does not injure anyone else.

There may have been complexities that Abner did not care to tell me about. It’s occurred to me, too, that his entire story may well have been sheer invention. It would not surprise me to learn that he spun the whole story out of thin air, or that he had put forth the plot of a novel as his own experience. It’s also quite possible that the three couples, friends and neighbors, do exist, but that the sexual activity among them does not, that it represented wishful thinking on Abner’s part. And it’s also possible that everything he told me is gospel. My judgment that evening was not at its best; strong drink, like the Shadow, has the power to cloud men’s minds. I do seem to recall the feeling throughout that Abner was holding something back, that there was a significant bit of data he was unwilling to reveal to me. As to what it might be, your guess is as good as mine.

JWW: Does group marriage have a future?

I’m a little sorry I asked myself that question, as I’m not at all sure of the answer. I would certainly say that group marriage has a short-term future — i.e., the number of experiments with group marriage and the general public’s awareness of the phenomenon will undoubtedly increase in, say, the next decade. This seems inevitable, given the great interest in the concept as contrasted to the small number of group marriages actually in existence.

But this is not to say that it will have lasting impact on marriage as an institution, or that it will serve most people who embrace it as an alternative to monogamy. It would seem to me that a successful group marriage would have to have the components which Burton describes as existing in his, including a strong emotional bond among all the participants, a deep universal commitment to both the concept of group marriage and to permanence, and either an extreme community of interests and personal circumstances or a great deal of flexibility in these areas.

Finally, I would submit that a large portion of the attraction of group marriage in concept derives directly from the fact that it is uncommon. “What we have is beautiful and righteous despite what the outside world would think” — this heady statement of affirmation loses much of its impact if the outside world does accept group marriage.

I might as well state my personal bias. I find it illogical at root that a person who considers sharing his life with one other person an infringement on his freedom would fail to find himself more fettered by being united in marriage to more than one person. It is like discovering that one’s apartment is too small, and coping with the problem by adopting three children and six English sheepdogs.