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Marriage Without Monogamy
One couple's alternative to traditional vows? A legally binding contract.
by Dan Eldridge
Because we aren’t getting married. Not exactly. But we do both want to be partners for life, for reasons that are both romantic and practical. And we want to celebrate that decision, just as couples who’ve chosen a more standard arrangement, and a more standard future, want to celebrate theirs. So we’re having a wedding, although we’ve been referring to it lately as a Life Partner Ceremony, regardless of the fact that “Life Partner” sounds flaky and New Age-y. And since our partnership won’t be legally recognized by the state, and because Carrie is a co-owner of her family’s business, and because I’m in the process of starting a business of my own, we’ve spent a lot of time wondering how to keep things simple and uncomplicated in the case of a break-up. Eventually, we both decided that the smartest thing to do would be to simply start a business together, which would at least transform half of our partnership into a legal entity.
Carrie is the left-brained half of the couple, and so she worked out all the details with a lawyer: We’ll be creating a holdings company, which won’t actually do anything–it will simply exist as a sort of alternative savings account. The rules we’ve set forth are simple: In the instance of a break-up, Carrie would get nothing that belonged to me before the holdings company was formed, and I would get nothing that had previously belonged to her. We’ll make deposits into the company’s account only when we make a profit on a project that we’ve worked on together, like a real estate flip, or a writing job.
Naturally, we’re both hopeful that our business will never have to be split. And yet we’re doing our very best to be proactive and realistic. And yes, just like Carrie’s relationship with Michael, ours is an open relationship, although we’ve managed to tread very lightly around that privilege so far. And yes, we do realize just how self-important and precious this partnership probably looks to those of you who’ve spent many long, hard years working to improve upon your own marriages. But as we’ve stayed up late at night and laughed with each other about the incredible ridiculousness and the incredible seriousness of what it is that we’re about to do, we’ve come to realize just how proud we are of ourselves for at least trying to improve upon that mousetrap known as modern marriage.
And of course, whether or not that wheel becomes something we manage to reinvent remains to be seen. I hope you’ll choose to come along for the ride.
(So to speak.)
Dan Eldridge is a Lonely Planet guidebook writer, the author of Moon Handbooks Pittsburgh (Avalon Travel), and the publisher of Young Pioneers, a magazine about creative entrepreneurs. He lives in Philadelphia, and his website is pioneercontent.com.
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1 t // Apr 11, 2008 at 3:20 pm
I guess I don’t understand why you and Carrie are going through all of this hassle. You’re not getting married. You’re not even dating exclusively. So why are you bothering with the joint accounts, the joint businesses and the “life partner” ceremony? Just date each other, and date others as well. Simple as that.
It sounds like you’re going through an awful lot of hassle to pretend that your relationship is something that both of you know it isn’t. Just date each other and date others as well. No fuss, no muss.
2 Jalena // Apr 11, 2008 at 9:19 am
I predict that in a few short years you will go the way of Michael - or vice versa, as you each find people new people that give you the emotional highs you relish in the newness of a relationship. Why else would you be open to sex with someone other than your “life partner” than to fulfill your primal urge?
3 The Daily Bedpost weighs in on Tango’s Marriage Without Monogamy column, again « The Labor Party // Mar 27, 2008 at 10:37 am
[…] known as Em & Lo have weighed in on the relationship I’ve been recently chronicling for TangoMag.com. Apparently, a good friend of Em & Lo’s accused them of having an anti-open relationship […]
4 Beauty Marks // Mar 27, 2008 at 7:33 am
[…] as her physical characteristics, rather than her writing or opinions. Our own contributors, like “Marriage Without Monogamy” writer Dan Eldridge, have experienced this mean-spirited jabbing, which seems so much easier when […]
5 PaulVan2008 // Mar 26, 2008 at 7:51 pm
“Having children is what makes life rewarding in the long term.”
Well, for some people, yes. For others (growing in numbers, according to Pew Research), it is becoming less important as the holy grail of happiness. Sorry to say that some of the most recent surveys of married people indicate their “unhappiest” time together is while they are raising teenage children. Their reported happiness trends upward after the little darlings leave home.
Likewise, for men at least, a very recent survey showed the trough of their satisfaction with their lives was around age 44 - precisely when most are married and raising children (often for the second time in a second marriage).
So, Anna, methinks thou hast gone a bit too far.
If you believe in your anthropologists, then you perhaps believe that monogamy is natural for human beings, i.e., we tend to have intimate relationships (”marriage” if you will) with one person at a time. Monogamy, however, is not to be confused with sexual fidelity. On that count, both men and women (where they are not burned or stoned for the crime) are not famous for their faithfulness. Perhaps it is only fair to say that being sexually faithful to a partner is “natural” for something like 50% of the population - and for the remainder, it is not.
I suppose the question is whether or not we should be striving for sexual fidelity as a human goal. Evolution and natural selection clearly did not favor such a trait, but this does not mean we cannot make a collective decision that it represents a moral high ground.
My problem is, I really don’t see how it qualifies as a moral high ground. More often than not, it simply reinforces our childhood indoctrination in one monotheistic religion or the other. If you don’t subscribe to the sky-fairy version of human creation and purpose, then what problems are we left with?
1.) Unplanned or unwanted pregnancy
2.) Sexually transmitted diseases
3.) The emotions of sexual jealousy and betrayal
The first two, while not entirely conquered yet by modern technology, certainly will be. Contraception can be nearly 100% effective even with the tools we have available today. In the future, more than likely, both men and women will have very reliable, low overhead methods of contraception available.
Concerning STDs, again, I would guess we are no more than 10 to 20 years away from either near 100% effective vaccines, or therapies that make the contraction of STDs no more threatening than the common cold.
That will leave us with the toughest knot of all - the emotions of sexual jealousy.
If Dan, Carrie, or anyone else has made a conscious decision to ignore or at least actively question their feelings of sexual jealousy as a means to preserve an important relationship, then I have a hard time understanding why anyone would object?
As usual, in this world, why can it not be that unless we see harm being done to others, we are at worst neutral, and at best supportive of our fellow homo sapiens?
Isn’t something like “live and let live”?
Anna, the world is not dangerously underpopulated. Let’s hope that we can find meaning and purpose without the requirement that all of us reproduce and raise children to adulthood. In fact, it is perhaps key to our survival as a species that we convince large numbers of people to avoid exactly that.
I would guess at least some of us are flat out “jealous” (ha) of Dan and Carrie’s good luck to have found each other. They have their friendship and mutual support, without at the same time being asked to kill off the very emotions that brought them together in the first place. That has always struck me as a square peg in a round hole.
And as far as the dire prediction of their future break up - they will likely do no worse than those who have walked down the church aisle and “promised” to stay together forever…… in other words, they have about a 50% chance of staying together for a lifetime.
Dan and Carrie, I hope we meet someday. You’re much more interesting to me than those who still think the apex of human achievement is to keep it in their pants.
Whatever.
Peace.
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