Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (7 page)

Thus, open relationships have a long way to go before be- coming socially acceptable, let alone part of the status quo. Bigots who still find the idea of gay marriage unsavory probably won’t cotton to nonmonogamy anytime soon.

Most of the people interviewed for this article wanted to con- ceal their identities, either because they feared repercussions at work—Kate, for instance, is an elementary schoolteacher; Ned asked that the name of his university be redacted, to avoid raising the attention of administrators—or because they hadn’t “come

out” to their families. Jessica said her mom mildly disapproves of open relationships and tends to dodge the subject when Jessica brings it up. A woman named Jess Young, who grew up in Texas and moved to the Bay Area after college, said her parents threw her out of the house when she was in high school for being a les- bian. “I think that polyamory would be beyond the scope of their understanding,” she said.

The other problem is that humans are jealous creatures, whether or not you throw the concept of ownership into the equation. Asked if we can ever overcome jealousy, Dan Savage had a pretty straightforward answer: “No,” he wrote, in an email interview. “And I say that as someone who has been in a monoga- m
ish
relationship for a dozen years. Jealousy is a control, I think, a natural human emotion—just like the desire for variety and other partners.”

And the truth is that polyamorous relationships are hard. Those who practice them say there’s no set way of doing it. Levkoff and Whittaker are loose enough and trusting enough to let each other spend entire weekends with their respective lovers. Whit- taker said she usually likes to meet the people her partner dates, particularly if it’s more than just a casual romance, but she’s not always interested in hearing all the details.

Jessica and John have a more hands-on approach, meaning they pretty much tell each other everything. Jessica confessed that she finds herself getting jealous in unexpected ways, and not al- ways about sex. “I’ll be like, ‘Hey, you made dinner with her? No fair.’” Ned describes his relationship with Maggie as “poly- fuckerous” rather than polyamorous, and says that largely owes to time constraints; he’s a full-time student, she has a day job, and neither of them has the energy for endless “processing.”

Some polyamorists subscribe to the idea of “compersion,”

which is basically a way of being happy that your partner is happy, even if that means allowing your partner to see other people. Oft described as “the inverse of jealousy,” it’s defined both as an en- lightened, empathic state, and a tool to surmount the feelings of possessiveness and insecurity that normally crop up in romantic relationships. Some polyamory scholars argue that compersion can be learned. Easton discusses it at length in
The Ethical Slut
. Jessica says she’s been able to implement it sometimes. “Really,” she said, “nobody’s immune to jealousy.”

And then, well, there’s the problem of some people being liars, no matter what situation you put them in—closed, open, what- ever. People in monogamous relationships cheat, but so do people in polyamorous relationships. Some people “open up” relation- ships in order to sabotage rather than enhance them. Savage put it bluntly: “Some people convince their partners to open their relationships, and promise them that it’s not because they’re not attracted to ’em anymore, but they’re really done and want out of the relationship, and ‘openness’ for them means ‘I’m out there auditioning potential new partners and as soon as I find one I’m going to dump the person I’m with.’”

Kate agreed. “Nonmonogamous people can cheat,” she said. “It’s just about being a dishonest schmuck. If you do it right, it’s supposed to be thoughtful. You’re supposed to do a lot of ‘checking in’ and talking things to death.”

And, granted, people in polyamorous relationships deal with their fair share of dishonest schmucks. “The first guy I dated in New York, I think he wanted to rescue me from John,” Jessica said. “He was super emotionally intimate with me, listened to me talk about my relationships, sort of alluded to the fact that he wasn’t really down with the program. After two months he disappeared.” She sighed. “I feel like dudes think that because

you already have a boyfriend, they don’t have to actually break things off.”

John’s been jilted, too. “There was a girl I was dating for a month or two, the sex was really hot, and she was down with the fact that I had another partner,” he said. “Then I went off to New York for a few weeks, and she basically started dating someone who wanted to be monogamous.” So the girl just bounced, leaving John in the lurch. “It really hurts when someone starts dating you, and then they have to stop because they’re not actu- ally poly.” He explained that even though most people are theo- retically born nonmonogamous, few people can actually practice nonmonogamy in a healthy, fair, fully communicative way. We’re so habituated to think of romance in terms of competition and scarcity that it becomes nearly impossible to break away from that model. John said one would think that his and Jessica’s pool of potential partners is a lot bigger than that of the average person, but it’s actually more limited.

In the end, it’s hard to say which model is better, given our so- cial circumstances. “I think monogamy has certain pressures and discontents that complicate relationships,” Savage wrote. “And I think polyamory does, too. You get to pick your poison.”

It’s possible to make a serious mess of a polyamorous relation- ship, be an unthinking, uncaring jerk, and alienate the people around you. Then again, it’s also possible to create the kind of ro- mance that John and Jessica apparently have, in which everything seems beautiful and clean.

Very Legal: Sex and Love in Retirement

Alex Mor r is

Sally loves her boyfriend Albert’s hair. She loves his face and his body, too, but she keeps coming back to the hair. It is great hair, thick and luxuriant and combed back from his face in little waves that puff out here and there. Still, when they first met, Sally wasn’t always sure Al was right for her. She thought,
Albert is good- looking, but he’s too loud and boisterous for me.
His voice would carry across the entire dining room.

For his part, Al noticed Sally right away. He didn’t sit with her at meals, but he got in the habit of stopping by her table, where he would stand and chat with the ladies seated around it. Then he joined the poker game she played every night and saw how other men flirted with her over their cards. Still, he kept his cool and waited patiently. “I used to say, ‘See you at the game,’ and that’s all. I never made a play at her.” Eventually, his slow-burn ap- proach had the desired effect.

“He’s so handsome,” Sally now coos. We’re in the Large Ac- tivities Room of Flushing House—an independent-living facility in Queens, with a population just over three hundred—and de- spite the game of volleyball going on behind them in which fif- teen or so seated residents bat a balloon back and forth over a low net, Al and Sally have scooted their chairs close together, and their hands are like moths, constantly flittering over the armrests and toward each other. “He is a handsome man for eighty-nine. Look at that hair.” Sally runs her fingers through it.

“And the moustache? You don’t like the moustache?” asks Al. “I love the moustache. You know that, Albert.”

“You’re the prettiest girl here, Sally. The prettiest woman here.”

“I’m ninety years old! The prettiest girl here?” Sally laughs at the thought, and yet her hand reaches up to smooth her peach- tinted bob.

By Flushing House standards, Sally and Al took things at a glacial pace. So did Kitty and David, who had been at Flushing House together for around a year before they started dating, though she’d had a tendency to fall asleep sitting next to him in the lobby with her head resting on his shoulder. (“She came after me” is how he explains it. “It may be true,” she responds.) Herb and Henrietta met in the hallway shortly after she moved in four doors down from him, and she says, “He didn’t give me a chance to look for anybody else.” Tony and Alice became “companions” after dancing together at the New Year’s Eve party just a few months after he became a resident.

This last coupling was a particular disappointment to a number of the single women. Tony has a twinkly, Frank Sinatra vibe. He walks without a cane. He dances with panache. But while Tony will amiably two-step with anyone, his real attentions are

directed at Alice, for reasons even he can’t articulate. (“It just grows, I guess.”) She’s the one he takes on walks, the one whose hand he holds, the one he cares for ever since her memory started to slip—and the one whom he might do a few more intimate things with, though as a rule he stays tight-lipped on that par- ticular subject.

Al decidedly doesn’t. “I’m eighty-nine, but I’ve still got that zing.” Along with chewing gum and sugar pills, he keeps Viagra in a plastic bag in the breast pocket of his shirt. “I get the best from the V.A.,” he tells me, fingering the blue tablet. “They’re better now than ever. They get me crazy… You know, sex isn’t everything, but it has a lot to do with it. An awful lot to do with it. That’s three quarters of your battle won.” And it’s a battle he won with Sally, even though she was the one to initiate the ro- mance, following him home one night from poker. “She made a right turn. I asked, ‘Where are you going?’ She said, ‘To your apartment.’ And that was it.”

Traditionally, nursing homes don’t encourage sex. Not only do many, including Flushing House, have religious affiliations to contend with, but there’s also the fact that the people footing the bill are often children and grandchildren not thrilled to imagine their forebears shacking up with someone new. Then there’s the fear of sexually transmitted diseases, which, owing in part to Vi- agra, are famously on the rise among the geriatric population. As Al puts it, “Sex takes a little longer now, but it’s wonderful for the woman. I can go on. You know?”

In response to the rising STD rate, Flushing House has in- vited the Visiting Nurse Service of New York to come in and lead two sex-ed programs: one for the men and one for the women. “They can’t get them to talk if they do it together,” Katie, the activities leader, says of her clients. “They just don’t

think about [STDs], because in their day and age, they didn’t.”

But Flushing House is an independent-living facility, not a nursing home, which drastically limits the level of supervision. Sure, the staff can stop someone from looking at porn on the communal computers, but when one resident started going out clubbing, for example, they turned a blind eye. If anything, re- lationships—as a useful antidote to loneliness—are encouraged. There’s a darkened TV room that plays a constant cycle of ro- mantic oldies. There are tables for two in the dining room. There are even frequent dances in the glass solarium on the roof, from where you can see all five boroughs; security cameras recently caught one couple up there going at it in the nude.

The population is overwhelmingly heterosexual—though, until recently, there was one transgender resident—and more than two thirds are female, meaning that the men typically get to do the picking. When a guy comes on the scene that the women consider a catch—someone who you can tell was handsome years ago—jostling ensues. One male resident confessed to me that he hadn’t had sex in three days, as if it were a crime. Another con- fided that he still gets blow jobs.

The dining room is the social nexus of the facility. There’s Tony and Alice’s group, which is usually one of the first to be seated, with their friend Hilda begging Abraham (a staffer who escorts residents to their seats) not to put them in “Sing Sing,” one of the tables farthest from the door. There’s a table of five women who implore Abraham to fill the sixth seat with “either a gor- geous guy or another woman we can talk to.” There’s the woman who always wanted to sit with the man who looked like her dead husband, until she did and realized he wasn’t like her husband at all. “I was married fifty-five and a half years,” she explains. “I don’t think I could go with anybody else.”

The most-sought-after dinner companion of late is a man named Roosevelt, who is a young seventy-one and who wears pressed shirts and speaks in a velvety rumble. Shortly after his ar- rival, Abraham noticed a trend: women were trying to save a seat at their table, and as soon as Roosevelt sauntered up to the hostess stand, they would eagerly wave Abraham their way. Not that it did them much good in the end. By and large, Roosevelt feels the women at Flushing House are just too old for him.

Age, unsurprisingly, is the biggest deterrent to dating at Flushing House. Most of its residents have already nursed and lost one life partner and are not keen to do it again. As one woman explains, “I was married twice, and then I had a boyfriend. I don’t want to be bothered now.” Another resident tells me he doesn’t want to date an older woman, but refuses to make himself “ri- diculous” by being seen on the arm of a young one. Even when residents are partnered up, there can come a point when one’s body becomes too fragile to entrust it to someone else. Herb and Henrietta, ninety-seven and ninety respectively, were both too sick to even come downstairs most of this past winter. “Sex?” she says. “Oh, honey, there isn’t any.”

Al and Sally have had the most tumultuous relationship at Flushing House. They’ve broken up and rekindled and broken up four or five times. Al blames Sally’s declining health: not only has their sex life dropped off, but she needs a walker these days and rarely agrees to leave the building. “I want to go out,” he says. “I want to drive to Jones Beach and take her to dinner. But she just says no. It wasn’t like that before.”

When Al’s family came to visit, “I invited her all week long. I said, ‘Sally, don’t forget you’re coming with me. We’re going to eat with them. We’re gonna go out to eat.’ The following day, she calls me up in the morning, and she says, ‘Al, I don’t

feel good.’ I told her, ‘You’re full of shit.’”

Sally, for her part, can’t understand why Al expects a woman her age to always be up for anything. She’s had three husbands—a lifetime filled with men. If there were ever a moment when she should be let off the hook, when little should be asked of her, then that time is now.