Future Sex (21 page)

One thing, however, proved heartening about the experience.
In the end, despite the difficulties, Burning Man restored the balance of friendship among the three of them. On Molly Make Out Monday, it was Wes and Elizabeth who cared for Chris the whole night he was ill. They helped him work through his feelings of isolation. Once again, the hurt feelings were submerged. Elizabeth and Wes might be together, but they cared about him, too.

The feelings did
not go away completely, however. Chris watched as Elizabeth and Wes grew closer and closer to each other. He returned to San Francisco after Burning Man with the intention of developing a serious relationship of his own. After all the heady uncertainty he wanted quiet and stability, but if anything, things were going in the opposite direction. He dated some women, nothing stuck, and his desire for
a longer-term commitment had no bearing on the dating he was doing, where he didn’t meet anybody he loved.

At the end of 2012, a year into their heightened friendship, the three of them took another weekend trip together. This time they drove down the coast to San Luis Obispo. They had booked a room at the Madonna Inn, a kitschy old hotel on the side of the 101. (Elizabeth, Wes, and Chris might
have avoided irony in discussing sexuality, but they embraced it in their choice of weekend getaways.) It rained the whole weekend, so they spent it talking, surrounded by pink rose carpets and stone fireplaces, brass rails and chintz. They talked, but as if everyone agreed that Chris was pleased with his status as moonlighting lover, which he wasn’t. They were three best friends with a clear division,
a distance he felt acutely. Afterward, he went to Santa Barbara, where his parents now lived, for the holidays. He compared his state of mind that Christmas with that of Superman in his Fortress of Solitude.

*   *   *

Wes and Elizabeth’s relationship had acquired an acceleration, a momentum based on mutual daring. In the beginning, Elizabeth had devised the rules and regulations of the relationship
out of fear. She had wanted to cover all of her bases, guard each of her possible weaknesses, and outline every parameter. After a year of nonmonogamy had passed, she had learned that preventing conflict was less important than resolving it. By 2013, the rules of a more uncertain phase of commitment began to drop away. The more solid their relationship, the more adventurous she could be.

In the
way that some couples might spend their energy systematically researching and eating at new restaurants in a city, Elizabeth and Wes went to sex parties. Elizabeth attended two porn shoots at Kink, one of them with Wes, another with a woman who had become another long-term sexual partner. In June 2013, Wes left Google to start his own company. Between ending the one job and beginning the other,
he traveled around Europe. Elizabeth met him in Amsterdam, where they decided to take advantage of legal sex work and hire a prostitute.

Chris kept dating. He dated one woman for two months, another woman for four months. Dating people felt quiet and uncomplicated. It felt basic but also boring, like nothing was at stake. He no longer worried about explaining his sexual arrangements with the
people he dated—everyone in San Francisco now seemed to assume they were in open relationships. So Chris kept sleeping with Elizabeth, too, but still with some worry. In May 2013, Elizabeth needed to take a work trip to Tokyo. Chris decided to go with her and play “house husband.” It proved to be another turning point, of sorts.

They stayed at the Ritz-Carlton overlooking the Tokyo cityscape.
Elizabeth worked during the day, and Chris wandered the city and the hotel by himself. On their last night in Tokyo, a Friday, after Elizabeth’s professional duties had ended for the week, they sat down across from each other and each took a tab of LSD.

They stayed up all night, talking. For Elizabeth, as for Chris, their relationship reached its most honest state that spring night, overlooking
the glittering expanse of Tokyo. The previous year had been a long series of failures in communication, conversations that felt impossible because they demanded exposure of the deep vulnerabilities.

For the first time they honestly discussed Chris’s understanding of Wes, of how in Chris’s hopes and expectations he had fallen in love, “filled in the dots with his own lines,” as Elizabeth put it,
and perhaps avoided acknowledging aspects of Wes’s personality that empirically contradicted Chris’s idea of him. They talked about Elizabeth’s optimism, and Chris’s pessimism, how pessimistic people might also be better at accurately assessing their reality. Elizabeth left the conversation feeling they finally understood their differences, but also felt Chris’s romantic attraction to her break.

When they talked about their co-workers in the Bay Area, Chris and Wes discussed the culture of “hyperbolic optimism,” which they defined as a genuine commitment to the idea that all things were possible. It was not a tenable ideology, was in fact totally ungrounded in any wider reality, but for a number of reasons hyperbolic optimism could actually be pondered in the highly specific time and
place of San Francisco, in the first half of the second decade of the new millennium, among a group of young educated people with high standards of living. Chris saw it in the hubris of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, the Internet marketplace whose founding premise was that being good at navigating the Internet meant one could, from the humble confines of Glen Park Library, defy a whole range
of federal laws. He saw it in the “nontrivial” number of his co-workers who genuinely believed there was a reasonable chance they would live forever, who read the works of Ray Kurzweil and made plans for the singularity. He saw it in his friends, who saw no reason not to try going beyond sexual traditions that had governed societal behavior for thousands of years. Few people, he noticed, bothered
with the question of whether one would really
want
to live forever.

The hyperbolic optimists, as Chris saw it, thought that an action was right if it promoted individual happiness, regardless of its effect on others. Radical selfishness was an easy philosophy for a group of people who did not really have any problems, who made lots of money and had socially progressive and flexible work environments.
His friends were not libertarians, but the way they approached sex had roots in a libertarian idea that if the right dynamics were set up every problem would work itself out. As Chris learned, this ignored the element of human emotion involved in figuring things out. But while he recognized the reality distortion of the hyperbolic optimists, he wasn’t setting himself entirely apart from their
outlook. His experiences had not led him to retrench into monogamy. Monogamy also “didn’t work.” The only way to go was forward. By 2014, Chris was in a serious relationship. They agreed to still sleep with other people, when moved to do so.

*   *   *

As untraditional as Wes and Elizabeth’s relationship was, it had started to look like it was heading toward the traditional happy ending. They
met, they slowly fell in love. They discussed moving in together over the course of a year, and finally did so in late 2013. Wes felt that being open made the process of declaring a serious commitment easier. The decision to move in together carried less weight with the knowledge that at least a few nights a month one of them would be spending the night at someone else’s place. They both liked that
being apart from each other became a structural part of their relationship, and that reasons for spending time alone did not have to be manufactured and excused. The lingering question, for both Elizabeth and Wes, was what would happen should one of them fall in love with someone else. If they continued together into the future, then there would be times when they would fall in love with other
people they were dating. They even discussed this likelihood with an older married couple, a couple in their late thirties who had been married for years and open for longer than Elizabeth and Wes had been dating. The man told them a story of how in the course of their open marriage his wife had truly fallen for another person. He called it a “crisis episode” in their marriage. Her love for the other
person was real but they decided together that they were what they called “life journey partners”—a designation that sounded very hokey, but which was meant to indicate, said Wes, that “there’s being in love and there’s being in love and wanting to spend the rest of your life with someone.” There would be times when a person had to compromise.

In August 2014, while at Burning Man, Elizabeth and
Wes got engaged. In August 2015, I attended their wedding in Black Rock City. They encouraged their guests to dress as bridesmaids, and women and men wore wigs, thrift store prom dresses, and lacy hats. To the tune of “Somewhere over the Rainbow” played on an electric piano, Wes and Elizabeth, he in a white button-down shirt and black trousers, she in a white dress, both with colorful face paint
around their eyes, processed to an altar decorated with pink fabric flowers and tasseled fringe. Relatives delivered loving statements. Wes’s godfather recited a Druid prayer. Elizabeth’s best friend recited a poem by Derrick Brown called “A Finger, Two Dots, and Me” (“The design / in the stars / is the same / in our hearts.”)

Elizabeth and Wes, who were close to all four of their parents, had
told them about their polyamory. “A successful marriage involves falling in love many times … always with the same person,” said Wes’s dad, in his speech, and the audience laughed knowingly.

Wes and Elizabeth spoke in turn. “When I was little I had to learn how to relate to others,” said Wes. His way of connecting, he said, was to “ask for big numbers from friends to show off at long division.”
He thanked the people who had shown him love even when he didn’t know how to reciprocate. Elizabeth had taught him how to love, he said. He spoke of their shared pursuit of communitarianism, “that there is no coherent notion of humans as ethical actors outside their culture and tribe; that humans have an ethical obligation to contribute to their communities and the right to be supported in turn
in times of need.” He called Elizabeth “my strongest attractor in this great space we’re all living in.”

“When I told him I loved him he responded just like Han Solo responded to Princess Leia: ‘I know,’” said Elizabeth, when it was her turn. She spoke of her excitement at planning a future in years rather than months, of looking forward to the children they would have together.

Chris sat grinning
in the audience, next to his girlfriend. When he stood up to speak he recalled the early days of their friendship, “a period when we were exploring whether love and intimacy can be freely given.” He recalled his rocky first experience at Burning Man, and when he traveled to Japan with Elizabeth and realized “it wasn’t me she needed, it was Wes, back home.” He grew introspective, evoking his
desire to seek new ways of being in the world. “When I’m looking for relationships that are stronger I don’t have to look very far,” he said.

Wes and Elizabeth shared their vows privately, while their friends and family stood around them in a ring. We lit sparklers and held them skyward as the sun set, forming a ring of light. The drone of a didgeridoo obscured the couple’s quiet murmuring. We
stood there, sparklers lifted, standing on the soft dust, until we held only thin and smoking pieces of metal and dusk fell over us. “By the power invested in me by the Internet, you are now married,” said the officiant, Wes’s uncle. “You can kiss each other and other people.”

*   *   *

Chris and Elizabeth threw their first sex party together in the fall of 2012. The idea was to throw a sex
party that was actually cool, with people whom they liked, so they didn’t feel like a bunch of married swingers in a room listening to “Don’t You Want Me, Baby.” In early 2015 I went to the fourth iteration of the event: Thunderwear IV. It was held in a rented loft south of Market Street. A photographer had taken photographs of Elizabeth, and a black-and-white portrait of her lifting one of her legs
up over her head in a full split and penetrating herself with a dildo hung over the room. She had also installed a stripper pole.

The invitation had laid out the party’s rules in a charter, to which every invitee had to agree:

1.  Useful mantra: low expectations, high possibilities.

2.  Consent is required. And sexy. If you wanna do something, ask first. Bonus points for enthusiastic consent.

3.  This is a party. Parties are fun! You don’t have to do anything you don’t wanna do. If you don’t wanna, say “no thanks.”

4.  This is a party. Have fun! White ribbon means: ask to feed me (remember, you can say no). Red ribbon means: ask me for a kiss (on the cheek … at first at least;)

5.  Relationship conversation with your partner recommended
before
you start partying.

A final rule: no
glitter, at the request of the venue.

As guests arrived, they were asked to read the charter, then were given bracelets of red and white satin cord. The party started calmly: drinking and talking, like any other party. Wes made me a vodka and cranberry juice; I stood and talked with one of the two other people at the party over the age of thirty. Some people wore street clothes, like me. Others
changed into special outfits: Wes in white sparkly boy shorts and a black shirt; Elizabeth in leather shorts and knee-high boots. One woman wore a red thrift shop dress accessorized with a leather corset, another had a leather corset that left her breasts bare. Another man wore gold leggings with a fur coat. A woman wearing a fishnet bodysock had a rhinestone choker that spelled
S-E-X
across her
throat. Elizabeth, ever organized, told me she had purchased liability insurance for the stripper pole.

Among themselves, the friends had arranged to begin the evening with an amateur burlesque show. We watched a slightly botched silk acrobatic routine to the song “Jump” by Rihanna. The dancer’s foot kept slipping out of her toehold and she would need to rewind the silk and harness herself back
in. “She isn’t very good at it,” sighed the woman standing next to me, who, like me, was more of an interloper among what was mostly a group of good friends, and also in her mid-thirties. The rest of the group clapped and whooped encouragingly. The next woman performed a pirate-themed striptease that concluded with her taping a pair of red Solo cups to her breasts, filling them with Malibu, orange
juice, and coconut milk, and letting people drink from them with straws. Then, to Rihanna’s “Birthday Cake,” came a striptease that ended with the performer smearing herself all over with cake. Then we watched a professional pole-dancing instructor perform a poignant dance to the song “Wildest Moments” by Jessie Ware.