Podcast #66: Dan Savage on Monogamy

By Tracy O'Neill, Social Media Curator
June 23, 2015

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Dan Savage is one of the most intelligent, mordant, and deliciously fun voices discussing sex, relationships, and identity today. An advice columnist, activist, and author, Savage has written six works of nonfiction and created the It Gets Better Project, a nonprofit aimed at preventing suicide amongst LGBT youth. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we're thrilled to present Savage in conversation with Andrew Sullivan. 

Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan

Savage is known to many as a critic of monogamy, but perhaps it's more accurate to say that he has offered a qualified response to monogamy, which can best be summed up in his own term, "monogamish." He notes that the biological arguments for sexual monogamy have not proved particularly useful:

"We are not naturally monogamous. We are socially monogamous, we pair bond. A lot of socially monogamous mammals out there, there is a pair bond, you can see it in the wild. But the DNA tests are in now, and now we know that we do not have to live like herons or macaque monkeys. That these animals that appeared to be sexually and socially monogamous were just socially monogamous. They were f**king around."

Savage knows that his stance on monogamy has raised questions about his own morality. He defines consent as the primary facet of his brand of morality, however, and clarifies that his advice is not comprehensively permissive:

"I get accused of being sort of a hedonist, and anything goes, and if you read the columns, I’m often telling people to knock it off, that that isn’t right, they shouldn’t have done that. It’s just that I will give permission slips that nobody else will give. That there are times that I think adultery is better than divorce. And there are absolutely positively times when cheating is not just—is the right thing to do for your spouse, and we should embrace those ambiguities and contradictions because it will strengthen marriages. This crazy maniacal attachment that we believe that successful monogamy defines a successful marriage is destroying marriages, is leading to unsuccessful marriages. Monogamy is a disaster for marriage... I love, the antigay conservatives run around saying, 'One man, one woman, for life.' Ha ha ha. Tell that to Newt Gingrich and tell that to Rush Limbaugh. It’s one man, one woman for however long they wish to be married to each other. So if misery is built into that marriage, if sexual deprivation is built into that marriage, that is the engine that will destroy that marriage."

A married man himself, Savage observes that while it's true that today many marriages do not last forever, neither do some divorces. Divorce, for some, might even be a path to a better marriage:

"People talk about the culture of divorce somehow cheapening marriage, and in a way couples who are unhappy together being able to leave each other and not be compelled to stay together, not being welded together, that tells us something about the couples who do stay together and sometimes when a couple divorces, and this has happened in my own sort of family and life circles more than once, a couple will divorce and then they will remarry a couple of years later, because there’s something about realizing that marriage is always opt-in, which it is now, marriage is always opt-in. At any moment you can opt out. So it’s almost as if you have to earn your partner’s presence in your life. You have to not woo them everyday but you cannot take them for granted in the way you could when it was one woman, one man, for life."

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