Atlantic: What Gays can teach Straights about Marriage

The Atlantic magazine (along with much of the rest of the American old media) continues its descent into self-parody in Liza Mundy’s new piece on marriage. According to Mundy, when it comes to marital relations, straight couples just aren’t going about it the right way. So, in order to fix marriage, they should pay close attention to gay couples because, after all, who could be better qualified to serve as an example?

Of course, she doesn’t mention that gay men overwhelmingly choose not to marry (for perfectly sound reasons, I might add), but that’s just a minor detail…

The title and subhead look to have been chosen for novelty value:

The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss

Research finds that same-sex unions are happier than heterosexual marriages. What can gay and lesbian couples teach straight ones about living in harmony?

From such a provocative title, you might think there’d be something revolutionary and interesting in the content, so let’s take a look at a few of the spectacular revelations Mundy presents.

That’s right: even when they’re gay, women initiate divorce a lot more than men.

A growing body of social science has begun to compare straight and same-sex couples in an attempt to get at the question of what is female, what is male. Some of the findings are surprising. For instance: we know that heterosexual wives are more likely than husbands to initiate divorce. Social scientists have struggled to explain the discrepancy, variously attributing it to the sexual revolution; to women’s financial independence; to men’s failure to keep modern wives happy. Intriguingly, in Norway and Sweden, where registered partnerships for same-sex couples have been in place for about two decades (full-fledged marriage was introduced several years ago), research has found that lesbians are twice as likely as gay men to split up. If women become dissatisfied even when married to other women, maybe the problem with marriage isn’t men. Maybe women are too particular. Maybe even women don’t know what women want.

Gay couples are more egalitarian — when they aren’t

Gays tend to share duties evenly, but actually they don’t.

Even as they are more egalitarian in their parenting styles, same-sex parents resemble their heterosexual counterparts in one somewhat old-fashioned way: a surprising number establish a division of labor whereby one spouse becomes the primary earner and the other stays home. Lee Badgett, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me that, “in terms of economics,” same-sex couples with children resemble heterosexual couples with children much more than they resemble childless same-sex couples. You might say that gay parents are simultaneously departing from traditional family structures and leading the way back toward them.

However, for gays, determining who takes on what role requires more effort:

“You start throwing out questions for men and women: ‘Who’s going to take care of the money?’ And the guy says, ‘That’s me.’ And you ask: ‘Who’s responsible for birth control?’ And the guy says, ‘That’s her department.’ ” By contrast, he reports, same-sex couples “have thought really hard about how they’re going to share the property, the responsibilities, the obligations in a mutual way. They’ve had to devote much more thought to that than straight couples, because the straight couples pretty much still fall back on old modes.”

Perhaps it would do straight couples good to sit down and have a long talk about who’s going to nurse the baby and who will do home and auto repair. I’m sure that would result in a more efficient, harmonious household…

Men not entirely happy with monogamy

In a stunning new finding, it turns out that men – including gay ones – like sexual variety.

When, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Pepper Schwartz asked couples about their sex lives, she arrived at perhaps her most explosive finding: non-monogamy was rampant among gay men, a whopping 82 percent of whom reported having had sex outside their relationship. Slightly more than one-third of gay-male couples felt that monogamy was important; the other two-thirds said that monogamy was unimportant or that they were neutral on the topic.

STOP THE PRESSES!!! “EXPLOSIVE” NEWS: UNRESTRAINED MEN FOOL AROUND

What are the implications of this shocking discovery? Some (gay males) recommend tolerance for infidelity:

…some gay-rights advocates, like the writer and sex columnist Dan Savage, argue very publicly that insisting on monogamy can do a couple more harm than good. Savage, who questions whether most humans are cut out for decades of sex with only one person, told me that “monogamy in marriage has been a disaster for straight couples” because it has set unrealistic expectations. “Gay-male couples are much more likely to be realistic about what men are…”

Oddly, no heterosexual female opinion on this matter has been included in the article. It remains to be seen whether wives would endorse Mr. Savage’s idea, which appears to suggest that women ought to cut men a little slack when it comes to infidelity.

So, according to Liza Mundy, what we can learn from gay marriage is that women are emotionally capricious, men crave sexual novelty, and division of labor is important in marriage.

What would we ever do without The Atlantic?