[It is important at this moment..] that we think about how hard monogamy is, how hard marriage is and about whether we make unrealistic demands on the institution and on ourselves.<\/p>\n
That, anyway, is what Dan Savage, America\u2019s leading sex-advice columnist, would say. Although best known for his It Gets Better project, an archive of hopeful videos aimed at troubled gay youth, Savage has for 20 years been saying monogamy is harder than we admit and articulating a sexual ethic that he thinks honors the reality, rather than the romantic ideal, of marriage. In Savage Love, his weekly column, he inveighs against the American obsession with strict fidelity. In its place he proposes a sensibility that we might call American Gay Male, after that community\u2019s tolerance for pornography, fetishes and a variety of partnered arrangements, from strict monogamy to wide openness.<\/p>\n
Savage believes monogamy is right for many couples. But he believes that our discourse about it, and about sexuality more generally, is dishonest….
…straight talk about the difficulty of monogamy, Savage argues, is simply good sense. People who are eager to cheat need to be honest with their partners, but people who think they would never cheat need honesty even more. \u201cThe point,\u201d\u009d he wrote on his blog last year, \u201cis that people \u201d\u201d particularly those who value monogamy \u201d\u201d need to understand why being monogamous is so much harder than they\u2019ve been led to believe.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n