Personally I think that in the future we’re going to drift toward reestablishing the biological imperative.If one man actually declares at the beginning of a marriage, “I will never ask where you have been,” and subsequently declares, “I will never charge you with betrayal,” then, all of the emotional energy around betrayal-of-the-marriage-vows would simply have its point taken away.A certain percentage of men is going to have sex outside a relationship. That’s what men do. And God knows we’ve seen that proven in the last fifty years, if you take almost any demographic you care to examine.
But if the marriage is a good one—if they love each other—a temporary or even semi-permanent relationship outside of it needn’t be damaging. A smaller percentage of marriages will break up over these incidents. But if couples have declared at the beginning that these incidents are not grounds for cries of “betrayal” or eviction of the other party and calling a divorce lawyer, then the marriage goes on, children’s lives are not disrupted, the life the two people have created together—their home, all the ways they are financially intertwined, their contribution to the community, all the ways they have become enmeshed in each other—go on.
This way of looking at the relationship puts the emphasis on devotion between the two men and takes the emphasis off of sexual things. In this kind of relationship, neither man claims sexual ownership of the other, and sex is not the paramount way they communicate. At the same time, they are sexually free to act any way they desire, including having a sexual relationship.This describes marriages of men I know, some of whom have been married a very long time. One couple we know has been married more than 40 years. This kind of marriage has been developed during our years in the wilderness, with respect for the way men actually behave, and with respect for the whole relationship the two men have created. This is a sophisticated creation, and I suspect that many gay men are going to try to retain its features as we are assimilated into marriage.