**
[ Thunder rumbles ]
**
"Dear Dan, I'm writing to you today
'cause I'm in a state of total crisis.
My wife has just left me after nearly 10 years together,
and my whole world has crumbled.
I'm not sure where to turn.
I'm about to lose my home, my adopted family,
and everything I care about.
I know I'm not alone.
1.1 million Americans get divorced every year,
which doesn't exactly give me solace.
Of course, it's not just the couples who suffer.
By the time they reach adulthood,
half of all children see their parents split up,
like I did.
When I got married, it seemed so romantic.
We were so young and in love.
Were we naive to get married?
How was I supposed to deal with the inevitable changes
that every relationship undergoes --
from the passion of first love
to the day-to-day demands of domestic life?
Is it natural to be monogamous --
to be with one person for our whole lives?
Or are we, at best, as you say, monogamish?"
**
"I'm setting off today in search of some answers.
I'm really hoping you can help."
[ Engine starts ]
[ Engine idling ]
**
-I don't know where to start.
Um, you know, that desire, that impulse,
you know, to be so overwhelmed by love
that you want to permanently, somehow,
enshrine that, that, that momentary feeling
by codifying it through marriage
is evidence, all by itself, that you shouldn't get married --
that you're not mature enough for marriage.
And you have so much working against you,
that you're both so young.
You know, if you're gonna measure success by,
"Are we gonna be together for the rest of our lives,
are we gonna be able to preserve forever this feeling
by getting married?" --
No. No, you're not.
**
-I was completely promiscuous
for the late part of the '60s and early part of the '70s.
The pill had just become widely distributed,
and there was a wave of feminist thought
that said that women almost had the obligation
to be as promiscuous as men.
It was a mighty time.
**
I felt like I had a series
of the same sort of relationships
that went to the same dreary end.
I went back to Wyoming,
and I was in this much more 19th-century condition
where I thought, "Well, you know,
I'm running a large ranch in Wyoming.
This is impossible to do with, you know,
frontier housewives for a fortnight.
What I really need is a wife, and if I'm going to do that,
I'm going to try to be married in the conventional sense,
and I'm not going to be polygamous, as is my tendency,"
and I managed to convince somebody
to come up there into this frontier state
and marry me,
and then imposed monogamy on myself
for a good long time.
**
-When I got married,
it was the most optimistic, hopeful, loving act
that I've ever engaged in.
I'd always, before, put the brakes on every relationship,
always been hesitant.
And I decided that, "I'm going for it."
[ Sentimental music plays ]
-Do we really understand marriage?
Do we understand the social aspects of marriage?
-Does each of us really want to make the other one happy?
-Most Americans tend to think that the traditional marriage
was the one that they see on "Leave it to Beaver,"
as though, you know, that might be a documentary.
[ Chuckles ] So they think of it
as a male-breadwinner family,
the wife at home, doing the vacuuming,
spending all of her time raising the children.
-They make sure that everything is on the table
in just the right place.
-We have an idea that the American family --
a mom, dad, two kids, and a picket fence,
suburban household --
that this is the way family has always been
and always should be.
-It's a nuclear family of two people
who once loved each other -- and may still --
and who have committed themselves
to exclusive sexual relations.
-The world is a scary place,
and we need somebody to help us feel safe and secure.
That is what a spouse,
or somebody that we choose to commit to,
provides for us.
-My parents never got married. -Mm-hmm.
-Like, they spent 10 years --
very wonderful years -- together.
But it was, you know, a very unconventional relationship.
In the 1950s, my maternal grandfather, Billy,
married my grandmother, Marge.
They had two kids -- my aunt, Carin, and my mom, Debra.
They lived in the nuclear-family model for just a few years,
until my grandfather ran off to Italy,
where he became a spaghetti-western star.
[ Gunfire ]
While there, he started a commune
where free love was practiced
and societal structures of all kinds were rejected.
When she was 15, my mom dropped out of high school
and went to Italy to find her dad.
They ended up getting along really well,
and she stayed there.
When she was just 16, she met my father,
an Italian prince named Dado Ruspoli.
My dad had been a well-known playboy in the '50s and '60s
and was still married to Nancy, his second wife,
when he met my mom.
Nancy and my dad had a son -- my older brother, Francesco --
and Nancy and Francesco lived with Nancy's boyfriend,
upstairs from my mother and father.
When my mom was 17, I was conceived,
and they went to Thailand, where I was born in 1975.
My dad was 50, and my mom was 18.
There was even a newspaper headline once that said,
"Here is Prince Dado Ruspoli
with his wife, his son, and his lover" --
my mom -- "pregnant."
Then my little brother Bartolomeo was born.
Meanwhile, my grandfather, Billy,
had three more children with three different women --
Hania, Dirta, and Pat --
named Casomir, Alexander, and Wendell.
When I was 8, my parents separated,
and my brother and I went to live in Los Angeles,
where we were raised by our now-single mom.
We did get to spend our summers in Italy,
in the family castle outside of Rome,
with our dad.
When he was 70, Dado married for the third time
and had two more children --
my sister Melusine and my brother Theodore.
-I tell you the truth. I never went through marriage.
I never went through marriage, and one of the reasons
is because I had an example in my family with your father --
with many, many wives, with many children --
and I got extremely confused.
Also, if I tell you the truth,
I thought it was very much fun
to see all this thing going on.
And then I saw my father, also,
marrying once, marrying twice, marrying three times,
and blah, blah, blah.
So all the thing confused me very much
that when I understood that what my father had told me,
all, you know, growing up,
saying that marriage was sacred, that fidelity was sacred,
et cetera, et cetera,
and suddenly, I understood that all this was a lie.
**
-It's a complete falsehood.
-In fact, this is a relatively-new invention.
-Our family situations have always been rather complex.
It's never been just about, you know, one man and one woman
and they come together for life and so forth and so on.
-We look at history through the lens of the current day.
In our book, we call this process "Flintstonization."
-Marriage never existed the way that we see it
and the way that it developed in the last 100 years.
-What made you decide to choose, you know, being married?
-I was forced, since I was very small,
into the role of the caretaker
and the responsible one. -Mm-hmm.
-My brother was a little bit wild,
and my mom was very young.
When I met my wife,
she had come to Los Angeles
to pursue an acting career.
We fell madly in love with each other
and had this extremely passionate connection.
-Mm-hmm. -And she was very young,
and I got to provide a sense of security within,
you know, a world full of unknowns.
**
All I remember is
I said I was thinking of getting married,
you know, secretly. But I'd already done it,
so I didn't know how to tell you that.
-I think it's wonderful, the way you got married.
You both gave yourselves so fully to this love,
and honored it by getting married.
It was a beautiful act.
**
-My own thinking went through quite an evolution.
I was raised in the '60s,
and, in that time, the anthropological theory
was that marriage was invented to protect women and children --
that women traded sexual monogamy
in return for the man going out and hunting the meat
and protecting them from the saber-tooth tigers.
But then, in the '70s,
a lot of female anthropologists came along,
and they pointed out,
if the men were out hunting and the women were home,
who was protecting the women from the saber-tooth tiger?
Then you got a totally different theory
of the invention of marriage --
that it was invented to oppress women.
**
-[ Speaking Italian ]
-In Assyria, in Mesopotamia,
and through the entire ancient world,
a woman's virginity -- her marriage value --
was really more of an economic thing
than an emotional thing.
A father in Assyria,
if his virgin daughter was raped,
the father is the one who had the remedies
against the man who raped his daughter,
not because his daughter was raped,
but because someone actually stole his property.
His daughter wasn't worth as much after being raped.
What does the court do?
Can the father collect the money that he lost
from the rapist's family?
Yeah, he generally could,
but at the same time, the best solution was often seen
to force the rapist and the girl who was raped
to settle down and get married.
That's really a traditional remedy for rape.
**
-With the advent of agriculture,
the concept of private property
entered the cognitive lexicon of our species.
-As men had multiple sexual partners,
they didn't want women also to have multiple sexual partners,
because they wanted to know
that their property was going to descend
to their own child.
-"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife."
Read that in context in the Old Testament,
and what you find is it says, "Nor his house, nor his she-ass,
nor his ox, nor his servants."
In other words, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's stuff."
It has nothing to do with respecting his relationship.
It's about respecting his property.
**
-Eventually, I came to the conclusion
that marriage had nothing to do with the relationship
between the husband and the wife and the children.
It was a way of getting in-laws.
In-laws were the reason for marriage.
"I marry my son to your daughter,
and therefore, we have a relationship.
I owe you things, you owe me things."
**
-When I got married,
her parents took me in like a son.
It was amazing.
I did not expect
that level of being brought into a family.
I had never really known that.
I felt, for the first time in my life,
the possibility of true stability.
So marriage, for me, wasn't just about love and commitment,
but it was also integrating into this larger family unit.
And I think it was a feeling that,
"It's not just my desires that count anymore.
Let's expand that sense of what and who matters."
**
-For a lot of history,
marriage was not a romantic institution.
-The social-conservative position on love and marriage
was you don't mix those two things,
because love is unstable and sexual desire is unstable.
-I love you, Nora. Do you love me?
-In the 20th century, the idea of romantic marriage --
that an individual falls in love and finds their soul mate
and then marries that person --
came to predominate at least our public discourse about marriage.
-I think so, but I have to think about it.
[ Mid-tempo rock music playing ]
-Back in Italy,
I wanted to find out from my cousin Claudia
why people had gotten married in our own family,
going back 1,000 years.
-Most of these marriages are to consolidate power --
I would say all of them --
until a generation when, instead,
passion come in the story. Hmm.
These marriages of passion are leaving us
and basically selling tickets at the door
to have people coming to visit the garden
to try to pay the bills of the gardener and whatever.
**
The last great marriage
who was made to bring money into the family
was Matarazzo -- this one.
**
He married all his girls, all organized,
to aristocracy in Italy.
-And did you ever ask our grandfather
how he felt about this? Was he -- Well, did he --
-Well, I tell you what he felt about this.
He felt that he didn't -- Basically, I think,
that he wasn't madly in love.
He was a [speaking Italian] He loved women.
And I think that our grandmother suffered a lot.
I think she -- I know she suffered a lot,
because my father, when he talks about her,
he still cries when she was crying,
waiting for the grandfather to come home.
-So it wasn't very good for women --
this whole situation? -No.
This always happened, always happened.
All these women cried.
**
-My grandfather, Billy, had three kids that are all my age.
All around the same time that his daughter, my mom,
was having me,
he was having kids, in the mid-'70s.
Two of them were born almost exactly the same time,
from women that he met on this --
that he was living with on this commune.
And my uncle Wendell, who lives in Torrance,
has been married 15 years --
certainly the only example in my family
of somebody who has decided to go
the traditional marriage-monogamy route.
-Good to see you. -Good to see you.
Having seen Billy saying, "I'm never gonna commit,
I'm going to love who I want,"
how on Earth do you go from that
to saying, "I want to be with you forever"?
-To me, it was about the promise.
It was about standing there,
making the covenant, making the promise,
and being there for the children.
I didn't want my kids to feel like I did.
-Which is how? How did you feel?
-Kind of, you know -- kind of abandoned.
-Right.
My first memories in life
are of the rupture of my parents splitting up,
and I know that that's affected me.
I know it's part of why I suffered so much
in the end of my marriage --
because I had a total fear of abandonment.
-Well, you said something before,
when we first started talking about your marriage and divorce,
there were no children.
You didn't have any childen with your wife,
and that made it simpler.
And it does.
And I'm actually sometimes accused of being conservative,
because the first question I ask somebody when they say,
"You know, we've been together a certain amount of time.
We're thinking about getting divorced" --
The first thing out of my mouth is, "Do you have kids?"
Because it does change the advice that you give,
because I don't think that adults have a right
to just careen around, traumatizing children.
Kids have this desire for -- this need -- for some constancy.
Is marriage a response to this free-love shit in the '60s?
Is this sort of modern,
sort of bring-the-gays-in marriage movement?
Perhaps. Perhaps it is.
You know, I don't -- Your childhood sounds fascinating.
It doesn't sound like you're wrecked by it.
And it seems like you're not --
You know, you probably had a really colorful life experience.
I wouldn't trade yours for mine, though,
even though my parents divorced when I was a teenager.
But for the first, you know, 15, 16 years of my life,
it was, everything stayed the same one day to the next.
**
-As I was separating, one of the first people
I turned to for advice was my neighbor Roberta,
a wise and eccentric woman who seemed to have had
a lot more experiences with these things than I did.
-Susie. -[ Barks ]
-Why did you keep leaving these men, do you think?
-They were boring.
They weren't the right person for me,
but there wasn't a good way to leave them.
I moved to California because I was married to someone
I didn't really like anymore,
and he came out here to pursue an acting career.
He had pretty eyes. That was it.
He was an alcoholic. He died at a young age.
And then I was married and had a second child.
Then I left him
and followed some unemployed writer.
-So, what about marriage?
Is it a doomed institution?
-No. I think people --
people want to be together with a partner
and want to have kids and all that.
**
-The first time I saw her in that cafeteria in Detroit,
she was sitting at a table near the window.
Light was coming onto her,
and, you know, and those eyes.
Like, it was -- I was just like, "Wow."
Like, you know? Like, "Wow."
-Seven years later, I got a letter to my mom's address.
"Hey, this is Wendell. I live in California now.
Give me a call."
I called him here in Torrance,
and we decided that we were gonna do this now --
We're gonna get married and have kids
without having met in person in seven years.
**
-What's your philosophy on monogamy, in general?
Do you think it's something that's just an unattainable ideal,
or do you think it's possible?
-I don't think men are basically very monogamous.
-You think men are less monogamous than women?
-Yes, by nature.
But, I mean, speaking for myself alone,
I must be a man.
-The word "nature" is a very contextual thing,
as if there is some natural way of making love
and some unnatural way of making love.
-Wild, flagrant abuses of the God-given gift of sex.
-When you start to say
that something is objectively natural or unnatural,
you really get into trouble.
-The body has a design.
People who say, "Oh, we should overcome nature" --
In "The African Queen"...
-It's only human nature.
-Nature, Mr. Allnutt,
is what we are put in this world to rise above.
-Bullshit!
You're not gonna rise above nature.
You're not an angel. You're an animal.
You're an ape, just like everybody else.
Deal with it. [ Monkey screeching ]
So, they say, "Well, you know, monogamy is natural.
Look at the penguins.
This film, the -- What was it called?
The "March of the Penguins."
Churches across the country were renting out cinemas
so they could take the whole congregation in
to see this film, the "March of the Penguins,"
which was this stellar example of monogamous parents
teaming up to get through the winter
in celebration of monogamy.
But those penguins take a new mate every season.
Your typical emperor penguin
has 20 or 25 sexual partners in its lifetime,
and yet this is held up
as an example of monogamy occurring in nature.
If you're gonna do this at all,
do it with the species
that are most closely related to human beings.
Let's talk about primates.
Over 300 species of primates,
many of which live in complex social groups
with more than one male.
How many of those species are monogamous?
Goose egg. Not one, not one.
Unless you think we're the sole exception.
-* Face to face with Christ, my savior *
-Do you have a Bible? Do you study the Bible at all?
-No, I don't. -You really should.
God told us to be fruitful and multiply
and replenish the Earth.
-Do you think that we have an obligation
to stay in the marriage even if we're not happy in it?
-If we are following God's commands, he will make it work.
-I had no religious upbringing, thank God.
My parents kind of did the rebelling before me.
But marriage and religion have been tied closely together,
and I can see why that is.
In a world where everything else is commodified and replaceable,
the idea of one thing that's sacred.
-Religions always insert themselves
into human relationships and human sexual expression
because if you can come in between people and their desires
and if you make their desires their ticket to Hell,
potentially, without your intervention,
you can control those people forever.
That's why religion rushes in to regulate sexual relationships,
interpersonal relationships, marital relationships --
Because you can control people if you seize that,
which is not to say that religion
and the pageantry and the symbolism,
and religion can solemnize a moment,
and it has a beauty.
And, you know, the moment can, emotionally,
feel very transcendent.
And then, if you have these dance steps, basically,
that you can go through
that make manifest those transcendent feelings
and then tie you to this history, in your family,
going back generations, to be able to say that,
"This thing that I'm doing now, my parents did.
My grandparents did. My great-grandparents did.
My great-great-grandparents did."
I don't know what my great-grandparents were like.
I do know they married, and so did I.
-Ave, Maria, piena di grazia.
Tu sei benedetta fra le donne
e benedetto é il frutto del tuo seno, Gesú.
-Oh, my God.
Right, right, right, right.
-"Fallen" in the sense of --
-Yeah. But I tell you the truth,
that our saint was a rebel herself.
-What year is this, more or less?
-1650 or '60.
I have to see it on the tree.
She was obliged by her father to go to the convent
because she didn't want to go.
And so she lived in the convent, you know, in luxury.
You know, she treated very badly the nuns.
She didn't follow the rules.
-She had many lovers, I heard. Right?
-Well, that, of the lovers, I don't know.
This, I don't know.
-Is it true that she was supposed to marry somebody,
and then he came and liked the sister?
-No, no, no, no. He didn't like anybody.
In those times, there was no question of liking somebody.
It was the father who decided that the boy that she loved
had to go and marry her youngest sister.
The father probably thought
that Giacinta was a little bit too wild
and too much a rebel to be good for marriage,
and so he decided to send her in this convent.
**
-Marriage actually means a lot to me.
I'm very old-fashioned.
I'm actually 17, and I have a 1-year-old son.
I have been with the father for three years now.
A lot of people, they ask me,
"How can you be with someone so long?"
What's important to me is having somebody
that's always gonna be there for you
and that trusts you and loves you.
-Or when you see, like, really old couples,
where one is pushing the other in a wheelchair,
it's, like, there is definitely no sex appeal,
but the one person will be loyal to the other to the grave.
And I think that supersedes that,
"Oh, I have butterflies in my belly,"
because I'll have it sometimes, but not all the time.
So if I'm just only gonna be nice on butterfly days,
oh, that's gonna be bad.
-If you'll humor me, I wrote letters to you, imagining,
during the different stages of my marriage and divorce,
that I would have liked to have asked you, maybe,
and see how you would react.
"Dear Dan, I've been married five years now,
and everything is so good
that I'm wondering if I should be worried.
I know that sounds funny, but I wonder if being too comfortable
can have a negative effect on a relationship."
-At a certain point, my beloved wife --
who I love to this day very much -- had children,
and something changed profoundly in her hormonal makeup
and cultural makeup as well.
And suddenly, she was about as interested in sex
as she was in canasta,
which was a game that she didn't even play.
And I'm thinking, "Well, you know,
a little offshore drilling,
what difference is it gonna make?
I intend to be married to my wife forever.
I'm faithful in my heart," which I truly was.
I felt like I could do the whole thing
on a don't-ask-don't-tell basis and everything would be fine.
But, you know, the problem is
that she was then continuously trying to trick me
into lies of commission,
which were different from lies of omission.
You can't just up-front lie to the other party
and expect your relationship to survive it.
Eventually, it just had this terribly erosive effect,
and it ended this.
I mean, there were a lot of things that ended this
besides that -- And not the least of which
was that there was no sexuality at the core of it.
-Why does good sex so often fade,
even for couples who continue to love each other as much as ever?
Why does good intimacy not guarantee good sex?
Can we want what we already have?
And why is the forbidden so erotic?
-Now they're radiant with excitement
and the thrill of taking matters into their own hands.
When this excitement of the moment settles down,
what will remain?
-Being in love is like being high.
I mean, you're wild, and you feel it.
And I think that has to transform into love,
because that state is like you know, snorting coke.
It's not a state that you can live in all the time.
-I don't think I'm alone in the world
in having a relationship
going from being very sexual to not as sexual
because it's evolved into other things.
It's become more of a companionship
and it's become more of a sense of complicity
and settledness.
-I'm curious in the tension
between passion and aliveness and freedom on one side
and security and stability on the other.
-We're fed this story that we're supposed to be able
to find a lifelong, monogamous pairing
that continues to be sexually juicy at the same time,
but you're each other's co-parent for children,
you're running a household together,
you're sharing all of your finances,
you're dealing with logistics
and picking up the dry-cleaning together.
-In one relationship,
we want security, stability, dependability --
all the anchoring, grounding experiences of life.
And at the same time, we also want our love life
to bring with it mystery and awe
and the unpredictable and novelty and surprise
and the unexpected and that which fuels desire.
**
-Every new relationship that's sexual
is kind of an adventure,
and then the adventure goes away.
Then it's just kind of where you live,
and it's not an adventure anymore.
It's not a surprise anymore.
And how can you continue to surprise each other
without feeling like
you're having to pull rabbits out of a hat all the time?
**
-People go into relationships and go into marriage
with some really misguided notions
about what it should and what it should not be.
There's a depth of connection that you have in monogamy
that you just don't have otherwise.
You're happier. There's a sense of safety.
-But that very sense of safety that you're talking about
is the antithesis of sexuality.
-I don't -- I wholeheartedly disagree.
We need to differentiate between sexuality and intimacy,
because I think anybody can get naked and have sex,
and, you know, it can be pleasurable.
But not everybody can reach a deep emotional place
with somebody else,
and that's what I believe that you can only do
when you're in a committed relationship with someone else.
-If love isn't eroticized --
if it remains something rational and something ethical
and something unchanging and eternal --
then we go through life in a kind of despair.
And a lot of people think of love this way,
but it makes human existence, this mortal existence,
a kind of waste of time.
From the other side, if Eros isn't spiritualized...
-Power hungry, domineering.
-...then life becomes
just this transient, animal sort of existence
where we're driven from one satisfaction of appetite to another.
-And so we can stay married and not be sexually,
to each other, who we were at the start.
We have to recognize, though, that adult human beings
want to feel that kind of sexual passion and that kind of desire.
-We are basically asking one person today
to give us two sets of fundamental human needs
that spring from different sources,
take us in different directions, as if they are one.
How you reconcile the domestic and the erotic
or your need for security with your need for passion
with the same person isn't a problem that you solve.
It's a paradox that you manage.
**
-I can't help noticing you guys are dressed the same.
Is that a coincidence? -That is a coincidence.
-That is kind of a coincidence, yeah.
-The longer you're together, the more you look alike.
-Yeah, I guess that's true.
[ Both chuckle ]
-So, how did you guys meet?
-Um... -Um...
-Well, we got snowed in on New Year's Eve,
ended up having to all share a big bed
in the middle of the living room.
And she and I stayed up talking,
and by the end of the night, we were dating.
[ Chuckles ]
-What is the meaning of marriage for you guys?
-Companionship. -Companionship, stability.
You have somebody to fall back on
and know is gonna be there when you need someone.
Both of us are on our second marriage.
Both of us had spouses who decided to look for the mystery
and look for something else.
So it makes us not think in that way, I think,
because we've wanted that stability in the first place,
so we've found it now and we're happy.
**
-Tell me about this marriage here.
What does this represent to you?
-Allora, this marriage here is very interesting
because this was Ortensia Farnese,
who was the niece of the Pope Paul III Farnese.
And he gave Vignanello to his niece, Ortensia,
who married this man here,
who was Sforza Ercole Marescotti from Bologna, this one here.
That's where our family comes into Vignanello --
beginning of 1500.
She was the niece of the pope,
so she was very powerful -- very powerful.
So she kills her husband in this room,
and she razes his coat of arm.
-Do we know why she was so angry with him to kill?
-One minute, one minute.
She had other two husbands after him,
and both, she had them killed in the village.
She didn't like these men.
There was no lawyers then, luckily.
You poisoned the people in those times, right?
If you didn't want -- To get rid of them,
you didn't have those stupid lawyers
who suck your blood from here and nothing happens, ever.
I hate the lawyers.
At least -- Ciao, and light, little drink
or a bang on your head or whatever,
and, ciao, much easier.
**
-I'm very skeptical of the idea
that there is anything hardwired in human beings.
Unlike animals, who have to respond in programmed ways,
we can make choices, and we do make choices.
-The Mosuo people of mountains of Southwestern China,
they separate the realm of desire and domesticity.
You separate family life, which is a daytime activity,
from sexuality, romance, and love,
which is primarily a nighttime activity.
Men and women alike can invite or refuse sexual relationships
with as many people as they do or don't want.
Children are raised by their mothers,
their grandmothers,
their mothers' sisters and brothers.
And so biological paternity is irrelevant.
-Among the Inuit, men and wife, by mutual consent,
may allow the wife to have an affair
or to sleep with a guest who's coming overnight
or even to travel with a different man.
Sexual infidelity, under certain circumstances,
is perfectly okay within marriage.
Among the Bari of Venezuela,
a woman is actually encouraged
to take lovers during her pregnancy.
Every man who sleeps with a woman while she is pregnant
is considered to give something of his substance to the child.
-Like mothers everywhere, she wants to have
the smartest, funniest, strongest kid she can.
She'll have sex with the funny guy and the strong guy
and the guy who's a good hunter and the most intelligent guy
to get the essence of all these different men into her baby.
And then, when the child's born,
these different men will come forward and say,
"Yes, I'm a father. Yes, I'm a father."
So fatherhood's a team enterprise.
-But the tremendous variability of everything
from social structures to personal relationships,
throughout history,
suggests to me that it's just a just-so story
to pretend that any way we behave is encoded in our genes.
-I think everyone's different.
I think, for me, monogamy is important, though.
-I'm pretty traditional, I guess.
I think it's essential to a relationship.
-I think monogamy is important --
and commitment.
It lets you focus on...
what you can build together in this relationship,
out of trust.
And I think, to make a relationship work,
it has to be the most important thing in your life,
and he was.
But then, what happens is you end up cutting off
parts of my sense of adventure and curiosity about life.
And so at a certain point, I had to come back to my true nature,
and that was not to be married, in a relationship
with what felt claustrophobic,
what felt like it was limiting rather than expansive.
-After how many years did you start to feel this way?
-About seven years.
-So, she came.
I was able to provide this incredible world
and the sense of stability and the sense of excitement
and bring her into my world.
And then, as she became more and more successful,
I became emasculated.
And I think that it...
It...
Yeah, it was, I felt very vulnerable.
**
-How I feel about love is I'm trying to learn, at 73,
to believe and feel and internalize
that somebody loves me their way,
not my idea of what they should be doing
or my idea of what I want back.
-For philosophers like Kierkegaard,
love was a place where you could bring your desires
into communion with your reason
and have a genuine synthesis, a genuine harmony.
-And then I fell in love, like they do in movies --
you know, like in Shakespeare or opera, I mean.
And, you know, I think it's an unusual condition,
and it generally ends with everybody dead on the stage.
But I had one of those experiences.
I looked across a crowded room,
and I knew, for the first time in my life.
I hadn't even seen her face yet.
And, you know, she turned at looked at me
and had the same deal,
and we were living together a week later
in spite of the fact that she was freshly married
to somebody far better qualified than me.
And during the time that we were together,
I could see the beauty of women,
appreciate it even better than usual,
because it was detached from any desire to own.
It was like knowing that the mountains are beautiful at sunset
without having the slightest desire to own the mountains.
I didn't even think
that this was something that existed in men.
And then I put her on her plane in Los Angeles one night,
2 days before her 30th birthday.
And when she got off that plane in New York, she was dead.
**
I had never put all my eggs in one emotional basket
like that before,
and I was completely devastated.
[ Sniffles ]
I had then experienced voluntary monogamy
and involuntary monogamy,
and I decided that I was not gonna try to be monogamous again
unless I felt that same kind of completely voluntary sense of it.
[ Fireworks exploding ]
-The idea of losing all of this love,
all of this family --
My whole identity had gotten wrapped up in this,
for better or worse.
And the idea of losing that was really scary.
And then, when it happened,
it was even worse than I expected.
And I remember my mother, you know,
being in a very interesting position
to help me through this, because on the one hand,
she saw me suffering
and wanted to take care of her son
that's, like, in this terrible position.
But at the same time,
I think she related very much to my wife.
She helped me to understand that it wasn't about me.
-If you really love someone,
it's about wanting them to be a full human being,
wanting them to, to grow,
wanting them to be fulfilled,
whether it's with me or not.
And in your breakup, I saw that pivotal moment
where you were in so much pain --
everything that validated you,
everything that you had created together,
the years that you spent together.
But at that moment, to really question,
"What is love?
If I love this person, how do I deal with my own pain?
How do I let go with love?"
And you were able to do that.
**
-First of all, you've known me since I was a kid.
You've known my mom since high school.
I can understand the impulse that says,
"I've really gotten to know this person.
I know everything they're gonna say
before they say it. I'm bored."
So then you say, "Okay. Well, we've had a great run,
and let's part ways." -Sure.
-And there's this great Nietzsche line --
"I like a life of brief habits" --
because I get totally immersed in something,
and then we part ways as friends,
having learned something from each other.
-Yeah. -And then we continue to grow.
Do you think there's something more enriching
with this, like, soul mate for life
than somebody who has a relationship every 10 years
and then has the next thing
because they've really outgrown it
and they just have exhausted
all the possibilities of that relationship?
-Yeah. If people can stay together,
the relationship can change, the dynamics change.
But if you can expand and include,
then as you get older and get more life behind you,
you have a larger family, a larger tribe,
a larger connectivity to society.
You have more people who you care about
and, you know, theoretically care about you.
That's, I think, a much better model than,
"Okay. I've done this for 10 years.
I've had this experience.
I've taken what I need. I'm a bigger, better person.
And now I'm gonna go over here and have more of my experience
and become more of me and --" No.
Most people, if you walk around the streets
and look at their faces,
they're fucking miserable --
miserable because they're living
in a shallow pool of nothingness.
**
-Where are we now?
Because last time we talked, we were in the castle.
What is this place? -[ Speaking indistinctly ]
This used to be Palazzo Ruspoli.
This used to be all in the hands of your father and my father.
This was a name. It was an identity.
It was in our family since 1700.
We give up everything. For what? For sex.
-So, how was this given up for sex?
Because Dado basically ran after women,
not thinking about the future.
Dado had five children from different women, you know,
and my father had, you know, all of these wives.
But where is the wife with the money?
-I think Sigmund Freud really had it right in his book
"Civilization and its Discontents,"
when he was talking about the sexual urge being so powerful
and the needs of society
being completely contrary to the urges that people feel.
The first legal collections out of Mesopotamia
were consumed with questions of marriage --
monogamy, adultery, sexual issues, bestiality,
things like that.
And it was seen, primarily,
as necessary to visit the worst kinds of punishments
on those who broke sexual rules,
and specifically, those were adulterous women.
The first death-penalty statute I could find on Earth
was the impalement of a wife for committing adultery.
-But you know why your father and my father
never wanted women with money?
There's a reason. -Why?
-Because they always said -- both of them --
that women with money try to control them
and they do not want to be controlled.
They always told me -- my father and your father.
This is a very Latin, macho way of thinking --
of the insecurity of men.
-The laws surrounding sex
generally reflect man's terror at women --
man's terror at women's reproductive power,
man's sense of helplessness in front of women,
and our desire to do anything that we can do
to tell ourselves that we have control over forces
that we really, in life,
feel like we have no control over whatsoever.
[ Sentimental music plays ]
-Do you think you can help us get married?
-Why, I'm in favor of marriage.
-The United States government has made a decision --
a long-standing public-policy objective --
to encourage its citizens to get married.
Part of this comes from lack of separation of church and state
and Judeo-Christian morality
that this is the best way to organize families.
People call this the marital-industrial complex.
-* I will be your Casanova
* With that, you must agree
-* I know you're a Casanova
* But you'll have to marry me
[ Swing music plays ]
-I think, if you're ready to get married --
-How long? -I wasn't ready to get married.
So -- Well, but we did. So I don't know.
-Why'd you get married?
-Prom night, I was 19. She was 17.
I took her to her prom.
Nine months later... -Nine months later...
-...we got married --
under the gun, so to speak.
It's been hard.
-Montana shotgun wedding.
-Yeah. -[ Laughs ]
-We have an economic system
that's based on an idea of a male breadwinner
and who's supporting a wife and children.
This is a way that the government
can privatize dependency
and not have to take responsibility
for caring for those single mothers and their children.
But that form of social-welfare state has completely failed.
The largest group of people in poverty in America
are single mothers and their children --
more than mentally-ill people,
drug addicts, physically-disabled people,
and people who don't speak English, combined.
Going into a government office and saying, "I need food.
I need help to support my children
so that we don't become homeless,
like many of the other single-mother families
in this country," and having the government say,
"Why don't you get into a sexual relationship
with a man who will support you?"
is akin to the government being a pimp
to poor women in America.
**
-"Dear Dan, it's been three months since my separation.
Now that I'm single again,
I have to admit there's something exciting
about the idea of starting over,
of rediscovering myself
through new experiences with new people.
I realize now, looking back,
that, that attraction to the new,
it's always there.
I think it must be there for everyone.
What did you do when you felt that pull to something new?"
-I always cheated on -- I just did what I wanted.
And I think I did it when I was pissed off at somebody.
I'd just go find somebody.
Or when I wanted out and I didn't have the nerve to do it.
Women have to make a story up about it,
that they're in love or they're very interesting
or this person is spiritual.
You know what?
You just wanted to get out and get laid
and have attention.
It's more about the attention and the excitement,
because, I mean, sex is sex, you know?
It's like, how different is it gonna be?
But it's all the -- It's all the building up to it
and the flirting and the somebody pursuing you.
When you're married, that doesn't happen.
-But, of course, the culture tells us sex isn't that important.
-I know! The culture tells -- -Right?
And they accuse you of being... -I know.
-...overly concerned with sex, but that's the one thing that
we kind of base our monogamous relationships on, right?
-Right. The culture says, "Sex is so unimportant
that you shouldn't prioritize it in a marriage,
but sex is so hugely important
that you can't have it with anybody else."
These forces are in conflict, culturally.
We tell people, "You're a bad person
if you think too much about sex.
You're a bad person if you look at your partner and reject them
because the sex isn't there."
And then we look at them and say,
"You're a bad person for fucking somebody else."
**
-I have that whole cliche list
that girls make in romantic comedies
where you're like, "Make your list,
and then he'll come, then you'll find the dude."
I would love to meet somebody that I don't want to cheat on.
You know what I mean?
And I don't even think it's hard.
I didn't cheat in my five-year relationship.
Well, cheating, I feel like, comes --
I'm already lying. Okay.
I feel like, for me, every time I've cheated --
And I've cheated in a lot of relationships,
but not with -- Well, one time with sex,
most of the time with make outs, all the time emotionally.
That's -- I always break up with a person I'm with
the minute I cheat.
I need that to -- Like, as a hook to get me out.
**
-I call it the shadow of the third.
The shadow of the third
is, really, the third exists all the time --
either in your head, either in fantasy --
between you and me,
either in our memories of our past
in acknowledgment that we've known other people,
either in reality, because we've allowed each other
to be with those thirds.
But the third exists all the time.
-There's a guy at the gym.
I call him my Latino guilty pleasure.
I look at him, but I come home to my husband, you know?
And Wendell laughs about it. Like, he jokes.
When he's there, he's like, "Look. There's your dude."
-Yeah. -It's funny.
And you really don't have to have sex
with just anybody who's good looking.
-And what about porn? -Some people don't care,
and some people are like, "Oh, like, so many guys watch porn,"
and they just kind of make it, like, like a mainstream thing.
Like, am I not enough for you?
Like, do you know what I mean?
Like, I'd be, like, offended,
because I'd be, like,
you have to, like, go to, like, porn
and, like, look at images of other women.
It's, like -- Also, I find creepy.
Like, I don't know.
Some people think it's, like, normal,
but I just think it's creepy
to, like, watch someone else have sex.
-Some couples deny its existence
and would rather, you know,
tighten the hatches and hunker down
and make believe that there is no outside world.
Okay.
Then when they find their partner online doing porn renting,
you know, they have a deep sense
that their partner is having sex with somebody else.
-You go against every other advice columnist
in the world, probably,
and say that infidelity isn't always a bad thing.
Can you kind of spell out the times
where you think that people have permission to cheat
and when they don't?
-The difficulty, when you you talk about
when it's okay to cheat,
is that everyone pictures sort of an idealized newlywed couple,
together a couple of years, and then he or she cheats,
and, of course, that's, like,
the worst thing you could possibly do.
And often, the "cheating" comes later in a marriage.
Like, two people can have 20, 25 years.
One of them is done with sex.
One of them actually does not want to have sex anymore.
What is that other person supposed to do?
Are they supposed to submit to having their sexual life
unilaterally declared dead?
Or are they supposed to divorce?
What if they can't divorce?
What if their partner is dependent on them
for health insurance or economically dependent on them
or they have small children?
I look at that situation and go,
"Well, there are two options there.
You can leave, or you can cheat."
And sometimes cheating is the least-worst option.
**
-What happens in long-term relationship
is that people will often create an illusion of familiarity.
They really think they know the person that's next to them.
In my experience, they often think they do
until they find out the other one has cheated on them,
and then they realize that maybe the person
that lives so close to you, they may be familial,
but they're not necessarily known to you.
-I look at a marriage, and I see a history --
these two people together.
I see children. I see property.
I see two extended families that have knit together.
I see a network of friends,
neighbors, other relationships --
all these people emotionally invested in this partnership.
Somebody cheated.
And "the people who think
that I put too much importance on sex" say,
"Oh, no, no, no. You must discard all of this.
Divorce and the trauma of it.
Traumatize your children. Rip your lives apart.
Rip these two extended families apart.
Force friends and relatives and neighbors to choose sides."
They put so much weight on that one sexual transgression.
There's a higher loyalty than just,
"I didn't touch anybody else, ever, over 50 years."
[ Swing music plays ]
When non-monogamous behavior destroys a relationship,
we all hear about it.
When non-monogamy saves a marriage,
it never gets the credit.
-Very few of us these days
expect to live our whole lives
having sex with only one person.
-We generalize this idea that the only healthy relationship
is one man and one woman, and the fact is,
most of those don't even work out.
-Who were you really with --
That -- That little, blonde secretary from the office?
-Because the mistake, I think, we made in,
like, the '50s and '40s and '60s
was instead of giving women the same freedom
that men had always enjoyed,
we imposed on men the same limitations
and restrictions that women had always endured.
-[ Sobbing ] -The divorce rate's over 50%,
and the amount of affairs is even larger,
and most police calls are for domestic violence, you know?
We're not very good at two people getting along, period.
-And yet, despite the massive rates of dissatisfaction,
lack of female orgasm, and infidelity in relationships,
we're still fed this story
that that's the way it's supposed to be
and if it's not working for you,
there's something wrong with you.
-We talk about intimacy.
People talk a lot about intimacy.
But they have intimacy with their friends.
They have intimacy with relatives.
They have intimacy with other people,
but the sex thing,
there seems, almost, I think,
this superstitious aura around it that,
that thing, you can't have that thing with everyone else.
Everything else you do in a relationship
you can do with anyone else, but somehow, this sex thing,
you can't have with anybody else.
-You get a million letters in an advice column,
and it's amazing how often the same, like, sentences pop up
in a million different letters
from a million different couples.
"But I would take a bullet for him."
"I would walk through fire for her."
"I can't forgive."
It's, like, how is forgiving harder than getting shot?
-Right.
-But that seems to be people's hang-up.
-If one of you were to slip up and be with someone else,
would that be grounds for ending your marriage?
-Probably. -Yeah.
-His suitcase and crap would be in the front yard.
-I'd never talk to him again.
-Oh, yeah, for sure. Straight up, just like that.
Even if I was in love with them, how can you respect yourself
if you're gonna get back with somebody who cheats on you?
-I was in Cambodia shooting music videos
for a Cambodian hip-hop band.
And she comes over to me and puts her hand on me.
"You got to meet my daughter."
-I didn't want to have anything to do with it,
and then I sat down
next to this incredibly good-looking, cool guy,
and that was it.
-We fell in love.
-We were together for five years before we got married.
It felt very safe and nurturing
and different than what I had had growing up.
I was definitely attracted to the fact
that he'd grown up in a family
where the parents had been together,
basically, their whole lives.
-I had a picture-perfect childhood
with a lot of stability and a lot of routine,
which is something that, having kids now,
is a big priority for us.
-We were the first of our friends to get married.
We were really young. -Hmm.
-And we were also the first of our friends to have kids.
-A lot of folks around us, friends,
were still just sort of wild and crazy
as we were settling into this.
-Having kids is incredibly tiring and intense
and overwhelming, but we work so well as a team
that it was actually incredibly attractive
to see him become a father.
That rebonded us again.
-And I think what's interesting, too,
about any long-term relationship
is that you sort of fall in and out of love with each other.
-We have -- and had -- such a close bond,
and I felt so incredibly loved by him.
It was never a question of whether we were gonna be monogamous or not.
It just sort of was our life, and we were such a pair.
**
-Non-monogamous people say,
"Because I care about you so much,
I want you to have other experiences like that
with other people.
Never would I want to deprive you of that.
I want you to be able to have other experiences
that are meaningful of that sort with other people.
And it makes me happy to be able to give this to you."
It's a very different relationship.
-Polyamory is the idea
that you can be in more than one loving relationship.
It's a different model than monogamy.
-It is a model in which you actually say,
"One can love more than one person at the same time,
and one can construct a system
that can incorporate those multiple loves."
-Most married gay men,
after they've been together for five years or so,
are in, either in action or in open verbal agreement,
an open sexual relationship.
This is to say that they reserve
the emotional sympathy for each other,
but they're having casual sex with other people.
They realize that our biological compulsion
to have sex with other people doesn't go away
the minute you put a marriage ring on.
-A friend of ours came to stay with us,
and he told us that he and his wife had an open marriage.
And we're like, "What?"
No one we knew had ever talked about that
or been in a relationship like that.
It kind of sparked this thing between us,
where we thought, "Why not? Let's see what happens."
We had had nine years of monogamy
without even considering not having it.
Sandy was brave enough to allow me to kind of start
a relationship with this other person,
and that was the beginning of our exploration.
That was three years ago?
-The lessons of polyamory
that are applicable to people who are monogamous as well
is the idea that your partner
does not need to be everything for you
and that you can take responsibility
for getting your needs met.
So, for instance, I don't like to do adventure sports.
They make me feel like I'm going to die.
My partner can go and do that with somebody else.
I like to go to dorky policy conferences all day long.
My partner doesn't want to do that, and that's fine.
-I have been on quite a journey
from, like, utter shame to utter celebration of my sexuality.
I'm the daughter
of a fundamentalist, conservative Christian minister,
and I was hard-core Jesus girl until I was about 22.
Vonnegut said, "Every argument in a marriage boils down to,
'You're not enough people for me.'"
We thought we invented polyamory, absolutely.
I'm thrilled to have since read all the literature
and met many wonderful people,
but at the time, it felt really scary
because of how much we cared about each other.
**
-I've been with Terry for almost 20 years,
and we've been together through thick and thin
and we've raised a kid together.
But because we're publicly non-monogamous,
I get letters every fucking day from people,
saying, "You don't really love each other.
You're not really committed."
They will say, "Every relationship
I've ever been in has been monogamous."
And I will write them back and say,
"How many relationships are you talking about?"
And they will say, "Oh, you know, I'm 35,
and I've had five committed, monogamous relationships" --
that you've ended for newness, for novelty, for new love.
You've had to discard these people one at a time.
I have never discarded Terry, he's never discarded me,
and we are less committed than you with the five exes?
-Yeah, so you're pro-commitment. That's what's --
-I am pro-commitment. -And all of the other benefits
that come from what otherwise people think is only possible
in a monogamous relationship.
-Right. And sexual exclusivity is the enemy of commitment.
-Polyamory is already socially acceptable.
We don't call it polyamory. We call it divorce.
So, John marries Susan, and they have two kids together,
and then they divorce.
And John still has a relationship with Susan and the kids
because, you know, John has to be in the kids' life.
And John goes off and marries Samantha.
My brother, for example, has been divorced four times, right?
Does that mean that he's failed to love all his previous wives?
No. So we already accept the fact
that it's quite possible
to love more than one human being at a time.
Anybody who tells you otherwise
probably shouldn't have more than just one child.
-With kids, you open your heart in a way where you understand
that you can love multiple people fully
and at the same time.
**
-I personally am a polyamorous woman and a queer woman.
I've had a long-term male partner whom I live with
and a long-term female partner.
I've never been unfaithful, and I don't want to be.
And so I've sought out a relationship
in which we can both have the freedom, with full honesty
and checking in with each other,
to have relationships with other people.
-My wife's French. -Mm-hmm.
-You edit this carefully. We were married in 1976.
We have a lot of similar interests
and, more importantly, points of view on the world.
We're best friends.
For sure, we're soul mates.
I'm polyamorous.
-I knew that conventional marriage
didn't feel right for me,
and so I've decided that I want to be out
in order to give other people an image of possibility.
-For me, polyamory, or being polyamorous,
means that I can be in love -- in love --
with more than one person at the same time.
-I found it incredibly attractive
that he was so brave and willing to let me do that.
And all our friends were like, "You guys are nuts.
This is gonna ruin your relationship.
You're gonna completely,
you know, drift away from each other."
And we found the opposite to be true.
We found that, because we kind of went into it
with pretty radical honesty,
we had so much more faith in each other,
and it rebonded us...
-Hmm. -...and made us
more attracted to each other.
It's hot.
-It was me and my first girlfriend.
So, one of the things we started talking about,
"You're attracted to this person.
Why shouldn't we make out with them?
I mean, what will that do? You and I are secure.
We know we're not gonna leave each other.
It was amazing to have that experience of a new person
but also have the comfort of,
"This is -- I have this long-term relationship."
-Most relationships,
there's a place where each individual says,
"Hey, I need to go. I need my time.
I need my time to grow,
and then I can come back and give more."
This feels like an iteration, or a version, of that.
-The point is to have more love in your life
and to have deeper connections.
-No matter what happens or where we go
or whatever direction,
we always seem to come back to each other
and reconnect and share our experiences.
-If, all of a sudden, polyamory was widely accepted,
what would that do for the way we think of property at large?
What would that do for the way we think of
who we have duties to
and who we're responsible to?
Instead of two fundamentally different experiences --
the one I have with my partner
and then the way I feel about strangers in the street --
they start to blend and bleed together more.
You don't put all of your compassion and passion
and generosity into one person.
-I mean, I also think it definitely --
It takes a certain personality type.
This is not for everybody.
-As part of our research,
we went to a free-love commune in Portugal.
I can see by you rolling your eyes and --
-Love ain't free. Sex isn't free.
-Do you think -- -There's costs.
There's consequences.
There's other people's lives in the balance.
-Well, their attitude was, like,
"We can provide stability as a group
and as a community for the kids,
which is more than this kind of rupture
that happens when the divorce happens."
-I agree with that. You know, it takes a village.
I agree with Hillary.
The nuclear family isolated,
by itself in a ranch house in the suburbs,
without elders around,
without other community members involved or intimate
in the lives of the children, that is an aberration.
-We are here in the most remarkable project,
called the Peace Research Center of Tamera.
-This is the place, the edge place,
of actually finding the ways of the heart,
the ways of connection between human beings.
It's really about finding ways to reopen our hardened hearts.
-You were saying last night that some of the other women
were offering their partners to you?
-Yes. -What was that like?
-My eyes nearly fell out my head...
[ Chuckles ]
...because it's so countercultural.
-How did they do it? What did they say?
-I was talking about a real terror
of being back in relationship
after being single and celibate for a while.
And one of the women said,
"You know, my lover is so gorgeous and so tender,
and if it would really help you, go.
You have my blessing.
If he can help you in your healing process,
I would love that."
-Women want to express their sexual nature
as much as men do,
particularly if they are allowed to bloom
and if the whole sort of overlay of patriarchal stickers --
you know, "slut" and so forth if you show your desires --
and you are allowed to really express your wish
for sexuality, intimacy, love, and so forth,
then you start to bloom.
Most women never bloom in our society.
-It takes so much work and so much processing,
and every time someone new comes into your life,
you have to navigate
all the personalities and issues that come up.
-Is it harder to be left by two women
than to be left by one? -Oh, totally.
I had totally committed love
and, you know, beautiful erotic relationships
with two amazing people.
Then, when it went wrong, I had double the heartbreak.
And for some reason, I never imagined that.
I always thought, "You know, that's one cool thing
about this setup, is if someone left me,
there would be another person there
and that would ease my heartbreak a little bit."
I never imagined that they would both leave at the same time.
And they're still together.
-The sociologist, 100 years ago, Georg Simmel,
pointed out that there's these inherent differences
between a group of two and a group of three or more.
In a group of two, you can't have secrets,
because if we come out in the morning
and the milk is spilled and there's only two of us,
we both know who did it.
Either you did it or I did it, and I know, if I didn't do it,
that you did it or I know that I did it.
In a group of three, you can never know.
You can know that you didn't do it,
but you can't know who of the other two did it.
With a group of three or more, you get politics.
You can get two ganging up against one.
You can get one who tries to divide and conquer
the other two.
-My little brother is polyamorous,
and he's trying really, really hard to make it work
because he believes in it.
But I've noticed that all it's ever really brought him is pain.
It's like communism.
It's a great idea, but good luck making it work.
**
-I think this is a real, major,
and probably unresolvable conflict in people's minds.
I believe that human beings have the capacity
for monogamy or polygamy.
I think that we have impulses in both directions
and that we'll do a lot better
if we recognize that we have both impulses
and that we're going to be conflicted about it
and that we need to talk about it honestly
and that not everybody is going to resolve the problem
in the same way.
I don't think there's one right answer to this.
Some couples are going to find
that monogamy is so important to them as a value
that they're going to have to work hard
on ways to wall off their sexual relationship
from the sexual temptations around them.
-Monogamy and marriage have been thought of
in lots of different ways,
and it hasn't always involved love.
And it hasn't always involved the set of obligations
in relationships that it does right now.
But we also have to remember that it's an ideal,
and ideals are often very hard to achieve.
-We can do better than this.
But here I am.
You know, I'm 64 years old,
having spent a long life
trying to figure out better ways to do it,
and I'm still, you know...
I can't say I know a great deal more than I did when I was 18.
[ Chuckles ]
-Having grown so much out from the experience,
I ask myself, like, "Maybe it was for the best, right?"
Do you ever tell people, like, "That's it.
Maybe you should split up now."
-I won't tell people, "No, you know what?
You just need to throw in the towel."
I'm still a firm believer in monogamy.
The notion of monogamy is no longer this archaic idea
where it has to mean kind of sexual deprivation and monotony.
I think it can be a very vibrant kind of institution or construct
that provides some stability for people to grow.
-We have reached, I think, a world-historic paradox,
that we expect more of the marriage relationship
than ever before in history,
but we no longer think that marriage
is such a vital institution that everybody has to enter it.
So, when a marriage works today,
I think that it's arguably more fulfilling sexually,
emotionally, more fair -- definitely more fair --
more passionate than ever before in history.
But there are also more alternatives to marriage.
And when a marriage doesn't live up to those ideals,
it seems less bearable to people.
-And if people think getting married
is the only way they can fall in love
and have relationships, that's a sad prospect,
because then, what they get told
when the relationship comes to an end
is that they made a terrible mistake
and they must have been terribly stupid.
Right?
How could they have been so dumb?
This wasn't the real one.
This wasn't true love.
This wasn't the one-and-only.
Well, we'll have to try for the next one-and-only.
-We wish that everybody had the ideal marriage,
and we hope that it could be an absolutely pervasive phenomenon,
but it might be beyond the capacity of many people
to achieve that.
That doesn't undermine it as an ideal.
-If your spiritual, ethical value in life
is located in your monogamous marriage,
then good for you.
My parents have been married 52 years.
And, as far as I know, they've been pretty damn happy
every one of those years -- and monogamous.
And Mom and Dad, if you see this,
I don't want to hear about it if you weren't, you know?
-So, we've been married over 50 years.
-When I saw her, she just seemed to be the ideal.
I learned later, she wasn't, but...
[ Both laugh ]
**
-I am his -- like, no one else's.
I'm not embarrassed by it at all.
He's mine, also.
-We've grown so much together over so many years.
-I just cannot imagine being with anyone else.
-Is monogamy and marriage
something that you would recommend,
that people should try and preserve?
-I would say love should be preserved.
Whether that means getting married,
I never knew that we had a choice.
-I can't imagine any other... -I mean, yeah.
What would life be like without her?
I mean, it would be meaningless.
My whole life has been with this woman,
and it's been great.
So I don't have any regrets.
**
-"Dear Dan, it's been four years since my divorce.
I've learned so much during the making of this film,
thanks, in part, to you
and all the other people I talked to.
Of course, there aren't any easy answers
to these questions I've been asking,
are there?
On the contrary, it seems that the deeper I dig,
the more complicated it all gets.
One thing is certain, though --
Love is universal, but it's a delicate process.
It requires constant nurturing
through communication and honesty.
My hope is that we've helped people have conversations
that they might not otherwise have had
and maybe think, without shame,
about the relationship model that could work best for them.
The other conclusion I've come to
is that change is constant -- in ourselves,
in our relationships, and in the culture at large.
I started with an ending,
so now it seems appropriate to end with a beginning --
an uncertain one, a risky one, an exciting one,
and one that would have been impossible
without having gone on this journey with you.
Will it work? Who knows?
What counts as working, anyway?
That seems to change all the time, too.
I'll let you know the next time we talk.
Thanks again.
Yours, Tao."
**