A little over three years ago I found myself in a place I had never pictured myself before. I was dating again after separating from my husband of 12 years, and I had met someone I really clicked with and instantly fell for…and now this person was telling me that he could never been in an exclusive relationship with me. Not with me, not with anyone. I had no idea what to do. I decided to continue seeing him. I… Read more
My personal journey toward ethical non-monogamy has seen its share of good days and bad alike. I’ve made a number of mistakes along the way, trusted the wrong people, and have fallen in love more than once. I’ve also broken more than one heart, and have learned I’m not very good at forgiving myself when I do (nor have they always been, for that matter). So you can imagine my relief upon finally finding a partner who can not only… Read more
Writing about sex is hard. Heh. And it’s not just because the innuendos keep coming again and again whether you want them to or not. What makes it so…um…difficult…is that people cannot stop telling you what you should do, how you should think, and how you should talk about your own sexuality. It’s not just religious people, either. It’s everybody. It’s in Our DNA In case you haven’t yet discovered this, the things nonreligious people dislike about religious culture are… Read more
Is monogamy natural? Well, yes and no. But, more importantly, is that really the right question we should be asking? I’m starting here because it seems to be where a lot of people go with this discussion. But before we can even answer this question, we first have to ask what we mean by “natural” anyway. And for that matter we need to settle on what we mean by “monogamy” as well. Most would agree monogamy means having sex with… Read more
For those of you familiar with fundamentalist movements, particularly the IFB (Independent Fundamental Baptist), you’ll know these movements tend to be rife with sexual abuse and cover-ups. Because the IFB maintains ideologies of separatism and elitism, they tend to deal with their issues “in house.” The trend is: keep it in the church, don’t tell anyone (authorities included), blame the victim, and re-locate the offender to another church in another town (and don’t forget his severance package). Well, in a… Read more
This past Sunday at church, my daughters heard a sermon (they still attend with their mother) by Owen Strachan, a visiting preacher who until recently headed up the Biblical Council on Manhood and Womanhood, a conservative evangelical think tank created to preserve and defend the traditional American family structure. The CBMW would argue their rigid family model is pulled straight from the Bible itself and not from American culture. But I have yet to see them touting anything like the household… Read more
[Author Note: I wrote this piece when reflecting on my experience of early sexual abuse and then later, being trafficked. I could not articulate a lot of these words before now, because they felt lodged so deeply inside me in a place that I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, reach. CONTENT WARNING: It will almost certainly be triggering to survivors of sexual abuse. I actually WANT it to be triggering – but not to survivors. I want it to trigger… Read more
Remember the documentary March of the Penguins? It’s about the emperor penguins’ annual journey across Antarctica. The movie is a beautiful story, full of tender moments. As we watch a courtship between penguins unfold, the father selflessly protects their egg and the chick struggles to survive infancy. It’s been over ten years since I first saw the movie, but there was one part that always stood out for me. When the penguins began their courtship, I heard Morgan Freeman explain that emperor penguins are monogamous – sort… Read more
Remember the documentary March of the Penguins? It’s about the emperor penguins’ annual journey across Antarctica. The movie is a beautiful story, full of tender moments. As we watch a courtship between penguins unfold, the father selflessly protects their egg and the chick struggles to survive infancy. It’s been over ten years since I first saw the movie, but there was one part that always stood out for me. When the penguins began their courtship, I heard Morgan Freeman explain that emperor penguins are monogamous – sort… Read more
Earlier this past week I asked my friends on Facebook what they would change if they could somehow change one thing about the dating process. A number of men intimated they wish it were a more common expectation for women to make the first move, like the way that it works on Bumble. So the next day I posed a thought experiment: What if tomorrow morning you woke up in a world in which women had to make the first… Read more
