Atlantic Monthly has a very provocative cover story this month on what same-sex marrieds have to teach us straights about wedded-bliss. However, their research delivers exactly what it promises, but in precisely the opposite way.
Liza Munday, a noted science writer, honestly illustrates the following about same-sex marriages and long-term relationships:
The Good:
They don’t live by old-timey gender stereotypes, based the whole-sale assumption that this can be healthy for a relationship. (As if today’s young women are dutifully subservient to their men like so many of their grandmothers were.)
The Bad:
- Lesbian relationships break up at stunningly high rates, dramatically higher than male/male relations, male/female cohabitors and male/female marrieds.
- Lesbian also experience, after a time, the cessation of sex in their relationships, so much so that it’s developed its own name: “lesbian bed death”.
- Male/male marriages and long-term relationships are highly likely to have deals worked out between partners which allow for extra-marital sexual engagements. Boys will be boys with out women to help them not be. “Fidelity” for these men is defined as merely living within the parameters to their extra-curricular activities, clearly a very different definition of marriage than others have.
First Things features my fuller break-down of the Atlantic’s piece here.