We hear a lot these days about the institution of marriage being in trouble, and there is no doubt it is. But why is it in trouble? It's a question that has no single or simple answer.
In an era when same sex marriage is beginning to be sanctioned by a few of the more liberal leaning states, some people would have us believe same sex marriage is a deadly threat to the whole institution of marriage. These people go on and on about how God intended marriage to be between one man and one woman. I guess they've conveniently forgotten about such major servants of God as King David who loved and had ties to many women and at least one man.
There is no denying, the facts concerning marriage are worrisome to those who feel marriage is an important institution. At the present time over half of new marriages in the United States end in divorce. And if you value marriage you'd do well to get it right the first time; because if you marry, divorce and remarry, you join a group of people in which 67% of second marriages fail. Not getting it right the second time is even more dire. If you're unwise enough to marry a third time, your marriage has a 75% chance of failure.
Obviously the
idea of marriage is important to many people, but marriage itself--not so much. The statistics speak for themselves. For well over 50% of the people, there are other things more important than marriage, things that cause their marriages to break down and end in divorce.
Perhaps the high rate of failure in their parents' marriages is one of the factors turning young people away from marriage and turning them to cohabiting arrangements without the benefit of marriage. At the present time in the United States, there are well over 6 million couples who are living together without being married. Unfortunately though, such arrangements do little or nothing to increase one's chances of living happily ever after. Over 80% of these couples break up eventually. Of those who do eventually marry, only 12% see their marriage survive for more than ten years.
The statistics are disheartening to say the least. The emotional and economic costs behind these statistics are staggering. Very few marriages end quietly, calmly and friendly. Even those couples who vow to end their marriages without acrimony have no more chance of keeping that vow than they had keeping their original marriage vow. Most divorces are bitter as well as emotionally and economically draining. Many even endure for a time in violence and then end in violence too. Some even end in murder. One reads about such things almost every week in the news.
At some point, society is going to have to begin to ask itself difficult and searching questions about what is behind this carnage that is modern marriage. What has to change to stop the divorces? Obviously, as a society we have unrealistic expectations of marriage and unrealistic expectations of our individual abilities to make it work in the long term.
The facts are that 60% of married men cheat; and contrary to what daytime television tells women these days, all those married men are not cheating on their wives with other married men. Over 40% of married women also cheat on their husbands.
As both I and my marriage get older, I think more and more often about what it is that has allowed my own marriage to approach the 50 year mark. What advice would I give to someone contemplating marriage that might increase their odds of building a successful one? I find that even from inside a happy and successful marriage of almost 50 years, its hard to put a finger on what it is that allowed our marriage to endure. And some of the things I think allowed it to endure will draw anger and condemnation from others who, in spite of their own marriage failures, are still quite happy to criticize based on their own self-righteousness, anger, and bitterness from their own experience.
My wife and I started dating when we were only 15 years old. We had known each other since we were 12 years old. It certainly wasn't love at first sight for either of us though my wife says that it wasn't long after our first date that she first thought I might be the one. It wasn't anything like that for me. I can't say that I really remember that first date in any detail. I do remember that it came about not as my own idea at all, but rather because of pressure from my best friend who was a long time friend of hers.
Even at 15, I had "been in love" a couple of times with other girls, at least in love to the extent that a 15 year old boy can be in love. Both relationships had ended badly and not by any decision I had made. In fact, on that first date with the woman who would eventually be my wife I was on the rebound from a breakup with a girl I had dated awhile and with whom I was quite infatuated. When she decided it was over, it hurt. It hurt a lot.
So, eventually, at the urging of my best friend who was a life long friend of hers, I asked her out for a date. Had anyone asked me if there could be anything serious develop between the two of us, I'd have told them they were crazy. But as fate would have it "Sadie Hawkins Day" came around a couple of weeks after that first date and again, somewhat reluctantly on my part, we found ourselves on another date. This time at her request. (Most young people probably have no idea what "Sadie Hawkins Day" was as it has long since become an anachronism; but you can google it by clicking
here.)
I have no idea why the third date took place. I don't remember what I was thinking. I have no idea when I really began to enjoy our time together, but I did. Still, from the beginning there was so much against our building a successful relationship. There was my own lack of interest at first, but that was far from the only thing.
That life long friend of hers who was my best friend was not just my best friend. He was a friend with benefits, and he had been my sexual partner for four years. And sex between us wasn't a sometimes thing. It was a regular thing and it wasn't just him, there were other guys too. But though I had other sexual partners among my guy friends, he was the primary one at the time. We enjoyed each other sexually with no inhibitions.
That part of Texas, where the caprock ends in an escarpment and the great plains of Texas turn to a gently rolling landscape, was our play ground. His father owned thousands and thousands of acres in that beautiful rolling land. There were seemingly endless square miles of territory to be explored on horseback miles from the nearest road or house, and it was not unusual for the two of us to saddle our horses and ride and explore and play all day. It was a boy's life that every boy should have. It was the very essence of freedom, sexually and otherwise.
When we were sufficiently in the back range, away from everything and everyone but ourselves, our horses and nature, we would strip off our jeans and shirts, strip the saddles and saddle blankets from our horses and ride bareback and bare butt with the wind blowing through our hair, all of our hair. There was something almost spiritual about it. The sandy riverbed stretched for miles uninterrupted by anything not a part of nature. There was a private lake on his dad's property too where his dad kept a small row boat. We would spend hours naked in that boat or on the grassy bank of the lake just fishing and talking and doing whatever we felt like doing. It was a good life. A very good life.
I'm aware that we are all the product of a complicated mix of genetics and life experiences, but male to male sexuality was such an prominent part of my boyhood and such a thoroughly natural part of it that I honestly believe it was and is a natural part of what it means to be a male. No one taught us to be sexual, we simply were sexual. True enough, in the beginning of it all, I was the youngest boy and I was taught by the older boys how to suck cock and how to jack off to orgasm. But those things were just added information to the sexuality that had been a part of me from my earliest memories.
I had always been fascinated with sex long before I knew what sex was. I had been fascinated with my own equipment and what it could do and how it could make me feel. It was a natural thing because it was a part of me that had always been. To me and to most of the other boys in my life, it was a natural as the sun rising in the east each morning. We didn't question the rising of the sun and we didn't question the rising of our cocks to each other's touch.
And the bonds that formed between us were natural too. I am convinced that it is the way boys are meant to be raised. As an adult bisexual male, I have come to believe that inside every man there is that boy who still longs for and needs that absolute unquestioned bond that ties him so closely to another man that sexual expression of it is just a given. And its a bond that is not romantic and it has absolutely nothing to do with nor is it in conflict with love in the way that a man loves his wife. It is simply the respect, the affection and the sense of shared confidences that one man has for another man.
The more I have talked to bisexual men over the years, the more I've read of history, aboriginal culture and the Greek and Roman cultures, the more convinced I have become that the ability for men to forge such bonds has been vital to the rise of civilization itself. Without that enormous pull on men to bond together in mutually beneficial relationships with other men to hunt, to protect and defend their women and children and to pass on their skills and their concept of what it was to be a man to new generations, society as we know it would not exist.
I think that women form similar bonds with other women which were also invaluable to the rise of civilization. In early cultures, women bonded with other women in groups to gather food and resources, to care for children and share the work of providing home and hearth. Even today women are expected to get together with their girlfriends frequently for shopping, talking, laughing and having fun.
With men not so much. Men are only allowed to get together in well organized groups for a specific purpose such as sports or organized hobby pursuits. The difference between men and their friends and women and their friends is that men's sexual equipment is hanging right in front of them. And men like to talk about sex and when they talk about sex, the equipment responds. Sometimes if the relationship is private enough and close enough, hunting buddies or golfing buddies or fishing buddies or camping buddies rediscover the naturalness of buddies with benefits.
Perhaps the only thing missing ultimately for me and the boys that were so much a part of my life back then was the understanding of ourselves and our natural sexuality that would be needed to transition into manhood in a society where the understanding of what it means to be a man was being swept away by the heterosexualization of men and the dawning of an age, dominated by the feminist movement. It was to be an age when women achieved the place in society that they deserved; but unfortunately, it would be an age when being male became a bad thing.
But how could we have known. Society itself had changed the rules and would change them further. Such bonds among boys and men were no long understood. Worse yet, religious dogmas had labeled them as sin and society had labeled them as homosexual, a term that was less than seventy years old when I became a sexually aware boy.
The awful truth is neither we nor anyone else had much understanding of it all back in those days. We boys didn't talk about it; we just lived it and enjoyed it in what we could not know were the last summers when boys and men would be allowed to be wild at heart. It wasn't a subject one learned in school. It wasn't something one discussed with parents. It just was. We didn't question if we were gay or straight. I don't think we had any better understanding of what it meant to be gay than we had of what we were doing. As it turned out not a single one of us was gay. No one remained single. Now, all these years later, I have learned that there is good reason why none of us turned out to be gay. What we were engaged in had nothing whatsoever to do with homosexuality. The name for what we were engaged in is
Frot (which rhymes with hot).
Frot is the normal and natural celebration of masculinity. It's hard to believe but even in the United States, that normal and natural acceptance of masculinity has ceased to be recognized as cause for celebration only in the last 100 years or so. It is still celebrated today in first world countries such as Japan where every March 15 is National Penis Day. A day when the penis and the gift of masculinity are openly celebrated.
Men who practice Frot believe all guys have same sex feelings and fantasies. They believe its not a big deal simply because guys have sex with guys, always have. Always will. And they believe all guys have fantasies about sex with guys, always have. Always will. It is part of the human condition. It is part of being a man.
But though sex between two men is part of the human condition in Frot philosophy, it says nothing about the conditional role of men. For men it is simply an activity that excites their shared masculinity. For men other than homosexual men, and sometimes for those men too, sexual acts with another man have absolutely no implications beyond the act itself as far as the men are concerned. They do it simply because they can. Simply because they are hard wired to do it.
As with any philosophy, I don't agree completely with Frot philosophy. In their world view, all sexual labels would cease to exist. Men would simply be men - sexual creatures. They would be neither heterosexual, bisexual nor homosexual. After years of living my own life and years of talking to other men from every walk of life from priest to lawyer to carpenter and everything in between, I have no doubt that Frot is on target when it say sex between men is just part of being a man. I just think that there are men who don't want anything whatsoever to do with women sexually. And I think there are a few men, very few, who have never so much as had a passing thought about sex with another man. Homosexuality is a reality as is bisexuality and Frot.
It's hard to believe that the words heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual are themselves throughly modern words. They didn't exist in our vocabulary until the 19th century. In the Greek and Roman world at the time of Christ they didn't need such words. The fact that men had sex with men was no secret. It was a cultural norm in Greek and Roman societies. An important thing to remember is that men in that culture had sex with men just as their fathers and grandfathers had before them. Having sex with men had no implications whatsoever concerning marriage and family. Young men had sex with other men. They also married and impregnated their wives. That was just the way it was. They didn't need a name for such behavior. It was just natural.
Today, unfortunately, the situation has changed. In our uptight and Right minded society dominated by the self-righteous and dogmatic radical and evangelical Christian Right, what was a natural, normal and good thing among boys and men has now come to be seen as perversion and an all out threat to the institution of marriage and to women everywhere.
If it really was a threat to the institution of marriage and to women everywhere, the institution of marriage would have faded away long ago because men have always had sexual relationships with other men.
When I look back on my boyhood knowing what I know of todays world, I am struck by the innocence of it all. We were all simply friends. No one played the bully. No one gave commands. No one issued threats. We simply took great pleasure in being males together and doing male things. I can't help but think that many marriages would be stronger today if both the men and the women in those marriages better understood the natural state of male sexuality. Women perceive male to male sex as a threat to them and to their marriage. Many times it is not. It is simply the expression of a male bond that has nothing to do with anything outside that male bond. On in the case of a homosexual man who is married yet cannot form a proper relationship with his wife, is their danger to the marriage from his becoming sexually active with another man.
The fact that times are changing and homosexual men can now live more openly with all the benefits of society at their disposal will mean there will be fewer homosexual men in marriages they have no business being in in future years.
Without anything to base my opinions and my judgement on other than my own experience, my own feelings and the overarching norms of society, I married at age 18 assuming that all the male to male sex had been nothing other than a substitute for and a preparation for "normal" heterosexual life. I assumed that being a married man with heterosexual sex, more or less, available to me at anytime, male to male sex was a boyhood thing that would no longer be a part of my life. There was no need for me to tell my wife I was a bisexual man. I didn't know it myself at the time. I assumed I was a straight guy who would take great joy in heterosexual sex and leave homosexual sex behind. The first part of that proved to be the case. I loved straight sex. Leaving male to male sex behind became an unexpected problem.
The wedding was formal and elaborate, everything my new wife had dreamed of since she was a small girl. Truthfully, to me as I suspect it is to most guys, the wedding itself meant very little to me. I just did what I had to do and showed up for the ceremony. I'd have been just as happy getting the task taken care of in a small ceremony in front of a justice of the peace with our immediate families watching and getting on with the sex.
The planning of it all was incredible to me. Fortunately, I wasn't expected to get too involved, just do what I was told to do. The expense of it all was staggering to me. Fortunately, that didn't fall on my shoulders either. Some cost fell to my parents, but her parents bore the brunt of it all. They could afford it and were seemingly more than thrilled to provide the wedding their daughter had always dreamed of.
Looking back, I've got to say I don't know how they did it; or, at least I didn't until our own daughter married. I wonder now if my own in-laws had the same fears I had on my own daughter's wedding day. My daughter was several years older than her mother and I had been when she married. She had always been an intelligent and pleasant child. She had never given us a moment's problem until her late teens and then, as so many women do, she developed a fascination with bad boys. The inevitable came to pass. She decided to marry one. Her mother and I were very distressed about her decision; but there was really nothing we could say or do that would both change her decision; and at the same time, preserve our relationship with her. So like her mother before her, she had the big wedding. I walked her down the aisle and gave her hand to her bad boy knowing that as sure as I was breathing, there was not one shred of hope for the marriage.
I've got to hand it to my daughter. I was proud of her. She tried mightily to make it work. She endured three long miserable years of hell determined till the end to make it work, overlooking his faults and his flaws. But in spite of everything she gave to the marriage, he gave nothing. In the end there were only three good things about the marriage:
- There were no children
- He never physically abused her
- He finally fucked up enough in one utterly devastating show of stupidity and selfishness that she could no longer convince herself that she could make the marriage work.
So, now I often wonder if my wife's dad walked her down the aisle and gave her hand to an 18 year old kid thinking much the same thing. I'll never know. He died a few months later. But I think he'd be happy to know that in spite of everything we're closing in on 50 years; and in spite of everything, we're happy and still in love with each other, probably more so than we were at age 18.
It's hard to say why a marriage with so much against it has endured, but I think I understand much of it though its difficult to put into words. I think the first seed of success was planted in that first initial dating period. We were never infatuated with one another. We never fell in love. We were friends who grew into love. Though we were and are very different individuals, we complemented each other. She is introverted and slow to trust; but when she gives her trust its a done deal. I'm extroverted and intuitive. I like people and I enjoy interacting with people. She would rather observe people than interact with them. Money is important to me because it can buy me things I enjoy. Money is important to her because it brings financial security. I'm always in charge. She happy to follow a reasonable lead. I'm flamboyant and supremely confident. She is practical with a quiet confidence. I force her out into the world. I force things into her world which she enjoys but would never reach for herself. She restrains me with just the gentlest look or word and she's always there when my exuberance results in my taking a fall.
In all our years of marriage we have only fought about three things:
It's difficult to explain why we fought about sex; and the fact is, I didn't understand it all myself at the time. My wife has always been playful and sexually giving. She has always been very good at keeping sex interesting and exciting and I've enjoyed the immense benefits of that. But at the same time because we married so young and took on the responsibilities of building a new life together from a young age with nothing to start with, there were many years of hard work necessary to make it all unfold.
Kids came along and sometimes my wife just had too much going on in her life with working a full time job while also pursuing a bachelor of science degree and then an advanced degree and an internship. There were time when she simply wasn't in the mood for sex. As for me, I was was helpful to her. I helped take care of the kids on weekends when I was home from the road. I had no problem in helping to keep the house clean. I cooked whenever I was at home. I understood that the work she was doing, the schooling and the internships would pay off eventually in a better life for us and our family. But the truth is I didn't stop being a man and I wasn't quite as understanding as I should have been about being turned down for sex from time to time. I never wanted sex except when I was feeling good or feeling bad or feeling frustrated or when it had been more than 24 hours.
But to me, there was a good side to my constant need for sex with my wife. I really enjoyed it, needed it and an enthusiastic participant in it. That was reassuring for a guy who didn't want to be gay but nevertheless also had a constant and now unfulfilled desire for male to male sex. In those pre internet days I thought I was the only married guy in the world with desires like mine. I didn't know what to label myself, but I was sure I wasn't gay.
The kids all too quickly grew up and moved out on their own. All the hard work had paid off and money was no longer a problem, so fighting became a very rare thing for us. Our relationship, which had always been sound simply grew stronger with each passing year.
As the demands of career and family lessened, as money became available for things other than necessities and as the monkey on my back began to claw and bite ever harder I continued to struggle with my seemingly inescapable desire for male to male sex. Finally the internet came along, I bought my first computer and I discovered, much to my amazement, that I was not alone. There were millions of married men like me out there. It took me only a very short time to find one who was to become my buddy with benefits for ten years.
During those ten years, I read everything I could get my hands on about male bisexuality. I found the subject to be broad and controversial. Some say it doesn't exist. Some say it is a passing stage, a precursor to homosexuality. Some say it is a biological norm that has been dislodged from society by the dogma of fundamentalist Christianity. Most researchers admit that the topic simply has not yet been effectively and exhaustively researched. I agree, but my opinion based on my own life and what I know about the lives of the hundreds of men I've talked to over the years is that bisexuality does exist, that some men who are married and really homosexual label themselves as bisexual mistakenly and that male to male sex as part of normal and natural male bonding is in deed a biological norm.
If that is the case, and I believe it to be, each guy has only to find himself in that continuum. I think with all that is being shared by men these days and with more and more research finding oneself will be much much easier than it was in 1950 or 1960.
Men who are homosexual will be homosexual and will live homosexual lives partnered with other homosexual men. Heterosexual men will marry and live their lives with women. Bisexual men will continue to face a challenge. They will have to make decisions about which life they want to lead primarily and how much they are going to say about it to their partners. In the world that is coming, bisexual men will be able to marry a woman or form a legal partnership with another man. Bisexual men who need and/or want sexual relationships with both men and women will continue to face ethical dilemmas about how open they should be with their partners.
But whether a guy is heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual, there is the real possibility that he could build a Frot bond with another man. This bond would be simply a celebration of each man's masculinity and as such would have no implications for relationships outside the bond. Almost by definition these bonds would be long term and not promiscuous. So the threat of disease transmission would be lessened. Also if one looks at the Frot philosophy, he will find that Frot is non-penatrative. It never includes anal sex. That also lessens the possibility of disease transmission.
I don't expect that people everywhere are going to flock to my way of thinking. They are not. And most married women certainly are not going to. Yet, the fact remains and I have verified it over and over and over again through conversations with other married men, that the sexual activity they have with their buddy has nothing to do with their feelings or lack of feelings for their wives. They love their wives. They need their families. They simply need the male to male bond also.
In my own case, when I did tell my wife about my bisexuality, she chose to see it for what it is and more importantly for what it is not. It is not a threat to our marriage or our relationship. That relationship has been and remains strong.
The fact is, I have talked to a number of men whose wives have responded to a situation they did not understand and ended up sacrificing their marriages, their homes, and their social view of themselves for what they perceived as a threat when in actuality it was no threat at all.
Marriage is an institution which is in trouble in the United States and around the world. Simple male bonding, even male bonding that includes sexual activity, is not a threat to one's marriage as far as any male is concerned. That is simply a fact. It is also simply a fact that for some women, perhaps most women, such bonding is a problem. That is their right and their choice. But they should think carefully.
Men engage in sexual activity with other men, always have. Always will. Many men do not comprehend how normal their desires are and they spend years racked by useless guilt over something which is essentially normal. My hope is that men like myself who have chosen to put our own thoughts and our own lives into the open via blogs like this one will help other men to see the normality of what they are thinking and feeling. Perhaps through dialogue over a number of years women too will come to see that men are wired a little differently women and find that to be an acceptable thing.
I don't have the answers to all the ethical questions posed by every relationship between a husband and a wife. I do know that married men have always has sexual encounters with other married men and always will and society has continued to advance.
If every woman could suddenly come to understand the reality of bonding between men that often leads to sexual contact, the present threat to the institution of marriage would not suddenly go away. The threat to marriage is much more complex than male sexuality. But one aspect of the threat would be mitigated.
To save marriage as an institution, it has to meet the needs of real people as they are today and it has to fit into the realities of the world as it is today. It was one thing when people tended to die in their thirties, forties or fifties and when women were completely dependent upon their husbands for support. It is quite another thing when people routinely live healthy lives into their seventies, eighties and nineties and the fastest growing age group is people above 100 years of age. It is quite another thing when women are independent of their husbands in every way and when they do not look to him for their livelihood.
My wife and I have talked often of what different persons we are now than when we married. And its not just my bisexuality. When I married at 18, I had no understanding at all of my sexuality. I didn't even know what I wanted to be when I grew up. My wife was much the same. She had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. The only thing we had going for us when we married was a lot of love, some youthful lust and a great deal of ambition. And we lived in the greatest land of opportunity the world had ever known.
I ended up in a career field that didn't even exist when we were married. My wife's career took a turn she had never considered. We each became totally different people than either of us would have ever imagined. Lust was lost along the way. Love became heavily laced with friendship and an abiding affection and joy in being together. Fortunately, the changes in each of us were along lines that left us on common ground. I don't think either one of us ever expected our marriage to be a fairy tale, and it hasn't been. I think in addition to being lovers when we married we were the best of friends. We still are.
Most importantly, through the years we've been willing to give and to take. There have been times when I've given more than I got. Their have been times when she's given much more than she got. There have been times when we were both pulling together with all we had to keep it going. There have been few times when we were at cross purpose.
Thats the kind of thing that is vital to keeping a marriage healthy.
Jack Scott
Stand Up - Don't Stand for Homophobic Bullying
