New Research: Young Couples Disagree About Whether They’re Monogamous

This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.


I don’t watch a lot of TV these days, but back when I did, there was a subplot on Friends when Rachel & Ross “took a break” in their relationship, during which Ross had sex with someone else. When they got back together, it turned into an ongoing source of drama. Rachel thought that he had cheated because, by her definition, they had still been in a relationship even if they were taking some time apart. Ross didn’t think so since they were “on a break,” which meant to him that the rules of being in their relationship didn’t apply.

Miscommunications of this sort are pretty common, as I’m sure most of you know from …

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Consent, Open Relationships, and Sex-Positivity

One of the difficulties I’ve seen when it comes to discussions and debates around sexual practices and communities of erotic affiliation centers on the notion of consent.

On one side, there are the folks who bring everything back to the question of the individual. The general argument is that if a person consents to a particular act, then there isn’t any reason that they shouldn’t be allowed to do it. Yes, this is a vast oversimplification of a much more complex statement, but it often boils down to the notion that people should be able to anything they want, as long as they and their partner(s) consent to it.

On the other hand, there are people who …

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New Ways to Envision Monogamy

This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.

There’s a new article on ways that people are creating new visions of what monogamy means on the Psychotherapy Networker site. And while The New Monogamy is written for therapists and other mental health professionals, I think that there’s a lot of wisdom there for anyone interested in creating sustainable relationships.

The author, Tammy Nelson, describes some of the shifts that she has seen during her career as a therapist. As she sees it:

People no longer marry for economic, dynastic, or procreative reasons, as they did for millennia; they can’t be compelled to marry by law, religion, or custom; they don’t need to marry to have sex or cohabit or even produce and raise

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