"My Friend Just Asked Me for the Most Absurd Favor. It Involves My Husband."
The uptopians v flaming brains
Original column: How To Do It, March 17 2024
My take: The LW and her husband have an open marriage, which has been “doing well.” But recently, a friend who is going through a divorce asked to “borrow” the LW’s husband. This “put flames in [her] brain.” She wanted to slap her friend. She responded “curtly” and the conversation ended “coldly.”
Now she’s bewildered by her own reaction. What happened? Other friends have borrowed her husband before!
How To Do It quotes author Tristan Taormino to the effect that “jealousy is really an umbrella term for a constellation of feelings including envy, competitiveness, insecurity, inadequacy, possessiveness, fear of abandonment, feeling unloved, and feeling left out.” The columnist advises the LW to figure out which one of those she’s feeling.
“Envy, competitiveness, insecurity, inadequacy, possessiveness, fear of abandonment, feeling unloved, and feeling left out.” What a long list of nasties! I certainly hope the open-marriage people don’t bully the LW into confessing to any of them. The likelier explanation for her flaming brain is simple, and actually good: She loves her husband.
Jealousy is perfectly natural, when someone threatens to insert herself into the intimacy that should belong only to a loving couple.
Love—true love—excludes others from its inner, intimate core. That core is where sex happens. It’s also where the two people talk about things they don’t discuss with anyone else—sex often opens the door to those conversations. It’s where each of them is most exposed and most vulnerable, and it calls for perfect trust. That’s why each partner makes the nurture of that very private core, which they share with no one else, their top priority.
There are cases where kids have to take priority, but that’s a topic for another post. My point is that admitting a third adult to what should be the couple’s sanctuary will only end, sooner or later, in the LW’s “flames in the brain.”
Some might wonder whether love actually has to exclude others, but that’s a question for the utopians, who don’t live on earth. So let’s ask a better question, instead: Why do people torture themselves to work against nature, when working with it is so much easier?
The poor LW is now deeply confused. She writes: “I don’t know what to do about this or why this came on so suddenly for something that isn’t that big of a deal.” But because she loves her husband, it’s a very big deal after all.
Instead of castigating herself because she can’t make this work, the LW should tell her husband it’s time to close that open door. She may find that he resists. It wouldn’t shock me to learn that some wives get pressured into this. The differences between men and women on this topic is, again, a subject for another post, and it’ll probably be a long one. Suffice it to say now that if this LW was pressured, she must stand her ground, whether or not her marriage survives the crisis.
Intimacy with a spouse is not to be breached. If the LW continues to tolerate this, in direct opposition to her perfectly natural desire not to, she will destroy herself from within.
Chance this letter is fake: No chance.
I like to guess that for some people, the open marriage thing could work. But if it ain’t working, it ain’t working. Actors talking to the camera can work too, theoretically. But when it flops, it flops pretty definitively.
To be a contrarian here (and also speaking as someone who finds the idea of an open marriage baffling): I am always nervous about arguments from nature—in this case, the suggestion that in having an open marriage the letter writer is working against nature. There are lots of things that over time have been deemed natural that we now reject—e.g., women's inferiority to men, some races' inferiority to some other races, the institution of slavery.
Moreover, the question wasn't why she was jealous that another woman wanted to sleep with her husband, it was why she was jealous in this case when she had not been in other cases. If she really was not jealous in other cases, then not everyone is wired the same way, and what is natural for some (or most) is not natural for others. Perhaps for some people open marriages are workable and suitable. Whether they are good for children, society, etc. are other questions.