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Sexual
Secrets- Our favorite adult DVD. Click on the picture
above to learn why. |
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Spreading
the Word! Our Reviews at Wild in Secret! |
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The Love
Swing: Our Favorite Sex Product - Period! |
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Clean Mojo
- Body Bare Shaver |
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Couples Living
Apart Together |
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Dr. Robert T. Francoeur
asks, "How much togetherness is healthy?" |
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In the social
exuberance of the Roarin' 1920s, Margaret Mead began her search of a sexual
Eden in the idyllic islands of the South Pacific where innocent children ran
around naked, "night crawling" boys visited girls to ward off insanity with
frequent sex, and both men and women were more or less free to enjoy sex
with multiple partners. Mead's reports of growing up in New Guinea, Samoa,
Bali, in what were then called "primitive societies" are still read today by
those hoping to find or create a modern Garden of Eden.
As with all pioneering research, Mead's accounts of sexual customs left some
interesting questions unanswered. One that has long intrigued me is why
adult South Pacific Islanders chose to live in sex-segregated housing. Men
with men; women with women, even after marriage.
Teenagers and adults in these societies have very positive, "liberal" views
of sexual intimacy and pleasure. These people enjoy sex, and enjoy it
frequently. But not living together in their own private home or apartment,
as we do today. They get together when they want and find a private place to
enjoy themselves, away from others, and then return to the men's or women's
house.
Five hundred years ago, European married couples lived in multi-generation,
multi-family "big houses," with public baths, lots of varied contact among
adults, and practically no privacy. Even a hundred years ago, most of our
ancestors lived in small private homes and apartments usually with several
generations of relatives. The shared space and lack of privacy kept a
married couple's expectations of one-on-one intimacy, both erotic and
non-erotic, within bounds -- "realistic" if you want. Despite many problems
and tensions, some claim this extended family lifestyle had a climate of
marital togetherness and personal expectations that may have been more
healthy than the intense expectations we have today of passionate erotic
love and daily togetherness over many decades in our own private castle.
As our great grandparents moved from farm to city, the role of children in
the family changed. On the farm, children contributed to the family
economics. In the cities, child labor laws gradually converted children into
long-term consumers, dependent on their parents for support through high
school and college. Faced with the cost of raising children into their adult
years, the average European woman today has 1.5 children, compared with 6 to
8 children a hundred years ago. Married couples developed new expectations
of intimacy, togetherness, romanticism and erotic pleasure that please more
demands on the marital bond than ever before in human history.
In the past five years, as I worked on my International Encyclopedia of
Sexuality, I found rates of marriage were declining in most European
countries, while cohabitation, single parent families, and couples with one
or no children are increasing. Strong evidence of major changes in our
patterns of pair-bonding.
Early on, Jelto Drenth and A. Koss Slob, who wrote about sex in The
Netherlands for my Encyclopedia, caught my attention with a single sentence
noting that a child born "out of wedlock" could be born to a cohabiting
couple, a lesbian couple, an unwed homosexual or heterosexual woman, or "a
child in a Living Apart Together (LAT) arrangement."
A second mention of LAT came from Jan Trost in his chapter on Sweden. Given
the lack of hard data on the sexual behavior of Swedish singles in 1996,
Trost suggested that "quite a few of those who are officially classified as
singles and even as living in one-person household very often are one way or
another living in a dyadic relationship. Here I refer to those who are non-maritally
cohabiting but who are classified, for a number of reasons, as living alone.
I also refer to what is nowadays called LAT (Living Alone Together), couples
living apart in separate households but still together as a couple. These
dyadic relationships seem to be increasing gradually."
When I mentioned LAT to Jakob Pastoetter in Berlin, his return e-mail
explained the Germany's strong economy is the main reason for the growing
number of LAT relations today. "If both partners have or want to have their
own career, or if one or both partners can find work only in different
cities, instead of taking the toll of commuting every day, many couples
decide for two or even three households at least for some time."
Then Pastoetter offered a hard statistic. "In Germany, more than 15 percent
of all couples (married as well as unmarried) have this kind of weekend
relationship. Higher education and flexibility make it more likely to live
apart together."
In the 1970s, we talked about married and other committed couples having a
particular kind of LAT. We still call them "commuter marriages". A friend of
mine has a steady secure job in New York; his partner has been offered a
position of pastor in a Baltimore church. The church elders suggest the two
make their relationship official with a wedding, but he spend five days in
New York and the couple get together on weekends in Baltimore. LAT.
Other variations of LAT are more interesting. For 25 years one wife I know
maintained a triple career, her own professional work, raising four
children, and serving as the doctor's supportive "Girl Friday", With her
nest empty, the wife suggested they sell their big house and buy two smaller
homes within a half mile of each other. They would then both have their
private space, take responsibility for their own careers, and get together
whenever they were so inclined.
Living Apart Together: separate apartments or homes close to each other,
with private time and space a priority within a long-term committed
relationship.
In one sense, LAT is a very old and traditional way of life, dating back to
the agricultural world of Old Europe. In those days, few newly wed couples
could afford to establish their own household. Only wealthy farmers,
burghers, and aristocrats could afford to pay the bride prize or dowry
sufficient for the newlywed couple to establish their own household. The
younger sons and daughters of the wealthy could marry but the bride and
groom usually continued living with their parents, LAT, until they could
afford their own home. Likewise when poor day laborers and servants married.
The alternative was to join a convent or the clergy. "In a sense,"
Pastoetter reminded me, "LAT relations are only new if we forget history."
True, but what is new in LAT is the fact that increasing numbers of couples
in Europe and North America are choosing to make a commitment to each other
with the agreement that they will live separately.
Consider that the Institute for Social and Economic Research in the U.K.
predicts that one in five Brits will never marry. Down under, Peter
McDonald, a demographer at the Australian National University, predicts that
about a quarter of young Aussies will never get married.
Chrissy Iley, writing recently in The London Sunday-Times, was not surprised
at this. Young people don't want to [marry]. They don't see the point.
They'd rather live together." With more and more of us living into our 80s,
90s, and beyond, small wonder the divorce rate is rising and we have serial
monogamy.
Chrissy married Spencer when she was very young. He was her first proper
boyfriend and she innately knew they could make it together long term. They
didn't even go for a trial marriage.
She had only one expectation: her marriage would be forever. Only she did
not realize how much a marriage could change as the years passed. When
Spencer asked Charlie Wafts of the Rolling Stones the secret of his long
marriage, he replied: "Separate bathrooms". So Chrissy and Spencer have
separate homes. "This works for me because everybody needs an autonomous
zone. Everyone needs love, but everyone needs space to feel that love."
"The most interesting togetherness," Chrissy explains, "is when you know
separateness. People fall out of marriages not because one day they wake up
out of love, but often because they are crushed under the weight of domestic
trivia. They become emotionally claustrophobic."
Spencer and Chrissy have no children and she admits that with children
marriage may make more sense than LAT.
When Chrissy got married she had no idea she would end up in an LAT, but
that, she says is "what works for me for now. I read a story last week about
a woman who chose to be a housewife, how she took delight in making rack of
lamb for her husband. It all sounded rather attractive and I began to wish I
had the time for such events."
"But it also sounded very between-the-wars. Marriage was different then
because everything else was different. A woman's only job was homemaking. If
the marriage ended, she lost her career as well. But also, why would a man
want to leave a house that was a pretty palace, a kitchen that was always
stuffed as wonderfully as his stomach? Obviously, he wouldn't and didn't as
much."
"Did people have affairs?" Chrissy asks. "Of course they did. And the
affairs were recognized for what they were - diversions and ego pillows that
can easily be provided by different people."
I would suggest that we have unrealistically romanticized and eroticized
marriage in our films, novels, and songs by focusing on its passionate "in
love" birth. Marriage whether it is living together or apart together, is,
as Chrissy says, "about something solid and safe."
Few women today are willing to be a man's Total Woman domestic goddess.
Women no longer spend most of their adult lives raising children. The two
score years of togetherness our ancestors hoped for have now been replaced
by "three score and ten" years together. That will take some creative
adaptations, with LAT certainly among our short or long term options. |
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