Dan Savage on Polyamory, Chosen Family and Better Sex

Even if you don’t recognize the advice columnist Dan Savage by name, it’s possible that his ideas have influenced how you think about sex and relationships. For decades now, Savage has been arguing that our expectations for long-term partnerships are way too high; that healthy relationships are about acknowledging our vast spectrum of desires, not repressing them; and that monogamy is not the ideal setup for every partnership. Through over 30 years of writing “Savage Love,” one of the most widely read sex advice columns in the country, and more than 17 years of hosting the podcast “Savage Lovecast,” he has been one of America’s most subtly influential public intellectuals on the topic of how humans conduct our most intimate — and important — relationships. In the past half-century or so, America’s culture around sex, dating and relationships has undergone a profound transformation. Women are no longer confined to roles as wives and mothers, same-sex marriage is legal, hookup culture has changed the way young people enter the dating world, and there has been a growing interest in less traditional approaches to relationships, like polyamory and ethical nonmonogamy. These transformations have ushered in a lot of new freedoms but also a lot of new anxieties and frustrations. So I wanted to bring Savage on the show to talk through how we navigate this complicated, messy moment in our relational and sexual lives. We discuss how America’s relationship culture has changed in the past 30 years, why the myth of finding “the one” can be so damaging, what dating apps are (and aren’t) good for, how to give more grace to our partners when they do not meet our expectations, why so many feminist writers are re-evaluating the legacy of the sexual revolution, how gay sexual cultures have influenced straight dating life, why we’ve had a “sexual revolution” but not a concomitant “relationship revolution,” what Savage makes of the statistic that 18 percent of people have had sexual experiences outside their primary relationships without their partners’ consent, the advantages and risks of experimenting with nonmonogamy, what better sex education for young people should look like, why marriages between two men seem to end less frequently than heterosexual marriages do and more. This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: YouGov poll on Monogamy and Polyamory “Can We Change Our Sexual Desires? Should We?” with Amia Srinivasan on The Ezra Klein Show “Let’s Talk About the Anxiety Freedom Can Cause” with Maggie Nelson on The Ezra Klein Show “Sex, Abortion and Feminism, as Seen From the Right” with Erika Bachiochi on The Ezra Klein Show Dan Savage and Esther Perel on “Love, Marriage & Monogamy” Screaming on the Inside by Jessica Grose “What Does the ‘Post-Liberal Right’ Actually Want?” with Patrick Deneen on The Ezra Klein Show Book Recommendations: The Ethical Slut by Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton Berlin Diary by William L. Shirer A Royal Affair by Stella Tillyard Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld and Sonia Herrero. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Pat McCusker.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:24Ezra Klein?

  How do you introduce Dan Savage? I think it's fair. I think it's maybe inarguable to say he's the most important sex advice columnist in the country and has been for a long time. There's a good profile of him in Slate from a bit back that wrote, "In the three decades since the column debuted, Savage Love," which is the name of his sex advice column, "has morphed from a crude stunt into the most important text in contemporary American sexual ethics." I think that's right. The most important text in contemporary American sexual ethics. But what's so important about it, I think, is that Savage, in his columns and in his podcast,

• 1:04Ezra Klein?

  The Savage Love Cast, has been this crucial bridge between the gay, queer, and straight communities at a time when sexual and relational norms in all of them are changing and cross pollinating. And this has been a time of a lot of change and a lot of cross pollination. I think it is hard, if you're just living through this, as we all are, to really step back and recognize how different things have become in such a short period of time. Legal, not just legal, constitutional same-sex marriage, the rise of app-based dating, which I don't think we've really apprehended how different that is, to completely turn around the fundamental question of dating from scarcity to abundance, at least abundance

• 1:45Ezra Klein?

  of choices, if not always people, much more openness, in part due to Savage, towards various forms of ethical non-monogamy. We're seeing so much more fluidity and possibility and freedom, and that has come with a lot of anxiety and unhappiness and second guessing. You would think we'd be in this space of unbelievable sexual and relational abundance, and instead, people are talking about sex recessions. App-based dating may have given people more choice, but are they happier? Are their relationships stronger? It doesn't seem so.

• 2:19Ezra Klein?

  And I think the tension here is that we now have the freedom to live our sexual and relational lives really differently. But I'm not sure that we have, or that many of us have, the skills, or the expectations, or the communication needed to navigate that freedom smoothly. And in a way, I've always thought that's really the deeper topic Savage writes about. Sex is sort of a way into that for him. So I want to bring him on the show to discuss it. As always, my email, [email protected]. Dan Savage, what a pleasure to have you on the show.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  I'm shocked to be here.

• 2:59Ezra Klein?

  I like that. That's how I want people to feel when we begin. So I want to start with a bit of Grand Sweet. You've been writing, I think, the most important sex and probably relationship advice column in America for 30 years. What are the biggest changes in that period to you in our sexual and relational landscape?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  When I started writing Savage Love in 1991, kink wasn't as widely understood, gender wasn't as widely understood. And the possibility of structuring your own relationships in a way that worked for you, rather than a way that worked for your parents or grandparents, wasn't something that straight people had embraced. And I'm gay, and one of the things that was unique about Savage Love when I started writing it was it was sex advice for straight people written by a gay dude. And I got a lot of angry letters in the first couple of years from people projecting onto me as a gay person their ignorance of gay people as straight people. Like, they didn't know anything about gay people or gay relationships, and they just assumed I would know nothing about straight people and straight relationships,

• 4:00Speaker 01

  as if my parents weren't straight, as if my siblings weren't straight, as if I didn't fake being straight for a while, and didn't make a very close study of what a straight person acted like, wanted, and did in an attempt to pass myself as straight. Gay people know what straight people are like. And if there's been any change in the last thirty years that I think is the most significant is this great kind of cultural cross-pollinization between gay life and straight life that really drove home that things we thought of as particular to gay communities, gay subcultures, gay life, were not choices gay people were making. And a lot of things that we associated with straight people, straight life, were not choices that straight people were freely making. Once people were more free to make

• 4:44Speaker 01

  their own choices, a lot of gay people acted a lot more straight, and a lot of straight people began to act a lot more gay.

• 4:51Ezra Klein?

  We've been thinking, to pull back the curtain on this a bit, about doing a relationships episode for a while. And what keeps tripping us up is that most relationship books are bad. And one of the reasons I was excited when we thought of having you on is that, one, I realize that a lot of just the language people use around me now comes from you, comes from your column, comes from your readers, monogamish, and GGG, and all these things you've brought to the discourse. But beyond that, something that I think you've had a huge influence on is being this bridge from gay and queer and kink culture to straight dating culture. In a way that has actually made, at least just as I've moved to San Francisco, I see it much more, straight dating culture very different.

• 5:36Ezra Klein?

  What are some of those differences? We've talked, you mentioned that there was this kind of bridge that opened up, but what came over it?

• 5:43Speaker 01

  The idea that monogamy is a choice a couple makes, and a choice a couple can revisit, that monogamy shouldn't be a default setting, it should be something that you opt into and can opt out of over the life of a relationship. When I first came out as gay and began to meet gay couples, I was surprised. I moved into dating and relationships with expectations and wants that had been handed to me. And I was surprised by the numbers of gay couples I met who were writing their own script and doing their own thing. And at first, I found that threatening, and I got used to it. And then I saw the logic and the utility of it, in that you should do what works for you, and what for you two as a couple. And

• 6:25Speaker 01

  That should be a conversation. I think that's primarily what came over it. I don't think everybody is monogamish or open now. If there's anything that I've really tried to hammer home over the years is to attack these myths, these lies that we're told when we're children, that being in love means you aren't going to want to sleep with anybody else. Not true. Being in love, if you've made a monogamous commitment, might mean you don't sleep with anybody else out of respect for your partner and the choice you made and the choice you made together. But you're still going to want to sleep with somebody else and expecting that other person to pretend they don't want to sometimes, that they aren't tempted, and getting angry whenever you stumble over evidence that your partner might be attracted to somebody else, which isn't me giving permission

• 7:08Speaker 01

  to people to be insensitive or cruel about sometimes finding other people attractive if you're in an exclusive relationship. But it's such an engine of conflict. That's what I began to see when I first started getting a lot of letters from straight people, that these expectations that love meant you didn't sleep with anybody else, that all true and lasting relationships were monogamous relationships. It created so much stress and tension and wound up ending a lot of really good relationships and imperfect ones. And monogamy, you know, is sort of my hobby horse. Monogamy is literally the only thing humans attempt where perfection is the only metric of success. You should meet some vegans.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Well, I guess there's that too. Sorry. I've met a few. We have some for Christmas Eve dinner every year. It's very complicated. But, you know, perfection is your measure of success. You're setting yourself up for failure and disappointment in a committed, long-term, sexually exclusive relationship. You know, the world's greatest chef sometimes burns an omelet. Still the world's greatest chef. Shaun White is the world's greatest snowboarder, has fallen down and gotten up and still been Shaun White, world's greatest snowboarder. If you're with somebody for 50 years and you find out they cheated on you once, they were terrible at monogamy, they failed at monogamy, they never loved you, it wasn't a real relationship. We believe these things. And then they destroy,

• 8:33Speaker 01

  not open relationships, they destroy monogamous relationships that are imperfect, as all relationships are. And if anything, I've, if there's any windmill I tilted against that I feel like I knocked over, it was that one.

• 8:47Ezra Klein?

  I was looking at a poll preparing for this that I thought was both kind of funny and revealing. It was a YouGov poll from 2020, and it found that 12% of adults said they'd had some kind of sexual experience outside their partnership with their partner's consent, which is higher than I thought it would be, actually. And 18% said they'd had a sexual experience outside their partnership without their partner's consent. And we know in polling, people are not going to admit to that in full numbers, so it's probably higher. So it's not just that there is monogamy and non-monogamy, but there's also the shade of people who say they're monogamous and aren't.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, people doing what they need to do sometimes to stay married and stay sane. And everybody looks at that, and it's suddenly white hats and black hats, and the person who cheated is a terrible person. I like what Esther Perel has said, that sometimes the victim of the affair is not the victim of the marriage. I also like what I've said, that sometimes cheating is the least worst option for all involved. You know, whenever I say I'm the guy who sometimes gives people permission to cheat, a lot of people jump down my throat because they just think that must be awful. And then a lot of the examples that I cite, things that have come up in my column, are, you know, someone who's in a long-term committed relationship with a person who is chronically ill, and the sexual

• 10:07Speaker 01

  part of their relationship has ended. And is it the right thing to tell the person who wants to have sex outside that relationship that's about care and nurturing and commitment, but not about sex anymore? Am I supposed to tell that person, well, do the right thing and leave? Do the right thing and get a divorce? Don't like slip out to discreetly get a sexual need met so that you can be there fully for your partner and not resent your partner for how deprived you feel of any sort of sexual outlet. Go do that discreetly and then be there. And that's me somehow being against relationships, against commitment. And that's me sort of wrestling with reality, that life is long and that sometimes contingencies have to be made.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  I would just say in that 18%, everyone's going to hear that figure and think, oh, these serial adulterers, oh, these awful people lying and cheating and running around behind their partners' backs. If you're in my position where you get a lot of letters and emails and calls from people who are in very difficult circumstances, where they have a very human reptile brain need, that they're kind of going crazy and it's harming their relationship that this need is unmet, I think represented in that 18% figure to a very significant degree. But when we talk about the 18% who've slept with somebody else without their partner's consent, what we see are CADs and what we see are terrible

• 11:36Speaker 01

  people. We see cheaters as they're presented to us in film and television and novels, and realities are very different.

• 11:46Ezra Klein?

  I don't think I've ever known anybody cheating on their partner, and not that they so often admitted to me where they were happy, which is just, it speaks a little bit to your point. I mean, I may be a bit more of a moralist on this than you, may have not fully absorbed the savage wisdom. But I've been a confidant on situations like this before, and they're always very tough. People...

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:14Ezra Klein?

  Sometimes they're not. I do want to say sometimes people are not doing what they need to do. They're just doing what they would like to do. But oftentimes, these things are in context where my advice is, well, you guys should have broken up. But it's very easy to be outside of a relationship, saying that everything that has been built should be ended. And inside relationships, it's much more complicated and how people got to a point where they're sort of miserably unable to talk about their own unhappiness with each other and trying to find too much outside is, I mean, often the tragedy and to Prell's point, the crimes occurred before. This is a culmination.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yes. And the need, you know...

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Sex is bigger than we are and we pretend that we're in control of sex and we're in charge of sex. Sex built us and is building whatever comes after us, through the processes of natural selection and spontaneous mutation. Here we are. And we like to pretend that we get to define sex. I think we negotiate with sex from a position of relative powerlessness and it has to be channeled. It can't be dammed up. And that includes sexual desire, which is a lot, you know, about a lot more than sex, even in the context of a committed relationship. I'm not against monogamy. This is usually when somebody jumps up to say you're against monogamy. I'm in a long-term, committed, open relationship. We're approaching our

• 13:40Speaker 01

  third decade together and I still get people who are monogamists who will say to my face, "Well, I couldn't do what you and Terry do because I value commitment too highly." And I look at them and like, "How many decades do we have to be together before we get some credit for commitment?"

• 13:56Ezra Klein?

  I always think sex is a word here that obscures so much more than it reveals. Particularly when people talk about men, where it's like sex is just as if you need to play basketball once a week to, you know, get your, get your energy out. Where particularly in, in relationships and in long relationships, what people want, it often seems to me, is much more complicated. Sex is this stand-in or this way people are finding the feeling of being desired or of desire or of novelty or of love and security. And different kinds produce completely different things, right? This is a big Esther Perel point of this kind of competition between the need for security and the need for novelty. But it always seemed

• 14:40Ezra Klein?

  to me, we have this discourse about sex as if simply having sex is if you can tally it up on a little, you know, marker sheet, where people have a lot of trouble, in my experience, saying what needs they actually need fulfilled because they're not typically given a lot of language for like what's behind that gigantic thing blotting out the sun of emotional needs that we always talk about instead.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  And that those two things, sexual, emotional needs, can be on parallel tracks, but they're on separate tracks. And just the freedom to acknowledge that.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  In the context of a committed relationship can make it easier to be in a committed relationship. I'm not the enemy of monogamy. I see the benefits of monogamy for many people around sexual exclusivity, paternal security, protection from sexually transmitted infections. There are advantages to monogamy. There are advantages to some degree of permitted controlled sexual freedom in the context of a committed relationship. But I recognize that you have a zone of erotic autonomy and so do I. And to not try to control that, to create some space and freedom inside the relationship

• 15:59Speaker 01

  for that makes that less of a potentially damaging chaos agent that could destroy the relationship. There's a really interesting study out of the Netherlands looking at marriage. Netherlands is the place that's had marriage equality for the longest, gay marriage for the longest. And interestingly, they found, despite people's assumptions, that gay male couples were the least likely to divorce. Straight couples were more likely, lesbian couples most likely. Lesbian couples and straight couples most likely to be monogamous. Gay couples least likely to be monogamous. Correlation ain't causation. But it would seem that gay male couples are doing something right

• 16:39Speaker 01

  by diffusing the bomb that explodes so many straight and lesbian relationships, which is this desire for outside sexual contact, for autonomous sexual experiences, for the affirmation of your desirability by others whose job it isn't to affirm your desirability. And that can redound to the benefit of your committed relationship to your primary partnership. And you know, you look at this study and you read it and you think, well, maybe gay couples are doing something right here. And I think as more gay people have come out, more straight people have gotten to know the gay people that they knew or, you know, gotten to know gay people they didn't know.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  They've seen that at work in our relationships. And more straight people have.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  At least entertained the thought of there being different possibilities, which in a way ironically is the stated fear of social conservatives from the 70s and 80s, when I was a kid, that gay people led these hedonistic lifestyles and straight people were going to be tempted to adopt, you know, gay hedonistic lifestyles. And we've kind of seen that come to pass. It's just straight people took everything gay people were doing and gave it new names. Um, I don't know if I can swear on your podcast, but gay people had tricks and fuck buddies and straight people renamed that as friends with benefits and hooking up. There's just so much from gay culture that straight people just adopted wholesale and renamed.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  And that was what, you know, Jerry Falwell, senior, who would be very shocked at Jerry Falwell, junior's behavior was worried about, and it came true.

• 18:22Ezra Klein?

  We've been talking a bit about unhappiness that afflicts married or long-term committed partnerships. But one of the motivations for this chat for me has been that there's been this spate of books over the past couple of years with names like Bad Sex and Rethinking Sex and The Right to Sex. And I've done podcasts with some of these people like Amish Navasen and Maggie Nelson and Erica Bakayaki. There's an interesting moment here of questioning where the sexual revolution got us and practically questioning where it has left people, not so much in committed partnerships, but who are struggling with this kind of expansive freedom to not be in committed partnerships. And I'm curious of your sense of that. What's behind a lot of the discontent right now and how do you read it?

• 19:08Speaker 01

  I read Right to Sex. I also read the writer for the Washington Post.

• 19:13Ezra Klein?

  Oh, Christine Emba.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  You had her on my show, Rethinking Sex, Provocation. It is interesting. I have felt for, you know, I'm sort of identified with the sex positivity movement and I've never really tossed that term around a lot to describe myself or what I do. I was really thrilled to read all the way through Christine Emba's book, Rethinking Sex, and get to a place where she quoted something I said that was basically, there needs to be a limiting principle. You can have sex with too many people. You can have sex too often and that can do a kind of, puts you at a greater physical risk and can do a kind of psychic damage. I've never been, the solution for everybody's unhappiness is just for everybody to have more and tons and lots of.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Different partners, I'm kind of, I think, less a part of the sex positivity movement, the Mary Poppins idea that enough is as good as a feast. You know, these books are being written by women. A lot of the young feminists that are written about in The Right to Sex, who are reevaluating and rethinking and embracing writers like Andrea Dworkin, are women and young women who find the sexual marketplace to be dehumanizing. And that may be an element of the current sex culture that there needs to be a correction for, counterreformation maybe.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  I think when sex is bad, odds are it was worse for, bad for the woman. So it doesn't surprise me that a lot of these books were written by women. And I think the critique in these books about a lot of what's been sold to people as sex positivity is just calibrating the settings so that they work for men. And I've always thought Andrew Sullivan's point about when you look at gay male sex culture versus lesbian sex culture, sometimes that you can see some sort of essential difference between men and women. And men approach sex, straight men approach sex without, I think, an awareness of

• 21:20Speaker 01

  the implied violence, the threat, that a lot of women will say yes to sex because they don't feel empowered to say no. And that can result in a lot of women having sex that they didn't enjoy, that left them feeling terrible, and the guy doesn't even realize, right? Because he's so thoughtless about it.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Because he hasn't projected himself into the woman's experience. As a gay man, as a man who has sex with men, I think I have some appreciation for what it's like to have sex with men and for what men are. A lot of men don't. And I think that results in a lot of bad sex for a lot of women. And like I said, I think we do need some sort of counterreformation that corrects for and raises some awareness of insensitivities around the relative vulnerability that a woman experiences in a sexual encounter with a man, relative to the man's experience or even perceptions of the power differential that exists.

• 22:25Ezra Klein?

  You had an interesting point in there that I was reflecting on while you were talking about how most of these books have been written by women. And I get the sense, this is an unproven hypothesis, I don't get the sense that young men are super happy out there. And you mentioned, you see it in the data, that young men are not having a lot of sex, they're also having a lot of mental problems. There's been this huge rise, the incels, and Amiashina Voss's book is written in direct response to, or at least the title essay is in direct response to incel stuff. And I sometimes think on both sides that it gets to this idea that one thing that we have told people is that sex can solve more problems than it actually can. I always thought there's a weird thing that would happen repeatedly in conversations

• 23:10Ezra Klein?

  about incels, where somebody would say, and then get a ton of crap, I think correctly, for saying, "Well, should we just give them sex workers? Should there be some kind of right to a sex worker?" And even if you could do that, and even if that was not incredibly dehumanizing to sex workers, I think it's completely clear that what these people wanted was not actually intercourse, it was status. It was the sense of having a position in society where people wanted you and would desire you and would think you had worth, enough worth, that they would choose you freely. And solving that need is way harder than answering the question of, "How can we possibly get you laid?"

• 23:54Ezra Klein?

  And similarly, I think what a lot of people are looking for in relationships that doesn't get well answered by hookups is these kind of secondary needs about what the gaze of another person means to me as a person. And, I don't know, reading some of these books, I've had this thought, and I'm curious if it rings true to you, that we just have had a lot more sexual revolution than relational revolution, or relationship revolution. I mean, we do talk about monogamy versus polyamory versus ethical monogamy, non-monogamy more, but in terms of how we relate to each other, we just seem way behind the amount of freedom we have suddenly achieved.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  I completely agree. I am one of those people, though, who've suggested that I don't think it's a solution to incels to hand sex workers to them. I have a lot of friends, unlike a lot of people who write about these things, who are sex workers. The last thing I want to do is lock one of my friends who's a sex worker in a room with a violent misogynist incel. That said, downstream, in a culture where we de-stigmatized sex work and de-stigmatized paying for sex in that very clear way of like handing over of money for sex, people who, in addition to feeling,

• 25:17Speaker 01

  you know, emotionally unfulfilled, emotionally unsatisfied, then also stew in sexual deprivation, it might be a balm. I think all relationships, if you really peel the layers back far enough, are at some point transactional. I pay for it with my husband. I don't pay for it with cash money. I pay for it with time, attention, affection, concern, making sure he, you know, goes to see the doctor when he needs to go to see the doctor. There's a reason married people live longer. If I stopped paying in like that, if I stopped caring about him, if he stopped paying

• 25:56Speaker 01

  in like that, paying me with those same ephemeral, intangible, but very important things, our relationship would collapse. We see transactional relationships everywhere. And if you know people who are sex workers, a lot of what they're paid for is not sex. It's time, it's attention, it's focus. And if we have a culture that tells people that if you ever had to pay for it with cash, you're a loser, or a monster, or both.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  It makes the one outlet that some people may have, the one way that some people may pay for it, that other people who are also paying for it might not pay for it. It closes that lane down. It's not a solution for people who are right now on Reddit, you know, celebrating violence against women because they're so angry about being low status, right? It's a solution that could roll out over a generation or four, where we have less incels, less violence, less misogyny 100 years from now than we do now. If we could all just recognize, just like we should all recognize that being in love

• 27:09Speaker 01

  and in a committed monogamous relationship doesn't mean your partner isn't interested in the waiter. If we could also recognize that all relationships, all sexual relationships, all emotional relationships are on some level transactional and therefore we shouldn't stigmatize the ones that are more evidently transactional.

• 27:28Ezra Klein?

  So I agree on the not stigmatizing, but I want to hold. I'm so interested in this word transactional and I'm trying to watch what's happening in my own head on it, which is.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Which is just fancy for we all pay for it.

• 27:40Ezra Klein?

  You know, I know, but this is what has come to my mind on this. I don't know, I don't know if with more time to think about it, I would hold here, but I'm going to go with my instinct, which is, I think this is a place where our market metaphors are so dominant that that feels right even as, it feels to me wrong, which is, I wonder why the word there isn't actually still relational, which is to say, I mean, on some level, everything has an exchange and everything has a dynamic and things you give and things you get. But one thing, I have transactional, truly transactional relationships in my life and what makes them transactional.

• 28:18Ezra Klein?

  Is the ability to fairly cleanly walk away. One of the weird things about, you know, being a parent and having childcare is you have people who are embedded in your life in this unbelievably important familial role. And also you pay them and it creates this very intense and noticeable tension between the transactional level of the relationship and the fact that they love your child and you love your child and you love them for loving your child and like that. And it's this whole thing. And this is a little bit what I mean when I say sometimes I think that we have like over theorized and overworked on sex and under theorized and underworked on relationships. Because in some ways, it seems cleaner to say the relationship is transactional.

• 29:02Ezra Klein?

  But what's so frustrating and real about them to me is how often they're not.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  But maybe one of the things you exchange in that transactional committed relationship is the difficulty of extracting yourself from it, of extricating yourself from it. One of the things that Terry has given me is marriage. And one of the things I've given him is marriage, which upped the stakes, right? And made walking away from this relationship, uh, created a degree of difficulty that has disincentivized walking away from this relationship. And that is one of the things that we've exchanged.

• 29:36Ezra Klein?

  And it's a beautiful thing really about marriage. I had a friend used to say that, um, that I heard him say, and I've always felt it's true, that before he and his partner got married, you'd be arguing over, you know, the curtains in the house. And it wasn't clear if you're arguing about the curtains or arguing about whether or not you should break up. And after you get married, you're until it started in a really, really intense point, you're, you really are arguing about the curtains. And there's both difficulty and, and beauty in that.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I'm not against love and I don't think love is.

• 30:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm not putting you in against love. I'm just thinking aloud with you.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  I'm not against love and I think there's some there there, but it's so hard to pin down. It's so subjective. It's so personal. It's so, so hard to describe. We can only describe sort of the physical worlds and, and, and actual actions and deeds that are attendant to it. Right? But I know it's there and I know it's a thing itself too. I also know that it's an idea. I also know it's a lie. A love story is something that two people create together. It's a myth two people create together and then recommit to and are always sort of editing and reshaping and retelling. And it has a power. Stories have power.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Even that, though, the telling and retelling of that story is something we give each other in a relationship and something that gives us a feeling of meaning and safety and contentment as individuals, but also then as that, you know, we are all individuals. A couple is an idea, a couple is, uh, it's something two individuals agreed to pretend to be together. Right? I love that. I think that's so unbelievably true. You know, you think about so many of the problems of sex in a long-term relationship is trying to recapture the magic and intensity and passion of the beginning. And so much of the sex advice industrial complex is about lying to people and telling them they can. Right?

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Or that they should and that it's possible. And a long-term relationship by way of, and this is, we're not really even talking now about the, you know, rethinking sex, the right to sex, the problem of connection and how atomized people are these days and the difficulty particularly younger people are having in finding each other and the paradox of choice. There's too many different kinds of mustard in the mustard aisle at the grocery store. People walk down that aisle and don't get mustard, even if they was on their list because they can't choose. And really the internet has created for many people that, and so it's not all people, you know, who feel low status, who feel cheated, who feel unmarketable for some reason.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  A lot of people who are, you know, in the mustard aisle of like the dating apps and want to pick a jar of mustard and would like to have mustard at home whenever they want it, can't quite bring themselves to do it. And I think all of these problems and how we figure out how to address them are better problems to have than what people pine for, which are when women didn't have options, when women weren't legal adults, when women couldn't have credit cards or bank accounts or sign leases, when women were property and a lot of men wound up in relationships with women who were there under duress. And we called that marriage. Right? And that's not the case anymore.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  And how do we?

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Control for that, how do we control for high status men churning through as many women as they can get, just like high status gay men used to be able to churn through a lot of male partners? And then how do we control for low status or low social skills? You know, when I talk to incels, and I've talked to incels, I've gotten on the phone with people, some people privately, you think of that movie, I think The Sessions with Helen Hunt. It's about a sex worker going to see a profoundly physically disabled client. And everyone's like, oh, that's wonderful. That's complicated because we have weird, screwed up feelings about sex work and whether it's legitimate, whether it's work or not, whether it should be legal or not, safe or not. That's the argument when it comes to

• 33:46Speaker 01

  the legality of sex work. It's not whether it's going to exist or not, or it's going to be safe or riskier than, you know, all jobs are. And we recognize that if somebody is profoundly physically disabled, that the attention and affection of a sex worker is a wonderful thing to be provided, sometimes even by family to that person. Well, a lot of the incels that I've actually spoken to are profoundly socially disabled. I think that disability, when somebody who has profound social disabilities sees a sex worker, we should be able to recognize that, that need for affection, that need for sex, this route

• 34:27Speaker 01

  to obtaining it and the improvement to the quality of life of that person, it's legitimate. It's legitimate and it is a net good. And we should make that easier, not, you know, through federal subsidies, you know, the Department of Sex Work. We should make that easier by eliminating the stigma and giving people who do sex work or see sex workers the benefit of the doubt. And then also to recognize them, people who see sex workers, to recognize ourselves, to recognize the ways in which even in our own committed relationships, there are still these transactional elements. Doesn't mean there's not affection. Everyone

• 35:10Speaker 01

  I know who is a sex worker who has long-term clients, those are relationships of real, lasting affection. Those are long-term relationships.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  And yet, we want to knock those relationships down to purely transactional. We want to call them crimes. And then we refuse to recognize in our own relationships, the transactional elements that might help us empathize with people who have no other outlet except a sex worker.

• 35:38Ezra Klein?

  There's so much richness in that answer, but I want to go back to something you said early in it that struck me as one of the truest sentences I've ever heard, which is, every couple is an idea.

• 35:49Ezra Klein?

  And in a way, all of us are ideas. And another way of framing some things I've been saying here is that a big part of sex is how it changes, or affirms, or validates, or undermines our idea of ourselves. But you also see in relationships and in couples, this line, you know, that people often have many marriages to the same person. And I think that's true, but it's always been a very unclear line, what it means. But I think what you're saying is a much clearer way of saying it, that what will often happen in a marriage, and it's happened in mine, is that the first idea of the couple stops being true. And that's a very, very, very difficult place, when that idea stops being true, when the story you told is no longer the story that fits.

• 36:30Ezra Klein?

  And couples that survive and thrive can find another idea of themselves.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:37Ezra Klein?

  Some other story that they now inhabit and they're proud of and they like. But it's also true for individuals. You know, a lot of life is having a story that you believe of yourself and that other people believe enough about you, that you can move through the world in a way that you recognize who you are and recognize how you're seen and you are okay with what you see in that recognition. I'm curious though, because this seems like a skill, and I want to actually speak about skills here, but that we don't really have, which is to know explicitly how to tell what stories we are telling, and also know how to change them, know how to make them amenable to editing, to difference, to new chapters. How do you think about that?

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Well, the difficulty is you have to be telling the same story together. That if your revision isn't also your wife's revision, or the new way that you're telling the story, if you're imposing it on your partner, or it's just in conflict with the story that they're telling about the relationship, it's going to be a very dysfunctional relationship. It's going to fall apart. That's the hard part. Like, you know, I've been with my husband for almost 30 years. We've had very different stages and eras of our relationship. It's more like layers of sediment. It's more like, you know, digging up Troy than it is just like scrapping the story and telling a new one. There's just this new city built on top of the old city, but the old city's still under there somewhere. The hard part is, you know, when you're in conflict.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  And Terry and I have stared into the abyss. We've gone into couples counseling. We, in bitter conflict, screamed the word divorce in each other's spaces. And then we came to a new understanding of who we were going to be to each other and how that was going to work. And we began to inhabit that new story and tell that new story together. And that only works if you can do it together. Can I jump back for a second? Please. Something occurred to me when you were asking that question about like, we see, it's a cliche, you know, a powerful CEO who goes to see the dominatrix, right? The right on feminist woman who wants during sex with a partner that she chose,

• 38:48Speaker 01

  and she feels safe and comfortable with, wants her hair pulled and wants to be called a slut. The gay guy who's out and proud and is turned on during sex with someone he chose to have, you know, homophobic hate words hurled at him during sex. These are all cliches. These are all truisms about sex. And the paradox is, this is not who I am. Like, I am not a dirty slut who should have her hair pulled. This is not who I am. By leaping into that in fantasy or role play or experience, it almost affirms and solidifies who you are the rest of the time, the 99.99999% of the time when that is not happening. There's something about sex where we want to.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Transgress against our ideas of self. There's also something that's dangerously powerful about sex where we want to transgress against the story we're telling as a couple. That there's something about being in a long-term committed relationship. And there's something about sex where sometimes you want to be not you. And that can then extend to sometimes you want to violate who you're perceived to be, the couple that you want to violate, who your partner thinks you are. How do you put those things in harness to serve the relationship as opposed to tear the relationship apart is a real varsity level, high degree of difficulty thing to do honestly, really to incorporate honestly into the relationship. Most people incorporate that stuff dishonestly into the relationship.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  And I don't mean that most people cheat in a relationship, that most people have that zone of erotic autonomy or those times when they tiptoe up to the edge and then you don't jump over when they see how they could transgress. And that makes the adrenaline pump and that makes us feel like individuals again. And I think that's so important, right? And even just respecting your partner's privacy. I talk to so many people who have no respect for their partner's privacy as if their privacy is a violation of the idea of the couple, their partner having privacy. And this road so many people are on, these expectations so many people have about what it is to be a part of a couple are cancers that grow on their relationships until they

• 41:03Speaker 01

  kill them.

• 41:05Ezra Klein?

  I think there's something really interesting there in the way sex is a space where we will do things or inhabit things we would not say. And then I want to complicate the we here. So I moved out to San Francisco four years ago and I was coming from DC where I'd lived for 14 years. And that's a pretty head spinning difference in relational and sexual cultures. And to say the least. Well, one thing here that has been striking is my community here, it's much more queer than it was. It's much less likely to be monogamous than it was. I know people who are more in the kink community, which not something I knew much about before. And for a bit I was. Like really struck by all the category changes and differences in definition and

• 41:50Ezra Klein?

  rules. And then after some time of just knowing everybody, what I came to think was that the big difference out here is communication styles, that the way people will talk about what they want and negotiate their relationship, or negotiate something within kink for themselves, or it's like stuff that I wouldn't have even spoken about the thing, much less actually asked for the thing with a person whose, you know, opinion of me I was concerned about. And I think there's so much tension.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  We have to put a pin in that.

• 42:23Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, we will. There's so much attention on like, what kind of sex lives people should have and what kinds of relationships they should have, and are they polyamorous or monogamous? But I actually think this is more in a weird way important about how people communicate, that that's so much the base layer of all the relationships. And can you even know what story your partner is telling? It's so different to listen to people who are actually negotiating everything out and are used to doing that. That was by far the biggest, biggest like revolution in what I realized was possible.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  And I want to claim credit for that. Not me personally, not because of my column, gay people.

• 43:03Ezra Klein?

  I think that's right, though.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  I've always said, as a provocation myself, gay people are, have more sex, know more about sex, and are better at sex than straight people are. And then that makes, you know, straight people get defensive and recoil. And then I tell them why that's true. We have to communicate. A man and a woman consent to sex and go to bed for the first time, that's usually when the conversation about sex stops. Because what's going to happen is a default setting and is assumed, much to the detriment of both of their experiences often. Those assumptions can result in people having the kind of bad sex that Christine Emmer writes about a lot. When two men go to bed together for the first time, they

• 43:45Speaker 01

  consent to sex, it is the beginning of a conversation, because there is no default setting. What's going to happen? Who's going to do what to whom? My first sexual experiences with other men and, you know, I lost my virginity with a woman, so my first sexual experiences weren't with men. My first sexual experience with a man, the guy looked at me and said, what are you into? I call them the four magic words. What are you into? And at that moment, you can rule anything in, rule anything out. You can ask for what you want. You've been asked to ask for what you want because your partner can't assume, right? I have had experiences where both people ask that question at the exact same time and then look at each other and say, jinx, right? What are you into? Ha,

• 44:28Speaker 01

  ha, ha, jinx. And then you have that conversation. Some straight people have that conversation. Most don't because they can avoid it. Gay people don't have that conversation because we're more highly evolved. We don't have that conversation because we're better. We have that conversation because we must. And that's what you see in San Francisco. You see a lot of people, straight people, who have embraced what are you into as the start of a conversation about a relationship and about a sexual relationship. And it's made them better at sex. It's made them better at relationships. You know, I don't want to say gay people are necessarily better at relationships, but that study out of the Netherlands, other studies have shown that gay men are often slower to commit, but once

• 45:10Speaker 01

  they commit, less likely to, for the relationship to end. And I think it's because of those conversations and because of that question.

• 45:19Ezra Klein?

  But I think this is part of why there's so much unhappiness right now for, for a lot of people because, and I, I feel this even, so I met my wife, not then my wife, right before the rise of app dating. So online dating was still a little bit weird and it, within five years would be all anybody I knew did. And so this crazy thing happened, which is that the fundamental scarcity of your love life, like how do you find a person to date? You've met your friends' friends. You're not good at hitting people at parties. Like, what are you gonna do?

• 45:53Speaker 01

  You meet people at work or you used to.

• 45:55Ezra Klein?

  Right. It upends. And all of a sudden, people have this insane amount of choice. And I thought from the outside of this, I mean, this is gonna be a wonderland. Like, how great. And then, you know, nobody was happy. And people get tired and they seem to be meeting, you know, a lot of pain, you know, attached there, too. It's not like there's been some great shift in our societal happiness or the quality of our relationships or anything. And I do think this is a place where maybe the problem got mistaken, that there's so much more freedom and possibility and choice, and those things all seem really great. But you need a lot of skills, and particularly communication skills, to navigate that.

• 46:35Ezra Klein?

  And we got all these new options and possibilities and no upgrade or change in skills, and to some degree, no change in expectations. And those things are in a level of conflict with each other that it seems to me to be making a lot of people miserable.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Well, the better people are at communicating their desires, their wants, their boundaries, the less likely they are to wind up in a situation where they're having, you know, bad sex happens to everybody, but less likely to wind up in a situation where you're having sex or in a relationship that isn't making you happy. You know, the people out there who aren't having sex usually have a problem with communicating, with asking, with telling. And one of the things I wanted to jump back to is that thing you said, it can be difficult to share your actual wants and desires when the stakes are high. I can't remember exactly how you put it. That's often a problem in relationships. You know, people put up their Potemkin village version of themselves, and then they get into a committed relationship and they haven't actually revealed who they are sexually and

• 47:35Speaker 01

  what they want sexually. They didn't start with that. And now, if, you know, revealing those things about yourself is a threat to the relationship potentially, you fear it might be, you don't. You kick that can further down the road, it becomes harder and harder to reveal. But I'm not, I guess I'm not really answering your question. Yeah, everyone's unhappy all the time. Internet dating has been really interesting. You know, Terry and I predate that. Terry and I both have other partners that we did meet on the internet. So we have some experience with what the internet is like. And some people are paralyzed by the amount of choice that they have. You know, the mustard aisle problem.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  I think that's preferable to the lack of choice that people used to endure before the sexual revolution, before the internet.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Came along and we need, you know, we have new problems to address and we have new problems to correct for. And some people are miserable because they haven't made a choice, right? And they need to be encouraged to perhaps make a choice. And sometimes having someone or something is better than having no one or nothing. And there is no perfect partner. There's no lid for every pot. You know, there's no the one, which is a thing I talk about in my column all the time. There's a point seven, three that you round up to the one. And that's about as the best you can do. And some people find that dispiriting. I think that's kind of lovely because not only are you rounding that person up, but you know that

• 49:13Speaker 01

  they're rounding you up too. And I think that's a gift and you should take it.

• 49:51Ezra Klein?

  I want to take a moment here on communication culture because as you were saying, that's something that was occurring to me is to think about this in terms of sex. I actually want to think about it in terms of relationships. And I'll put it on myself that one of the hardest things for me has been getting to a point where I'm not offended by needing to ask for what I need. Right? Not getting over the fantasy that other people are going to know what it is I need at a moment, or that it is not natural for them to provide it, that that is some kind of problem

• 50:22Ezra Klein?

  And this is a place, I think, where where expectations are very destructive. But getting to a point as a person where you frankly know what you need, that you are willing to ask for it enough times that other people can understand it or be reminded of it, and that you're not so worried about everybody else's reactions to that, that you're not paralyzed when making the when making the ask, because other people's discomfort is more unbearable than your own or than your own possible, you know, feeling of humiliation or what happens if you ask and it can't be offered. And it got me thinking about, I watched, as part of preparing for this, a conversation you did with Esther Perel on YouTube. It's on YouTube and people should check it out. It's fantastic.

• 51:07Ezra Klein?

  The two of you have a long thing about what sex ed could and should be like in your perfect world. And it left me thinking a lot about how there's no relationship, Ed, and nobody even really talks about one, to say nothing of just how we talk to each other.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Which is what sex ed should be.

• 51:22Ezra Klein?

  Which is probably what sex ed should be, but just it's not even just sex. It's friendships and work. It's our whole democracy. Just being good at communication is so bedrock. And we just kind of turn people out in the world like, hope for the best. Like, good luck to you.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know what I have to say there, except that I completely agree. I would add to the ability to ask for what you need is also the ability to see what you're capable of giving, to know what you're capable of giving, and sometimes the ability to be patient. Because you may ask for something and not get a yes right away or get it right away or, you know, be told you need to to wait or be patient. You'll get it sooner eventually, this weekend, or, you know, I'm moving toward that or not yet. Which is often something people hear when they ask to open a relationship is maybe. And that's a conversation we need to keep having. So yeah, ask for what you need, know what you can give,

• 52:20Speaker 01

  and know that the answer is always going to be yes. There's a thing I talk about in my column on my podcast all the time called the price of admission, which is there's a price of admission you pay to be in any relationship. And if there's something that's a price of admission you're unwilling to pay, then you shouldn't be in that relationship. But, you know, if there's no price you're willing to pay to be in a relationship, you're not going to ever be in a relationship. You know, in addition to being a myth, the story of relationship is a never ending compromise.

• 52:49Ezra Klein?

  I think of this as the deepest level of your work, which is this constant pressure you're putting on people's expectations. And constant light you're trying to shine on it.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  To have realistic expectations.

• 53:00Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  People have unrealistic expectations, then they're constantly disappointed. And you know, this can get very like metaphysical, people's expectations. I do not expect when I go home to find a clean kitchen. Because the people I live with are not gonna do dishes. So I am never crushed when I get home and the first thing I have to do is dishes. It's like price of admission that I pay to be in these relationships. And that's fine. And you know, the trick to a price of, you know, paying the price of admission is you don't bitch about it. You know, you pay the price, you ride the ride. If you don't want to pay the price, don't get on the roller coaster. But don't buy a ticket to that roller coaster and then complain the whole time you're on the ride about how much it cost.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  At a certain point, you just, you get off or don't get on that ride. And you know, in addition to like encouraging people to have realistic expectations, people have to take responsibility for the choices that they've made, for the tickets they've purchased.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  And be with the people that they're actually with. And if they don't want to be with that person or people, they shouldn't be. I do want to jump back to this, what sex ed should be, because I think this isn't so important. And maybe people listen to your show who have some control of this. Oh my God, and the seizing of school boards across the country and the current sex panic that, you know, about groomers, any information being provided to kids about sex, sexuality, identity.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  Reproductive biology, you can cover in a half an hour. It's, it's simple. Where people get hurt having sex is communication, is negotiation, is talking somebody into having sex with you, is making sure that you have their consent, is making sure that you've clearly communicated whether they have yours. And, and feeling empowered to have those kinds of negotiations and conversations. That, that is where people get hurt. That is where sex goes wrong. How to put a condom on a banana? You can do that. Sexually transmitted infections, you can cover the ones people need to worry about in 10 extra minutes. Everything else is difficult and hard because

• 55:07Speaker 01

  feelings come into play, insecurities come into play, expectations, realistic and unrealistic come into play. And that's where people get in trouble. And the people we often have the hardest time talking about with sex are our sex partners. How did we construct that? And how do we deconstruct that? That corner we've painted ourselves into, that the person we feel most least free being ourselves with and opening up with about who we are sexually and what we want is somebody that we are about to have sex with for the first time? Or somebody we've been having sex with for 20 years?

• 55:47Ezra Klein?

  How do you get better at communication? I mean, even as you're saying that, it occurred to me, if I want to get stronger, I know who I can go pay. If I want to eat better, I know who I can go pay. If I want somebody who can teach me how to rock climb, I know who I can go pay. Like, I know where to look in the, I was gonna say the Yellow Pages, but that's only because I'm 1,000 years old now, but in Google.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  And I got the reference, so I'm much older than you.

• 56:13Ezra Klein?

  It's tough. But communication, it's everything, I mean, on some level. And completely fuzzy out there. If you're somebody who wants to be a better communicator, where do you start?

• 56:30Speaker 01

  People know how to ask for what they want from a waiter. People know how to ask often for what they want from a sex worker. You know, one of the things when it comes out, as it has, people who call me, who write me, their partner was seeing a sex worker and was doing with the sex worker something they never asked the partner to do with them. And it was because they weren't afraid that the sex worker would leave them. And usually when people have a hard time communicating about sex, desire, intimacy, relationships, there's this fear of rejection, fear of being judged, fear of being left. Early in a relationship, you should embrace rejection and you should run at that fear. You have to be willing to risk it. That's how you become a better communicator. You can't ask for what you

• 57:15Speaker 01

  want if you're not willing to risk losing what you have. And what you might risk losing is this person that you just met on an app that you, you know, you're getting along with and you'd like to see naked and, you know, you risk communicating, not in a like, if you come home with me, we're going to do four things from column A, four things from column B, and one thing from column C, but just like, you know, being actually who you are. In some ways, you have to straddle this creation of the Potemkin self, you know, your best self and your real self. You have to do both at the same time, and that can be difficult. And I'm not trying to dodge your question here. It's just about disinhibiting around the fear of rejection.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  That if this person isn't right for you, give them a chance, allow them to give you a chance. There may be things that you don't agree on. You know, everything won't be on the menu, but so much is and so much does work that, you know, you're willing to let go of some things and, you know, round them up. They're going to round you up. You're willing to pay certain prices of admission.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  But you have to be willing to risk rejection.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  And that's why people have a hard time communicating. So if you're going to open the Yellow Pages in 1972 and try to find, you know, where to go to get strong, you look for the gym, you just have to, there's no willing to risk rejection coach in the Yellow Pages, but that's what you have to be willing to do, and that's inside you. And that's really about prioritizing your needs, your comfort, what you want, and, you know, finding somebody who wants enough of what you want and enough of what you are, and vice versa, that it would work out long-term, which is not to say that, one of the things I like to talk about is that we overemphasize the importance or the primacy of long-term relationships. We have many more short-term relationships, and we should want those to be successes too.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  I don't think a relationship has to end with somebody in a box at a funeral home for it to have been a success, but death is our only standard of success. You know, a relationship is the only thing that we... Regardless of failure if everyone involved gets out alive. Imagine if we applied that standard to restaurants or flights, right? If it's a high conflict relationship and a, you know, terrible divorce and nobody can stand each other, speak to each other again. If there was abuse, emotional, physical. Yeah, that relationship needed to end and was probably experienced as a failure, particularly by the person who was abused. If two people get out of a relationship and there's affection and respect,

• 59:54Speaker 01

  even a friendship, even if it ended, it was a success. And if we just looked at all of our relationships, we have so many short term relationships and we work so hard at making the LTRs a success that we neglect making the STRs a success. And all an LTR is, is an STR that worked out.

• 1:00:13Ezra Klein?

  It's easy, I think, when we talk about communication to talk about us talking, right? When I say, how do I communicate? I think what people hear is how do I talk better? But the flip of that is, how do I listen better? How do I actually hear what you're saying when you're talking to me?

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  I have met people, some people poisoned by the, maybe the discourse around sex, who are all about what they want and asking for what they want, demanding what they want and expecting what they want, and not about hearing what their partner wants and not regarding their partner's wants, needs and securities as legitimate as their own. It's like that definition of pornography, you know, when you see it. You know, when you're talking with somebody who's asking for what they want, you know, when that person is also interested in what you want and finding that the center of that Venn diagram where you can establish all the compatibilities, sexual compatibility, emotional compatibility,

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  you know, long term prospect, what you want out of life compatibilities.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  And you want to be that person and to be that person who can ask for what you want, but also give and listen, you have to be self critical, you have to check in with friends, you have to listen to your exes, you have to identify patterns. You know, if you've had a long string of terrible relationships, at some point you have to look at that and go, well, I'm the common denominator. What am I doing wrong? And people have a hard time with that kind of communication, the internal communication, self criticism. And you have to ask yourself what you want and how you're getting in the way of it.

• 1:02:22Ezra Klein?

  I want to ask you about something we touched on at the beginning, which is first a bridge that you've been a big part of from the LGBTQ community to the straight community, but also now the way that's changing and just the underlying structure that is changing. So I think the polling on this is really, really interesting. So Gallup says 2.6% of baby boomers identify as some sort of LGBTQ, 10.5% of millennials do, and 20% of Gen Z does, and that 20% is doubled in a fairly short period of time. What do you think accounts for those radically higher rates?

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  These are things that'll get me in trouble for saying out loud.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  There's been this explosion in sort of more finely sized sexual orientations, identities. How many pride flags are there now? I have lost count. And younger people may be more comfortable identifying as not straight, identifying as queer in ways that, you know, as a result of relationship styles or interests that when you or I or people who remember what the Yellow Pages are, or were, hear the word queer, we think same-sex relationships for the most part. And a lot of people who identify as queer in that 20%

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  of Gen Z aren't necessarily in or interested in or ever going to be in same-sex relationships. Demisexual is someone who can't experience sexual attraction in the absence of some sort of emotional connection, which describes a lot of people, right, who aren't gay or lesbian or bi or trans necessarily. It also describes a lot of people who are gay, lesbian, bi, and/or trans. And asexuality is a real thing, really a hard-wired sexual orientation for about 1% of the population. Can you say what asexual is for people who don't know? Someone who doesn't experience sexual desire. And, you know, it is a spectrum.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Everything's a spectrum, right? So there are some people who are asexual who experience minimal sexual desire. There are some people asexual who have sexual relationships because sex meets a need that's not about sex. It's incredibly complicated. That said, most people who are asexual who are in relationships or would like to be in relationships are still interested in hetero-romantic relationships, even if they're not sexual relationships. So there's a lot of people being shipped under the queer label now that Yellow Pages types like you and me can't easily identify, can't see under that umbrella, right? But they are.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  And that's great. Welcome. I'm all for the most expansive definition of queer as possible. And anybody who wants to identify as whatever they want to identify as can identify as that. I see people on the right freaking out about, you know, at this rate, everybody's going to be queer in 100 years. Well, and then we're going to go extinct as a species because we're going to forget which whole babies comes out of, I guess. A lot of these people who identify as queer and may be legitimately so, when it comes down to sex and relationships are going to end up in having sex that social conservatives would be comfortable with and having relationships that most social conservatives would be comfortable with. And most social conservatives would assume they're not having if they're queer

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  identified when they actually are. You're in San Francisco. How many people do you know who identify as queer are opposite sex and married? However, they identify in other ways are technically opposite sex and in marriages that may or may not be monogamous. It's really high. And that's wonderful, I guess.

• 1:06:16Ezra Klein?

  This is sort of the motivation for the question in a way, which is that I, and I feel again, like I'm 2000 years old when I start asking questions motivated by, I was talking to some teens, but at least among people I've met out here, straight is not an aspirational identity. Like, it's sort of something you're like, yeah, yeah, sorry, you know?

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Ezra Klein?

  And that there, it's a really interesting, that's why I'm kind of asking your thoughts. And it's a really interesting change to me that has happened in my lifetime and seems to be growing where.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  Well, just like Christian.

• 1:06:51Ezra Klein?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Like so many people, you know, nuns are the fastest growing category of believers, people who don't believe in anything.

• 1:07:00Ezra Klein?

  Oh, not Christian nuns, but N O N E S.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  N O N E S.

• 1:07:03Ezra Klein?

  Yes, people who don't have a, yeah.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  I remember Christian, and I was taught by them. And a lot of these people are still sort of nominally Christian. They just don't want to publicly associate with what Christianity, politicized Christianity, has come to mean in our culture. Thanks to odious people like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Tony Perkins and Family Research Council. They don't want to be affiliated with that. And I think the same process has sort of played out with straight. There's a lot of people who feel like straight's brand is toxic. There used to be a greater stigma attached to being perceived as not straight. And in certain subcultures, certain milieus, that polarity has flipped.

• 1:07:49Ezra Klein?

  This cuts to something that I sometimes hear from my queer friends, and particularly my more politically radical queer friends, which is that we were talking earlier about the ways in which a lot of gay culture has migrated to straight culture. But there's a feeling that's gone the other way, too, that there was a more radical set of family formations, of kinship, not just non-monogamy, but ideas about how you would structure, you know, families of choice and how you would structure social networks and what it would mean to be in a relationship. And that in the fight for gay marriage, there was a lot of what gets called assimilation. But that a lot of that got pushed to the margins and a lot of that experimentation stopped happening.

• 1:08:34Ezra Klein?

  I sometimes get asked how having children changed my politics, which I have all kinds of answers for. But the main thing it's done more recently is really persuade me that something is completely wrong in how we do family. That it's a pretty new experience for so many people to live so far from the rest of their family. I have a four-year-old and a one-year-old, and at this moment, we don't live near any family.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  That's really hard.

• 1:09:02Ezra Klein?

  And it's completely insane. And my colleague David Brooks has written a great piece in The Atlantic a couple of years back on this, like the nuclear family, like this kind of golden age in nuclear family, was a couple-decade-long aberration. Before that, you had big extended families that lived together. And then after that, what you have is richer people buying extended families through purchasing a lot of household help and childcare and so on, and poor people really struggling. And we do, I think, have a constant ferment around...

• 1:09:34Ezra Klein?

  Questions of sexual revolution and we've been talking about relational revolution. But it just seems to me that two people is too few to raise a family. Now, maybe one answer is you live near your family if you can, and if that works for your job and if your family, if your parents are healthy and able to help. And I mean, there are all kinds of qualifications there. But in many ways, I keep waiting for this thing people, social conservatives keep warning me is coming, which is more experimentation in how we do family, more experimentation in how we do child raising. I mean, I do know people out here who, they live in poly households and six people raised two kids, and it's not so much about who's sleeping with whom, it's really about the parenting.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Ezra Klein?

  And just something just has seemed off to me as a parent for some time. It just, we have so little community and we seem trapped in this view that this kind of atomization is okay, or we paper over it with money. And I don't know, I don't feel like in 100 years, we're going to be doing it this way. I don't know how we're going to be doing it, but this seems crazy.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  We weren't doing it this way 100 years ago. I grew up in a multi-generational household, grew up in a two-flat apartment building, which is an apartment building that only has the two apartments in it on the north side of Chicago. And my grandparents and aunts and uncles lived downstairs and my mom and dad and my three siblings lived upstairs. There are a lot of people around and everybody helped raise the kids and some of my aunts and uncles were still kids themselves when we were very little children. That worked. There were downsides. You know, you were always who you were as a child. You were always under the gaze of your parents, your grandparents. We overcorrected when we atomized.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  And the pressure it puts on two people alone, just a couple, to raise kids, like Hillary Clinton was right, it really does take a village. And we have to ask ourselves, what are the motives of the people out there trying to convince everyone that it should just be two people living in a suburban home in the suburbs? I blame the automobile, I blame the expressway for contributing to the atomization of the family.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  But yeah, having family close by or having people in your life that are family, the family you've created, not, you know, biological kin, extended family, but, you know, the family of choice that people talk about in places like San Francisco and Seattle, that makes parenting easier and more possible. And resetting those cultural norms around extended families and around not expecting that a couple can or should do everything. You know, one of the things my mom did when Terry and I first became parents and she came to visit was take our infant from us and push us out the front door and told us to take advantage. Right?

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  You know, one of the things my mother told me when I became a parent was the only time you remember why you liked your partner enough to want to have children with them in the first place was when you were alone with your partner away from your children. And that was possible for my parents when we were little kids because of my grandparents and aunts and uncles. And it was harder for us because our family wasn't in Seattle with us. I completely agree with you. And not just in this way, but in so many ways, set up a system that makes parenting as miserable, isolating and punishing as possible. And then social conservatives sit around with their thumbs in their butts, wondering why so few people want to do this anymore. And it's not just about childcare. It's not just about professional childcare.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  It's about, you know, preschool or daycare. It's also about, you know, mother-in-law apartments. It's about people living, you know, in denser places. The neighborhood I grew up in Chicago was very dense. It was one of the reasons why, you know, when an aunt or uncle moved out of my grandparents' house, they moved down the block. And it was possible for them to move down the block and to stay in our lives and to be a relief for my parents, who had four kids.

• 1:13:42Ezra Klein?

  And this is a place that goes back to your focus sometimes on expectations, where I have, every sport, I have a flexible job, I make good money, my partner and I have a good relationship, we split the parenting. The expectations you're given on this are completely insane. And basically, every parent I know, you end up talking for two minutes. I mean, Jessica Groves just wrote a book about this. You end up talking for two minutes, and people are just climbing up the walls. And the part of the difficulty of it is this belief in the back of your head that somewhere, somebody is doing this perfectly, right? Somewhere, it isn't feeling like this for them. And it isn't. You start to realize that. But it's just a place where there's been so little experimentation. I mean, you

• 1:14:26Ezra Klein?

  were just mentioning density and housing. I think a big problem for liberals here is that, look, we can and should have universal pre-K and childcare and every part of the social state that can help people parent that is possible and that we see in dozens, dozens and dozens of other countries. But it isn't going to solve all of this. Like, at some point, there is this question of just the community around the parent. I mean, Clinton's book, in this way, is really prophetic. I should go back and read it again, because we've just completely lost it. And I did this conversation with Patrick Deneen some number of months ago, and he's a kind of hardcore, post-liberal conservative, very intense ideology happening over there.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, terrifying.

• 1:15:11Ezra Klein?

  But I was thinking, after our conversation, about the way in which something that he understood correctly was that liberals had stopped having anything really to say about the family beyond social sports. And as such, they weren't talking to people in a language they could hear. And I don't think where Deneen is going with this is going to talk to them in a language that makes sense either. I do think there, we got to a point where, after how much discrimination and how many wars for equality there were, a lot of folks got into a space of just wanting to show that they were accepting, and also, they weren't trying to change too much simultaneously, as opposed to saying, something has really

• 1:15:51Ezra Klein?

  gone wrong here, and we should be in a space of experimentation to try to create models where parenting is not something you inflict upon yourself, but something that works within the society that we have built.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04Ezra Klein?

  I have strong views about this.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  I do, too. And I listened to that conversation.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  Whenever you interview one of those people on the, I don't know what to call them, the far bizarre right, it's a torment to me because there are times when I'm nodding along, like, we need more family support, we need more working, you know, bring back jobs and make it possible for a family to function if it can on one income. But we also need universal pre-K and daycare, but it can't be 30 miles away or 10 miles away. It's got to be on the block. And one of the things you've been hammering away at is why liberals can't seem to run the cities that they're in charge of anymore. And this block

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  on constructing housing and denser neighborhoods where places where people want to live in, where the jobs are, and yet, you know, people who bought houses there 30 years ago are preventing the city where they live from continuing to be a city that functions and grows and where it's possible for families to thrive and, you know, multiple generations of a single family to live in close proximity to one another. And it's a problem.

• 1:17:23Ezra Klein?

  It reminds me of something that came up at the beginning of that conversation. And people should go, sorry if you didn't listen to it. It's a conversation between me and Patrick Denny and you can search him. But something he says at the beginning when I was asking him, who are you talking to? Who is your enemy here? Because I'm pretty sure it's actually me was what I was trying to get at. But nevertheless, he's like, well, there are these people, these liberals in the legal academy that want to do away with a family. And maybe there are. But the thing that's interesting to me is that the thing that I see on the edge, and is a reason I brought this topic up in the context of the question of was something lost in the experimentations of the queer community around

• 1:18:05Ezra Klein?

  marriage, is that the people I know who have expanded family quite a bit are in more marginal communities more often. I mean, I don't know many polyamorous households, but I know a couple that raise children and it seems to work for them. I do know, I do have queer friends who tend to have much more kind of serious allo parenting among their communities because there's just more people who are bought into that family's success and they've built more of a chosen The approach to the friendship is more like a family than it is among many straight folks or straight couples. And I keep wondering if that, if that kind of thing is going to expand, because we're not going to abolish a family. I find that to be a completely

• 1:18:47Ezra Klein?

  functionally ridiculous concern, but we do somehow need to expand it. And that's what we have not figured out.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Or have we? Are the poly families or people engaged in adult parenting that you're seeing in the process of figuring it out? Have they figured it out? I, I think they have. You know, one of the things, whenever I listen to a conversation of yours with someone like that dude, I always wish you'd ask them, and what are we going to do about the gay people who are already out and the queer families that are already formed? Because they seem to regard us as the enemy of family as opposed, you know, we don't jump out of cabbage patches. We don't emerge fully formed from the back rooms of gay bars at 18. We're part of these families that he pines for and the kind of family structure that he

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  pines for. And once we were free to start creating our own, we did. We want to be a part of, you know, queer people, of this familial project. And yet we're regarded by the people arguing that, you know, liberals are the enemies of the family. Our presence is somehow a threat to the family or antithetical to the idea of family. And I would like to know what their fix is, what they're going to do about us. And they never answer that question.

• 1:20:12Ezra Klein?

  I don't think they have an answer, but I will ask you what your answer on the opposite is. What are the principles of family, the ideas of family that you have seen in your community that, you know, if you were a parenting columnist and not a sex and relationships columnist, you'd be trying to push across the bridge?

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  Parenting comes up a lot. Well, in a way, you know, I think it takes more than two people. And sometimes a lot more than two people. And that's often my advice to people about their sex lives. That's also would be my advice to two people in a sexually exclusive relationship who are attempting to parent. It can't just be the two of you. You have to bring other people in, other, you know, family members if they're nearby. And if you're gonna have kids and start a family of your own, you need a network of chosen family to help you do this because it's so, so hard.

• 1:21:14Ezra Klein?

  I think that's a good place to end. Always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  I gave this so much thought. The Ethical Slut by Dosty Easton and Janet Hardy. I'm sure since moving to San Francisco, you've probably heard this book mentioned or seen it on a shelf somewhere. It was published 25 years ago and it's sort of the code of Hammurabi where ethical non-monogamy is concerned.

• 1:21:38Ezra Klein?

  They should make that the blurb.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was a kid and I've reread it a couple of times, but William Shire, who wrote Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, he was a foreign correspondent in Berlin in the 30s. He was, worked with Edward R. Murrow. And after the collapse of the Nazi regime, he wrote Rise and Fall of the Third Reich with access to the Nazi archives. It's a fascinating book, but he also wrote something called Berlin Diary, which was published in 1941 without the benefit of hindsight, which is diary entries as he's witnessing the rise of fascism and totalitarianism in Germany. And I don't think I need to tell your audience why I think that book is so relevant to this moment. And I recently reread it and it's chilling.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  And then one that I don't think people will expect from me is The Royal Affair, George III and His Scandalous Siblings by Stella Tillyard. George III, of course, was the king of England during the American Revolution. I love royal histories, royal biographies. I'm sort of a closet monarchist, except I'm always saying into microphones, I'm a closet monarchist, which I guess means I'm not a closet monarchist. But everyone's always trying to make in, you know, popular media and films and television, a kind of proto-feminist hero of Marie Antoinette, which she just does not. George III's youngest sister, Caroline Matilda, is that proto-feminist hero. And Stella Tillyard wrote a group biography about all of George III's siblings, but the focus

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  is Caroline Matilda. And she lived openly in a polyamorous triad. She had a child by her husband, the king of Denmark, she was the queen of Denmark, and a child by her lover, wore men's clothing, went out riding, and everything the American founding fathers did, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, banning cruel and unusual punishment. Caroline Matilda did first, as a teenage girl in Denmark and queen of Denmark in the 1760s. And that Americans don't know her, I've been trying for a decade to make a TV show about Caroline Matilda happen without much success, but Stella Tillyard's book is amazing. And if you like royal biographies, even if you don't, it's such a tremendous read. In some

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  ways, the title is a little salacious for the kind of original source history that Stella Tillyard wrote about Caroline Matilda and her siblings. If you're embarrassed by the title, just take the cover off the book, but read the book.

• 1:24:06Ezra Klein?

  I would definitely watch that. So, Prestige, drama producers who are listening and programmers, you know where to go. Go to Dan Savage. Dan, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you. It was a real honor.

• 1:24:25Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Em Fagawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Roji Karma, and Kristin Lynn. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld and Sonia Herrera. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Ross Strasser. And special thanks to Pat McCusker.