New York magazine's long meditation on adultery and sexual desire sort of reads like a conversation between two guys in their senior year of high school. "Wouldn't it be cool if we could have, like wives and girlfriends and affairs and people weren't so uptight about everything?" Ross notices that the piece barely mentions children, and the effect on them. I was struck that the piece didn't deal with how the men would feel if their wives had some open relationships too until the final paragraphs, when the subject is dumped like a bucket of ice water on the article. In general, if you're thinking about a new, more open model of romantic attachment and using your wife and cherished friends as the hypothetical participants, I'll take you seriously. If, however, you're only imagining yourself as this Master of Polyamory, then you're really just thinking about getting laid more, but trying to assuage your guilt by masking the desire in reams of poorly understood evolutionary biology and vague gestures towards Europe. Bleh.
