Future Sex (19 page)

They agreed that they would think of themselves as a couple now instead of two single people who slept together, but they would still not be monogamous.
Now they had to figure out how to manage the logistics. Elizabeth compiled a shared Google Document that was to become the foundation of their research—a syllabus of recommended reading, places to attend discussion groups, and sex parties open to the public—and Wes followed. He read the books that Elizabeth had read. They went to a play party at the sex club Mission Control, a floor-through apartment
up a flight of stairs in a low-rise building on Mission Street. It was decorated with fake flowers, velvet paintings, Mexican doilies strung over the bar, a stripper pole, a “fungeon.” They had sex surrounded by onlookers.

They returned another night, for an open-relationship discussion group, but most of the attendees were older, in their late thirties, and were either married and “frisky,”
or married and desperate to save their failing marriages. That was another thing about polyamory: at first almost none of their peers were trying it, at least not with the intention Wes and Elizabeth were showing. It was as if the precocity they showed in their professional lives extended into an extreme pragmatism about sex. I had met with other nonmonogamous communities in the Bay Area, who identified
their sexuality with political aims such as anarchism and who sought to separate forms of love from government involvement. Elizabeth and Wes’s inquiry was less about reconciling theory and practice. They did not speak of “the patriarchy,” or quote Wilhelm Reich, but saw openness as the pursuit of honesty. They were seeking to avoid the confusion and euphemism of their generation’s dating scene
by talking through their real feelings, naming their actual desires, and having extensive uncomfortable conversations. Instead of facing the specter of commitment and running away in uncertainty, they would try to find a modified commitment that acknowledged their mutual desire for a more experiential life. Elizabeth and Wes felt they could draw upon certain ideas of the older polyamorists but
had to do a lot of the thinking on their own. In monogamy there was one boundary. In their relationship there would be many. After completing their research they began to draw up rules.

The first held that on any given night, one could call the other and say, “Will you please come home.” This rule served as a baseline: a shared understanding that each of them was the most important person in
the other’s life. The second rule was about disclosure. If one of them consciously suspected he or she might sleep with another person, the premonition or sentiment should be disclosed. They agreed to discuss each other’s crushes. If a sexual encounter happened spontaneously, the event should be disclosed soon afterward. They would use condoms with their other partners. Despite making rules, they
would aim to fail. It was a concept they borrowed from computer security: if an unplanned event occurs, what should the fallback response look like? In the “fail open mode,” when an issue arises for which no rules or regulations have been devised, the default is to act first and discuss later, to have experiences first, then worry about formulating responses to those experiences for the next time.

The extrarelationship sex established a pattern. Elizabeth had more or less stable relationships. Wes was more likely to have one-night stands or meet with old friends while traveling for work. Wes did not tend to experience jealousy, although Elizabeth sometimes did.

In a final development, early in 2012, Brian left the country for three months. In the absence of her second partner, Elizabeth
felt an imbalance. Wes was still dating other people and she felt precarious and vulnerable. She was also coming to terms with what had been a growing crush on someone else, another co-worker at Google. His name was Chris. He happened to be Wes’s best friend.

Wes said he wouldn’t mind if Elizabeth and Chris wanted to start sleeping together. Elizabeth, upset, asked how he could possibly care
about her and want her to sleep with his best friend. They worked it out.

Chris is a tall man with a sweet smile and a shy affect. He grew up, like Elizabeth and Wes, with the expectation that happiness in life would be found in a long process of inquiry and experimentation. His parents had met at a commune in the hills of Santa Barbara in the early 1980s, so the example he had was one of youthful
adventure that would eventually settle into conformity, if open-minded conformity—in suburban New Jersey, it turned out, where Chris grew up. For college he went west to Stanford, studied computer science and creative writing, and graduated, like Wes and Elizabeth, in 2010. He met Wes at Google, where they both started working later that year.

Chris and Wes became friends around the same time
Wes met Elizabeth. Compared to them, Chris had more of an introspective personality. He wrote poetry. He was prone to occasional brooding. He did not have the easy emotional adjustment to the world around him that Elizabeth and Wes both had, and he was more careful about taking risks when it came to things like trying drugs and forming relationships.

The three of them spent time together at work,
where they would regularly clock sixty or seventy hours a week, and by the end of 2011 they regularly socialized as a group outside of work, too. By early 2012, Chris and Elizabeth would also hang out by themselves, such as the time when they went to IKEA together, since he had a car and she didn’t. Chris also knew, from conversations with them both, that his new friends were in an open relationship,
but at first he saw his own role the way most single people feel with their couple friends: as a mutual confidant, a sort of child to two parents, with a much closer relationship to his male counterpart.

One night Chris accompanied Elizabeth and Wes to a queer dance party at the club Public Works, on Fourteenth and Mission. They went with a group, some co-workers from Google, some of Chris’s
friends from Stanford, and scattered representatives of Elizabeth’s Burning Man crowd. Chris, Elizabeth, and Wes danced together, dancing that evolved seamlessly to making out on the dance floor. Chris enjoyed it, but felt a little bit like the third wheel. His friends were on MDMA and he was not (he had never liked MDMA, finding the crash of its aftermath, too psychologically destabilizing). Elizabeth
and Wes had planned a foursome with another couple later that night, so Chris ended up going home alone.

But it was the first time the three of them had made out with one another, and soon making out with Elizabeth and Wes became a recurring event for Chris. Sometimes while sober, sometimes not, but it became an unspoken understanding that if the three of them went out dancing they would probably
end up kissing together. This was true for a whole group of friends that began to coalesce at this time around Wes and Elizabeth, who began to be sought after as gurus by other couples their age who had considered opening their relationships. Elizabeth especially came to be known as someone to go to with questions. The shared Google Document soon had multiple subscribers. As the mood expanded,
so did the openness.

One night Elizabeth came over to dinner at Chris’s house, and after dinner decided to spend the night, much of which was spent awake and making out. The next day, Chris met with Wes. He asked Wes whether he really did not mind if he and Elizabeth occasionally slept together. Wes said that he truly did not mind. Then Chris brought up another idea. What about the three of them
together, a group situation? he asked, carefully. And then: or just the two men?

Chris described himself as “mostly straight but every once in a while…” He had found his sexuality agreed with Alfred Kinsey’s description of sexual orientation as a scale or spectrum. He had always assumed, when reading about the idea of the spectrum, that it meant a person had high levels of attraction to people
of one gender and slightly lower levels to another. Instead, Chris had learned that he was attracted to many women and a few men but the strength of the attraction, to those to whom he was drawn, was the same regardless of gender. Wes happened to be one of the men to whom Chris was attracted. There had not been very many, so Chris was perhaps inclined to see the attraction as one of value and importance.

Wes, meanwhile, suspected that he was not gay at all, although in the spirit of the times was having trouble making such a closed-minded declaration. He told Chris he needed to think about it a bit.

Chris and Elizabeth began regularly sleeping with each other. He continued his friendship with Wes. The two men were affectionate with each other, even kissing hello or goodbye, but the fact of his
unreturned desire for Wes remained surprisingly difficult for Chris. It was harder to kill off his hopes than he had anticipated—and maybe Wes really
was
mulling over the idea.

Unlike some of the authors he read, Chris did not see monogamy as “unnatural” or imposed by some historical superstructure. He did not consider himself as having been “conditioned” toward some prescribed end. If there
was a philosophical underpinning to his behavior it was that he considered himself a curious person. Some things he tried—sex with people of his own gender, psychoactive substances—because he wanted to be the kind of person who tried things. Wes and Elizabeth shared this view, too, that new experiences were valuable in themselves, even when they ended badly. If Chris felt left out, or Elizabeth got
jealous, or Wes had to deal with uncomfortable sexual interest from his best friend, all of this was something to think about and explore rather than something to push away. They began to think of their three-way sexually charged friendship as a more advanced, if more difficult, form of relationship. It took on a purpose beyond personal satisfaction. It began to represent something better, a desire
to improve human culture, to seek out a model of sexuality better suited to the present, to its freedoms, to its honesty.

Later, each of them in his or her own way would refer to this time as “the honeymoon period” or “the good part.” Elizabeth even picked up an acronym, NRE, for New Relationship Energy. Nobody knew on a particular night how it was going to end. Chris still hoped that Wes might
be a little bit gay. That spring of 2012, they were immersing in a new community, not just Chris, Elizabeth, and Wes, but an extended group who shared as a stated goal sexual openness with their partners and their friends.

*   *   *

I first met Chris, Elizabeth, and Wes around this time, in late May 2012, when their experiment was just a few months old. I was seven years older than Elizabeth
and Chris and eight years older than Wes. I envied their community of friends, the openness with which they shared their attractions. Elizabeth, Wes, and Chris did not proceed recklessly. They drew up ethical codes to protect their relationships. They sought to protect emotions and physical health with rules and charters. They were earnest, without sarcasm or cynicism, and treated feelings as individual
specimens, wrapped in cotton and carefully labeled. Instead of temptation as the ignoble emotion, jealousy was the reactionary response they tried never to indulge. My friend had been right: they were also self-confident, or at least Elizabeth and Wes seemed to plunge forward through life without fear. I saw in Chris a little more hesitation.

They were not bothered, as I was when I met them,
by the evidence that nonmonogamous arrangements had ultimately been rejected by the last generation of straight people who had tried them. The experiments Elizabeth, Wes, and Chris were undertaking had a direct historic connection, in language and structure, to the sexual revolution. The 1960s and its immediate aftermath loomed over any practice of free love, as the last moment in living memory that
my own particular demographic of Americans had initiated a massive and consequential critique of monogamy, especially as the last time that straight women had done intentional experiments in alternative lifestyles as part of a unified cultural movement. My moral worldview originated in that historical moment, along with my sexual freedom, the computers I used, my disinterest in organized religion,
the multiculturalism I valued, and much of the literature and music I loved. It glowed from the past like a city just over the horizon.

My sense had always been that compared with people in the 1960s and ’70s people my age had questioned very little about their expectations for adult life. I looked at the experiments of those decades and felt they had taught us that communes and other alternative
arrangements that celebrated sexual freedom generally ended in jealousy and hurt feelings. Obedient children of the 1980s and ’90s saw the failures of the counterculture, took them as implicit lessons from our parents, and held ourselves in thrall to grade point averages, drug laws, health insurance, student loan payments, college admissions, diplomas, internships, condoms, skin protection factors,
antidepressants, designated smoking areas, politically correct language, child safety locks, gym memberships, cell phone contracts, bike helmets, cancer screenings, credit histories, and career advancement. We had a nuanced understanding of risk.

When it came to sex I thought we had it much better than they had. I thought of sex in the 1960s and ’70s the way I thought of its contemporaries’ drug
use—they had gone to an unpleasant extreme, and now we knew better. They had done the work to sexually liberate women and start the gay rights movement, but we knew better than to move into rural communes or co-opt Native American spirituality or believe in Charles Reich’s “Consciousness III” or force one’s wife to sleep with another man to overcome her cultural programming. We had more access
to birth control, and knew more about our bodies, and enjoyed greater gender equality in things like education and expectation, even if it didn’t carry over into things like income equality or managerial power. We had a vast selection of vibrators sold in woman-friendly retail environments. We had
Sex and the City
. We had AIDS and therefore had evolved a notion of “safer sex.” We had rape crisis
centers, legal abortion, and over-the-counter emergency contraception.