Have either of you seriously ever thought about swinging?

Heidi: Ah, monogamy. The work of it. The comfy underwear. The grueling weeklong fights. The unflinching honesty about things like smelly body parts and bad haircuts. Why on Earth do we do this to ourselves? For JB and me, the question isn’t really, “Why monogamy?” It’s, “Why not anything else?” Why not swing? Because, honestly, we think we would hate it. Because we’d want it to be fun, but really it would be just another thing to turn us into a big mess. The truth is, for some folks, it’s entirely possible that looking outside the familiar strictly for sex may be a good choice—though we hesitate to call it natural. After all, in the “natural” world animals do all kinds of nutty things. Some are monogamous, lots are not. And a few eat the heads of their partners after mating. That doesn’t mean that it’s right for everyone.

Beyond that, me swinging would be like being an alcoholic working in a bar. I tend to fall in love as easily as catching a cold. This is what is “natural” for me: falling prey to the chemical cocktail of dopamine, phenylethylamine, and oxytocin that make me want to give myself over to one person and lose myself in love. The last time I did that I ended up here, in this perhaps unnatural, often challenging, place called marriage. The drugs may have worn off some, but I’m still happy to be here; still stoned on the safety and comfort it offers me. Do we ever think about stepping out of our “vanilla” ways and spicing things up? Sure. In a perfect world, JB would go to bed each night with me and my stripper girlfriends. But do we seriously consider it? Nope. The truth is, I don’t do well separating sex and love. I don’t like sex with no strings attached. For me, good sex is all about the strings—the sticky, slippery, confining, liberating strings of emotion. That’s what turns me on. Monogamy is a beautiful compromise. In exchange for working our asses off at this monogamy thing, in exchange for passing up the excitement of sex with other people, we get something else. We get to eliminate one variable. We get to look at the hard stuff without the distraction of the easy always being an option. We get to make new mistakes instead of getting stuck at our same old places, our same old jumping off points. It is hard, but it’s also deep—not unlike the sex we’ve been having lately, yet another payoff.

Ian: This is a question we all probably explore at some point. I mean, does monogamy really make sense, or are we all just avoiding the simple truth that, when looking at the forest for the trees, we’re pretty much alone amongst other animals: Nature tends to be about 99 percent of the sluttish type, excluding a few holdouts: prairie voles (basically little gerbil-sized rats), pygmy marmosets (basically the smallest-living monkey), gray foxes, gray-headed albatrosses, and that’s about it. So, seriously, whom are we kidding? If we want to stay faithful but still be enlivened with all that is Eros, it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than date night. Makes sense when you consider that study has shown that couples in long-term relationships tend to feel less content and satisfied. But as we said in the conclusion, there are those who not only make long-term love work, but who make it work well. I’m hoping to be one of those.