sometimes i think that love is just physical

said Joni, a woman ahead of her time. here's an excerpt of New York's current cover story, whick is pretty appropriate for what we always find ourselves talking about/ lamenting/ agonizing over. I added the emphasis and discussion questions. Don't be shy.

"But women are also programmed for infidelity, Buss says. They have a drive to monopolize the economic resources of their mate, according to the theory, but also to keep a man or two in reserve, because men die earlier than women, or men go off, and women need protection. Recent analyses of genetic databases reveal that fully 10 percent of people have different biological fathers from the men they name as their fathers, Buss notes; that’s evidence of women cheating. But Buss says the difference between the genders in the desire for variety is not minor (as, say, the gender difference in height is, about 10 percent on average); it is staggering, “like the difference between how far the average man and woman can throw a rock.” Consider the Website meet2cheat, in which married people find one another for recreational sex; it charges $59 for a man’s three-month entry fee, $9 for a woman. Cheating wives are harder to come by. “Women are going to get bored, just like men, but I don’t think they have this driving constant need,” says Nancy Heneson, a science writer who’s covered evolutionary psychology since its early days."
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“Marriage isn’t the problem; it’s the best answer anyone’s come up with,” Squire says. “Men and women are equally oppressed by expectations. Expectations are ridiculously high now. Nobody expected you to find personal fulfillment and happiness in marriage. Marriage can be very satisfying, but it’s not going to be this heady romance for 40 years.” Marriage involves routine, and routine kills passion. “What does Bataille say?” Squire continues. “There is nothing erotic that is not transgressive. Marriage has many benefits and values, but eroticism is not one of them.”
A long and supportive marriage may be more valuable than a sexually faithful one, Squire says. “Why does society consider it more moral for you to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, disrupt your children’s lives maybe forever, just to be able to fuck someone with whom the fucking is going to get just as boring as it was with the first person before long?”

...
I ... suggested that we could change sexual norms to, say, encourage New York waitresses to look on being mistresses as a cool option. “That’s fringe,” my friend said dismissively. Wives weren’t going to allow it, and we men grant them a lot of power; they’re all as dominant as Yoko Ono. “Look, we’re the weaker animal,” he said. “They commandeer the situation.” He and I love our wives and depend on them. In each of our cases, they make our homes, manage our social calendar, bind up our wounds and finish our thoughts, and are stitched into our extended families more intimately than we are. They seem emotionally better equipped than we are. If my marriage broke up, my wife could easily move in with a sister. I’d be as lost as plankton.
Later, I related my friend’s Yoko analogy to my wife. She pointed out that Ono and Lennon had a marriage based on what they both cared most passionately about, art—not money or sex, to judge from the fact that Lennon went off for a year with a mistress and the marriage survived. But how many of us can afford that? Tuten says that even the New York art world is short on mistresses. “Victor Hugo had a mistress even when he was in exile in Jersey. He lived in a house with his family and the mistress lived down the road, and he went to and fro. I don’t know anyone in the art world who has that. I don’t know too many men who have enough money to set up an apartment for a woman.”
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Polyamory is something of that fantasy I and other men I know harbor, of a community of free-loving people in multiple relationships. Not just dyads, or couples, but triads, or a woman with two “primaries,” a whole community of friends with benefits. “With practice, we can develop an intimacy based on warmth and mutual respect, much freer than desperation, neediness, or the blind insanity of falling in love,” Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt, two former hippies, write in The Ethical Slut. (sounds like a great idea to me!-em)
My most liberated male friend has expressed a similar view. He finds my confession of sexual torment backward. “It breaks my fucking heart to hear you talk that way. That any person has to talk about where their sexuality has led them in a shameful manner, in relation to other people. That a person’s sexuality has led them to hurt, and I don’t mean physically, another person— that breaks my heart.”
If we simply got rid of a vow of sexual exclusivity and the piety around “faithfulness,” which is a religiously inscribed misnomer for sexual exclusivity anyway, we have no idea what the family would look like in 100 years, he says. Okay, most people would be sexually exclusive and married. But there would be a party going on at the other end of town, in a community of people of high sexual desire who understood that about one another and didn’t feel jealousy or possessiveness.

“Underneath it all is this issue, if there is some divide between the sexes overall in how important sex is, how often you have it and with whom, and whether biological or not, how do we deal with that? We institutionalize things. We create institutions like marriage. For most people, it seems to work. That seems to be the issue we’re dealing with. Should that change?”
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The obvious question is whether we can import a European understanding. The stereotype is that in Europe, they have got this figured out, and every time they snigger over our scandals, they seem more superior. A gay friend tells me that gay European friends laugh at him because even gay relationships here tend to follow a bourgeois, monogamous model.
David Buss points out that in the U.S., it is very difficult for a candidate to be elected who has no professed religious belief, while this is not the case in Europe. In Germany, prostitution is legal. “It’s cleaned up and taxed, and the prostitutes get health insurance and benefits that they couldn’t get if it was illegal.” And German husbands and wives take separate vacations with the understanding that romance might ensue. “You could argue that European sensibility is more civilized and natural.”
BUT Vincent says that French women have to “put up with a lot” and so too do those instinctual Italians. “I’ve heard this mythology so many times, that Italian women, they’re more mature, more understanding of men’s needs, they expect infidelity. They don’t complain,” says Tuten, who was married to an Italian woman. “I don’t know if it’s true. A lot of Italian women expect their husbands to turn into philanderers, and how do they live with it? Some live by suffering.”
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“I think we’re getting into a question of social stability. The male libido is considered a very dangerous and a potentially disruptive force in society. I think that’s why there are so many religious dictums and taboos around that. The idea that one is allowed multiple partners—this is something that has to be rigidly controlled.”
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Nonetheless, the one strong impression I took away from interviewing peers is that American mores are evolving, especially among the affluent. An affair or two is handleable for the rich, says a friend, Jo Mango. “They’re more well read, better informed, and more tolerant. They say, ‘Get over it.’ It’s way costlier to break up. Because look what happens: You lose your living situation and your community in a divorce.” A sophisticated New Yorker made a similar point: “I don’t believe that straying diminishes your love or commitment to your partner. It’s not a zero-sum game. However, it does get complicated and hurtful when you start developing an emotional relationship with another woman.
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A gay friend who has “brooded” over his infidelity for a long time, sometimes feeling that he ought to confess, told me it’s a very 17-year-old American view of the world to think that you should tell someone you love everything and somehow the world will be a better place. Instead, he reminds himself, he’s a grown-up, he has secrets.
He’s keeping those secrets to protect himself as much as his mate. “A relationship is a myth you create with each other. It isn’t necessarily true, but it’s meaningful. The key to that myth is that the other person is enough for you. You know in your head that another person isn’t enough for you. But if you don’t honor the myth, then it crumbles.”

the entire article's here.

Q's:
so what's so wrong about cheating? By not cheating, are women just consigning themselves to traditional gender roles or are they really less sexual? Are our gender relationships naturally determined (ie evolutionarily) or culturally constructed (ie ancient religious texts that have promoted the subordination of women)?
Do we really all want the same thing? Even in a really broad sense, like satisfaction, companionship, etc.?
How can we change these social norms? The guy in the article says that women hold the power. I guess one way to get the party started is to use it. If we want to change gender and sexual relationship norms, how would we approach the conversation with the "other side?
And, are men being honest when they say they want strong, independent, sexually liberated women? We all know no one wants to realize (or fuck) their fantasy (thanks Meres!), so then what?
Also, why isn't everyone just having sex all the time? Why should we care about anything else, really? Talk about a way to fill the void.
And is that last quote about relationships as myths cynical or realistic? If it's a myth, what's the point of having a relationship at all? Why not be honest with yourself and everyone else and not engage in false emotional interaction? Finally, if relationships are a myth, and if no one is ever enough, is that part of the human condition, ie humanity's lot in life, or is it a culturally constructed void perpetuated by Disney's happily ever after and the instant gratification of MTV's hard-bodied mindlessness?