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DISPATCHES
posted 3/6/2007
Nerve.com - The Rise of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Relationship
"If my girlfriend falls in love with another guy, I want to know," says Serdna, a twenty-two-year-old painter from Queens. "If she goes on a date with a guy, or if she kisses another guy, I don't want to know. If she sleeps with another guy, assuming she uses protection, I definitely don't want to know. But if there ever comes a time that she can't do this anymore, I want to know. And then we would work it out from there."
Serdna is sitting across from me at a café in Manhattan's East Village. Soft-spoken and calm, his large, boyish eyes contrast the scruff of his barely-there beard. What he's telling me goes against all the conventional relationship wisdom I've ever heard. Even the most liberated, iconoclastic couples I know agree: total openness needs to be maintained in a healthy relationship. If you make the mutual decision to have an open relationship, fine, but you and your partner should practice complete transparency when it comes to the whos, wheres, whens and hows of your sexual activities.
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But is this really the best way to do it? Or has it simply become gospel via hundreds of advice columns? The concept of "communication" is often defined as full disclosure. But people like Serdna think this rigid interpretation is illogical. For the past three years, he's been in a "don't ask, don't tell" relationship with his girlfriend, a twenty-one-year-old fashion student we'll call Leslie.
Though "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) relationships brush the sexual fringe, the story of how Serdna and Leslie met sounds like a Dawson's Creek plotline. The high-school sweethearts were introduced at a dance, online chatting led to a first date, prom led to a two-year monogamous relationship and, somewhere in the middle, they lost their virginity together.
But by Serdna's sophomore year at Parsons art college, he felt two years had sapped the relationship of
its passion. "We would go out, see a movie, eat, then go home." And because he'd spent his entire adolescence at an all-boys school, his new coed campus — with its overwhelming majority of flirtatious female peers — was rife with temptation.
Serdna didn't want to risk slipping up and cheating, so he called off the relationship. But a week later, they were hanging out again, and having sex.
"What do we do?" they asked each other. Serdna felt conflicted. He didn't want to lose Leslie or the freedom to experience other women.
Then, while reading about different types of open relationships online, he stumbled upon the concept of DADT, and realized he could have it both ways — the girlfriend and the casual sex — without the trauma of hearing about her sleeping with other men. "[The website] explained that if you want the freedom to do whatever you want, it's better not to
Most in the polyamorous community (the go-to experts on open relationships) believe such a policy can only lead to catastrophe.
know," Serdna says. "So, when I read about it, I thought, that's it."
There's nothing new about couples not asking and not telling. Even good old-fashioned infidelity reaffirms a component
of DADT when someone knows their partner is cheating but looks the other way.
The difference with true DADT relationships is that both partners conform to a mutual, verbal agreement that stipulates they can both do what they want, so long as they don't talk about it. This arrangement serves two major purposes: it removes the stigma of cheating, and it allows the couple to operate in semi-ignorant bliss. Serdna didn't want to break up with Leslie, and he felt that keeping their relationship too open could create a friends-with-benefits situation, something neither of them wanted.
So the couple mutually agreed that during the times they weren't together, they were free to flirt with, date, kiss and sleep with other people. The only rule was that they keep quiet about it — neither one wanted to know anything about the other's secret sex life. Yet they considered their lines of communication open and fully functional. "We have to talk about how we feel, and there are rules," Serdna says. "I know guys who lie and cheat on their girlfriends, and I swore I would never turn into one of those guys."
But after Serdna kissed another woman for the first time, he felt so shaken that he broke the cardinal rule: he called Leslie and told her. She was so distraught that she hung up on him. The next time they talked, she was angry, not because of the kiss, but because he had told her. "I don't know if I can do this anymore," she said. "Why did you tell me?"
Still, they plunged ahead, and that was the last time Serdna told Leslie about a tryst with another woman. "If it's going to work, I can't tell her these things that happen," he said. "That was the first step toward accepting the reality of what we were doing."
For something based on the absence of questions and answers, people in DADT relationships spend a lot of time talking.
"It needs to be on the table," says Michael Shernoff, a New York City-based psychotherapist. "Is it just tricking? Can you see somebody more than once? Can you bring them into your house? There have to be certain rules, and both people must feel that they have the ability to revisit those rules any time they need to."
But for some couples, DADT is not primarily about damage control. George Olds, a fifty-five-year-old equal-marriage advocate in Toronto, has been with his partner Ian for so long that they consider what they do outside their bed to be a non-issue. "I already know after living with him for twenty-two years what kinds of people he goes for," says George, "or what he chats about online or what he likes to do in person. So there's not much for me to ask or for either of us to tell." Still, the constant exchange of details can feel harmful and awkward, and DADT allows George to bypass the psychological bruises of knowing who Ian is with, and when. "There's that envy thing: 'That could've been me,' or, 'You could've done that with me.' There's no point in shoving it in his face. And I wouldn't want it shoved in my face because that might make me feel inadequate."
George met Ian, who is fifty-six, in 1985 through a classified ad, but a month later, Ian moved to another city for a job. For two years, they kept their long-distance relationship open. When Ian returned and moved in with George, they never considered becoming exclusive, even after they tied the knot in Toronto in 2004. "I would never limit him if he felt he wanted to have some fun with somebody else," says George, "so long as he realizes that I'm his other half and he comes home to me."
