I had an email the other day from a journalist, writing to me wearing my therapist hat. He wanted to interview a “gay relationship expert on monogamy” for a magazine article. I responded, a bit too flippantly, saying I was amused he thought I would be any such thing, and declined. He informed me later that it was a typo: he was looking to interview a “gay relationship expert, on monogamy”.

Ah.
I still declined his request, though. What’s a “relationship expert”? Someone who has lots of relationships? Someone who has just the one? Someone who keeps on making mistakes in them and learns all about how not to relate? A prostitute who listens to her punters’ talk about their marriages? Someone who’s got a degree in psychotherapy or psychology? A statistician? An anthropologist? A couple counsellor? A divorce lawyer? A bereavement counsellor?
Being a therapist is a privilege in many ways; I am privy to so many people’s private struggles and concerns, about which I would not otherwise hear. It is this experience that has made me profoundly aware of how different everyone is, and that each relationship is unique, with its own stresses and strains. Most importantly, I know how rare the good ones are.
I can generalise, if required, on only one thing: long, successful relationships tend to be quite idiosyncratic, forgiving of how the other fails to live up to the conformist ideal of how partners should be; they celebrate each other’s difference. The corollary of this is: the scorn that people express when partners disappoint us is the primary corrosive agent in relationships.
A recent report by a psychologist, a self-styled “relationship expert”, demonstrated that longevity in relationship is fairly predictable, using a particular interview technique, and a scoring system designed to quantify the various emotions being displayed by a couple, consciously or unconsciously, through opinions, attitudes, body language, etc. The presence or absence of one particular emotion, contempt, proved to be key - if one partner was contemptuous, however subtly, the chances were the relationship wouldn’t last very long. In particular, it was the condescending aspect to contempt - the moral high ground, the implied evaluation that the other is of lesser status - that was the most telling significator. This was borne out by a recent follow-up study, many years after the first interviews. Interestingly, being critical is no bar to longevity in relationship - we can respond and grow with quite pungent criticism, if it’s offered from a position of equality.
If asked about monogamy, as a “relationship expert”, I’d say it’s lovely, in theory. I hear so many confessions about affairs and one-night stands and cottaging and visits to prostitutes from my clients, it makes me wonder about how revolutionary the truth on sexual matters is, how dangerous and potent it is. One of the effects of gay and lesbian people politically coming out in the '70s, and even more markedly in the '80s with the involuntary “coming out” that dying of AIDS signified, was the disintegration of old notions of sexual privacy (some would say modesty), that society and family and religion depended on. In particular, the sexual hyperactivity of men became impossible to conceal.
Being a “gay relationship expert” to me is a nonsense, if gay is a catch-all phrase including men and women. Lesbian couples relate very differently to gay men, in my experience. One of the few things we do share, often, is the “delayed adolescence” factor; when our heterosexual counterparts are busy dating and snogging and breaking up with each other on a weekly basis and telling all their friends about it and learning all about relationships, we tend to isolate and feel ashamed and take a few years to catch up. But, insofar as I have some expertise about anything, it is how men struggle with relationship and sex, and how deep that struggle is, in a way that is often kept very secret, and rarely admitted to others. This is, in my experience, true to some degree for all men. Indeed the difference between gay and heterosexual men, when it comes to sex and relationships, is minuscule, compared to the difference between men and women.
It is not very politically correct to talk about the difference between men and women these days – look at the trouble that Harvard President Lawrence Summers has got himself into recently when discussing this subject, in a highly tentative way, about why fewer women than men get top science jobs.
We all of us have male and female in us - no one knows this better than queers. But, at the moment, the split between male roles and female roles in society is rather deep, notwithstanding the decades since feminism, and this causes many relationship problems, for us all. We need to acknowledge our differences in order to relate honestly, and only then can we begin to value each other and our failings.b