A large crowd braved a snowstorm to come out to Savage Love Live at Boston's Wilbur Theatre last week. Questions were submitted on index cards, which allowed questioners to remain anonymous and forced them to be succinct. I got to as many of them as I could over two long, raucous, boozy hours. Here are some of the questions I didn't have time for in Boston ...
What do you think of poop play?
I think of it rarely.
How long should I keep my partner locked in male chastity?
Until Rick Santorum is president.
What exactly causes relationships to end?
Relationships end for all sorts of different reasons — boredom, neglect, contempt, betrayal, abuse — but all relationships that don't end survive for the same reason: The people in them just keep not breaking up. Sometimes people in relationships that need to end never get around to breaking up.
I was in an open relationship once and was heartbroken in the end because my partner broke the rules we made. My current partner wants to make our monogamous relationship open, but I am hesitant because of my previous burn. How do I get over this and become comfortable with an open relationship again?
Rejecting nonmonogamy because your last nonmonogamous relationship failed makes about as much sense as rejecting monogamy because your last monogamous relationship failed. If people applied the same standard to closed relationships that they apply to open ones ("I was in one that failed so I can never enter into another one!"), most of us would've had two relationships in our lives — one open, one closed — and then either taken a vow of celibacy or pledged to stick to NSA sex for the rest of our lives.
Our choices are informed by our experience, of course, and you had a bad experience with an open relationship. Open relationships might not be for you. But it's also possible that the problem with your last relationship wasn't the openness but the partner.
Advice for happily child-free people in a baby- and parent-worshipping world?
You could take comfort in your free time, your disposable income, and your vomit-free wardrobe. You could also see baby and parent worship for what it is: a desperate attempt on the part of the busy, broke, and vomit-spackled (and the people trying to sell stuff to us) to make ourselves feel better about the consequential and irrevocable choice we made to have kids.
Magnum condoms are just marketing, right?
Wrong — but you don't have to take my word for it. Just spend 10 minutes on Tumblr and you'll see for yourself.
I accidentally told my dad about your podcast when teaching him how to use iTunes. I called home a couple of weeks later, and Dad told me he's been listening and Mom yells, "I'm not gonna pee on you!"
It could've been worse. Mom could've yelled: "We can't talk right now! I'm peeing on your father!"
Why is the term "monogamy" and not "monoamory"?
Monogamy comes from the Greek "monos" for "single" and "gamos" for "marriage." So the term literally means "one marriage" not "one love." Since you can be monogamous without being married, and married without being monogamous, perhaps the term really should be "monoamory," meaning "one love at a time, married or not." But meaning follows usage, and an effort to get people to use monoamory would be just as futile as efforts to stop people from using polyamory because it mixes Greek ("poly") and Latin ("amory").
On the Lovecast, Dan and The Gist's Mike Pesca "tackle" a football relationship question: savagelovecast.com.
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