Well, what would you do with "a 'plain vanilla' box"?

After buying a “plain vanilla” box, a Chicago trio brought in an interior designer who blended their aesthetics and added elements like a moody den for socializing and a three-person bed.

🔗: https://t.co/b2Z4qO0bzg pic.twitter.com/2P6CpcN2xI

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 18, 2025

So a "moody den" is a solution to "a 'plain vanilla' box." Who knew?! The things you learn reading the Wall Street Journal. You can get a "three-person bed." How does that work?

"'I was poly before poly was a term,' he says, blue hair tied back, maroon nail varnish on his toes."

"Jay, an IT consultant and self-confessed computer nerd, grew up in suburban New Jersey and became interested in polyamory at the age of ten after reading Robert A Heinlein sci-fi books featuring sexually promiscuous open marriages. His first teenage relationship was nonmonogamous.... He moved to Somerville in the mid-1990s to find many people he knew coalescing around Boston’s university hub — either tech nerds he’d met in online chatrooms or those who attended the sci-fi conventions he would frequent. Large numbers of them were interested in polyamory. 'We had all independently been working on this thing [polyamory], and we found each other and we had a lot to talk about,' he says. He started organising casual poly meet-ups in people’s homes, applying the same academic rigour to discussions about romance as they did to technology. 'How do you handle jealousy? How do you handle getting a new partner when you’ve had one for a while?'"

From "Forget love triangles. Meet the ‘polycule’ with 80 people in it/Polyamory is on the rise — especially in one US city where romantic partners have organised themselves into ever expanding networks. Yes, it can get complicated, they tell Megan Agnew" (London Times).

Who knew the polyamory movement was so connected to science fiction? And yet one can imagine the sort of adolescent who gets submerged in science fiction while dreaming about an alternative to the existing world of finding a real-life girlfriend/boyfriend. Some entirely new structure is needed, he thinks.... blue hair tied back, maroon nail varnish on his toes.

ADDED: A little colloquy between me and ChatGPT.

"I was struck by conservative Instagrammer Arynne Wexler’s description of liberal women as 'androgynous pixie haircut unbathed Marxist freaks in polycules.'"

"Bravo on the clever turn of phrase, Miss Wexler. Impressive use of your Ivy League education to bash polycules.... Would Wexler prefer cheating as an alternative to polyamory? Wexler, per The Post, would delete her Instagram slurs about polyamorists, the WNBA ('welfare for tall lesbians') and other targets if only she could find a husband and kids.... Let’s stop othering and demonizing relationships that are based on consent, communication and affection. Fear, loathing and misinformation aren’t a route to happiness for anyone."

Natalie Davis, who runs the online publication Polyamory Today, writes in a letter to the Washington Post. 

Davis is responding to the article "MAGA and the single girl/What do the young women of the modern right want? It’s complicated." 

Wexler is just one person who's described in the article, which tells us: "She runs a popular Instagram account where she mocks Gen Z college degrees as 'pescatarian arts with a concentration on hating white people' and calls the WNBA 'welfare for tall lesbians' — but she’d delete her account tomorrow if she could trade it in for a husband and kids."

Don't get me started on my musings about what "pescatarian arts" is supposed to mean. Both Grok and Meade resisted the nonliteral interpretation.... 

"When my wife proposed that we stop being monogamous, she said it would make us stronger.... At the time, I was exiting a phase of my life perhaps best described as 'worship pastor bro.'"

"My Christian faith was undergoing a meticulous and scholarly deconstruction. I could begin to imagine a life without God, but with my new, expensive master’s degree in theology, I struggled to imagine a career without Him. By contrast, Corrie’s turn away from religion a year earlier had been quick, uncomplicated and annoyingly joyful.... Corrie started identifying as bisexual, then pansexual, then queer. It was hard to know how to feel about her transformation. On the one hand, it became harder to place myself and our heterosexual marriage on the new map of her sexual interests...."

Writes Jason Bilbrey, in "I Was Content With Monogamy. I Shouldn’t Have Been. Can exploring polyamory both break you and make you?" (NYT)(free access link).

The progress of polyamory in The New York Times.

March 11, 2023: "To Fix a Broken Marriage, an Experiment With Polyamory" ("The couple tried polyamory, which rekindled their passion, but it did not address their other issues...").

May 16, 2023: "Interested in Polyamory? Check Out These Places/Laws granting rights to people in polyamorous relationships are being recognized in more cities" ("We have a population that’s more open to these ideas, and many of these folks are either currently nonmonogamous or have tried nonmonogamy or at the very least know someone who’s polyamorous").

January 13, 2024: "How a Polyamorous Mom Had ‘a Big Sexual Adventure’ and Found Herself/In her memoir, 'More,' Molly Roden Winter recounts the highs and lows of juggling an open marriage with work and child care" ("I felt like there were no stories from the mainstream about it, and I felt very closeted.... It often feels like mothers are not supposed to be sexual beings").

January 19, 2024: "My Relationships Have No Clothes/I have no moral objection to infidelity. For me, sex is just sex" ("If I had to wait until he had no other partner, we would have missed out on this relationship, which is 90 percent TV jokes and 'Mad Men' quotes. We never would have the pride it brings each of us when we make the other laugh out loud").

April 15, 2024: "Lessons From a 20-Person Polycule/How they set boundaries, navigate jealousy, wingman their spouses and foster community" ("It’s not clear when the word ['polycule'] was coined, but it seems to have started catching on around 15 years ago to suggest an intricate structure formed of people with overlapping deep attachments: romantic, sexual, sensual, platonic").

May 9, 2024: "What Kind of Husband Behaves Like Donald Trump?" ("And as Ms. Daniels explained how Mr. Trump would call her 'honeybunch' when he phoned her, and tell her he missed her, I found myself wondering: Is this a man who is capable of missing anyone?")

"My husband...’s a frat bro who loves sports, and I’m a radical alien witch academic nerd."

"In the beginning, we did all the typical stuff. Read the books on nonmonogamy, did the relationship check-ins. We’d sit down, take notes. We did every exercise in the books, listened to every podcast. We learned a strategy from the Multiamory podcast called 'agile scrum,' which was adapted from business-meeting models. We utilized that format. We did that for a year and a half, at least once a month, sometimes six to 10 hours of hard poly-processing. That gave us great communication tactics."

Said a woman named Ann, quoted in "Lessons From a 20-Person Polycule/How they set boundaries, navigate jealousy, wingman their spouses and foster community" (NYT)(free access link).

My head spins. Who could listen to every podcast? Exhausting, and I'm barely picturing what "hard poly-processing" must mean!

Anyway, what does Ann's husband think? He seems quite a bit less jaunty and managerial about the whole thing. This is actually pretty sad, so I will put it after the jump, for your protection:

"Winter and her husband struggled with when and how to tell their sons about their arrangement..."

"... and wanted to wait until their children were mature enough to handle it. That plan failed when their oldest son, then 13, saw his dad’s online dating profile on his laptop, and texted his mother in a panic, asking if they were in an open marriage. Her youngest son found out in a similar way a few years ago, when he was 14, she said. By now, her sons, who are 19 and 21, are blasé about their parents’ sex lives. Her oldest has read her book, and told Winter he skipped some of the 'nitty-gritty' sex scenes, while her youngest chose not to read it, she said.... Her parents, Mary and Philip Roden, were a bit uncomfortable with the intimate details their daughter shares in her memoir, but... 'For the most part, I totally approved of what she was saying.'..."

From "How a Polyamorous Mom Had 'a Big Sexual Adventure’ and Found Herself/In her memoir, 'More,' Molly Roden Winter recounts the highs and lows of juggling an open marriage with work and child care" (NYT).

It's hard to write a memoir and publish it into the minds of everyone you know.

There must be moments when you think, this is just for me, or this ought to be rephrased as fiction, and then the great breakthrough, where you realize, no, this is memoir, and I will be heard.

And let's be fair. The sons didn't learn about their parents nonmonogamous relationship from their mother's memoir. They learned it from their father's online dating profile. The mother's memoir was just an inroad into mother's mind, and they didn't even want to go there.

"Ryan Malone, 37, a chemist who has lived on and off in Somerville for six years, said that he knows hundreds of people who identify as polyamorous..."

"... through his extended social circles. Mr. Malone, who has been nonmonogamous since he was in college, currently has a nesting partner, a long-term partner, two long-distance partners and a kink-based relationship with another person. Mr. Malone said he has never felt weird about going on dates with two or more people at the same time in Somerville. 'No one seems to bat an eye,' he said, so he sees the new protections as very subtle. Ashley Kirsner, 33, who has lived in Somerville for seven years, is the founder of Skip the Small Talk, an organization that offers speed-friending and speed-dating events.... Events like these, the support of the community and the city ordinances have helped Mx. Hall feel more seen. 'Every time a new book comes out, or a new protection comes into place, it feels like it’s validating your identity,' they said."

 
From "Interested in Polyamory? Check Out These Places/Laws granting rights to people in polyamorous relationships are being recognized in more cities" (NYT).

I googled "nesting partner." It's a standard term. I found this creepily illustrated Wikihow article on the subject. Creepily illustrated? I'm judging. The art.

How about "validating your identity"? Is that a standard term? Googling, I'm bombarded with material about ID cards, that kind of identity — are you really the person with the name, age, and address you're claiming? But what about the idea of validating your identity that is wanting your community to make outward gestures that approve of your cluster of personal relationships? 

Standard term or not, what do we make of this need to have the more complex aspects of your identity "validated"? It's funny that's going on at the same time that some people are getting invalidated — cancelled.

"When I first started my foray into poly, I thought of it as a radical break from my trad past... But tbh I’ve come to decide the only acceptable style of poly is best characterized as..."

"... something like 'imperial Chinese harem'... None of this non-hierarchical bulls–t; everyone should have a ranking of their partners, people should know where they fall on the ranking, and there should be vicious power struggles for the higher ranks.... I’m less hedonistic and more masochistic. I get a lot of pleasure from doing things that are hard, unpleasant, physically taxing, or emotionally painful..."

So wrote Caroline Ellison, quoted by the NY Post in "Sam Bankman-Fried ex Caroline Ellison made ‘foray’ into ‘Chinese harem’ polyamory."

Ellison has whatever legal/financial problems that motivated the press to go reading her now-deleted Tumblr account. I realize that I'm piling on by quoting what the NY Post chose to quote, but I want to say that we're not able to tell how speculative/humorous this statements might be if we had the context to know what kind of writer — what kind of person — Caroline Ellison is.

"One lesson of feminism, surely, is that being like other women, rather than a shining unfettered exception, isn’t such a terrible thing."

Writes Michelle Goldberg reacting to this line in a 1981 essay by Nona Willis Aronowitz: "I secretly wanted monogamy, that I was just like every other woman who wanted to tie her man down."

The Goldberg column is titled "When Sexual Liberation Is Oppressive" (NYT).

She's bringing up a 1981 essay by Nona Willis Aronowitz, because Willis Aronowitz quoted herself in her new book "Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure and an Unfinished Revolution."

Willis Aronowitz is the daughter of Ellen Willis, who was — as Goldberg puts it — a "pro-sex feminist writer."

Don't you have to choose what to put first, sex or feminism? If you set out to put them on equal footing, what do you get? I must be a feminist and I must be pro-sex.

"All holidays are sins, according to Jehovah’s Witnesses’ strict doctrine. Each one is a different tactic of the devil attempting to distract and tempt..."

"... faithful servants of Jehovah. Thanksgiving, Witnesses explain, is rooted in a harvest festival to pagan gods, and those pagan gods corrupt even the contemporary celebration. The holiday revels in gluttony and excess.... ​ When I was 20, I was excommunicated and completely cut off from my family.... The part of me that was broken when my family of origin rejected me gets a little closer to being whole each time I celebrate holidays with my chosen family.... The value of our polyam family isn’t in its stability, but rather that we choose each other even when we change, relationships change, feelings change. The power is in the choosing. There’s no obligation. I can only offer invitation and acceptance.... My husband’s girlfriend may prioritize another partner or her family... For me, the beauty is in making space for us to gather and also making space for each person to make their own choices.... We open ourselves, share love, swim in pleasure, sometimes get hurt.... Now, my community reminds me that the scarcity mind-set that tells us we can only have one love, that we must compete for our lover’s attention, is a lie."

From "I wasn’t allowed to celebrate holidays growing up. Now, I revel in hosting my queer, polyamorous family/After a childhood spent learning to deny pleasure, I’m relishing life’s abundant pleasures with my chosen family" by Patricia Fancher (WaPo).

"Why had the polyamorous community rephrased the rush of falling in love as 'new relationship energy' (NRE for short)?"

"Why would anyone endeavor to rebrand love into something like a start-up, complete with its own energized, abbreviated lingo? And how could Juhana encourage me to pursue other relationships? Did I truly inspire so little emotion he wouldn’t care if I dated someone else? 'I am willing to endure the discomfort,' he would reply, 'because you are worth it.' But why couldn’t he be willing to endure the discomfort of depriving himself of someone else? Why, I wanted to know, was one pain fundamentally more acceptable than the other?"

From "My Boyfriend Has Two Girlfriends. Should I Be His Third?/My mind could rationalize polyamory, but my heart rebelled" by Silva Kuusniemi (NYT). 

Spoiler alert: She rejects him. 

FROM THE EMAIL: Barbara writes;

When I was in college back in the '60s in Florida, a couple I knew decided that it was fine for the guy to have a girlfriend on the side, what with free love and all. It was so fine that the three of them moved into a three bedroom house together. After about a month of this, the first girlfriend put the second girlfriend's clothes in an old bathtub in the back yard and set them on fire. Then she--the first gf--jumped in her car and drove to Las Vegas, never to be seen again. That's a polyamorous story.

That makes me think of this old David Crosby song (originally from the 60s):

 

He says that song was "not the reason they threw me out of The Byrds": "They threw me out of The Byrds because I was an asshole."

"A day before I sent Malcolm the email saying I wanted to break up, I came across a term online: solo polyamory."

"It described a person who is romantically involved with many people but is not seeking a committed relationship with anyone. What makes this different from casual dating is that they’re not looking for a partner, and the relationship isn’t expected to escalate to long-term commitments, like marriage or children. More important, the relationship isn’t seen as wasted time or lacking significance because it doesn’t lead to those things. I wasn’t comfortable identifying as polyamorous then. My desire for something nontraditional was a source of shame and questioning. But for once, in the vast literature on love, I felt seen. I liked how solo polyamory cherished and prioritized autonomy and the preservation of self, and I found its rejection of traditional models of romantic love freeing. When Malcolm and I first told friends and family about our open relationship, we were met with verbal lashings and gross generalizations, including that this was 'not something Black people did.'"

From "My Choice Isn’t Marriage or Loneliness/I thought I had a classic fear of commitment, but it’s more complicated than that" by Haili Blassingame (NYT). There's an excellent illustration by Brian Rea at the link.

"Ollie says one of the 'rules' of the experiment is that he and Zoe, both bisexual, will only hook up with same-sex partners."

"But whoops, Zoe replies, she already broke that rule by sleeping with a man. Later, Ollie is dating and sleeping with a woman. We don’t see them discussing their rules, why they exist, why they might change, how they talk about the ones they’ve broken. Ollie’s narration adds no clarity.... While Ollie and Zoe are just kind of irritating—we’re treated to long sequences of them frolicking naked in fields; Ollie waxes poetic about how he loves Zoe for being such an 'adult,' because she soaks her oats overnight—what’s hardest to watch is how they’re hurting each other because they don’t communicate with specificity or empathy, or even agree why they’re doing this in the first place.... Zoe, Tom, and the other non-Ollie characters are played by actors, and the film is a re-creation of Ollie’s experience with the real Zoe.... Ollie and Real Zoe did try an open relationship and were documenting it, and Real Zoe really did end their relationship to be with another man, but what we see on screen here is not a documentary of an experiment in real time so much as Ollie’s on-screen memoir, starring himself...."

From "What HBO’s New Documentary Gets Wrong About Open Relationships/I’ve been in a nonmonogamous relationship for six years, and I’m tired of movies like There’s No 'I' in Threesome" (Slate).

I'm almost tempted to watch this just to see how terrible it is. It  might be funny.... oh, no.... I just looked at the trailer, here. I was thinking of embedding it. But watching it, I had to force myself, and by 0:34, I had to turn it off. The visuals are very unappealing.

"Sheltering in place forces roommates together and raises the stakes on everyday squabbles... You’re only as safe as your least-careful roommate."

"One friend of mine repeatedly scolded a roommate who refused to stop going to parties or to wash his hands, until the guy moved out in a huff. Another friend became ill with what seemed like covid-19 while subletting in Brooklyn; whenever she went into the common area to eat soup, her roommate would slam the bedroom door and send a nasty text. 'To be inside of all this, like we all are, with not only zero love around me but actual hate, as I’m sick, is a loneliness that is a new deep for me,' my friend wrote me. (She has since recovered.)..."

From "The Bushwick House Share Was a Haven—Then COVID-19 Struck" in The New Yorker.

At about exactly the point when I saw that, I saw "How a 16-Person Poly Pod Is Isolating in Bushwick" in New York Magazine. Different cast of characters. "A polyamorous lifestyle is undoubtedly ill-suited to our germophobic moment. Yet, the Villa’s residents seem to have an edge when it comes to thorny conversations about health and risk. 'We’re all about responsible humanism, so we’re used to talking about how our behavior affects other people,' Kenneth Play, a sex educator and co-founder of Hacienda Villa, said.... Play... has had hundreds of lovers over the years (he usually has an assistant book his liaisons), but he always wears a condom unless he is with his fiancée. She, in turn, has unprotected sex with only one other person, her other fiancé, who wears a condom with everyone else. 'I think the sex-positive community has something to teach in a time like this, because we all know how to follow strict protocols to make sure everyone is safe,' Play said."

"... we all know how to follow strict protocols to make sure everyone is safe...." I hate to inform the seemingly savvy Play but "make sure" is so last year. Here's my post on the subject from July 2019: "I've been noticing the phrase 'We need to make sure' in political speech lately. [Bernie] Sanders says 'We need to make sure that kids go to community schools, which are integrated and that means we have to focus on fair housing legislation and enforcement.' I see 'We need to make sure' as a sort of lie. It really only means we ought to try to get to a place out there that would be really nice to get to...."

"What It’s Like to Isolate With Your Girlfriend and Her Other Boyfriend."

From New York Magazine:

"I live in Brooklyn, and my girlfriend and metamour live in Jersey City. Megan and I have been dating about nine months, and she and her boyfriend have been dating for about two and a half years. I was only going to spend a couple of nights here, but I’m feeling like we’re moving closer and closer to an actual shut down of New York City, and I don’t want to be stuck there if they close the bridges and tunnels. I have a car and I brought a bunch of stuff, so I am temporarily hunkering down here....  They have a two-bedroom apartment here, so I have been staying in the guest room.... But I am personally approaching everything with a lot of caution, and trying to be as polite as possible.... He’s kind of a somber, quiet fella, and I am ready to burst with energy at any moment.... There’s a small little urge in me that’s like, Oh, I want him to like me. I also want everyone to like me.... There’s a part of me that’s relieved that Megan has another person here, because then I don’t have to be everything to her. I don’t have to give her all the attention that’s needed... And... it is a relief to know that if I need to have alone time, she’s good with that..."

"Dick (what my friends and I call him) and I have been officially dating for about a month; I’m queer and poly so we’re ethically nonmonogamous...."

"I’d been celibate for the first six months of 2019 — I had been having a lot of meaningless sex and finding myself trying to force feelings for people I didn’t care about. Then came Dick. We met at graduate school. He found out I was celibate and made it clear he enjoyed tempting me. After a month of flirting, I relented. Then a woman he’d been flirting with found out, and caused drama, flirting aggressively and nonstop with him and trying to make me feel like shit about myself. He cut ties with her and apologized profusely. We were good again for a couple days, before he went on a date with another woman and claimed to be in love with her. Two weeks later, that all blew up too and he came crawling back. Against my better judgement I gave him a third chance — and it’s been wonderful so far."

From "The Polyamorous Woman Coming Off 6 Months of Celibacy," a "Sex Diaries" piece at The Cut, i.e., New York Magazine, to which I subscribe and you probably don't. Why am I blogging this? I was interested in the phrase "I’m queer and poly so we’re ethically nonmonogamous." Where do people get the idea of proclaiming themselves "ethical"? There no talk of ethics in this diary. Similarly, when do people proclaim themselves "celibate"? Is it just a matter of going without until something good enough comes along or is must there be some substance to this way of life before the term "celibate" comes along? When do you declare it and why? All I see here is that "He found out" and it put him in a condition of "enjoy[ing] tempting me," which makes it sound like the old playing hard to get.

"I met men at hotels and at their homes in the hills. Then, I met a new guy at a bar in the Mission District, the perfect place to meet before a one-night stand. Except..."

"... I fell for him the moment he handed me a red Gerber daisy. I fell for the small gap between his teeth. I touched his hand by feigning interest in the ring he had made from a bicycle spoke. We loved the same obscure music. Days later, he waltzed with me on Berkeley Pier, my gloves arranged in his breast pocket like a kerchief. He created a rabbit out of a squeegee and a towel and made me laugh at its antics. The afternoon I chose to tell my husband, light streamed into our yellow kitchen. Our son was in his room, playing with Hogwarts toys...."

From "When a Boyfriend Joins the Marriage/They agreed she could have sex on the side as long as he didn’t have to know about it. Then she fell in love" (NYT).

"One of the emotions the writer didn’t name explicitly in her article was that of compersion..."

"... defined as the experience of being happy for your partner’s happiness including when they have had sex with a partner other than yourself. This feeling is hard for committed monogamists to understand and certainly many therapists would have difficulty trusting that this emotion is authentic since we have all been brought up in a world where jealousy seems the norm. It’s not that non-monogamous individuals never feel jealousy, they just work on it in a deeply committed way while also feeling compersion. So when a client of mine is expressing joy that his wife is experiencing a new kind of arousal with her boyfriend, most traditional therapists might look for some sort of pathology as to why this husband isn’t exclusively feeling jealous of his wife’s partner."

From "Open, Non-Monogamous, Poly or Designer Relationships/What the NY Times Article Missed and What Therapists Need to Learn" by sex therapist Sari Cooper in Psychology Today.

Compersion, eh? This is a coinage specific to the polyamory movement. I can see it's been in The Urban Dictionary since 2004. It appears exactly once in the NYT archive — 20 years ago in "They Call It Polyluv"*:

Jealousy, predictably, is a polylover's pox, which is why Loving More and its counterpart, the San Francisco-based Sacred Space Institute, sponsor therapeutic workshops. Facilitators like Deborah Anapol, Sacred Space's director, use exercises like ''jealousy compersion challenge'' (in which you practice feeling glad that your mate is with another) and soothing group massage (above). Hill says several four-or-more-somes have met on Loving More's web site; some have even ''married'' -- with as many as six figurines on the wedding cake.

What's the etymology of that coinage? It looks like it might be a portmanteau of "compassion" and "person." It can't be "compassion" and "perversion." I found an entry in "The Book of Human Emotions: From Ambiguphobia to Umpty":

Here's the Wikipedia article on Kerista, in which the great science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein makes a surprising appearance. In 1966, Heinlein wrote to his agent:

"I recently learned that [Stranger in a Strange Land] was considered the 'New Testament' - and compulsory reading - of a far-out cult called 'Kerista.' (Kee-rist!). I don't know exactly what 'Kerista' is, but its L.A. chapter offered me $100 to speak. (I turned them down.)"

___________________

* I assume the headline is a deliberate allusion to the old Paul Anka song: And they called it puppy love...

"Why Can't All Ashley Madison Hacking Victims Be Josh Duggar?" is the wrong title for this piece by Amanda Marcotte.

Because this is the core of it:

But cheating is about violating a deeply personal agreement between two people. If the person you’re with doesn’t care if you sleep with other people, it’s not cheating. It’s all about an agreement that you decide between yourselves, and like all such agreements, the only people who should care what you do are people who your behavior directly affects. It’s not the business of the world at large.

That's the second-to-the-last paragraph, the serious point. The final paragraph serves up some cheap political amusement:

Unless you’re Josh Duggar, of course. Or anyone else who fights publicly to use government interference to mess with the private sexual choices of consenting adults. If you fight for the government to limit or ban gay people’s marriages or women’s reproductive choices, then your sex life is our business. If only there were a way to do a targeted search of Ashley Madison data for that, while leaving everyone else alone.

I sort of agree with that observation, even though I'm a big proponent of equal justice and think it's an important test of any rules we have that we want them to apply to people we like just as much as to those we despise. But the Ashley Madison data dump isn't a rule we've adopted as a group. It's something a small bunch of hackers inflicted on us, and, like a car accident or a falling meteoroid, we can, without hypocrisy, hope that it hits someone we didn't like anyway. And, speaking of hypocrisy, there is something special about exposing the hypocrites. Anyone who's made a public show of disparaging the sexual morality of others had better uphold high standards privately, because there will be little sympathy if we catch them sinning (which seems to happen so often that I always assume public perseveration about sexual morality is motivated by guilt about sexual sin).

I've almost talked myself out of my original premise that the second-to-the-last paragraph is more significant. It is what I started this post to talk about. I want to take issue with the idea that "cheating is about violating a deeply personal agreement between two people," that "It’s all about an agreement that you decide between yourselves," that "the only people who should care what you do are people who your behavior directly affects," and "It’s not the business of the world at large." Hello?! We're talking about marriage. Why was same-sex marriage recognized as a constitutional right? It wasn't — I've read the opinion — so that couples could get access to the economic benefits of marriage. It was because same-sex couples deserved equal respect from society as a group. If it were just a "deeply personal agreement between two people," then the legal status of marriage would not have mattered.

Obviously, married couples can and do work out their own relationship in private, and they may have understandings about sex with outsiders to the marriage. Sometimes it's because — in Marcotte's crude language — "the person you’re with doesn’t care if you sleep with other people," and sometimes it's because "the person you’re with" — that is, your husband or wife — has pressured or talked you into accepting nonexclusivity. Sometimes it's because you blind yourself to something that, confronted, would destroy what you want to keep.

But when you take on the legal status of marriage, you are including the rest of the world. You may have the idea — perhaps based on enlightened self-interest and choice — that marriage for you isn't exactly what marriage is for the general public. It may be a festival of polyamory for you and your spouse. But it is not a thoroughly private arrangement. You invited the world in. You interacted with the government and acquired a status of "recognition, stability, and predictability." And that made it the public's business. Flooding into your personal life came all these outsiders' ideas about what marriage means.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jane the Actuary said: "So Ann Althouse is publicly coming out as saying that marriage, by definition, requires sexual exclusivity? Good!" And I said:

How do you figure I said that?

I said that when you marry, you deliberately take on a status that is about public recognition of your relationship, and that closes off your argument that what you are doing is purely private. You've invited public judgment.

You could still say: 1. The public are jerks to express judgment especially where they don't know the details of our relationship. 2. I'll ignore what people say and do what I want and the govt still can't take away my marital status unless we seek divorce, and 3. Marriage ought to be understood to include the privately arrived at relationship between the spouses, including greater sexual freedom.

The Ashley Madison problem has to do with one's public reputation, which is based on the public's idea of what is good, and which tends to be that married couples should be sexually faithful. So, it's going to hurt your reputation to look like an adulterer. That doesn't say thing about what marriage is "by definition."

Analogy: It hurts your reputation (in present day America) to be known to be an atheist, but that doesn't establish that God exists.