In that fantasy world known as monogamy
Most likely, “Kinsey” didn’t get nominated for a best picture Academy Award because of the story it told: Guy meets girl, guy marries girl, guy does pioneering research into human sexuality (this is where his Oscar chances began to go south) and discovers that sex is more than an expression of love between a man and a woman, it’s multi-variant -- a host of desires that, whether acted upon or not, are not necessarily less moral than straight, monogamous, federally funded married sex.
What Alfred Kinsey discovered, Hollywood -- promoting the monogamy myth (often starring Julia Roberts) -- continues to tear asunder. The publishing industry too, not to mention the Internet dating industry and, of course, the music business, have billions riding on the McGuffin of “one true love” (“Love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah,” singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen wrote, but how many people, including those who heard the tune in “Shrek,” have mulled that over?)
Winston Wilde, a therapist, puts it succinctly in “Loving & Cheating,” a lively documentary airing tonight on Cinemax, just in time to buzz-kill your Valentine’s Day. Most Americans live in a fantasy world when it comes to monogamy, Wilde says, “because they have been so enculturated with the mythology that when they grow up they’re going to find one person who’s going to meet all of their sexual needs, all of their emotional needs, is going to be their best friend and they’re going to live together and do this life that, if you look at human history and you look around the world, that doesn’t exist.”
Compared to what else tends to be on TV around Valentine’s Day, “Loving & Cheating” is subtly revealing and sophisticated. Although PBS has an “American Experience” biography of Kinsey airing tonight featuring interviews with students who took his boundary-pushing marriage class at Indiana University in the late 1930s, I turned off Sunday’s “Love Files” on the Women’s Entertainment network not long after I found myself staring at a picture of Ben Affleck and J.Lo while the show’s narrator said, “There is no logical explanation for why we fall in love with one person over another.”
As much as they undoubtedly have to teach us about our innermost selves, celebrities are not on hand in “Loving & Cheating.”
“Does monogamy work?” is the first question the documentary asks. The answer, as it unfolds over the hour, is a very hesitant yes. We will it to work, so it works. But then, of course, at times it doesn’t. So the show also asks, “Can you forgive?” and “Does honesty work?”
Eight couples are interviewed, as well as a handful of single men and women, and for the first 20 minutes the whole thing seems a little ordinary. But then these slow reveals happen. Nan and John, married for 23 years and looking like upright, middle-class parents, are identified as “polyamorous,” meaning that in their marriage they had a committed relationship with another couple.
The way they talk about what happened, it comes off as sweet and vulnerable and almost sad. “We went very slow and had lots of conversations between the two of us,” John says.
Another couple, Mark and Michelle, married 17 years, talk about how they overcame Mark’s many affairs early in their marriage (it involved Michelle going on a Caribbean vacation and having an affair of her own).
In the movie version, of course, Michelle would drown off Bermuda and Mark would never forgive his cheating self. It’s the movies that seem to have gone to the heads of the younger couples. They’re the idealistic ones, the ones with the fierce -- but also fearful -- attitudes about what’s to come. While they can articulate their commitment to life with one partner, you also sense that they’re headed for some sort of reckoning. It’s in their hesitant body language as much as their instantly defensive responses to questions like, “What if he cheats?”
“If you share that with someone else,” the twentysomething Tia says, dismissing out of hand the idea of having more than one sexual partner, “it’s like ... you’re giving your biggest, most precious gift to someone else.”
She makes a good point. But so does advice columnist Dan Savage, who demonstrates more wiggle room on the issue.
“We should think of monogamy the way we think of sobriety,” he says, “where you’re monogamous or sober until you fall off the wagon, but you can sober up, you can monogamous back up.”
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‘Loving & Cheating’
Where: Cinemax
When: 7 to 8 tonight
Ratings: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under 17).
Executive producers Jan Rofekemp and Diana Holtzberg. Director and producer Thom Powers.