Rethinking Matrimony - 12/31/06

[Smartmarriages]

The selection below on Nena O'Neill is from Sunday's NY Times  
Magazine's 13th annual "Lives They Lived" issue on people that have  
died over the past 12 months. As the Times puts it, this is "largely  
an idiosyncratic selection, chosen by our editors and writers, who are  
often following their own passions and curiosities." For additional  
essays: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html - diane

Nena O?Neill | b. 1923
Rethinking Matrimony
By MELANIE THERNSTROM
The New York Times Sunday Magazine
December 31, 2006

It is the fate of self-help books to become irrelevant with surprising  
alacrity as popular culture accepts or rejects their tenets, turning  
them into truisms or absurdities or both. Nena and George O?Neill?s  
1972 ?Open Marriage? is no exception.

O?Neill, here in 1976, admitted later that the book underestimates the  
trouble jealousy causes.

At the peak of the sexual revolution, while opinion pieces hotly  
debated whether the institution of marriage could survive the social  
tempest of an era in which swinging was new, the birth-control pill  
was a decade old and AIDS was still a decade away, ?Open Marriage? was  
a cozy, practical book that drew on the O?Neills? training as  
anthropologists, as well as concepts from popular psychology and  
feminism, to show people how to turn a stifling traditional ?closed?  
marriage, in which the man ?owns? the woman, into an enlightened  
modern ?open? one of freedom and equality.

Perhaps it is a mark of the book?s success that most couples embarking  
on a marriage now would find little of interest in its pages ? except  
for the interest of feeling smug about how dreadfully old-fashioned  
?70s marriages sound. Based on interviews with couples, the O?Neills  
strenuously advocated ideas we take for granted now: spouses trading  
domestic responsibilities, allowing each other independence and being  
permitted to have their own friends ? even friends of the opposite  
sex! (An anthropologist today might point out the paradox that while  
from a theoretical perspective these are all tired clichés, many  
couples still do not, in fact, put them into practice.)

The brief section of the book, however, that sparked controversy in  
its day, still catches one short: the idea of sexual liberty within  
marriage. The notion of truly nonmonogamous marriages, not quiet  
affairs or don?t-ask-don?t-tell understandings but genuine agreement  
to transparent extramarital sex, seems so foreign to mainstream  
American society now that it is hard to believe it was ever a subject  
of real national debate.

Although the O?Neills stressed that an open marriage might or might  
not include ?sexual openness,? the phrase ?open marriage,? which they  
coined, became synonymous with nonmonogamy, putting the O?Neills in  
the unfortunate situation of being known primarily for the sole  
proposition that was rejected rather than the many that were embraced.

Nena O?Neill was born Elizabeth Dross and grew up in modest  
circumstances in Pennsylvania and Ohio. She studied anthropology at  
Barnard and was married, briefly, to a pilot who died during World War  
II. George O?Neill, whom she later married, nicknamed her Nena, a  
Spanish word for ?baby girl.? He became an associate professor of  
anthropology at City College, and they lived in an apartment on the  
Upper West Side of Manhattan. With their two sons, Michael and Brian,  
they traveled frequently, doing fieldwork in Trinidad and in Mexico.  
Nena loved Latin culture, dancing, cocktail parties, turquoise  
jewelry, colored scarves, James Joyce and self-help books.

With the publication of ?Open Marriage,? their own marriage became a  
recurrent subject of gossip columnists. How did their much-quoted  
statement ?outside sexual relationships, when they are in the context  
of meaningful relationships, may be rewarding and beneficial to an  
open marriage? apply to them? When I broached this subject with their  
son Michael, now a highly regarded photographer, he said: ?Whether my  
parents had a sexually open marriage ? you have to understand, I never  
asked them. I didn?t want to know.?

Their son Brian, a distinguished anthropologist in Parede, Portugal,  
said, ?Every time someone would ask, ?Are you monogamous?? they would  
respond: ?Even if we weren?t at one moment or another, it?s  
irrelevant. We?ve been married for X years and we?re still married.? ?  
They asserted that the strength of their marriage illustrated the  
principles of the book. They cultivated separate hobbies (art films  
and opera for Nena; model airplanes and scuba diving for George), and  
once had house rules not to speak to each other two hours a day, even  
if they were working at home, and to take separate vacations once a  
year.

?Open Marriage? actually devotes only a few pages to the subject of a  
sexually open marriage. Jealousy is not an inherent aspect of human  
nature, they write, since it is virtually absent in societies like the  
Eskimos or the Toda of India. ?Man is not sexually monogamous by  
nature,? they write, and when he tries, he fails. ?He may fail  
gloriously, impudently, nonchalantly, regretfully or guiltily, but  
always he fails.? Their most daring statement is a rhetorical question  
that they do not try to answer: ?Is it the ?unfaithful? human being  
who is the failure, or is it the standard itself??

Nevertheless, Nena spent much of her professional life backing away  
from her association with sexual license. Five years later, she  
published a book, ?The Marriage Premise,? about ?the new call for  
sexual fidelity,? inspired, she said, by the breakup of her son  
Michael?s first marriage, which she found a ?deeply emotional?  
experience ?that set off a storm of questioning.? (Both sons are quick  
to volunteer that their marriages are entirely monogamous.) Although  
Michael never broached the issue with his mother, he says that his  
third wife discussed monogamy with Nena before she died and she was  
?adamant about her belief in its value.?

But what of the question of their own marriage? ?George was a ladies?  
man,? Nena?s friend Jeanette Volckmar told me. ?The book helped  
explain how one can have both a loving relationship and other  
interests. I think Nena had a small attempt ? or maybe an average  
attempt ? to spread her wings that way? to equalize the relationship.  
?But I think it was a painful part of the story. She told me that she  
realized later that they had underestimated jealousy in the book as a  
source of trouble. When she again interviewed the subjects years  
later, she found few of those with sexually open marriages had stayed  
married.? Of the 100 or so couples Nena spoke with, the longest  
sexually open marriage was two years.

When Brian went through Nena?s things after she died, he found  
hundreds of letters his parents received after the book came out.  
?Most people said, ?Your book changed my life,? and were grateful,? he  
said. ?But a few said, ?You ruined my marriage.? ?

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