So why not keep our mouths shut and let people assume we're monogamous? For the most part that's what we do -- gay or straight, it's what most couples with understandings about outside sexual contact do. Like most long-term couples, my boyfriend and I don't rub our friends' noses in the details of our private life -- unless we're pressed, of course, by drunk straight friends. But sexual honesty is a hard habit to break. Once you've told people that you're gay, telling them that you're nonmonogamous seems like pretty small beans. And with so many supporters of gay marriage busily promoting a double standard about monogamy, I thought at least one gay couple who wanted to marry but didn't want to be monogamous should speak up. We want equal marriage rights, after all, not the right to be held to a higher standard than straight people hold themselves -- on being parents or being strictly monogamous.

There are two lines of thought when it comes to allowing gay men to marry: Marriage will change us, making us more monogamous, or we will change marriage, making it less monogamous. On "Talk of the Nation," Jonathan Katz, executive coordinator of Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University, made the case for the latter. "[Monogamy is] one of the pillars of heterosexual marriage and perhaps its key source of trauma," Katz said. "Could it be that the inclusion of lesbian and gay same-sex marriage may, in fact, sort of de-center the notion of monogamy and allow the prospect that marriage need not be an exclusive sexual relationship among people?" In his new book "Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America," Jonathan Rauch writes that, "once gay couples are equipped with the entitlements and entanglements of legal marriage, same-sex relationships will continue to move toward both durability and exclusivity."

I think it's possible that Katz and Rauch are both right. If gay marriage is legalized once and for all, not all gay married couples will choose to be monogamous, just as not all straight couples choose to be monogamous. I would guess that married gay male couples will be nonmonogamous at higher rates than married straight couples. (Married lesbians, studies show, will be monogamous at higher rates than straight or gay male couples.) But with marriage comes the assumption of monogamy and, if a couple has kids, a host of logistical and ethical road blocks to being nonmonogamous. Marriage may not transform gay men into models of monogamous behavior, but marriage and family life will nudge us in that direction, moving us toward durability and exclusivity. But as gay people tend to be more open about the details of our sexual lives, gay couples with "understandings" about outside sexual contact are likelier to be honest and, therefore, likelier to promote the notion that marriage need not be an exclusive sexual relationship.

Ultimately gay people only want what straight people already have: the right for each couple to define marriage for themselves. Kids? No kids? Sexually exclusive? Open relationship? A lifetime? A starter marriage? Other people's standards -- particularly their double standards -- do not bind straight couples. They shouldn't bind gay ones either.

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Oh, and speaking of trauma ...

I agree with Katz when he says that monogamy is "one of the pillars of heterosexual marriage and perhaps its key source of trauma." It's almost impossible for two people to be all things to each other sexually, and the expectation that two people can or should be all things to each other sexually -- that they should never find another person attractive or act on that attraction -- does a great deal of harm. Human beings didn't evolve to be monogamous, and everything from divorce rates to recent impeachment proceedings prove, I think, that the expectation of lifelong monogamy places an incredible strain on a marriage. Being monogamous is hard work; it's not natural (even disgraced virtuecrat William Bennett concedes this point!) and it doesn't come easily to human beings or very many other mammals. But our concept of love and marriage has as its foundation not only the expectation of monogamy but the idea that where there's love, monogamy should be easy and joyful.

Since I don't demand or expect complete fidelity from my boyfriend, I'm not traumatized when he finds another guy attractive. Unlike a lot of straight couples, we've found a way to make our desire for others a nonissue in our relationship. Indeed, as most heterosexual swingers report, the times we've had sex with other guys have actually enhanced the sex we have with each other. Far from tearing us apart, the times we've had sex with another man -- the times we've had sexual adventures together -- have renewed and refreshed our intimate life.

All of this came rushing into my head when our friends -- the couple with the three girls -- announced that they were separating. The wife wants to have her sexual adventures, the ones she missed out on by marrying so young. Since there's no room in their marriage for nonmonogamy -- since they can't even consider a sexual adventure together -- their marriage has to go. It's a shame, isn't it? A little nonmonogamy could have saved their marriage, I'm convinced, but they can't conceive of being together, of being married, without being sexually exclusive. So the desire to have sex with someone else, to finally go and have that ah-fay-yah, to have those adventures, means their marriage has to end.

It's too bad for those three girls that their parents aren't gay men, isn't it?

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