Relationships are hell. The moment you have sex with someone, everything changes. Your brain ceases to function properly. A whole mess of biological programming kicks in, and it’s not pretty.

Men and women worry about their lovers’ other lovers, present, past, and future -- and we’re biologically programmed to do this. I’ve been on both ends, and I’ve seen the insanity it can produce. I’ve watched lovers go absolutely mad with jealousy, deserved or not, and I think every man knows what it’s like to visualize his lover being fucked by some other man, watching himself become maddeningly frustrated to the point of violence, incapable of reasoning as his thoughts spiral madly into an absolute hell, inescapable. Electrodes hooked up to men and women show that the heart rate of men, when they are asked just to imagine their partner’s sexual infidelity, jumps the equivalent of downing three cups of coffee. Women have a similar reaction imagining their partner in love with another woman. When men imagine their partner in love with another man, it doesn’t produce remotely as severe a reaction, and the same is true when women imagine their partner having sex with another woman -- the difference of emphasis deriving obviously from genetic self-interest (male in not spending decades raising and promoting someone else’s genetic material, female in the risk of their male partner leaving her and her children, rather than screwing and leaving other women). But this innate genetic difference between male and female brains is not the main point here: the point is that relationships are innately not only emotionally dangerous but physically dangerous, and that we are not entirely in control of our reactions. When we enter into relationships, we’re playing with fire -- and this finds confirmation in science, not to mention all of literature and history and personal experience, though not the social constructionism that has dominated the last thirty years of theoretical and oblivious (if not outright stupidly utopian) thought in the West.

Obviously, the risks and horrors of relationships extends far beyond sexual and emotional jealousy. We must constantly balance our commitment, emotional or verbal, to our partner with our deep fears of the unreliability of our partners to produce in us lasting happiness. To the degree to which we are aware at all, we must be aware of the phenomenal ease of our partners to hurt us, much less disappoint us. A glance or batted eyelash at a stranger might incense a rage that, without the constraints of law, might otherwise result in immediate violence. A choice of dress or of words achieves monumental proportionality, suggesting to our biologically paranoid minds that our partners are intentionally pissing us off, though they might not even remember our comments or preferences we are so certain they are slyly defying. We fear the lack of continuation of our partners’ pleasing us both emotionally and sexually: not consenting to some specific act, or just feeling insensitive on a certain day, often easily and involuntarily become nuclear attacks directly upon the heart.

This is a litigious society. We complain about it, but it has its benefits. Read Aeschylus’s The Libation-Bearers: the law exists to avoid conflict. It only seems right that we apply this to relationships as well. Life without laws, enforced both within and without, is indeed nasty, brutish, and short -- as Hobbes alleged and as all statistics of mortality and suffering in societies worldwide confirm. Men in particular have the genetic urge to violence, yet are commonly capable of making the calculations necessary to determine that their urges to the same would land them in prison and are thus not worth the doing.

Yet society in the West has long and increasingly taken a laissez-faire attitude when it comes to sexual relationships. Divorce law in the U.S. used to make discriminations based on fault, particularly to penalize men who followed their genetic predisposition to have sex with others. Laws in many nations have provided both men and women -- but, understandably given both sexes’ dispositions, particularly men -- the right to kill, as a crime of passion, their cheating spouses when discovered in the act. As atrocious as this sounds to us, it is not so different from our temporary insanity laws -- and there is ample evidence that, if one is ever temporarily insane beyond one’s ability to control one’s actions, it would occur -- particularly for men -- in exactly such a scenario. Such laws represent a recognition of a biological fact: cheating, physically or emotionally, are inevitably risky gestures, and the psychological forces at work in sexual relationships are powerful and inevitable, if not often uncontrollable.

We balk at such laws to govern sexuality because sexuality has generally become increasingly a private matter. While that is not a natural state -- the public is the default state of human interaction, with the notion of privacy being a slowly developed invention through history -- there is no going back. Most of us today cannot imagine restricting sexual choices as in the tribal state of mankind, closest to primates with their often rigid systems of sexual behavior. Today, at least in the West, we imagine sexuality as defined by a state, in its wisdom or otherwise, but by consent, usually tacit, by the individuals involved. And no matter how tenuous this vision -- given, if nothing else, the universality and genetic inducements to rape -- we have largely placed personal happiness above the social good, and relegating sexuality to the private ideally allows us greater freedom to pursue individual happiness in its various personalized forms.

Yet, for all of this, our sexual behavior is largely culturally derived. Our societies establish, usually in an informal manner, norms that govern sexual interactions. Thus, expectations can reasonably be made by all parties. The unfortunate consequence of this is to normalize sexual relations, narrowing the spectrum of acceptable -- or easily negotiated, given those expectations -- interactions. Freedom ironically often results in a narrow spectrum of possibilities through such a constantly evolving process of normalization.

I would like to propose another option, one that embraces private sexuality but nonetheless provides the security lacking in the informal and malleable negotiations with which private sexuality leaves us. Security is not just a matter for the insecure: no matter how secure we are in virtually all other matters, we are genetically programmed for insecurity in sexual relationships. To recognize a need for such security, in the wake of private sexuality, is solely to recognize that, from the greatest intellectual to the greatest illiterate, our brains are intrinsically prone to obsession, to paranoia, and to rage in sexual matters. All of us, as human beings, have a psychological disability that would be recognized as stark insanity were it not so universal -- and that we are wise, rather than insecure, to account for in the best interests of ourselves, our partners, and even innocent bystanders who might not know the situation between two lovers and thus stumble into, whether as witness or dupe.

I would like to propose that those entering into sexual relationships -- particularly committed ones -- negotiate a legal contract. As a private matter, none can require that such a contract be negotiated between lovers, but we ought to make every effort to normalize such legalistic negotiations. Parties ought to know where they stand, how easily the relationship may be terminated, and what expectations -- of fidelity, sexual available and willingness, and specific behaviors -- they might reasonably adopt. So long as the terms are reasonable, by which I mean as achievable as the terms of any contract, such contracts ought to have full legal weight, with the penalties for specific violations, as similarly agreed upon within the contract, enforceable by law.

As I have espoused such an idea and solidified it over the past decade or so, by far the most frequent response I have received might be characterized as the assumption that the very instability and uncertainty of relationships is not only intrinsic but provides the subtlety of constant discovery that make relationships rewarding. Of course, none articulate such a response as precisely: typically, they stumble, full of incomplete thoughts and phrases, responding precisely as one usually does when stating an assumption one has not had to question -- and thus to articulate. But this assumption collapses upon scrutiny. The intrinsic nature of this uncertainty, of the constant negotiation between lovers, may well be intrinsic, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. Indeed, it’s pretty clear that it’s not good: it leaves us palpable afraid, if not paranoid, of our lovers leaving, or changing the rules without notice. When we are hurt or afraid, we either lash out or strain to express our feelings precisely because we have no clear contract of expected behavior: we are not sure whether we are on good legal ground or not, whether our hurt or fear is something we should share as a personal problem or the result of something wrong or in violation of the terms of the relationship on the part of our lover. As for the process of constant discovery, it seems to me that this is intrinsic to all human relationships, given constant personal evolution or simple malleability, and has very little to do with the issue at hand. We are just as often surprised by our friends, but the psychological states of sexual relationships are more profoundly dangerous; though friendships matter and should matter, it should be immediately apparent that, while exceptions certainly occur, they go far more smoothly than sexual relationships. The increased resonance of such a process of discovery in sexual relationships is caused by our elevated level of concern, if not by romantic love, but that remains whatever the clarity of the terms of the relationship. And, of course, if one feels differently, one need not enter into such a contractual relationship.

In effect, negotiating a contract is precisely what we do anyway. As we date, or even have conversations with acquaintances, we are constantly revealing and concealing our sexual and romantic personalities. If a man talks about nothing but sex, he is making fairly clear his demands in sexual relationships. If a woman participates in such conversation, she is demonstrating that she is open to such terms, though she may be using the negotiating tactic of withholding other terms until after most of the contract has been formalized, at which point her negotiating power will be higher. Men use this same tactic, demonstrating their sensitivity and willingness to commit or to help, waiting to reveal the sexual demands until he has already lured her by tentatively agreeing to her emotional demands. When a lover or a potential lover responds to a story of someone cheating with adamant negative statements, often using the opportunity to state the his or her response in the same situation, that person does so to assert a contractual term through implication -- as a commentary on a third-party situation rather than on his or her sexual relationship itself. Often, we engage in such tactics unconsciously, yet the tactic is clear enough and typically produces a more conscious result as the other party silently ponders the assertion, perhaps replying to the hypothetical scenario so as to have a contractual conversation indirectly, with the avenue of retreat left available to both parties. We talk about movie stars to inflame our partners’ jealousy with the safety that talking about their friends would not provide. Every time we tell our partner that we don’t want our television watching interrupted or show disgust when our partner tells us the truth too bluntly about our appearance or dress, we are negotiating the terms of acceptable behavior. Indeed, we constantly train our sexual partners, negotiating and renegotiating the invisible contract.

Except that this contract, never written, is always largely implicit, always in dispute. The written word is certainly still open to interpretation, and more commonly to loopholes (which can, of course, be prevented or closed), and Socrates had a point in not recording his ideas because the written word lacks the intonation, the gesture, and unconscious understanding signaled by so many subtle factors that is a part of verbal conversation -- as the many misunderstandings, sometimes wide-scale, caused by the increase of e-mail communication makes apparent. Emoticons (and my preference, hierarchically scaled text) aside, the reverse is often the case when it comes to relationships. Precisely because of the emotions involved, we are more inclined to speak indirectly and obscurely to our lovers, leading to misunderstanding, deliberate and otherwise. Our memories revise themselves, and we do not have a text against which to check our remembered statements and contractual negotiations or with which to settle our disputes. Moreover, the intangibility of the contract allows its easy violation and the denial thereof: in the realpolitik of relationships, we may even knowingly violate our mutual understanding and then deny doing so, or else confess and assert “what are you going to do about it?” After all, the lack of a written contract means that guilt can never be ascertained but by the parties involved in the relationship and its verbal negotiations. Moreover, as a private matter, the only third-party persons willing to assess blame or to shame the violator are those presumptuous and ignorant enough to imagine that they understand the inner goings-on of the relationship -- or that they can impose their own sense of normalcy upon the private, intricate decisions and preferences of others. As no legally enforceable document exists, no penalties for violation may be assessed except voluntarily, usually through the blackmail of threatening to leave or withhold one’s own sexual or emotional portion of the implicit contract, the equivalent of leveling interpersonal sanctions. In short, the lack of a written contract, preferably with legal weight, leaves us in a state of ambiguity and helplessness in an emotional space of profound, life-wrecking danger, a space where logic routinely fails even in the most rational of beings.

I applaud the increase of pre-nuptial agreements that not only spell our financial settlement in case of marital collapse, but that provide penalties for infidelity, withholding of sex, and the like. I hope this trend will continue and that such contracts will become increasingly common. Yet marriage has largely given way to committed relationships, and we must both expand the terms of such contracts and expand the number of relationships and types of relationships for which such contracts are used. I envision a society in which people know where they stand in a relationship, in which people can sit down and rationally negotiate the terms of their relationship rather than plunge headlong into ferocious emotional terrain and slowly negotiate those terms after the fact. I envision a society in which lovers feeling hurt can know who is in the right and who is in the wrong, more rationally determining whether they should assert their lover’s violation of the terms of the relationship, doing so with the security of the rightness of their claim and of the penalties they may impose; whether they should seek to deal with their hurt as a personal response unwarranted by the terms of their relationship; or whether they should seek to renegotiate the contract. In short, I am arguing for the advent of pre-coital agreements, not mandatory but certainly normative.

In short, I am suggesting that we cut through the bullshit in our sexual relationships and negotiate clearly and rationally -- rather than in our genetically induced insanity after problems have occurred -- our wants, the relative importance of those wants, and about what issues we are willing to compromise. In short, I am suggesting that we have on hand such lists and drafts of contracts (as I do), allowing us to quickly realize what our partners desire and to determine mutual compatibility without the half-conscious rhetorical dance of date after date. Of course, the best consequence of the advent of such contracts, of the pre-coital agreement, is that it would require us to figure out what we really want, in detail, for ourselves.

The alternative, our present state, is unfortunately one that allows, if not condones, systemic and routine emotional terrorism.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT

I've wanted to write this essay for some time.

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