I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” [MUSIC PLAYING] How do you introduce Dan Savage? Oof. I think it’s fair. I think it’s maybe inarguable to say he’s the most important sex advice columnist in the country — and has been for a long time. There’s a good profile of him in Slate from a bit back that wrote, quote, “In the three decades since the column debuted, Savage Love”— which is the name of his sex advice column — “has morphed from a crude stunt into the most important text in contemporary American sexual ethics.” I think that’s right: “the most important text in contemporary American sexual ethics.” But what’s so important about it, I think, is that Savage, in his columns and in his podcast, the “Savage Lovecast,” has been this crucial bridge between the gay, queer and straight communities, at a time when sexual and relational norms in all of them are changing and cross-pollinating. And this has been a time of a lot of change and a lot of cross-pollination. I think it is hard, if you are just living through this — as we all are — to really step back and recognize how different things have become in such a short period of time. Legal — not just legal — constitutional same-sex marriage; the rise of app-based dating, which I don’t think we’ve really apprehended how different that is to completely turn around the fundamental question of dating from scarcity to abundance — or at least abundance of choices, if not always people; much more openness — in part due to Savage — towards various forms of ethical non-monogamy. We’re seeing so much more fluidity and possibility and freedom. And that has come with a lot of anxiety and unhappiness and second-guessing. You would think we’d be in this space of unbelievable sexual and relational abundance, and instead, people are talking about sex recessions. App-based dating may have given people more choice, but are they happier? Are their relationships stronger? It doesn’t seem so. And I think the tension here is that we now have the freedom to live our sexual and relational lives really differently, but I’m not sure that we have, or that many of us have, the skills or the expectations or the communication needed to navigate that freedom smoothly. And, in a way, I’ve always thought that’s really the deeper topic Savage writes about. Sex is sort of a way into that for him. So I want to bring him on the show to discuss it. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC PLAYING] Dan Savage, what a pleasure to have you on the show. Dan Savage I’m shocked to be here. Ezra Klein [LAUGHS] I like that. That’s how I want people to feel when we begin. So I want to start with a bit of a grand sweep. You’ve been writing, I think, the most important sex and probably relationship advice column in America for 30 years. What are the biggest changes in that period, to you, in our sexual and relational landscape? Dan Savage When I started writing Savage Love in 1991, kink wasn’t as widely understood, gender wasn’t as widely understood, and the possibility of structuring your own relationships in a way that worked for you, rather than in a way that worked for your parents or grandparents, wasn’t something that straight people had embraced. And I’m gay, and one of the things that was unique about Savage Love, when I started writing it, was it was sex advice for straight people written by a gay dude, and I got a lot of angry letters in the first couple of years from people projecting onto me, as a gay person, their ignorance of gay people as straight people. Like, they didn’t know anything about gay people or gay relationships, and they just assumed I would know nothing about straight people and straight relationships, as if my parents weren’t straight, as if my siblings weren’t straight, as if I didn’t fake being straight for a while, and didn’t make a very close study of what a straight person acted like, wanted, and did, in an attempt to pass myself as straight. Gay people know what straight people are like. And if there’s been any change in the last 30 years that I think is the most significant is this great cultural cross-pollination between gay life and straight life that really drove home that things we thought of as particular to gay communities, gay subcultures, gay life were not choices gay people were making, and a lot of things that we associated with straight people, straight life, were not choices that straight people were freely making, and that, once people were more free to make their own choices, a lot of gay people acted a lot more straight, and a lot of straight people began to act a lot more gay. Ezra Klein We’ve been thinking, to pull back the curtain on this a bit, about doing a relationships episode for a while, and what keeps tripping us up is that most relationship books are bad. And one of the reasons I was excited when we thought of having on is that, one, I realized that a lot of just the language people use around me now comes from you, comes from your column, comes from your readers — you know, “monogamish,” and “GGG” — and all these things you’ve brought to the discourse, but beyond that, something that I think you’ve had a huge influence on is being this bridge from gay and queer and kink culture to straight dating culture, in a way that has actually made — at least since I moved to San Francisco, I see it much more — straight dating culture very different. What are some of those differences? You’ve mentioned that there was this kind of bridge that opened up, but what came over it? Dan Savage The idea that monogamy is a choice a couple makes, and a choice a couple can revisit, that monogamy shouldn’t be a default setting, it should be something that you opt into and can opt out of over the life of a relationship. When I first came out as gay and began to meet gay couples, I was surprised. You know, I moved into dating and relationships with expectations and wants that had been handed to me, and I was surprised by the numbers of gay couples I met who were writing their own script and doing their own thing. And, at first, I found that threatening, and then I got used to it, and then I saw the logic and the utility of it, in that you should do what works for you and for you two as a couple, and that should be a conversation. I think that’s primarily what came over it. I don’t think everybody is monogamish or open now. If there’s anything that I’ve really tried to hammer home over the years, it’s to attack these myths, these lies that we’re told when we’re children that being in love means you aren’t going to want to sleep with anybody else. Not true. Being in love, if you’ve made a monogamous commitment, might mean you don’t sleep with anybody else, out of respect for your partner, and the choice you made, and the choice you made together, but you’re still going to want to sleep with somebody else, and expecting that other person to pretend they don’t want to sometimes, that they aren’t tempted, and getting angry whenever you stumble over evidence that your partner might be attracted to somebody else, which isn’t me giving permission to people to be insensitive or cruel about sometimes finding other people attractive, if you’re in an exclusive relationship, but it’s such an engine of conflict. That’s what I began to see when I first started getting a lot of letters from straight people, that these expectations — that love meant you didn’t sleep with anybody else at all, true and lasting relationships were monogamous relationships, it created so much stress and tension, and it wound up ending a lot of really good relationships and imperfect ones. And monogamy is sort of my hobbyhorse. Monogamy is literally the only thing humans attempt where perfection is the only metric of success. Ezra Klein You should meet some vegans. Dan Savage [LAUGHS] Well, I guess there’s that too. Ezra Klein Sorry. Dan Savage I’ve met a few. We have some for Christmas Eve dinner every year. It’s very complicated. But, you know, if perfection is your measure of success, you’re setting yourself up for failure and disappointment in a committed, long-term, sexually exclusive relationship. You know, the world’s greatest chef sometimes burns an omelet. Still the world’s greatest chef. Shaun White is the world’s greatest snowboarder, has fallen down and gotten up and still been Shaun White. world’s greatest snowboarder. If you’re with somebody for 50 years and you find out they cheated on you once, they were terrible at monogamy, they failed at monogamy, they never loved you, it wasn’t a real relationship. We believe these things and then they destroy not open relationships, they destroy monogamous relationships that are imperfect, as all relationships are. And, if anything, if there’s any windmill I tilted against that I feel like I knocked over, it was that one. Ezra Klein I was looking at a poll preparing for this that I thought was both kind of funny and revealing. It was a YouGov poll from 2020, and it found that 12 percent of adults said they’d had some kind of sexual experience outside their partnership with their partner’s consent — which is higher than I thought it would be, actually — and 18 percent said they’d had a sexual experience outside the partnership without their partner’s consent. And we know, in polling, people are not going to admit to that in full numbers, so it’s probably higher. So it’s not just that there is monogamy and non-monogamy, but there’s also the shade of people who say they’re monogamous and aren’t. Dan Savage Yeah, people doing what they need to do sometimes to stay married and stay sane, and everybody looks at that, and it’s suddenly white hats and black hats, and the person who cheated is a terrible person. I like what Esther Perel has said — that sometimes, the victim of the affair is not the victim of the marriage. I also like what I’ve said, that, sometimes, cheating is the least-worst option for all involved. You know, whenever I say I’m the guy who sometimes gives people permission to cheat, a lot of people jump down my throat, because they just think that must be awful. And then a lot of the examples that I cite, things that have come up in my column, are, you know, someone who’s in a long-term, committed relationship with a person who is chronically ill, and the sexual part of their relationship has ended. And is it the right thing to tell the person who wants to have sex outside that relationship — that’s about care and nurturing and commitment, but not about sex anymore? Am I supposed to tell that person, well, do the right thing and leave? Do the right thing and get a divorce? Don’t, like, slip out to discreetly get a sexual need met so that you can be there fully for your partner and not resent your partner for how deprived you feel of any sort of sexual outlet. Go do that discreetly and then be there. And that’s me somehow being against relationships, against commitment, and that’s me sort of wrestling with reality — that life is long and that, sometimes, contingencies have to be made. I would just say, in that 18 percent, everyone’s going to hear that figure and think, oh, these serial adulterers, oh, these awful people, lying and cheating and running around behind their partner’s backs. If you’re in my position, where you get a lot of letters and emails and calls from people who are in very difficult circumstances, where they have a very human, reptile brain need, that they’re kind of going crazy, and it’s harming their relationship that this need is unmet, I think, represented in that 18 percent figure to a very significant degree. But when we talk about the 18 percent who have slept with somebody else without their partner’s consent, what we see are cads, and what we see are terrible people. We see cheaters as they’re presented to us in film and television and novels. And realities are very different. Ezra Klein I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody cheating on their partner — and not that they so often admit it to me — where they were happy, which just speaks a little bit to your point. I mean, I may be a bit more of a moralist on this than you. I may have not fully absorbed the Savage wisdom, but I’ve been a confidant on situations like this before, and they’re always very tough. People — sometimes they’re not — I do want to say, sometimes, people are not doing what they need to do, they’re just doing what they would like to do. But oftentimes, these things are in context where my advice is, well, you guys should have broken up. But it’s very easy to be outside of a relationship saying that everything that has been built should be ended. And inside relationships, it’s much more complicated, and how people got to a point where they’re sort of miserably unable to talk about their own unhappiness with each other, and trying to find too much outside is — I mean, often the tragedy, and to Perel’s point, the crimes occurred before. This is a culmination. Dan Savage Yes, and a need. You know, sex is bigger than we are, and we pretend that we’re in control of sex, and we’re in charge of sex. Sex built us and is building whatever comes after us. Through the processes of natural selection and spontaneous mutation, here we are. And we like to pretend that we get to define sex. I think we negotiate with sex from a position of relative powerlessness, and it has to be channeled. It can’t be dammed up, and that includes sexual desire, which is about a lot more than sex, even in the context of a committed relationship. I’m not against monogamy. This is usually when somebody jumps up to say, you’re against monogamy. I’m in a long-term, committed, open relationship. We’re approaching our third decade together, and I still get people who are monogamists, who will say to my face, well, I couldn’t do what you and Terry do, because I value commitment too highly, and I look at them, and I’m like, how many decades do we have to be together before we get some credit for commitment? Ezra Klein I always think “sex” is a word here that obscures so much more than it reveals. Already, when people talk about men, where it’s like sex is just as if you need to play basketball once a week to get your energy out, where, particularly in relationships, and in long relationships, what people want, it often seems to me, is much more complicated. Sex is this stand-in — or this way people are finding the feeling of being desired or of desire or of novelty or of love and security. And different kinds produce completely different things, right? This is a big Esther Perel point — of this kind of competition between the need for security and the need for novelty. But it always has seemed to me, we have this discourse about sex as if simply having sex as if you can tally it up on a little marker sheet, where — people have a lot of trouble, in my experience, saying what needs they actually need fulfilled, because they’ve not typically been given a lot of language for what’s behind that gigantic thing blotting out the sun of emotional needs that we always talk about instead. Dan Savage And that those two things, sexual and emotional needs, can be on parallel tracks, but they’re on separate tracks, and just the freedom to acknowledge that in the context of a committed relationship can make it easier to be in a committed relationship. I’m not the enemy of monogamy. I see the benefits of monogamy for many people, around sexual exclusivity, paternal security, protection from sexually transmitted infections. There are advantages to monogamy. There are advantages to some degree of permitted, controlled sexual freedom in the context of a committed relationship. But I recognize that you have a zone of erotic autonomy, and so do I, and to not try to control that, to create some space and freedom inside the relationship for that makes that less of a potentially damaging chaos agent that could destroy the relationship. There’s a really interesting study out of the Netherlands looking at marriage. Netherlands is the place that’s had marriage equality for the longest — gay marriage for the longest. And interestingly, they found, despite people’s assumptions, that gay male couples are the least likely to divorce; straight couples were more likely, lesbian couples most likely. Lesbian couples and straight couples most likely to be monogamous; gay couples least likely to be monogamous. Correlation ain’t causation, but it would seem that gay male couples are doing something right by diffusing the bomb that explodes so many straight and lesbian relationships, which is this desire for outside sexual contact, for autonomous sexual experiences, for the affirmation of your desirability by others whose job it isn’t to affirm your desirability, and that can redound to the benefit of your committed relationship, to your primary partnership. And you look at this study, and you read it, and you think, well, maybe gay couples are doing something right here, and I think, as more gay people have come out, and more straight people have gotten to the gay people that they knew, or gotten to know gay people who they didn’t know, they’ve seen that at work in our relationships. And more straight people have at least entertained the thought of there being different possibilities, which, in a way, ironically, is the stated fear of social conservatives from the ‘70s and ‘80s, when I was a kid — that gay people led these hedonistic lifestyles, and straight people were going to be tempted to adopt gay, hedonistic lifestyles. And we’ve kind of seen that come to pass. It’s just straight people took everything gay people were doing and gave it new names. I don’t know if I can swear on your podcast, but gay people had tricks and fuck buddies, and straight people renamed that as friends with benefits and hooking up. There’s just so much from gay culture that straight people just adopted wholesale and renamed, and that was what Jerry Falwell Sr. — who would be very shocked at Jerry Falwell Jr.‘s behavior — was worried about, and it came true. Ezra Klein We’ve been talking a bit about unhappiness that afflicts married or long-term, committed partnerships, but one of the motivations for this chat, for me, has been that there’s been this spate of books over the past couple of years with names like “Bad Sex” and “Rethinking Sex” and “The Right to Sex,” and I’ve done podcasts with some of these people, like Amia Srinivasan and Maggie Nelson and Erika Bachiochi. There’s an interesting moment here of questioning where the sexual revolution got us, and particularly questioning where it is left people, not so much in committed partnerships but who are struggling with this kind of expansive freedom to not be in committed partnerships, and I’m curious of your sense of that. What’s behind a lot of the discontent right now, and how do you read it? Dan Savage I read “Right to Sex.” I also read the writer for The Washington Post. Ezra Klein Oh, Christine Emba. Dan Savage I had her on my show for “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.” It is interesting. I have felt for — you know, I’m sort of identified with the sex positivity movement, and I’ve never really tossed that term around a lot to describe myself or what I do. I was really thrilled to read all the way through Chrine Emba’s book, “Rethinking Sex,” and get to a place where she quoted something I said, that was basically, there needs to be a limiting principle. You can have sex with too many people. You can have sex too often, and that kind of puts you at a greater physical risk, and can do a psychic damage. I’ve never been, the solution for everybody’s unhappiness is just for everybody to have more, and tons, and lots of different partners. I think that’s a part of the sex positivity movement, the Mary Poppins idea that enough is as good as a feast. You know, these books are being written by women. A lot of the young feminists that are written about in “The Right to Sex,” who are re-evaluating and rethinking and embracing writers like Andrea Dworkin are women and young women, who find the sexual marketplace to be dehumanizing. And that may be an element of the current sex culture that there needs to be a correction for, a counter-reformation, maybe. I think, when sex is bad, odds are it was worse for, bad for the woman. So it doesn’t surprise me that a lot of these books were written by women, and I think the critique in these books about a lot of what’s been sold to people as sex positivity is just calibrating the settings so that they work for men. And I’ve always thought Andrew Sullivan’s point about, when you look at gay male sex culture versus lesbian sex culture, sometimes, that you can see some sort of essential difference between men and women. And men approach sex, straight men approach sex without, I think, an awareness of the implied violence, the threat that a lot of women will say yes to sex because they don’t feel empowered to say no, and that can result in a lot of women having sex that they didn’t enjoy, that left them feeling terrible, and the guy doesn’t even realize, right, because he’s so thoughtless about it, because he hasn’t projected himself into the woman’s experience. As a gay man, as a man who has sex with men, I think I have some appreciation for what it’s like to have sex with men, and for what men are. A lot of men don’t, and I think that results in a lot of bad sex for a lot of women. And like I’ve said, I think we do need some sort of counter-reformation that corrects for and raises some awareness of insensitivities around the relative vulnerability that a woman experiences in a sexual encounter with a man, relative to the man’s experience or even perceptions of the power differential that exists. Ezra Klein You had an interesting point in there that I was reflecting on while you were talking about how most of these books have been written by women, and I get the sense — this is an unproven hypothesis — I don’t get the sense that young men are super happy out there. And you mentioned, you see it in the data that young men are not having a lot of sex. They’re also having a lot of mental problems. There’s been this huge rise of the incels, and Amia Srinivasan’s this is written in direct response to, or at least the title essay is in direct response to incel stuff. And I sometimes think, on both sides, that it gets to this idea that one thing that we have told people is that sex can solve more problems than it actually can. I always thought there’s a weird thing that would happen repeatedly in conversations about incels, where somebody would say, and then get a ton of crap, I think correctly, for saying, well, should we just give them sex workers? Should there be some kind of right to a sex worker? And even if you could do that — and even if that was not incredibly dehumanizing to sex workers — I think it’s completely clear that what these people wanted was not actually intercourse; it was status. It was the sense of having a position in society where people wanted you and would desire you and would think you had worth, enough worth that they would choose you freely. And solving that need is way harder than answering the question of how can we possibly get you laid. And, similarly, I think, what a lot of people are looking for in relationships that doesn’t get well-answered by hook-ups is these kind of secondary needs about what the gaze of another person means to me as a person. And I don’t know, reading some of these books, I’ve had this thought, and I’m curious if it rings true to you, that we just have had a lot more sexual revolution than relational revolution, or relationship revolution. I mean, we do talk about monogamy versus polyamory versus ethical monogamy and non-monogamy more, but in terms of how we relate to each other, we just seem way behind the amount of freedom we have suddenly achieved. Dan Savage I completely agree. I am one of those people, though, who have suggested that I don’t think it’s a solution to incels to hand sex workers to them. I have a lot of friends, unlike a lot of people who write about these things, who are sex workers. The last thing I want to do is lock one of my friends who’s a sex worker in a room with a violent misogynist incel. That said, downstream, in a culture where we destigmatized sex work and destigmatized paying for sex, in that very clear way of, like, handing over of money for sex, people who, in addition to feeling emotionally unfulfilled, emotionally unsatisfied, then also stew in sexual deprivation, it might be a balm. I think all relationships, if you really peel the layers back far enough, are, at some point, transactional. I pay for it with my husband. I don’t pay for it with cash money. I pay for it with time, attention, affection, concern, making sure he goes to see the doctor when he needs to go see the doctor. There’s a reason married people live longer. If I stopped paying in like that, if I stopped caring about him, if he stopped paying in like that, stopped paying me with those same ephemeral, intangible, but very important things, our relationship would collapse. We see transactional relationships everywhere, and if you know people who are sex workers, a lot of what they’re paid for is not sex, it’s time, it’s attention, it’s focus, and if we have a culture that tells people that, if you ever had to pay for it with cash, you’re a loser, or a monster, or both, it makes the one outlet that some people may have, the one way that some people may pay for it, that other people who are also paying for it might not pay for it, it closes that lane down. It’s not a solution for people who are right now on Reddit, you know, celebrating violence against women, because they’re so angry about being low status, right? It’s a solution that could roll out over a generation or four, where we have less incels, less violence, less misogyny 100 years from now than we do now, if we could all just recognize — just like we should all recognize that being in love and in a committed monogamous relationship doesn’t mean your partner isn’t interested in the waiter — if we could also recognize that all relationships, all sexual relationships, all emotional relationships are, on some level, transactional, and, therefore, we shouldn’t stigmatize the ones that are more evidently transactional. Ezra Klein So I agree on the not stigmatizing, but I want to hold, I’m so interested in this word “transactional,” and I’m trying to watch what’s happening in my own head on it, which is — Which is just fancy for “we all pay for it.” You know, I know, but this is what has come to my mind on this. I don’t know if, with more time to think about it, I would hold here, but I’m gonna go with my instinct, which is, I think this is a place where our market metaphors are so dominant that that feels right, even as it feels to be wrong, which is, I wonder why the word there isn’t actually still relational, which is to say, I mean, on some level, everything has an exchange, and everything has a dynamic, and things you give, and things you get, but, one thing, I have transactional, truly transactional relationships in my life, and what makes them transactional is the ability to fairly, cleanly walk away. One of the weird things about being a parent and having child care is you have people who are embedded in your life in this unbelievably important familial role and, also, you pay them, and it creates this very intense and noticeable tension between the transactional level of the relationship and the fact that they love your child, and you love your child, and you love them for loving your child, and it’s this whole thing. And this is a little bit what I mean when I say, sometimes, I think that we have over-theorized and over-worked on sex and under-theorized and under-worked on relationships. Because, in some ways, it seems cleaner to say the relationship is transactional, but what’s so frustrating and real about them, to me, is how often they’re not. Dan Savage But maybe one of the things you exchange in that transactional, committed relationship is the difficulty of extracting yourself from it, of extricating yourself from it. One of the things that Terry has given me is marriage, and one of things I’ve given him is marriage, which upped the stakes, right, and made walking away from this relationship — created a degree of difficulty that has disincentivized walking away from this relationship, and that is one of the things that we have exchanged. Ezra Klein And it’s a beautiful thing, really, about marriage. I had a friend who used to say — that I heard him say, and I’ve always felt it’s true, that, before he and his partner got married, you’d be arguing over, you know, the curtains in the house, and it wasn’t clear if you’re arguing about the curtains or arguing about whether or not you should break up, and after you get married, until a certain really, really intense point, you really are arguing about the curtains, and there’s both difficulty and beauty in that. Dan Savage Mm-hmm. Yeah, I’m not against love, and I don’t think love is — Ezra Klein I’m not putting you in it against love. I’m just thinking aloud with you. Dan Savage I’m not against love, and I think there is some there there, but it’s so hard to pin down. It’s so subjective. It’s so personal. It’s so hard to describe. We can only describe sort of the physical worlds and actual actions and deeds that are attendant to it, right? But I know it’s there, and I know it’s a thing itself too. I also know that it’s an idea. I also know it’s a lie. A love story is something that two people create together. It’s a myth two people create together and then recommit to and are always sort of editing and reshaping and retelling. And it has a power. Stories have power. Even that, though, the telling and retelling of that story, is something we give each other in a relationship and something that gives us a feeling of meaning and safety and contentment as individuals, but also, then, as that — you know, we are all individuals. A couple is an idea. A couple is something two individuals agreed to pretend to be together, right? Ezra Klein I love that. I think that’s so unbelievably true. Dan Savage You know, you think about, so many of the problems of sex in a long-term relationship is trying to recapture the magic and intensity and passion of the beginning, and so much of the sex advice-industrial complex is about lying to people and telling them they can, right, or that they should, and that it’s possible. And a long-term relationship, by weight of — and we’re not really even talking now about, you know, “Rethinking Sex,” “The Right to Sex.” The problem of connection, and how atomized people are these days, and the difficulty, particularly younger people are having, in finding each other and the paradox of choice — if there’s too many different kinds of mustard in the mustard aisle at the grocery store, people walk down that aisle and don’t get mustard, even if it was on their list, because they can’t choose, and, really, the internet has created for many people that — and so it’s not all people who feel low status, who feel cheated, who feel unmarketable for some reason. A lot of people who are, you know, in the mustard aisle of, like, dating apps, and want to pick a jar of mustard and would like to have mustard at home whenever they want it can’t quite bring themselves to do it, and I think all of these problems and how we figure out how to address them are better problems to have than what people pine for, which are when women didn’t have options, when women weren’t legal adults, when women couldn’t have credit cards or bank accounts or sign leases, when women were property, and a lot of men wound up in relationships with women who were there under duress, and we called that “marriage,” right? And that’s not the case anymore. And how do we control for that? How do we control for high-status men churning through as many women as they can get, just like high-status gay men used to be able to churn through a lot of male partners, and then how do we control for low status or low social skills? You know, when I talk to incels, and I’ve talked to incels — I’ve gotten on the phone with some people privately — you think of that movie, I think, “The Sessions,” with Helen Hunt. It’s about a sex worker going to see a profoundly physically disabled client, and everyone’s like, oh, that’s wonderful. That’s complicated, because we have weird, screwed-up feelings about sex work and whether it’s legitimate, whether it’s work or not, whether it should be legal or not, safe or not — that’s the argument when it comes to the legality of sex work. It’s not whether it’s going to exist or not, or it’s going to be safe, or riskier than all jobs are. And we recognize that, if somebody is profoundly physically disabled, that the attention and affection of a sex worker is a wonderful thing to be provided, sometimes even by family, to that person. Well, a lot of the incels that I’ve actually spoken to are profoundly socially disabled. I think that disability, when somebody who has profound social disabilities sees a sex worker, we should be able to recognize that, that need for affection, that need for sex, this route to obtaining it and the improvement of the quality of life of that person, it’s legitimate. It’s legitimate. And it is a net good, and we should make that easier — not, you know, through federal subsidies, you know, the Department of Sex Work. We should make that easier by eliminating the stigma and giving people who do sex work or see sex workers the benefit of the doubt, and then also to recognize in people who see sex workers, to recognize ourselves, to recognize the ways in which, even in our own committed relationships, there are still these transactional elements. That doesn’t mean there’s not affection. Everyone I know who is a sex worker who has long-term clients, those are relationships of real, lasting affection. Those are long-term relationships. And yet we want to knock those relationships down to purely transactional; we want to call them crimes; and then we refuse to recognize in our own relationships the transactional elements that might help us empathize with people who have no other outlet except a sex worker. Ezra Klein There’s so much richness in that answer, but I want to go back to something you said early in it that struck me as one of the truest sentences I’ve ever heard, which is, “Every couple is an idea.” And, in a way, all of us are ideas, and another way of framing some things I’ve been saying here is that a big part of sex is how it changes or affirms or validates, or undermines our idea of ourselves. But you also see in relationships, and in couples, this line, you know, that people often have many marriages to the same person, and I think that’s true, but it’s always been a very unclear line, what it means. But I think what you’re saying is a much clearer way of saying it, that what will often happen in a marriage, and it’s happened in mine, is that the first idea of the couple stops being true, and that’s a very, very, very difficult place, when that idea stops being true, when the story you told is no longer the story that fits, and couples that survive and thrive can find another idea of themselves — Dan Savage Yes. Ezra Klein — some other story that they now inhabit, and they’re proud of, and they like. But it’s also true for individuals. A lot of life is having a story that you believe of yourself and that other people believe enough about you that you can move through the world in a way that you recognize who you are, and recognize how you are seen, and you are OK with what you see in that recognition. I’m curious, though, because this seems like a skill, and I want to actually speak about skills here, but that we don’t really have, which is to know explicitly how to tell what stories we are telling, and to also know how to change them, know how to make them amenable to editing, to difference, to new chapters. How do you think about that? Dan Savage Well, the difficulty is you have to be telling the same story together — that if your revision isn’t also your wife’s revision, or the new way that you’re telling the story. If you’re imposing it on your partner, or it’s just in conflict with the story that they’re telling about the relationship, it’s going to be a very dysfunctional relationship. It’s going to fall apart. That’s the hard part. You know, I’ve been with my husband for almost 30 years. We’ve had very different stages and eras of our relationship. It’s more like layers of sediment. It’s more like digging up Troy than it is just, like, scrapping the story and telling a new one. There’s just this new city built on top of the old city, but the old city is still under there somewhere. The hard part is, you know, when you’re in conflict — and Terry and I have stared into the abyss. We’ve gone into couples counseling. We’ve been in bitter conflicts, screamed the word “divorce” in each other’s faces, and then we came to a new understanding of who we were going to be to each other and how that was going to work, and we began to inhabit that new story and tell that new story together. And that only works if you can do it together. Can I jump back for a second — Ezra Klein Please. Dan Savage — because something occured to me when you were asking that question about, like, we see — it’s a cliche, you know, the powerful C.E.O who goes to see the dominatrix, right, the right-on feminist woman who wants, during sex with a partner that she chose, and she feels safe and comfortable with, wants her hair pulled and wants to be called a “slut,” the gay guy, who’s out and proud, and is turned on during sex, with someone he chose, to have homophobic hate words hurled at him during sex. These are all cliches. These are all truisms about sex. And the paradox is this is not who I am. Like, I am not a dirty slut who should have her hair pulled. This is not who I am. By leaping into that, in fantasy or role play or experience, it almost affirms and solidifies who you are the rest of the time, the 99.9999 percent of the time, when that is not happening. There’s something about sex where we want to transgress against our ideas of self. There’s also something that’s dangerously powerful about sex, where we want to transgress against the story we’re telling as a couple, that there is something about being in a long-term, committed relationship, and there’s something about sex where, sometimes, you want to be not you, and that can then extend to, sometimes, you want to violate who you’re perceived to be, the couple that — you want to violate who your partner thinks you are. How do you put those things in harness to serve the relationship, as opposed to tear the relationship apart, is a real, varsity-level, high degree of difficulty thing to do. Honestly, really, to incorporate honestly into the relationship, most people incorporate that stuff dishonestly into the relationship, and I don’t mean that most people cheat in a relationship, but that most people have that zone of erotic autonomy, or those times when they tiptoe up to the edge, and then they don’t jump over, when they see how they could transgress, and that makes the adrenaline pump, and that makes us feel like individuals again, and I think that’s so important, right, and even just respecting your partner’s privacy. I’ve talked to so many people who have no respect for their partner’s privacy, as if their privacy is a violation of the idea of the couple, their partner having privacy. And this road so many people are on, these expectations so many people have about what it is to be a part of a couple are cancers that grow on their relationships until they kill them. Ezra Klein I think there’s something really interesting there in the way sex is a space where we will do things or inhabit things we would not say, and then I want to complicate the “we” here. So I moved out to San Francisco four years ago, and I was coming from D.C., where I had lived for 14 years, and that’s a pretty head-spinning difference in relational and sexual cultures, to say the least. Well, one thing here that has been striking is my community here, it’s much more queer than it was. It’s much less likely to be monogamous than it was. I know people who are more in the kink community, which is not something I knew much about before. And for a bit, I was, like, really struck by all the category changes and differences in definition and rules. And then, after some time of just knowing everybody, what I came to think was that the big difference out here is communication styles, that the way people will talk about what they want and negotiate their relationship or negotiate something within kink for themselves or — it’s, like, stuff that I wouldn’t have even spoken about the thing, much less actually ask for the thing with a person whose opinion of me I was concerned about. And I think there’s so much attention — Dan Savage We have to put a pin in that. We need to revisit that. Ezra Klein Yeah, we will. There’s so much attention on, like, what kind of sex lives people should have and what kinds of relationships they should have and are they polyamorous or monogamous, but I actually think this is more, in a weird way, important, about how people communicate, that’s so much the base layer of all the relationships, and can you even know what story your partner is telling? It’s so different to listen to people who are actually negotiating everything out and are used to doing that that that was by far the biggest, like, revolution in what I realized was possible. Dan Savage And I want to claim credit for that — not me personally, not because of my column — gay people. Ezra Klein I think that’s right, though. Dan Savage I’ve always said, as a provocation myself, gay people have more sex, know more about sex, and are better at sex than straight people are, and then that makes straight people get defensive and recoil, and then I tell them why that’s true. We have to communicate. A man and a woman consent to sex and go to bed for the first time — that’s usually when the conversation about sex stops, because what’s going to happen is a default setting and is assumed. Much to the detriment of both of their experiences, often, those assumptions can result in people having the kind of bad sex that Christine Emba writes about a lot. When two men go to bed together for the first time, they consent to sex, it is the beginning of a conversation, because there is no default setting. What’s going to happen? Who’s going to do what to whom? My first sexual experiences with other men — and, you know, I lost my virginity with a woman, so my first sex experiences weren’t with men — my first sexual appearance with a man, the guy looked at me and said, what are you into? I call them the four magic words, “What are you into?” And at that moment, you can rule anything in, rule anything out. You can ask for what you want. You’ve been asked to ask for what you want, because your partner can’t assume, right? I have had experiences where both people ask that question at the exact same time, and then look at each other and say, jinx, right? What are you into? Ha, ha, ha, jinx, and then you have that conversation. Some straight people have that conversation. Most don’t, because they can avoid it. Gay people don’t have that conversation because we’re more highly evolved. We don’t have that conversation because we’re better. We have that conversation because we must. And that’s what you see in San Francisco. You see a lot of people, straight people, who have embraced “What are you into?” as the start of a conversation about a relationship and about a sexual relationship, and it’s made them better at sex. It’s made them better at relationships. You know, I don’t want to say gay people are necessarily better at relationships, but that study out of the Netherlands, other studies, have shown that gay men are often slower to commit, but once they commit, less likely for the relationship to end, and I think it’s because of those conversations and because of that question. Ezra Klein But I think this is part of why there is so much unhappiness right now for a lot of people, and I feel this, even. So, I met my wife, not then my wife, right before the rise of app dating, so online dating was still a little bit weird, and within five years, it would be all anybody I knew did. And so this crazy thing happened, which is that the fundamental scarcity of your love life, like, how do you find a person to date — you’ve met your friends’ friends. You’re not good at hitting on people parties. Like, what are you gonnna do? Dan Savage You meet people at work, or you used to. Ezra Klein Right. It upends, and all of a sudden, people have this insane amount of choice. And I thought, from the outside of this, I mean, this is gonna be a wonderland. Like, how great? And then, you know, nobody was happy, and people get tired, and they seem to be meeting — you know, a lot of pain attached there too. It’s not like there’s been some great shift in our societal happiness or the quality of our relationships or anything. And I do think this is a place where maybe the problem got mistaken, that there’s so much more freedom and possibility and choice, and those things all seem really great, but you need a lot of skills, and particularly communication skills, to navigate that. And we got all these new options and possibilities, and no upgrade or change in skills and, to some degree, no change in expectations. And those things are in a level of conflict with each other that seems to me to be making a lot of people miserable. Dan Savage Well, the better people are at communicating their desires, their wants, their boundaries, the less likely they are to wind up in a situation where they’re having — you know, bad sex happens to everybody, but less likely to wind up in a situation where you’re having sex or in a relationship that isn’t making you happy. You know, the people out there who aren’t having sex usually have a problem with communicating, with asking, with telling, and one of the things I wanted to jump back to is that thing you said that it can be difficult to share your actual wants and desires when the stakes are high. I can’t remember exactly how you put it. That’s often a problem in relationships. You know, people put up their Potemkin village version of themselves and then they get into a committed relationship, and they haven’t actually revealed who they are sexually and what they want sexually. They didn’t start with that. And now, if revealing those things about yourself is a threat to the relationship potentially — you fear it might be — you don’t. You kick that can further down the road, and then it becomes harder and harder to reveal it. But I guess I’m not really answering your question. Yeah, everyone is unhappy all the time. Internet dating has been really interesting. You know, Terry and I predate that. Terry and I both have other partners that we did meet on the internet, so we have some experience with what the internet is like, and some people are paralyzed by the amount of choice that they have, you know, the mustard aisle problem. I think that’s preferable to the lack of choice that people used to endure before the sexual revolution, before the internet came along, and we need — you know, we have new problems to address, and we have new problems to correct for, and some people are miserable because they haven’t made a choice, right, and they need to be encouraged to perhaps make a choice, and sometimes having someone or something is better than having no one or nothing. And there is no perfect partner. There’s no lid for every pot. You know, there’s no “the one,” which is a thing I talk about in my column all the time. There’s a .73 that you round up to the one, and that’s about the best you can do. And some people find that dispiriting. I think that’s kind of lovely, because not only are you rounding that person up, but you know that they’re rounding you up too, and I think that’s a gift, and you should take it. [MUSIC PLAYING] Ezra Klein I want to take a moment here on communication culture, because, as you were saying that, something that was occurring to me is, you think about this in terms of sex, but I actually want to think about it in terms of relationships, and I’ll put it on myself, that one of the hardest things for me has been getting to a point where I’m not offended by needing to ask for what I need, right, getting over the fantasy that other people are going to know what it is I need at a moment, or that, if it is not natural for them to provide it, that that is some kind of problem with them. And this is a place, I think, where expectations are very destructive, but getting to a point as a person where you, frankly, know what you need, that you are willing to ask for it enough times that other people can understand it or be reminded of it, and that you’re not so worried about everybody else’s reactions to that, that you’re not paralyzed when making the ask, because other people’s discomfort is more unbearable than your own or than your own possible feeling of humiliation or what happens if you ask and it can’t be offered, and it got me thinking about, I watched, as part of preparing for this, a conversation you did with Esther Perel on YouTube. It’s on YouTube, and people should check it out. It’s fantastic. The two of you have a long thing about what sex ed could and should be like in your perfect world, and it left me thinking a lot about how there’s no relationship ed, and nobody even really talks about one, to say nothing of just how we talk to each other — Dan Savage Which is what sex ed should be. Ezra Klein Which is probably what sex ed should be, but it’s not even just sex. It’s friendships. It’s work. It’s our whole democracy. Just being good at communication is so bedrock, and we just kind of turn people out into the world and are like, hope for the best, like, good luck to you. Dan Savage Yeah. I don’t know what I have to say there except that I completely agree. I would add to the ability to ask for what you need is also the ability to see what you’re capable of giving, to know what you’re capable of giving, and, sometimes, the ability to be patient, because you may ask for something and not get a yes right away or get it right away, or you know, you’re told you to wait or be patient, you’ll get it soon, or eventually, this weekend, or, you know, I’m moving toward that, or not yet, which is often something people hear when they ask to open a relationship, is maybe, and that’s a conversation we need to keep having. So, yeah, ask for what you need, know what you can give and know that the answer isn’t always going to be yes. There’s a thing I talk about in my column and on my podcast all the time called the “price of admission,” which is there’s a price of admission you pay to be in any relationship, and if there’s something that’s a price of admission that you’re unwilling to pay, then you shouldn’t be in that relationship. But, you know, if there’s no price you’re willing to pay to be in a relationship, you’re not going to ever be in a relationship. You know, in addition to being a myth, a story, a relationship is a never-ending compromise. Ezra Klein I think of this as the deepest level of your work, which is this constant pressure you’re putting on people’s expectations and constant light you’re trying to shine on it. Dan Savage To have realistic expectations. Ezra Klein Yes. Dan Savage If people have unrealistic expectations, then they’re constantly disappointed. And this can get very, like, metaphysical, people’s expectations. I do not expect, when I go home, to find a clean kitchen, because the people I live with are not gonna do dishes, so I am never crushed when I get home and the first thing I have to do is dishes. I’m just like, price of admission that I pay to be in these relationships, and that’s fine. And the trick to paying the price of admission is you don’t bitch about it. You know, you pay the price, you ride the ride. If you don’t want to pay the price, don’t get on the roller coaster. But don’t buy a ticket to that roller coaster and then complain the whole time you’re on the ride about how much it costs. At a certain point, you just get off or you don’t get on that ride. And in addition to encouraging people to have realistic expectations, people have to take responsibility for the choices that they’ve made, for the tickets they’ve purchased, and be with the people that they’re actually with, and if they don’t want to be with that person or people, they shouldn’t be. I do want to jump back, though, to this what sex ed should be, because I think this is so important and maybe people listen to your show who have some control of this, and, oh my God, on the seizing of school boards across the country and the current sex panic, you know, about groomers, any information being provided to kids about sex, sexuality, identity. Reproductive biology you can cover at a half an hour. It’s simple. Where people get hurt having sex is communication, is negotiation, is talking somebody into having sex with you, is making sure that you have their consent, is making sure that you’ve clearly communicated whether they have yours and feeling empowered to have those kinds of negotiations and conversations. That is where people get hurt. That is where sex goes wrong. How to put a condom on a banana, you can do that. Sexually transmitted infections, you can cover the ones people need to worry about in 10 extra minutes. Everything else is difficult and hard, because feelings come into play, insecurities come into play, expectations, realistic and unrealistic, come into play, and that’s where people get in trouble. And the people we often have the hardest time talking about with sex are our sex partners. How did we construct that, and how do we deconstruct that, that corner we’ve painted ourselves into, that the person we feel least free being ourselves with and opening up with about who we are sexually and what we want is somebody that we are about to have sex with for the first time, or somebody we’ve been having sex with for 20 years? Ezra Klein How do you get better at communication? I mean, even as you’re saying that, it occurred to me, if I wanted to get stronger, I know who I can go pay. If I want to eat better, I know who I can go pay. If I want somebody who can teach me how to rock climb, I know who can go pay. Like, I know where to look in the — I was gonna say the yellow pages, but that’s only because I’m 1,000 years old now — but in Google. Dan Savage And I got the reference, so I’m much older than you, actually. Ezra Klein Yeah, it’s tough. But communication, it’s everything, I mean, on some level, and completely fuzzy out there. If you’re somebody who wants to be a better communicator, where do you start? Dan Savage People know how to ask for what they want, you know, from a waiter. People know how to ask, often, for what they want from a sex worker. You know, one of the things, when it comes out, as it has, people who call me to write me, their partner was seeing a sex worker, and was doing with the sex worker, something they never asked the partner to do with them, and it was because they weren’t afraid that the sex worker would leave them. And, usually, when people have a hard time communicating about sex, desire, intimacy, relationships, there’s this fear of rejection, fear of being judged, fear of being left. Early in a relationship, you should embrace rejection, and you should run at that fear. You have to be willing to risk it. That’s how you become a better communicator. You can’t ask for what you want if you’re not willing to risk losing what you have. And what you might risk losing is this person that you just met on an app that you’re getting along with and you’d like to see naked and you risk communicating, not in a, like, if you come home with me, we’re gonna do four things from column A, four things from column B, and one thing from column C, but just, like, being actually who you are. In some ways, you have to straddle this creation of the Potemkin self, your best self, and your real self. You have to do both at the same time, and that can be difficult. And I’m not trying to dodge your question here. It’s just about disinhibiting around the fear of rejection — that, if this person isn’t right for you, give them a chance. Allow them to give you a chance. There may be things that you don’t agree on. You know, everything won’t be on the menu, but so much is, and so much does work that, you know, you’re willing to let go of some things and round them up. They’re going to round you up. You’re willing to pay certain prices of admission. But you have to be willing to risk rejection, and that’s why people have a hard time communicating. So, if you were going to open the yellow pages in 1972 and try to find where to go to get strong, you look for the gym. You just have to — there’s no willing-to-risk-rejection coach in the yellow pages, but that’s what you have to be willing to do, and that’s inside you. And that’s really about prioritizing your needs, your comfort, what you want, and finding somebody who wants enough of what you want, and enough of what you are, and vise versa, that it would work out long term, which is not to say that — one of the things I like to talk about is that we overemphasize the importance or the primacy of long-term relationships. We have many more short-term relationships, and we should want those to be successes too. I don’t think a relationship has to end with somebody in a box at a funeral home for it to have been a success, but death is our only standard of success. You know, a relationship is the only thing that we regard as a failure of everyone involved gets out alive. Imagine if we applied that standard to restaurants or flights, right? If it’s a high-conflict relationship and a terrible divorce, and nobody can stand each other or speak to each other again, if there was abuse, emotional, physical, yeah, that relationship needed to end and was probably experienced as a failure, particularly by the person who was abused. If two people get out of a relationship and there’s affection and respect, even a friendship, even if it ended, it was a success. And if we just looked at all of our relationships, we have so many short-term relationships, and we work so hard at making the L.T.R.s a success that we neglect making the S.T.R.s a success, and all an L.T.R. is an S.T.R. that worked out. Ezra Klein It’s easy, I think, when we talk about communication, to talk about us talking, right? When I say, “How do I communicate?” I think what people hear is, “How do I talk better?” But the flip of that is, how do I listen better? How do I actually hear what you’re saying when you’re talking to me? Dan Savage I have met people, some people poisoned by, maybe, the discourse around sex, who are all about what they want and asking for what they want, demanding what they want and expecting what they want and not about hearing what their partner wants, and not regarding their partner’s wants, needs, insecurities as as legitimate as their own. It’s like that definition of pornography, you know it when you see it. You know, when you’re talking with somebody who’s asking for what they want, you know when that person is also interested in what you want, and finding the center of that Venn diagram, where you can establish all the compatibilities — sexual compatibility, emotional compatibility, you know, long-term prospect, what you want out of life compatibilities, and you want to be that person, and to be that person who can ask for what you want, but also give and listen, you have to be self-critical, you have to check in with friends, you have to listen to your exes, you have to identify patterns. You know, if you’ve had a long string of terrible relationships, at some point, you have to look at that and go, well, I’m the common denominator. What am I doing wrong? And people have a hard time with that kind of communication, internal communication, self criticism. And you have to ask yourself what you want and how you’re getting in the way of it. [MUSIC PLAYING] Ezra Klein I want to ask you about something we touched on at the beginning, which is, first, a bridge that you’ve been a big part of, from the L.G.B.T.Q. community to the straight community, but also, now, the way that’s changing and just the underlying structure that is changing. So, I think the polling on this is really, really interesting. So, Gallup says 2.6 percent of baby boomers identify as some sort of L.G.B.T.Q., 10.5 percent of millennials do, and 20 percent of Gen Z does, and that 20 percent is doubled in a fairly short period of time. What do you think accounts for those radically higher rates? Dan Savage These are things that will get me in trouble for saying out loud. There has been this explosion in sort of more finely sized sexual orientations, identities. How many pride flags are there now? I have lost count. And younger people may be more comfortable identifying as not straight, identifying as queer, in ways that, you know, as a result of relationship styles or interests, that, when you, or I, or people who remember what the yellow pages are, or were, hear the word “queer,” we think same-sex relationships, for the most part, and a lot of people who identify as queer in that 20 percent of Gen Z aren’t necessarily in — or interested in or ever going to be in — same-sex relationships. Demisexual is someone who can’t experience sexual attraction in the absence of some sort of emotional connection, which describes a lot of people, right, who aren’t gay or lesbian or bi or trans, necessarily. It also describes a lot of people who are gay, lesbian, bi, and/or trans. And asexuality is a real thing, really, a hardwired sexual orientation for about 1 percent of the population. Ezra Klein Can you say what asexual is for people who don’t know? Dan Savage Someone who doesn’t experience sexual desire. And, you know, it is a spectrum. Everything is a spectrum, right? So there are some people who are asexual who experience minimal sexual desire. There are some people asexual who have sexual relationships, because sex meets a need that is not about sex. It’s incredibly complicated. That said, most people who are asexual who are in relationships or would like to be in relationships are still interested in romantic relationships, even if they’re not sexual relationships. So there’s a lot of people being shipped under the “queer” label now that yellow pages types like you and me can’t easily identify, can’t see under that umbrella, right, but they are, and that’s great. Welcome. I’m all for the most expansive definition of “queer” as possible, and anybody who wants to identify as whatever they want to identify as can identify as that. I see people on the right freaking out about, you know, at this rate, everybody’s gonna be queer in 100 years, and then we’re going to go extinct as a species, because we’re going to forget which hole babies come out of, I guess. A lot of these people who identify as queer, and may be legitimately so, when it comes down to sex and relationships, are gonna end up in having sex that social conservatives would be comfortable with and having relationships that most social conservatives would be comfortable with, and most social conservatives would assume they’re not having if they’re queer-identified, when they actually are. You’re in San Francisco. How many people do you know who identify as queer who are opposite sex and married? Or however they identify in other ways, are technically opposite sex, and in marriages, they may or may not be monogamous. It’s really high, and that’s wonderful, I guess. Ezra Klein This is sort of the motivation for the question, in a way, which is that — and I feel, again, like I’m 2,000 years old when I start asking questions motivated by, well, I was talking to some teens, but at least among people I’ve met out here, straight is not an aspirational identity. Like, it’s sort of something where you’re like, yeah, yeah, sorry, you know? [LAUGHS] Dan Savage Yeah. Ezra Klein And it’s a really interesting — that’s why I’m kind of asking your thoughts on it. It’s a really interesting change to me that has happened in my lifetime, and seems to be growing, where — Dan Savage Well, it’s just like “Christian.” Like, so many people — nones are the fastest growing category of believers, people who don’t believe in anything. Ezra Klein Oh, not Christian nuns, but N-O-N-E-S. Dan Savage N-O-N-E-S, nones. Ezra Klein Yes, people who don’t have a — Yeah. Dan Savage I remember Christian nuns. I was taught by them. And a lot of these people are still sort of nominally Christian, they just don’t want to publicly associate with what Christianity, politicized Christianity, has come to mean in our culture, thanks to odious people like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council. They don’t want to be affiliated with that. And I think the same process is sort of played out with “straight.” There’s a lot of people who feel like straight’s brand is toxic. There used to be a greater stigma attached to being perceived as not straight, and in certain subcultures, certain milieus, that polarity has flipped. Ezra Klein This gets to something that I sometimes hear from my queer friends and particularly my more politically radical queer friends, which is that we were talking earlier about the ways in which a lot of gay culture has migrated to straight culture, but there’s a feeling that it’s gone the other way too, that there was a more radical set of family formations, of kinship, not just non-monogamy, but ideas about how you would structure, you know, families of choice, and how you would structure social networks, and what it would mean to be in a relationship and that, in the fight for gay marriage, there was a lot of what gets called “assimilation” but that a lot of that got pushed to the margins, and a lot of that experimentation stopped happening. I sometimes get asked how having children changed my politics, which I have all kinds of answers for, but the main thing it’s done more recently is really persuade me that something is completely wrong in how we do family — that it’s a pretty new experience for so many people to live so far from the rest of their family. I have a four-year-old and a one-year-old, and at this moment, we don’t live near any family. Dan Savage That’s really hard. Ezra Klein And it’s completely insane. Dan Savage Mm-hmm. Ezra Klein And my colleague David Brooks has written a great piece in The Atlantic a couple of years back on this, like, the nuclear family, like, this kind of golden age of the nuclear family, was a couple-decade-long aberration. Before that, you had big extended families that lived together, and then, after that, what you have is richer people buying extended families, through purchasing a lot of household help and child care and so on, and poor people really struggling. And we do, I think, have a constant ferment around questions of sexual revolution, and we’ve been talking about relational revolution, but it just seems to me that two people is too few to raise a family. Now, maybe one answer is you live near your family, if you can, and if that works for your job, and if your parents are healthy, and able to help, and, I mean, there are all kinds of qualifications there. But in many ways, I keep waiting for this thing social conservatives keep warning me is coming, which is more experimentation in how we do family, more experimentation in how we do child raising. I mean, I do know people out here who, they live in poly households, and six people raise two kids, and it’s not so much about who’s sleeping with whom, it’s really about the parenting. Dan Savage Yeah. Ezra Klein And just something just has seemed off to me as a parent for some time — it’s just we have so little community, and we seem trapped in this view that this kind of atomization is OK, or we paper over it with money, and I don’t know, I don’t feel like, in 100 years, we’re gonna be doing it this way. I don’t know how we’re gonna be doing it, but this seems crazy. Dan Savage We weren’t doing it this way 100 years ago. I grew up in a multigenerational household, grew up in a two-flat apartment building, which is an apartment building that only has the two apartments in it, on the North Side of Chicago, and my grandparents, and aunts, and uncles lived downstairs, and my mom, and dad, and my three siblings lived upstairs. There were a lot of people around, and everybody helped raise the kids, and some of my aunts and uncles were still kids themselves when we were very little children. That worked. There were downsides. You know, you were always who you were as a child. You were always under the gaze of your parents, grandparents. We overcorrected when we atomized, and the pressure it puts on two people, alone, just a couple to raise kids, like, Hillary Clinton was right, it really does take a village, and we have to ask ourselves, what are the motives of the people out there trying to convince everyone that it should just be two people living in a suburban home in the suburbs? I blame the automobile. I blame the expressway for contributing to the atomization of the family. But, yeah, having family close by or having people in your life that are family, the family you’ve created, not biological kin or extended family, but the family of choice that people talk about in places like San Francisco and Seattle, that makes parenting easier and more possible, and resetting those cultural norms around extended families and around not expecting that a couple can or should do everything — You know, one of the things my mom did when Terry and I first became parents, and she came to visit, was take our infant from us and push us out the front door and told us to take advantage, right? You know, one of things my mother told me when I became a parent was the only time you remember why you liked your partner enough to want to have children with them in the first place was when you were alone with your partner, away from your children. And that was possible for my parents, when we were little kids, because of my grandparents and aunts and uncles. And it was harder for us, because our family wasn’t in Seattle with us. I completely agree with you. And not just in this way but in so many ways. Set up a system that makes parenting as miserable, isolating and punishing as possible, and then social conservatives sit around with their thumbs in their butts, wondering why so few people want to do this anymore. And it’s not just about child care. It’s not just about professional child care, just about preschool or day care. It’s also about mother-in-law apartments. It’s about people living in denser places. The neighborhood I grew up in Chicago was very dense. It was one of the reasons why, you know, when an aunt and uncle moved out of my grandparents’ house, they moved down the block, and it was possible for them to move down the block and to stay in our lives and to be a relief for my parents, who had four kids. Ezra Klein And this is a place that goes back to your focus, sometimes, on expectations, where I have every supply of a flexible job, I make good money, my partner and, I, like have a good relationship, we split the parenting. The expectations you’re given on this are completely insane, and basically every parent I know, you up talking for two minutes — I mean, Jessica Grose just wrote a book about this — you end up talking for two minutes, and people just climbing up the walls, and the part of the difficulty of it is this belief in the back of your head that, somewhere, somebody is doing this perfectly, right? Somewhere, it isn’t feeling like this for them. And it isn’t. You start to realize that. But it’s just a place where there’s been so little experimentation. I mean, you were just mentioning density and housing. I think a big problem for liberals here is that, look, we can and should have universal pre-K and child care, and every part of the social state that can help people parent that is possible, and that we see in dozens and dozens of other countries, but it isn’t going to solve all of this. Like, at some point — Dan Savage Oh, yeah. Ezra Klein — there is this question of just the community around the parent. I mean, Clinton’s book, in this way, is really prophetic. I should go back and read it again, because we’ve just completely lost it, and I did this conversation with Patrick Deneen some number of months ago, and he’s a kind of hardcore, post-liberal conservative — Dan Savage Oh. Ezra Klein Very intense ideology happening over there. Dan Savage Yeah. Terrifying. Ezra Klein But I was thinking, after our conversation, about the way in which something that he understood correctly was that liberals had stopped having anything, really, to say about the family beyond social supports, and as such, they weren’t talking to people in a language they could hear, and I don’t think where Deneen is going with this isn’t going to talk to them in a language that makes sense either. I do think, there, we got to a point where, after how much discrimination, and how many wars for equality there were, a lot of folks got into a space of just wanting to show that they were accepting, and, also, they weren’t trying to change too much simultaneously, as opposed to saying, something has really gone wrong here, and we should be in a space of experimentation to try to create models where parenting is not something you inflict upon yourself, but something that works within the society that we have built. Dan Savage Yeah. Ezra Klein I have strong views about this. [LAUGHS] Dan Savage But I do too, and I listened to that conversation, and whenever you interview one of those people on the — I don’t know what to call them — the far bizarro right, it’s a torment to me, because there are times when I’m nodding along, like, we need more family support, we need more working — you know, bring back jobs and make it possible for a family to function, if it can, on one income. But we also need universal pre-K and day care, but it can’t be 30 miles away, or 10 miles away. It’s gotta be on the block. And one of the things you’ve been hammering away at is why liberals can’t seem to run the cities that they’re in charge of anymore, and this block on constructing housing and denser neighborhoods, where places where people want to live and where the jobs are, and yet people who bought houses there 30 years ago are preventing the city where they live from continuing to be a city that functions and grows and where it’s possible for families to thrive, and, you kmnow, multiple generations of a single family to live in close proximity to one another. And it’s a problem. Ezra Klein It reminds me of something that came up at the beginning of that conversation, and people should go — sorry if you didn’t listen to it. It’s a conversation between me and Patrick Deneen. You can search it. But something he says at the beginning, when I was asking him, like, who are you talking to? Who is your enemy here? Because I’m pretty sure it’s actually me, was what I was trying to get at. But, nevertheless, he’s like, well, there are these people, these liberals in the legal academy that want to do away with the family, and maybe there are. But the thing that’s interesting to me is that the thing that I see on the edge, and is the reason I brought this topic up in the context of the question of, was something lost in the experimentations of the queer community around marriage, is that the people I know who have expanded family quite a bit are in more marginal communities more often. I mean, I don’t know many polyamorous households, but I know a couple that raise children, and it seems to work for them. I do have queer friends who tend to have much more kind of serious alloparenting among their communities, because there’s just more people who are bought into that family’s success, and they’ve built more of a chosen — the approach to the friendship is more like a family than it is among many straight folks or straight couples. And I keep wondering about if that kind of thing is going to expand, because we’re not going to abolish the family. I find that to be a completely functionally ridiculous concern. But we do somehow need to expand it, and that’s what we have not figured out. Dan Savage Or have we? Are the poly families or people engaged in alloparenting that you are seeing in the process of figuring it out? Have they figured it out? I think they have. You know, one of the things, whenever I listen to a conversation of yours with someone like that dude, I always wished you’d ask them, and what are we going to do about the gay people who are already out and the queer families that are already formed? Because they seem to regard us as the enemy of family, as opposed — you know, we don’t jump out of cabbage patches. We don’t emerge fully formed from the back rooms of gay bars at 18. We’re part of these families that he pines for and the kind of family structure that he pines for, and once we were free to start creating our own, we did. We want to be a part, you know, queer people, of this familial project, and yet we’re regarded, by the people arguing that liberals are the enemies of the family, our presence is somehow a threat to the family, or antithetical to the idea of family, and I would like to know what their fix is, what they’re going to do about us, and they never answer that question. Ezra Klein I don’t think they have an answer, but I will ask you what your answer on the opposite is. What are the principles of family, the ideas of family, that you have seen in your community that, if you were a parenting columnist and not a sex and relationships columnist, you’d be trying to push across the bridge? Dan Savage [LAUGHS] Parenting comes up a lot. Well, in a way, you know, I think it takes more than two people, and sometimes a lot more than two people, and that’s often my advice to people about their sex lives. That also would be my advice two people in a sexually exclusive relationship who are attempting to parent. It can’t just be the two of you. You have to bring other people in, other family members, if they’re nearby, and if you’re going to have kids and start a family of your own, you need a network of chosen family to help you do this, because it’s so, so hard. Ezra Klein I think that’s a good place to end. Always our final question. What are the three books you’d recommend to the audience? Dan Savage I gave this so much thought. “The Ethical Slut,” by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy. I’m sure, since moving to San Francisco, you’ve probably heard this book mentioned, or seen it on a shelf somewhere. It was published 25 years ago, and it’s sort of the Code of Hammurabi where ethical non-monogamy is concerned. Ezra Klein They should make that the blurb. Dan Savage [LAUGHS] I read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” when I was a kid, and I’ve regretted a couple of times but William Shirer, who wrote “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” he was a foreign correspondent in Berlin in the ‘30s. He worked with Edward R. Murrow, and after the collapse of the Nazi regime, he wrote “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” with access to the Nazi archives. It’s a fascinating book. But he also wrote something called “Berlin Diary,” which was published in 1941, without the benefit of hindsight, which is diary entries as he’s witnessing the rise of fascism and totalitarianism in Germany, and I don’t think I need to tell your audience why I think that book is so relevant to this moment, and I recently reread it, and it’s chilling. And then one that I don’t think people would expect from me is “A Royal Affair: George III and His Scandalous Siblings,” by Stella Tillyard. George III, of course, was the King of England during the American Revolution. I love royal histories, royal biographies. I’m sort of a closet monarchist — except I’m always saying into microphones I’m a closet monarchist, which I guess means I’m not a closet monarchist. [LAUGHS] But everyone’s always trying to make, in popular media, and films, and television a kind of proto-feminist hero of Marie Antoinette, which she just is not. George III’s youngest sister, Caroline Matilda, is that proto-feminist hero, and Stella Tillyard wrote a group biography about all of George III’s siblings, but the focus is Caroline Matilda, and she lived openly in a polyamorous triad. She had a child by her husband the King of Denmark — she was the queen of Denmark — and a child by her lover, wore men’s clothing, went out riding, and everything the American founding fathers did, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, banning cruel and unusual punishment, Caroline Matilda did first as a teenage girl in Denmark and Queen of Denmark in the 1760s. And that Americans don’t know her — I’ve been trying for a decade to make a TV show about Caroline Matilda happen, without much success, but Stella Tillyard’s book is amazing, and if you like real biographies, even if you don’t, it’s such a tremendous read. In some ways, the title is a little salacious for the kind of original source history that Stella Tillyard wrote about Caroline Matilda and her siblings. If you’re embarrassed by the title, just take the cover off the book but read the book. Ezra Klein I would definitely watch that. So, Prestige drama producers who are listening, and programmers, you know where to go. Go to Dan Savage. Dan, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you. Dan Savage Thank you. Thank you. It was a real honor. [MUSIC PLAYING] Ezra Klein “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld and Sonia Herrero. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Pat McCusker.