“For the next month or so Les and I would see each other a few times a week. If it was a Friday or Saturday he would sleep over at my place, or I would stay over at his. On week nights I would go back to my place afterward, or vice versa, so that we could put on clean clothes for work. I also was going out to dinner with other guys during this time, although nothing ever got started sexually. That was how casual our scene was. I suppose I would have avoided balling anybody else, or if I did, I might have felt I would want to break off with Les. I think I’m basically monogamous. I’ve had casual sex — one-night stands — but I’ve never been really involved with two men at the same time, and if I’m involved with one man, I won’t let anything happen with anyone else, casual or heavy. Sometimes I consider this a moral standard on my part, and other times I wonder if it’s just a hang-up.
“One night I was complaining about what the apartment was costing me, and saying that maybe I should try to find another roommate, and Les suggested that he move in so that we could both save on rent. Of course, I had thought of this myself as a possibility. I couldn’t see any reason not to, and the next night we moved his stuff into my apartment.”
JWW: Ruth is twenty-five. Her father is an architect, and her parents live in a North Shore suburb of Chicago. Ruth graduated from a Midwestern college and is currently employed as a secretary and editorial assistant at a New York publishing house. She lives in a small but comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side. She is living with a man now, but not with Les; that relationship, her first of that sort, did not turn out successfully.
“It was a mistake from the start, although I didn’t realize it at the time. We didn’t really care that much about each other. We cared for each other enough to sleep together, but not enough to live together. The thing is, I didn’t know enough at the time to draw a distinction. I knew it would have been absurd for us to get married, but I thought living together would simply be convenient; I didn’t realize that it’s closer to being married than to having an affair.
“The whole thing was very strange. Of course, I stopped seeing other men, and I resented having to do this, although it was never stated openly between us that we wouldn’t go out with others. It was more or less taken for granted. At the same time that I resented his having this hold on me, I became very possessive myself. Like expecting him to call me if he was going to be late at the office, and at the same time being annoyed at having to call him when I was working late.
“The experience of living together was valuable in a way, if only because I learned how wrong we were for each other. I felt uncomfortable with his friends, and he didn’t like my friends, and the result of that was that we were both cut off from everyone except each other. The few friends we had were couples we got to know after we had started living together, and in those cases neither of us much cared for any of them, but we latched onto them in the hope that they would give us something in common.
“We had very little in common. This doesn’t show up when you’re not living together. For one thing, it’s easy to mask a lot of your feelings when you know you can go home and be by yourself in a few hours.
“We separated after a few months. The break was nothing spectacular. By the time it came, we were both relieved. There were no hard feelings. He just moved out. We would still call each other from time to time. We had friendly feelings toward each other, and still do, although I haven’t seen him in a long time. Just the other day someone was talking about Les, that he had a new job and was doing very well. I’m happy for him, because I know material success is very important to him. That was another thing I found out, that he was more hung up on material things than I was.
“If anything precipitated the split between us, it was my pregnancy scare. I wasn’t pregnant, I was just a few days late, but I had always been regular, and I was convinced this was it. I even showed up with some psychosomatic symptoms — sore breasts and so on. I didn’t say anything to Les and took it for granted that I would get an abortion, and then I realized that nothing on earth would induce me to marry Les, and from that point it became obvious to me that we were going to break up before very long.”
JWW: Although the split was not a painful one for Ruth, it left her wary of quick involvements, the same sort of wariness characteristic of the recently divorced. She began dating extensively, feeling a real need to diversify her social life, which had shrunk during her relationship with Les. She purposefully avoided serious involvements.
“I was more casual about sex than I had ever been before. I didn’t sleep with everyone I dated, not by any means, but I stopped using the potential seriousness of a relationship as a criterion. If anything, I found it easier to have sex with a man when there was no chance of anything heavy developing. I was especially drawn to married men during this period, probably because I knew nothing could develop. This period was very good for me in terms of sexual growth. I became orgasmic and dropped a lot of inhibitions, especially in regard to oral sex. You would think this would have happened during the time I was living with Les, because we were together so much and had sex over an extended period of time, but the sexual relationship between us never really evolved. It had seemed good at the beginning, but it never improved, and it was during this period of more casual sex that I really came to terms with my body, with my sexuality.
“With Barry, I don’t know which of us suggested that we might start living together. It just came up in conversation, and we talked it over a lot before we made our decision.
“We were in love with each other before either of us would admit it to ourselves, let alone to each other. Barry had almost gotten married in college — he was informally engaged when he realized he was getting in over his head and broke things off. Since then he had lived with two girls for brief periods of time. With one girl and then with another girl, not both at once.
“So we were both a little careful about not getting involved too deeply. Without even discussing it, we found that we had stopped seeing other people, stopped dating, and this was before we ever spent a full night together. We had sex quite frequently for, I think, a month before we ever literally slept together.
“Then things gradually evolved. I would keep some clothes at his place, and he kept some things at mine. On the weekends we were often together from Friday night until Monday morning. Still, we didn’t rush into making it a regular arrangement. We talked it over, and we realized that we already felt about each other as if we were living together. We had that degree of closeness. In fact, the only thing we didn’t have was the convenience. We were paying double rent, and one of us was always rushing from one apartment to the other, and it was silly to go on like that. My lease was up first, and his place was a better value, so I moved in with him. He had a roommate at the time, but the roommate was hardly ever home, since he spent most nights at his girl’s, so when I moved in with Barry, the roommate moved in with his girl in a sort of chain reaction. They got married recently, as a matter of fact.
“I’m sure Barry and I will get married sooner or later. My parents don’t exactly know that I’m living with him, but I’m sure they realize it. I mean, they’ll call here on Sunday mornings, and he’ll answer the phone and talk with them before he hands it to me. They’ve met Barry several times. I know they’ll be relieved when we get married, although I must say that they’ve never put on the slightest degree of pressure.
“I guess we’ll ultimately marry for the same reason we began living together, that it’s more convenient and because we already feel married. I’m not sure if we want children or not. Not for the time being, certainly. As far as that goes, I don’t see anything wrong with having children without going through a marriage ceremony. I probably wouldn’t actually do it, though.