Rosie Wilby - Is Monogamy Dead?: Rethinking Relationships in the 21st Century

Bittersweet, original, honest and so funny. Rosie Wilby nails the challenges of intimacy and romance in this depressing age of Tinder. Would it be wrong to end a life of monogamy and leave my husband for her?

Viv Groskop

My favourite way to learn is when a funny, clever, honest person is teaching me thats why I love Rosie Wilby!

Sara Pascoe

A talented performer with a winning self-deprecating personality

Evening Standard

One of Londons doyennes of thoughtful, intimate, and warmly entertaining comedy

Metro

Published by Accent Press Ltd 2017

www.accentpress.co.uk

Copyright Rosie Wilby 2017

The right of Rosie Wilby to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of Accent Press Ltd.

ISBN 9781786154538

eISBN 9781786154521

Nobody warned me.

A bright young lady like you? The worlds your oyster. You could be a doctor. Go to Cambridge like your mother. Youll be absolutely fine, said Mr Wallington, our head of year. A sentiment echoed by pretty much every responsible adult I knew. I was a white, middle-class, British girl with two academic parents, an only child with no siblings vying for attention. Life would be cool. I got complacent and a little smug, occasionally flunking an exam on purpose because I knew I could get an A next time.

And yet, as adulthood dawned, a darkness crept up through the cracks of the paving stones of the life they had all mapped out for me.

The problem wasnt being gay. Everyone was fine about that . Mum had even once tried to tell me something about her and her friend Joan on holiday. Fresh from an aerobic session in front of her Mad Lizzie video, she emerged from the house sporting a green leotard and pink legwarmers to say, I wouldnt mind if I had a daughter who was a lesbian. Then came the masked revelation about her close female friendships. Having totally disrupted my sun-kissed, adolescent reverie about a girl from the year below in school, she rushed back indoors to find a book of lesbian poetry so that she could recite it later over the tea table to the silent horror of dad and me.

No, being gay wasnt the problem. The monster yapping and snarling at the heels of my happiness was called monogamy. Nobody warned me about monogamy. Nobody told me that by the time I was forty, I would have had four serious relationships great. Oh, and four, gut-wrenching, serious breakups not so great. Each would smash me into a million pieces, the hammer wielded by a completely unexpected, exquisitely awful dance of mutual sacrifice; a compromise of my freedoms, desires and, ultimately, my identity and my soul.

Each time, either I or my beloved would cave in and screw up the dance and betray all the lifelong promises wed made. Each time, Id put myself back together again and start all over again, trust all over again, hope all over again. I was exhausted. But nobody gave me a round of applause for this resilience. No wonder I sought out a career where I would habitually get two rounds of applause every night, maybe more if Id done super well. Maybe I could make jokes about monogamy, about the heartbreak. I could pretend everything was fine, just like all those responsible adults had said.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, yes of course Im fine Here I am being super-confident, sharp, witty and sexy in front of a hundred strangers.

Im really thinking, None of these people know me. I will go home alone on the last train with all the drunks and freaks, the one a comedian friend refers to as the vomit comet.

Most normal people file away any thoughts of doing stand-up.

Youre so brave. I couldnt do it, they gasp.

Well, its not like being a firefighter, I say.

Yet it takes a whopping personal tragedy to propel you to undertake this extreme form of very public therapy. Many of the UKs most famous comics started after a divorce (Sarah Millican, John Bishop), the loss of a parent (Michael McIntyre) or a similar seismic event.

If my life was now the sinking Titanic , comedy was my lifeboat and monogamy was my iceberg. I was using one to try and save myself from the damage, the carnage inflicted by the other. I was going to fight the monster that threatened me by understanding and taming it and having a jolly good laugh at it.

At this point in pretty much every book about relationships, theres a disclaimer. They all say the same thing. At the bottom of page eight of Aziz Ansaris fun and interesting Modern Romance , he says this book is primarily about heterosexual relationships and goes on to explain that if he tried to address LGBT relationships, he would need to write an entirely separate book. To use his casual language, Well, write another book, dude! I dont mean to single him out specifically. His is just the latest in about fifty similar disclaimers that Ive read.

It seems a pretty paradoxical poor-do for governments around the world to start allowing same-sex couples to marry but not be open to embracing, discussing and fully understanding the uniqueness of those partnerships. Thus far, the equality debate has been based upon a short-sighted and unsophisticated presumption of sameness. Yet being gay in a heteronormative world is akin to being left-handed in a world designed for right-handed people. And I should know. I am left-handed (apparently an unusually high proportion of gay women are). Tin openers, toilet flushes, doors, buildings, computers everything is designed the wrong way round. Yet because Im in a minority, Im expected to adapt and accept my lower level of comfort.

In the same way, everything about love and sex in our world is viewed through a prism of assumed heterosexuality. From relationship self-help and psychology books, romantic films, TV documentaries about love to marriage guidance and therapy services, we are expected to flip genders around in our heads.

I have lived proudly as an openly gay woman for most of my adult life. Yet this mind-blowing four-year journey into the dark heart of monogamy has made even that label, once attached firmly with superglue, look decidedly shaky. I probably am occasionally attracted to men Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp and Mark Ruffalo would top the list. To be honest, Id be hard-pushed to choose between them and my top women Kate Winslet, Julianne Moore and Kristin Scott Thomas. Mind you, the mathematical probability of these six Hollywood stars making a simultaneous beeline for a modestly successful jobbing English comedian is probably lower than winning the lottery a hundred times over. So maybe I shouldnt sweat over it.