I appreciate what you're doing with "Monogamous Week" on your blog! Speaking as a happily monogamous lady who is a ferocious reader of what you have to say, it's nice to know that I and my husband are not alone among your fans. Monogamous couples are looked down on by a few of your fans. "Monogamous Week" serves as a reminder that, yes, monogamous people can acknowledge that they are kinksters and still be in a happy and healthy one-on-one commitment. Furthermore, they can still be "real" Dan Savage fans.

My second reason is, someone on your blog commented that all the monogamous relationships you have posted about thus far have been open, which was taken as implication that the only healthy monogamous relationships are open! This is an interesting thought, I will admit, but I find myself disagreeing nonetheless. The world is full of wonderfully strange people with whole spectrums of sexual proclivities. Surely there must be room for straight-up, non-open monogamy!

In my particular case, monogamy was a price of admission that I cheerfully paid without ever really acknowledging my own feelings on the matter. What can I say? I was young. My husband is a pretty cool gentleman with a wide variety of things he likes to do in the bedroom, and we have in the ensuing years explored quite a few of our kinks and continue to learn who we are sexually and take delight in our explorations. One thing is and always will be off the table, though, and that's opening up our marriage to an outside party of any kind. My husband is not the sort to accept it; it would make him feel emotionally threatened and physically grossed-out. He has OCD, with a focus on germophobia. There's no getting around that. It's part of who he is.

On the other hand, I am not by nature monogamous. It took me years to realize it, still more years to come to terms with it. I find the world to be full of wonderfully attractive people who I would, given my druthers, sleep with in a New York minute. Why, then, would I accept a monogamous relationship? Because I love my husband. I love him more than I would an open relationship and all its attached complications. Life with him is worth not sleeping with other people. If I were to make a pro/con list, the con-side would have "Can't sleep around" in black Sharpie, the pro-side would have "GET TO SLEEP WITH HIM!" highlighted in bright green with glitter on it. I am fully conscious of the choice to be monogamous. I'm not being brainwashed, I'm not being stupid and I'm not repressing myself. I have considered all (well, most) angles of the situation and every once in awhile I re-evaluate it, just to make sure, and the choice is always clear and it is always him.

I still watch porn, I still read erotic prose, I still check out people on the bus. My husband is aware of this, and is equally aware that I will not cheat on him. It's a price I'm more than willing to pay, and it does nothing to detract from our weird and wonderful sexual existence.

So, yeah. Thanks for making the time to acknowledge me and people like me, who are simultaneously fully sexual beings AND monogamous.

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Thanks for sharing, ISWHTSAS, but a point of clarification: the first two letters in "Monogamous Week" were not from non-monogamous, or even monogamish, couples. Monday and Tuesday's letters were from couples who were open to non-monogamy in theory, maybe, but happily monogamous in practice—just like you, ISWHTSAS.