Fox's Morning Show with Mike and Juliet Gives Open Marriage Nay Sayers Last Word

Update on Friday, September 26, 2008:

Late yesterday after receiving my e-mail letting her know that her portion of this segment had been excluded from video of the rest of the segment posted on the show's website, Jenny Block contacted the show's producers and asked them to play fair and post her segment of the program. To their credit, they agreed, and you can now see it here. You can see the second part wherein nay-sayer, uninformed guests get the last word, here.

Original post:

This morning Jenny Block, author of Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage and pictured to the right with guest couples therapist Dr. Diana Kirschner, was a guest on Fox TV's daily live Morning Show with Mike and Juliet, where hosts Mike Jerrick and Juliet Huddy, pictured below, engage in discussions with guests about hot topics in pop culture, women’s health, fashion, parenting and relationships, and general entertainment.

Unfortunately Fox, like some other talk shows, set up open marriage to discredit it. In the beginning all went well. Jenny did a fabulous job - no surprise there. She spoke intelligently and articulately about her life, her relationships, and got out a lot of great messaging about how open marriage can work and is a valid choice. Juliet asked respectful questions, including some of the usual "but what about" questions that come to people's minds when they first hear about such relationships. So, at the beginning people who saw the live segment heard much positive messaging about open relationships.

Mike actually pointed out that open marriage does work for some people, at least for Jenny and for a poly couple that was seated in the audience and briefly interviewed. (Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get their names.) The wife said she had had a relationship with a girlfriend that recently ended. Both she and her husband came across well, presented themselves well visually and had a pragmatic demeanor when answering questions. Definitely a positive.

The producers of this program spent the last two days thoroughly canvassing polyamory community leadership to find two couples willing to be guests. They sought a couple whose story mirror's Jenny's, i.e. a couple who opened their marriage at the wife's request due to the wife's bisexuality. Finding that couple wasn't so difficult, but they also sought a couple for whom an open relationship didn't work. I respectfully declined to help with that part of the search, since I personally don't see how providing people for whom polyamory didn't work is in our community's best interests. There are already plenty of people who believe polyamory can't work, why would we help perpetuate that myth?

Evenso, the person the producers found to serve that purpose was Jennifer Gates, author of Survivors of an Open Marriage. Gates blamed inability to control emotions as the reason her open marriage nearly ended – after ten years of it being open, BTW. It is still intact today, though now closed and monogamous.

It's too bad that Gates and her husband didn't have the kind of resources now available - like Jenny Block's book, for example - to guide them through dealing with the emotional challenges of polyamory. Many, many polyamorists know that for those who are serious about it - as Gates and her husband clearly were for ten years - emotional challenges don't have to result in broken hearts.

It's also too bad that it is only Gates' story and the very negative opinions of Dr. Diana Kirschner that Fox has decided to make available on their website. More on that below.

So when asked to respond to Gates' story, Dr. Kirschner said, "Usually this whole thing is a recipe for disaster. There is competitiveness, jealousy, very limited time and affection, time for sex, and all these resentments start. The head says we think we can handle this but other feelings take over and you get a run away train effect and a lot of people get their hearts broken."

If I had been there to respond, I’d have said that this isn't necessarily so for those who have or are willing to develop great relationship skills and whose existing relationships are solid. Failure IS NOT inevitable. This is where Dr. Kirschner may wish to update her understanding of this subject.

Juliet then asks Kirchner, “What happens 10, 20, 30 years down the line? Two people are agreeing to do this and they’re adults, then you start to blur the lines of love and monogamy and communication and loyalty. What’s going to happen to the state of marriage, the culture, in 30 years?"

Kirchner’s response: “It’s interesting. Of course the divorce rate is very high, and that’s with just two people. Can you imagine with three people, how much more complicated that is, whose going to be left out, who’s going to get a broken heart?”

So there it is, the conservative party line that says that open relationships are dangerous and further weaken marriage, an already seriously weakened institution. And that may be true to the extent that people don’t have access to education that has the power to result in a positive outcome and MORE happiness than monogamy brings for many people.

Mike asks, “Does open marriage ever work?" and Kirchner responds, “Yes, for some people, but by far for the vast majority of people it backfires completely."

And that’s it - the uninformed opinion got the last word. Fox has chosen to post on its website only the second half of the open marriage segment. The entire first half which includes Jenny’s interview is excluded, with only the part that says that open marriages don't work included. Of course, this *is* Fox we're talking about here, and it seems that Fox doesn't have the integrity to include the whole story, not if it sets them up for accusations by their conservative viewership of promoting or sanctioning open marriage.

For another review of this see Joreth's blog post.