Aside from the 14 months I spent working as a music editor for an alt-weekly in Pittsburgh, I've been making my living as a freelance journalist for the past five years. I also work out of a home office – my morning commute never takes more than five or ten seconds – so it was pretty much business as usual when a few weeks ago, I was sitting at my desk and tapping away at my laptop late at night, slowly working through the paces of putting together yet another magazine article.

Before long, I decided to pack it in … Read More

This is the first conversation I can remember having about my aversion to marriage: I'm in high school - either eleventh or twelfth grade, I can't remember which - and I'm in the laundry room in the basement of my house, talking with my mother.

She's folding something. Brown bath towels, I think. Anyway, the two of us are chatting amicably, as we often do while she's making her daily housekeeping rounds, and somehow we end up on the topic of marriage. "I am absolutely never going to get married," I tell her. "I can't even imagine why I … Read More

One of the very first times I got up enough nerve to talk about my open relationship with a stranger, I was in Turkey, of all places, on a business trip.

I was doing research for a travel guide in the relatively modern town of Antalya, and I'd met a very kind local couple who had asked me out to dinner. They were both my age: late twenties, early thirties. The guy—I don't remember his name, so let's call him Nazim—was Turkish. But his wife was an American from Los Angeles. She had creamy brown skin and dark hair, … Read More

Our hero gets engaged to the girl of his dreams, a friend of a friend who just so happens to hate the concept of marriage, and who prefers the convenience of an open relationship. Here, how the "marriage contract" materialized. As a freelance journalist, I'm constantly on the lookout for good ideas. Sometimes they come to me in the middle of a shower, or during a walk. But not so long ago, the woman I refer to alternately as my "life partner" or my fiancée, Carrie, stumbled upon an especially bright idea after becoming the unfortunate recipient of an … Read More

Our hero gets engaged to the girl of his dreams, a friend of a friend who just so happens to hate the concept of marriage, and who prefers the convenience of an open relationship. Here, an introduction to their not-so-traditional first encounters.

It’s just after midnight, and I’m huddled into a bar booth next to Ray, an old college friend who has lately become my very frequent drinking buddy. Ray and I went to the same state school in Pittsburgh, and although we both fled town almost as soon as we graduated--Ray went to New York City and … Read More