What Have You Been Learning Lately?

Imagine that you approach a fun-looking roller coaster and without knowing a lot about it, you buy a ticket. As you run through the line to get to the front, there are signs informing you about elements of the ride worth noting, but you only briefly glance, convinced as you are that it's the perfect ride for you. You get strapped in, the car jolts forward, and you realize after the third nauseating loop that this was, in fact, not a great decision. Hunter S. Thompson wrote "buy the ticket, take the ride," and Dan Savage quotes this in a talk he gave about understanding and getting good with what you're buying into when you enter a relationship. I'm just as guilty as any fool of rushing into love, signing the liability waiver without so much as a skim of the fine print. There's a myriad of possible reasons for this; we live in a culture dominated by a monogamous relational model which passes some toxic mythology off as fact. For instance, under this model