54. There is not only no evidence that “open marriages” are better for most people, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the opposite is the case. That was the message when Nena O’Neill died. O’Neill was one of the two authors of the landmark book Open Marriage: A New Life Style for Couples (M. Evans and Company, 1972), which has sold over 35 million copies in fourteen languages. The book ever so tentatively proposed: “We are not recommending outside sex, but we are not saying it should be avoided, either. The choice is up to you.” That statement, along with the famous line, “Sexual fidelity is the false god of a closed marriage,” backed up with lots of seventies-era popular psychology, provided many married readers with a warrant for sex with partners beside their spouses. In O’Neill’s New York Times obituary, it was said that the book’s “bolder suggestions [now] seem not so much daring as painfully naïve.” Some years after the publication of Open Marriage, O’Neill told the New York Times, “The whole area of extramarital sex is touchy. I don’t think we ever saw it as a concept for the majority, and certainly it has not proved to be.” She is referring to the fact that so many couples who have tried it have found it devastating, bringing in feelings of jealousy and betrayal that destroy intimacy. (These quotes are taken from Margalit Fox, “Nena O’Neill, 82, an Author of ‘Open Marriage,’ Is Dead” New York Times, March 26, 2006.) In other words, despite the popularity of the idea of non-monogamous marriages, there is no empirical or anecdotal evidence that it works at all.