Is It Time To Banish Polyamory?
shelby suggests the good ole fashioned affair and gets booed off the internet (again)
People who choose polyamory do so for various, occasionally profound, reasons. Perhaps they find joy in the tricky parts, the scheduling and negotiating and navigating the choppy waters of juggling multiple partners (fucking nerds). Others seem to get off on the freedom to be attracted (and act on this) to others.
To be clear: these are not my reasons. I am pathologically allergic to scheduling. I am not purposefully disrupting the nuclear family; I didn't seek out non-monogamy because of its supposed ethics, or even a commitment to exploring and loving in new ways. I am poly because I need attention, am addicted to unavailable men, and simply must create a problem out of my love life at all times.
Until recently I had two boyfriends. It ended badly and sadly with one, in large part because of the existence of the other, which was never a secret but rather openly reviled. Also I really suck at the whole “thoughtfully organizing” or simply “organizing” aspect (call me the unethical wench) and thought driving cross country with one boyfriend, meeting the other boyfriend at a wedding, and carrying on driving seemed fine. Well, it was fine. I ended the road trip with one less boyfriend and some great personal insight: as I recently declared to my friends, “I’m learning I have absolutely zero tact.”
My remaining boyfriend has a wife (not actually married but the colloquial wife best explains it) who I have met and think is lovely. I miss the ex-boyfriend acutely, but also feel freed from defending the appeal of polyamory to someone that had only ever been very monogamous, and the often humiliating position I found myself in trying to articulate why I wanted to continue dating my boyfriend with a wife besides “the dick hits.”
The ex didn’t know anything about polyamory and didn’t want it for himself, which I respect—whatever relationship model works for you, cool. During the polyamory pitch process I came to resent explaining myself, and I also knew the version I could suggest to “google”—with its glossaries and endless definitions—didn’t adequately define my particular perversions, or penchants, for non-monogamy, that is to say, the mess of it all, the antithesis of the scheduling and the endless, hall-of-mirrors-like discussions that seemed to be touted elsewhere as the way to do polyamory.
I’m musing on this now because Discourse is having a dalliance with polyamory. Doing service journalism on how to “ethically” fuck multiple people is, in and of itself, fascinating as a cultural object—how the hell did we get here? I find myself wondering if it’s the subject matter or the ephemera around it that gives me the shivers—lots of people, for a long while, have had “non traditional relationships.” Something about the texture, the tone, of how it is exemplified now seems…ghoulish? Ghoulish.
It is a God-delivered commandment that when you discuss contemporary polyamory you must mention the books “Polysecure” and “The Ethical Slut.” I have read neither, though I’ve seen them in nearly every bookstore in Brooklyn, and have seen at least one copy discarded ominously on a curb. (Is the modern “baby shoes, never worn’ a thumbed through and then abandoned copy of “Polysecure”?)
When I am sent a piece of writing about polyamory my mind goes completely blank, an aphasia for the word and the concepts surrounding it. Partly that must be due to the abundance of functional details included about how being poly “works”—far and away the least interesting part, akin to telling someone else about a particularly convoluted dream. This fever dream is accelerated by the internal vocabulary, more of a technical jargon, rendering what could be frisky, sexy, expansive into something cold and weirdly impersonal, coming off tinged with the flavor of tech-world-imbued self-quantifying. (I’m thinking apps that measure your body stats and tell you when to go to sleep, but it could also be that guy who is trying to give himself the body of a 16-year-old and keeps tweeting about his penis improvement surgeries).
Relationship dynamics are fascinating — I’ve spent much of my adult life thinking and writing and drawing about them. But look: what I’ve seen of The Discourse about polyamory and what it implies about how some people practice it…it’s gotta be banished. BANGS GAVEL. It should be disallowed. Our world is: endlessly disintegrating, fractured, mediated by technology, surveillance, capital. I am much more interested in how those factors influence relationship styles, and to what sorts of people they might make non-monogamy feasible for, than the day-to-day of Brooklynites using Google Calendar to wage consistent and low level psychological warfare on their polycule.
The people I’ve met who are poly veer into what I will very simplistically call two camps: those where it seems healthy and works for everyone albeit complicated and demanding of emotional awareness. These people normally don’t make a big deal of being poly, they simply are. They are often friends with the people they see outside of their primary relationship, if they have a primary relationship. They are not cycling through apps and treating everyone as disposable accessories to the strengthening of their soul, their home life, their other relationships, their interiority.
And then there are those who are Poly and need you to know and are absolutely obsessed with micromanaging the minutiae of a relationship, taking the joy and whimsy of loving someone(s) and turning it into a maniacal Stanford prison experiment hell bent on destruction. The predominant type of “poly person” described in the medias current infatuation with them seems to be this latter type, the type who goes to Burning Man (could stop this whole screed there, what a perfect microcosm) and thinks endless introspection and divulging of still processing thoughts is both healthy and good. It is often neither. It is a cousin of Therapy Speak (read my investigation into that phenomenon here) wherein sometimes… maybe… over processing, over identifying and distilling and naming, can inflict more damage than not processing at all.
And like therapy speak, the publicized poly world comes with its own, ever evolving, deeply cringe language. The jargon around these relationships (years of using Feeld and it has become so awash in acronyms and micro-identifiers that the mind reels, never forget it used to be called “3nder” and was for threesomes, simpler times) makes them siloed and strange, what I’ll call the TikTokification of talking like an actual fucking person. The translator modules…they’re cooked. In that sense, the ghoulish tinge of contemporary polyamory seems part of a larger trend wherein interpersonal frisson is cloaked abundantly (flimsily) in the language of self-growth and discovery, endlessly iterating and reiterating amazement at the self and generously calling it introspection.
Years ago I dated a much older man, a relationship in which I was unknowingly, for almost the entire duration, the other woman. At this phase in my life I was completely addled by isolation and depression and had taken to thinking of myself as “a relationship anarchist.” I said those words—OUT LOUD!!!! But the point is, I had a profound sense of morality attached to my relationship style. I thought it was superior, that engaging in it was some sort of intellectual adventure, something that would expand my capacity to love. Reader, it was not.
I remember trying to explain this to him (POV: your mistress earnestly explains relationship anarchy to you). And though he was intrigued, he kept coming back to what I thought was scandalous at the time and now keep hearing in my head: “Us Brits—we’d simply cheat.”
In retrospect 1) lmfao yeah clearly my good chap but also 2) did he have a point?
I had never been properly cheated on—at least that I know about—until a few years ago. Weeks after meeting a man who I definitely thought would be my husband, I suggested keeping things “open” while we were still on different coasts but he implored me to be monogamous. I was game and very, very, in love. Then he promptly cheated on me and tail-spun both our lives into the ground for a bit. It was fun! I swore off monogamy for a while after (and still): not on principle but out of self-protection. Yes, hearts can be broken in non-monogamous relationships too, and absolutely infidelity can happen, but at least (hopefully) I wouldn’t suffer the same rage/splitting of the soul that being cheated on while monogamous did. Look ma, now I’m consenting to my boyfriend shtupping other people! We’re poly!
Ironically now that I feel most uninterested with the poly oeuvre I’ve found myself in an extremely functional, loving, and shockingly undramatic polyamorous relationship. There are no Google Calendars involved and I finally have nice curtains in my apartment. He cooks me dinner and helps sift through texts from suitors…it’s beautiful.
And though I really thought of my past experiments in polyamory (to varying means of success) as some sort of deliberate adventure in new ways of loving, realistically I think most of those attempts were a list ditch effort in which to save a failing monogamous relationship, to lasso a person who does not want to be caught, to hold them, to say look we can do this with no rules, which is not how it works, not at all. I look back and think with sadness on relationships that devolved into “openness” not because we wanted to grow outwards, with each other, for each other, but because we wanted to stop the inevitable caving in. At least with the cheating ex, the bandaid was ripped off. I see it now as a kindness, that he refused to be open with me. What a world of fucking pain I would’ve been in, trying to navigate polyamory with..all that was going on there. I suspect a part of him knew this intimately, even if he couldn’t articulate it.
I’ve been on both sides of the cheating aisle (bipartisan queen) and it’s ugly. I’m not saying that cheating and polyamory are the same thing, or that you can’t cheat in your poly relationship (you can). I think: maybe some people becoming familiarized with contemporary polyamory through media depictions and frenzied, impenetrable discourse about it are also about to enter a world of pain. Picking up the Poly Service Manuals they will be equipped with the new linguistics of organization in service of a more expansive romantic life but… perhaps this will only cause relentless pain to themselves and everyone around them and call it a radical new way of loving. When I hear about the ardor involved, the heavy-lifting, the constant negotiation in some of these situations, I would be lying if I didn't sometimes hear my cheating and very British ex rolling his eyes and saying: “god, just have a fucking affair already."