Variety is the spice of love: thoughts on polyamory

I recently came across a Facebook page with over a million fans, called “A relationship is only for two, but some bitches don’t know how to count”. While it presumably refers to the practice of cheating – specifically by women – I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at the assumption that only two people can be involved in a happy, healthy relationship. What about polyamory, aka consensual non-monogamy, “the practice, desire, or acceptance of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved”? Does a relationship have to be “only for two” if all parties are happy with a different arrangement?

Polyamory gets a bad name because it is often confused with polygamy, which almost always takes the form of the marriage of one man to several women. In America, polygamy is associated with fundamentalist Mormon culture, and especially with its leader Warren Jeffs, who was imprisoned for sexually abusing young girls. But the history of polyamory is a radical one. Modern-day polyamory is intertwined with the rise of feminism and its roots go as far back as the 1840s. Flouting the repression and conservativeness of the Victorian era, the most radical women renounced monogamy as a tool of their oppression. The anarchist Emma Goldman lived with her boyfriend and another couple, and the four of them often made love together. The first books on the polyamory movement were written by women; a sizeable number of polyamorous households consist of more men than women. Associated with a kind of utopian New Age feminism, polyamory has historically been as much about carving out one’s own little corner of the world as it has been about sex.

Although I am someone who has only ever experimented with monogamy before, I believe that it’s possible to be just as happy in a polyamorous relationship. It’s true that polyamory is not inherently feminist: like monogamy, it has the potential to go wrong, and if a relationship is structured or negotiated on unequal terms it’s obviously not healthy. For some it can be difficult and overwhelming, as Zoe Whittall found out:

“I felt unconfined and open-minded and totally confused. Intellectually, non-monogamy made complete sense; emotionally, it felt like sandpaper across my eyelids.”

But when we enter into a monogamous relationship with another person, we enter into a series of unsaid expectations of how that relationship will function. Polyamory is different because it forces you to have open discussion about these expectations. Society does not yet have a preformed package of expectations for poly relationships. And talking on equal terms about how to structure your relationship rather than defaulting to the unspoken heteronormative is beneficial for all parties. There are fewer cracks through which insidious power dynamics can creep. As Red Chidgey quotes Tristan Taormino in a previous F-Word post:

 “Non-monogamous folks are constantly engaged in their relationships: they negotiate and establish boundaries, respect them, test them and, yes, even violate them. But the limits are not assumed or set by society; they are consciously chosen.”

Some would argue that polyamory is an unnatural state – but monogamy isn’t exactly natural either. During the Stone Age it was common for a man to impregnate a woman  and provide resources to protect her and her offspring, while impregnating as many other women as possible in order to replicate his genes. In the words of David Buss:

“The picture is not a very pretty one, but humans were not designed by natural selection to coexist in matrimonial bliss. They were designed for individual survival and genetic reproduction.”

Many people believe that a polyamorous person cannot truly give themselves to anyone, because their love is shared. This is based on the “starvation model” of love – the idea that you only have a limited amount of love, comparable to sharing a pizza or dividing up your wages, and it is completely false. Others don’t believe that it’s possible to love more than one person at a time, so if you’re in a position where you’re in a relationship with one person and you happen to fall for someone else, this shows that you don’t really love the person you’re with, right? After all, we are put here on this earth to love only one other person, our one true soulmate who is right for us in a world of seven billion people…This is the “scarcity model” of love, and it is deeply flawed.

I’m not suggesting that we should all reject monogamy. What needs to change is the widespread closed-mindedness regarding different relationship structures and the assumption that polyamory is somehow less valuable or viable than other relationship structures. We should question our monogamy because in most cases we didn’t freely choose it. We defaulted to it.