What Is Polyamory?
"Most of you are jealous and possessive in your love. When your love turns to possessiveness it makes demands. The demands then alienate the loved one and you incorporate anger and fear into the relationship. With these come bitterness and aggression, and whether we speak of individual love relationships or global interactions, what you call love, but is in fact ownership and manipulation, takes over and the problems then flow."
-Wayne Dyer, Gifts from Eykis
Our culture puts so much emphasis on monogamy that few people realize they have a choice about how many sexualoving partners they can have at one time. Even harder to grasp is the idea that multi-partner relationships can be stable, responsible, consensual, nurturing, and long term. Polyamory is not a synonym for promiscuity!
I myself didn't realize that polyamory was really a possibility until I'd failed several times at the usual possessive and dependent arrangement that commonly passes for love. As time went on, I began to realize that, for me, monogamous marriage was profoundly isolating and intolerably lonely, partly because of the strict limits on whom I could love. My husband at the time was only willing to love and accept me if he could be sure that I loved and desired no one else.
In truth, however, I still cared deeply for all my past lovers and sometimes encountered others to whom I felt strongly attracted. Sure, I could suppress these feelings, but the bottom line was that in order to maintain my monogamous commitment I had to pretend to be someone other than who I really was. If I acknowledged being attracted to other men, my husband quickly let me know that I was out of line. Worse yet, as a trained observer of human behavior, he could easily detect any signs of attraction unless I was careful to cover them up. Our relationship didn't feel very intimate because it wasn't!
Another pattern I began to notice was that, after about four years of exclusive commitment to one partner, I would grow increasingly restless and dissatisfied. At first I though the solution was to find a new and better partner. After several of these four year cycles, I realized that I was just repeating the first stages of relationship over and over. Most of the long-term marriages I'd observed in my parents' generation seemed to go on automatic pilot after a few years, an alternative that didn't appeal at all. Nevertheless, I suspected that genuine intimacy could continue to unfold over many decades. In order to find out what was possible later on in a partnership, I realized I would have to find a way to sustain intimate relationships over time.
I knew that my real self wanted to give and receive unconditional love. I'd experienced this kind of total acceptance only outside the arena of marriage, in a few special friendships and in the contexts of psychotherapy and spiritual teaching. Next to this kind of genuine intimacy, most romantic liaisons seemed like protection rackets. I knew I was capable of loving more than one person at a time, so I assumed others must be, too. But strangely enough it never occurred to me that polyamory could coincide with marriage. So I decided that I was through with marriage and set off on a quest for sustainable intimacy.
It's been quite an amazing journey! It took me many years and one more marriage and divorce to realize that the secret to keeping any intimate connection alive is simply to be wholly authentic in every moment and to practice radical honesty. I've learned that relationships based on truth, self responsibility, and unconditional love can take many forms, but even small withholds will gradually erode any relationship. I've learned that it is indeed possible to love more than one person over many years. I call this lovestyle responsible nonmonogamy or polyamory.
The Facts
Most of us are not monogamous in the strict sense of the word. That is, we do not limit ourselves to one sexual partner for an entire lifetime. Census data reveal a global tendency for couples to divorce after four years of marriage. And while many aspire to serial monogamy, or one partner at a time, national surveys repeatedly reveal that most Americans do not observe this rule very scrupulously, either. Statistics for married men and women reporting extramarital affairs, range from 37% to 70% for men and from 29% to 50% for women. And these proportions, particularly for women, increase as time goes on since more and more married women are working outside the home and consequently have more opportunities to encounter potential lovers. For single, unattached men and women the incidence of multiple, simultaneous relationships is undoubtedly even higher.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of multipartner relationship are neither ethical nor responsible! Lies, deceit, guilt, unilateral decisions and broken commitments are so commonplace in classic American-Style nonmonogamy that responsible nonmonogamy may sound like an oxymoron. When words like cheating, unfaithfulness, or adultery are used to represent a breakdown in sexual fidelity, divorce is likely to be the outcome.
Because so many of us have been raised to believe that it's simply not okay—with God, our parents or our partners—to be polyamorous, we fail to realize that we actually can include more than one sexualoving partner in our lives in an ethical and trustworthy fashion. WE never realize the joy we can find in willingly sharing a lover. We never realize that we can design a lovestyle which is both nonmonogamous and responsible—one which can be positive for us, our loved ones, and the rest of the world—one which is also consistent with basic spiritual principles.
The bad news is that it won't necessarily be easy. But few people find monogamous relationships easy either. Still there is no denying that polyamory demands a good measure of maturity, self esteem, skill and commitment. If you're not willing to undertake the necessary preparation, polyamory is not for you. But if you value the depth, richness, excitement and evolutionary opportunities found here—enough to give it everything you've got—polyamory can be a very rewarding choice.
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