Polyamory Doesn’t Liberate; Monogamy Doesn’t Protect

More Multitudinous Mores

I remember when I first heard about the concept of Polyamory. Having grown up in Utah, Polygamy was the butt of many jokes, but the idea of having multiple partners was 100% off the radar. My high school peers were a mixture of Mormon and ABC (American-born Chinese) kids, and neither group is known for their teenage promiscuity. I moved to California for college in 2009 — the land of free love — although at this point polyamory was still very counter-cultural. I think I was a sophomore when my friend Carlos (a super-senior with nose rings and purple dyed hair) explained his polyamorous relationship to me. “We just have the perspective that we don’t own each other. Monogamy is kind of messed-up. Why should I get to decide what my partner can or can’t do, right?”

The first relationship I had where exclusivity was not an assumed default was a year later, around 2012. I read The Ethical Slut, which at the time was a common entry point read. I took it as quite revelatory. I’m a sucker for philosophy, and The Ethical Slut argues about relationship dynamics from a primarily ideological perspective, though it brings in the experiences of the authors as well. It presents, as some of its core points:

• Love is not a limited resource. Your partner loving someone else does nothing to diminish their love of you. If anything, the opposite can occur.
• Jealousy happens and that’s ok. It’s naive to think that just because you are poly, jealousy won’t happen. But the healthy response to jealousy isn’t to structure your whole life around avoiding it, it’s to reassure your partner(s) of your commitment to them with good communication and affirmation.
• Monogamy is coercive. Shouldn’t we want to empower our partners? People are not a thing to own or possess. Why should we get to tell our partners what they can or can’t do?
• Make everything out in the open. The book argues that, with infidelity rates as they are, humans are not naturally monogamous — this is a societal construct, and a patriarchal one at that. We can be ethical by bringing this nature into the light.
• Desire is Diverse. There is a rich world of experience available in the polyamorous context that is not available in monogamy.

The book paints a pretty picture. In the decade since reading it, I was in several polyamorous relationships, several monogamous relationships, and some things in-between. From my vantage point, what in 2010 was some fringe-culture hippie nonsense advocated by one of the punkiest kids I met in undergrad, became an everyday topic. “How do you feel about poly?” is now a standard early relationship question right next to “do you want kids?” and “why did you and your ex break up?”. Poly is common in my social group of 30-something San Franciscans, maybe even more common than Monogamy, at least in the available dating pool. But how common is it, really?

Some Poly Statistics

While my community is a weird Bay Area bubble, polyamory has exploded into the public consciousness.

21% of Americans have experimented with consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lives, far more than two decades ago. This shift is also generational: 32% of Millennials express interest in polyamory, and roughly twice as many Millennials as GenX have been in a polyamorous relationship. The trend continues with roughly twice as many GenZ as Millennials having been in a poly relationship.

Some of the other statistics fascinatingly contradict my community experiences. I have many female friends who want monogamy and complain about all the poly guys in the dating pool, with very few of the inverse. Similarly I have some poly male friends who complain about the difficulty in finding poly women to date, with none of the inverse. So I was surprised to find that there are more poly women than poly men. It’s almost 60/40.

So…why do we generally have the idea that men are more likely to be poly, when in fact it’s dramatically skewed the other way? I have some ideas here. We’ll have to talk statistics, culture, and biology. But first, I want to give some background for those of you not in a poly hot-spot like SF. What do people mean when they say they are polyamorous?

Poly Lingo

• Metamour — Your lover’s lover. (“boyfriend/girlfriend in-law?”)
• Primary — Your main partner. The idea is that this person is your long term commitment that takes priority, if your relational style has such a thing.
• Secondary — Someone whom you have an ongoing commitment to (i.e. not a casual fling), but to whom your life is less woven than your primary.
• Non-hierarchical Poly — An arrangement that specifically demands no specification of “primaries” and “secondaries”. In rebellion to a perceived norm of “hierarchical poly”.
• Polycule — A connected graph of romantic bonds. (like “molecule”!)
• Polysaturated — Unable to date new people not because of relational rules, but because there is simply no more time.

More Than Two Relationship Styles

The big issue I see with the relationship statistics I presented is that people can mean a lot of different things by the words “monogamous” and “polyamorous”. “Polyamorous” in particular is a wide bucket. To start to break it down, I have seen two main ways in which people call themselves “polyamorous”: identity and practice.

Poly as Identity

When someone treats polyamory (or monogamy) as an identity, they conceive of it as some inherent part of themselves. You’ll hear things like “It always seemed weird to me to only date one person.” or “I discovered I was poly when I saw my boyfriend kiss another girl and liked it.” or “I’m poly, but I’m in a monogamous relationship right now.” Some community members I’ve asked have defined their poly identity as “The ability to feel deep romantic love for more than one person at a time.” — which I think most monogamous-identifying people are perfectly capable of as well; they just choose to not actualize those feelings into practice.

At the end of the day, I feel like polyamory conceptualized as identity is a little silly. We are a result of our environments, our past choices, and our experiences, and those things can all change with time. For the purposes of looking at poly as a cultural phenomenon, I’m going to say talk is cheap and identity is just a story you tell about yourself — polyamory is a practice; a style of a relationship, not a fact about a person. At most, being polyamorous is more like being “Christian” than being “tall”. But just like a religion, it can be a heartfelt, important practice.

What is Poly Culture Doing to Us?

On one hand: there is no single right way to have a consensual relationship. I said I wouldn’t be prescriptive and I won’t be. But I also don’t want to look at this dramatic cultural movement and say it’s all good, just because people have more options.

One tempting (and occasionally used) analogy for poly is that it’s like gay rights: embrace of polyamorous culture is the next big step in overturning the patriarchal and religious forces trying to control sexuality. But I don’t think this quite squares up. For one, despite what some of the sillier conservatives may think, you can’t “catch the gay”, and the actions of gay people mostly don’t affect straight people. In contrast, polyamory and monogamy are competing cultural norms. Through cultural induction, you can “catch the poly”, and there is tension at the edges. Many monogamous people (myself included) have been dragged into dramatic and unhappy situations because their partner decided that they wanted to experiment with poly, and vice versa. Both of these things can be traumatizing. The cultural conflict is palpable.

Over the years I’ve listened to many friends struggle with this cultural edge. Below I’ve collected a sample of quotations. These quotes don’t come from a place of ideology or sexual puritanism. Instead, it’s just a complex reflection of how poly culture has deeply affected the lives of everyone living here, and the tension between polyamory and monogamy:

I think a lot of these quotes paint a real picture. Each of these people has years of experience in polyamory, in a variety of situations. There’s a way that The Ethical Slut (my exposure point), and literature like it completely fails to warn about the potential downsides of polyamory. Our ideas about both Monogamy and Polyamory can be prone to delusion. There is a tendency to think “maybe this new relationship style will fix everything!”. If this essay has a thesis, that thesis is: it won’t.

The Poly Delusion

While both polyamory and monogamy are prone to being idealized and deluded, the type of idealization is rather different. The classic poly delusion is to think that via poly, you can get all of your needs met. Polyamory literature says you can’t expect one person to fulfill all of your emotional needs. This is true. The shadow implication is that you can expect a handful of people to fulfill all of your emotional needs. This is not true. Other people do not exist to fill our emotional voids.

This may sound dire, but I want to temper it with my own heartfelt belief: there is love for you. From friends, from community, and yes, from lovers…but if you are stuck in scarcity mindset, all the partners in the world can’t fill the void. If you aren’t in a scarcity mindset, then one (or zero!) partners definitely can give you everything you need from a partnership. It has little to do with how many partners you have, and more to do with the quality of those partnerships, and the quality of your own relationship with yourself.

To my experience, the less-talked-about but more common folly is the feeling that polyamory will free you from the expectations of others, or preserve your autonomy. On the surface this makes sense. If your sexuality is less “bound” to one person, and theirs is less bound to you, then expectation can be distributed across the network. Your partner will have backups, so it’s not all on you.

But in practice, this is not how it works. Just like in monogamy, a partner might want to see you all the time and want you to do the emotional labor of calming their insecurities. Just like in monogamy, your partners will have expectations of you, and there is no saving grace but communicating and negotiating expectations and boundaries well.

One thing the experienced polyamorists seem to agree on, is that the joy of poly is about sharing love, life, and pleasure. If you want to avoid emotional labor, (or value your “you” time) poly is probably not gonna help you with that:

The Monogamy Delusion

Monogamists are prone to their own delusions, and with dark symmetry, they stem from the same anxious and avoidant attachment insecurities that we see from the poly folks. The major monogamy delusion is obvious. It is simple: the idea that you possess your partner, or that you even can — the idea that by irrevocably binding yourself to someone, you can avoid any possibility of abandonment or heartbreak.

Every romantic relationship you ever have will end in heartbreak, death, or both.

In the long run, a happy relationship cannot be sustained by rules. It is sustained by the people in the relationship believing in the relationship, and they believe in the relationship when it is mutually nourishing. And it can only be mutually nourishing when a balance between autonomy and connectedness is struck.

Another, more subtle, monogamous delusion is that someone else choosing us imparts on us a specialness: we will have won romance, and we are done. But the quest for specialness is completely unsatisfiable (and Brené Brown argues, narcissistic). Real security does not rest on our essential specialness in the eyes of our partner. It rests on a shared understanding that we have built a life together and are continuing to do so. The value comes from the work we put into it.