Polyamory is NOT the same as Polygamy, and other myths busted

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Polyamory and mental health: how they fit together

**DISCLAIMER: This post is not meant to be a judgement on any particular romantic or sexual lifestyle, monogamous or otherwise. It is merely MY OWN thoughts and MY OWN experiences.**

 

Recently I had the unenviable experience of someone I found attractive telling me they didn't want to take things further with me because I am non-monogamous. It was particularly galling since this person knew from the off that I practice polyamory - one of many reasons I write about it so openly, so that no one's under any illusions - but for whatever reasons decided to lead me somewhat down the garden path before telling me they couldn't be with me. Everyone's entitled to change their mind, but it's still never nice to have the rug pulled out from under you.

 

It's hard in these situations to stick to your guns, especially when you really like someone and you're facing the fact you're no longer going to get what you wanted. It's a jolt, a slap in the face. It's tempting to weaken and say "Oh, fuck it, I'll do it, I'll be monogamous for you," because it seems like too high a price to pay, to lose someone you've just started forming a lovely and exciting connection with, just because you can't play this game that everyone else seems to manage (even though you know that in reality, many, many of the players aren't "managing" the mono game very well at all ). Given the disastrous state of my romantic life in the past month or so, it's tempting to conclude that polyamory is more trouble than it's worth, that it causes more problems than it solves, that I should just go back to the good old mono way of doing things.

 

Then I remember what monogamy is like. And it chills me.

 

I remember boredom. I remember depression. I remember feeling limited. I remember feeling old before my time. I remember feeling resigned.

 

I remember having wandering eyes and feeling tempted to cheat but never doing it. And wondering why, if I was supposed to be so fulfilled by the other person, I wanted to look elsewhere.

 

I remember the thought that this was the last person I might ever have sex with making me feel like doors were slamming everywhere to me.

 

I remember wanting to be seen and found attractive by people who weren't my partner, and wanting the freedom to enjoy that, even if it never led to anything, even if it was just flirtation, even if it was just a feeling; the freedom to feel possibility was always the more important part, and still is, than the freedom to turn that possibility into reality.

 

There are many reasons I might feel this way. Some of them may well be connected to the mental health condition I've been diagnosed with, namely Borderline Personality Disorder. Some characteristics of BPD people that mean we don't do well with monogamy include:

- sudden, intense and inexplicable bursts of emotion

- persistent sense of emptiness and that everything is basically pointless

- wildly altering preferences (including sexual and romantic attraction)

- impulsive behaviour

- a sense that no one cares about us as much as we care about them

 

Put a person like this in a monogamous relationship and the result is (in my experience):

- they get very bored

- they get depressed, often connected to the boredom

- they feel taken for granted

- they want to cheat

- they feel like a monster for all of the above

 

Taken so starkly, I'm sure some of these characteristics make BPD people sound like cold, callous bastards who want the moon on a stick and sulk if they don't get it. The truth is, BPD people are often extremely caring, loving people who are devoted to those around them, and yet live with a persistent sense that no one returns that devotion. We take things very hard. If someone snaps at me, it can ruin my day, and I'll remember that they snapped at me for weeks, months, possibly forever. As well as huge emotional sensitivity, I'm also cursed with perfect recall. I can remember the fights I've had with people even when they were over a decade ago, and can usually date them to the month. BPD people are sometimes described as experiencing 'hotter' emotions than neurotypical people, meaning we get burned more easily, and take longer to heal. That certainly is true.

 

When the most recent person rejected me, I cried solidly for three hours. No exaggeration. I had only known this person a matter of weeks. But I had really liked them, found them really attractive, and found the prospect of taking things further with them extremely exciting. It had made me happy. So when they took it away, I reacted very badly. I had to take four anti-psychotic tablets to calm down. It is a wonder BPD people attempt relationships at all, really, when this is the kind of reaction we know we can expect. And that's just from a very brief connection - the grief over any kind of long term relationship ending is so splintering that it's nearly killed me in the past (when I was mono, I lived with someone for several years).

 

But I do choose to still attempt some kind of romantic life; I just try and do it nowadays within parameters that leave me feeling less like an animal in a cage. I watch people who I believe are clearly not meant to be monogamous trying to shoe-horn themselves into marriage or long term monogamy and I watch them crash and burn. I watch them cheat, fail and then spiral further down a path of self-destruction because they hate themselves for not being able to live up to the monogamous ideal, and they want to make themselves feel even more dirty and useless. I do believe that these people would be better off being honest with everyone and starting to live a life of consensual non-monogamy (with the knowledge of all those involved), but I also recognise that they are so used to practising the art of lying that honesty is a stranger to them. Plus, polyamory probably wouldn't give them the twisted kicks they get out of their self-destructive behaviour.

 

Despite my BPD, I have enough self-esteem to believe that I deserve better than lying and cheating. However, what I don't believe is that "better" automatically equals monogamy, or LTRs, or marriage. When people  are trying to console you about your love life going wrong, they love to say "You're going to make some guy very happy," as if that's my raison d'etre. Guess what? I have no interest in being someone's "other half", their missing puzzle piece. Perhaps I have too much self-esteem, because I frankly question the idea that one other person could even begin to scratch the surface of giving me what I need, let alone fulfil me in every way. When I look at kinky people in full time master/slave relationships, my biggest question isn't about consent or feminism or whether it's degrading or any of that shit, it's how can the slave possibly trust the master to totally take care of them? How can they know that person will always make them feel safe? That leap of faith is one I doubt I could ever make. We trust our friends, but no one ever tests our trust by asking us to commit to one of those friends for the next six decades of our lives. Yet it's assumed that's exactly what we'll do with our romantic relationships. We're not expected to commit to one of anything for the rest of our lives - no single job, no single house, no single friend, no single country, no single child. Yet we're meant to nail our colours to the flag of one other person and make them our one and only. It just doesn't add up in my head.

 

Maybe that's my BPD. Maybe it's just logic. I may never know.

When this most recent person was telling me that they couldn't be with me because they couldn't handle non-monogamy, I thought the way they put it was very telling. They said "I want to know that the person who's with me is mine and mine only." I thought to myself, "Perhaps I have an unusual way of looking at things, but I don't think that any relationship that begins with you trying to possess another person is off to a good start." And I also sort of wanted to say "What makes you think you deserve to have me as yours and yours only?" It strikes me as massively presumptuous to make that kind of statement: love is so easy to say, so hard to demonstrate, and people fail to demonstrate it all the time. To me, devotion has to be earned and reciprocated, not just assumed. But again, this could well be the perfectionist and delusional part of my BPD making me think a) I'm massively fantastic but criminally underappreciated and b) no poor sod could ever come up to the imperceptibly high standard that is required to please me. See how difficult it is to trust yourself when someone can just throw your diagnosis in your face and call you manipulative, abusive and basically an ungrateful git?

Regardless, I don't buy that a relationship is stronger just because it's had rules applied to it about its exclusivity. If anything, I think that can make it easier to fool yourself that you're oh-so-committed, because your relationship is not subject to anything that's going to test that commitment. Whereas if you see, meet, date, fuck and love other people yet still return to someone out of free choice? That, to me, is a much deeper connection than one between two people who are just together and monogamous out of habit. And NO, I'm not saying that everyone or even most people in monogamous relationships are necessarily in that situation. But some are. I've seen them with my own eyes. I've heard their stories. And that's some too many, to my mind.

 

I don't expect the world, or even a fraction of it, to come round to my way of thinking. Polyamory really isn't for everyone. But in this case, I feel that the person in question wrote it off without properly considering what it might mean. I feel they clung to the fears that monogamy encourages us to hold (jealousy, possessiveness) without addressing them, and they assumed that nothing other than a two-person, long-term relationship could ever be considered "something real". I wished I could show them just how much you can adore someone without trying to own them.

In praise of realism - stop telling single people "You'll find someone"

A few years ago I remember a friend of mine suggesting that a lot of the platitudes we're fed as kids - "Follow your dreams and you will achieve your goals!" "You can do anything if you set your mind to it!" - are actually 'sweet poison' which set us up for failure and disappointment. This kind of Pollyanna, one-size-fits-all advice fails to account for the lottery of genes and birth which means I'm white and rich in a world where to be a poor person of colour is basically the shittiest hand you can be dealt, yet billions of people have still been given it. It also fails to consider the millions of slings and arrows that injurious fortune may send our way - disease, disability, deaths of loved ones, accidents, redundancies, economic crises, natural disasters. It'd be a whole lot more honest and accurate to say "It's more likely that your time on this planet will be a thankless struggle than a joyous parade of constant fulfilment, but if you're very fortunate it might end up being somewhere in between, so savour the good bits when they occur", but I guess it's seen as overly harsh to say that to children.

 

I got to thinking about this when I saw people posting on a (different) friend's Facebook status where she was bemoaning her long-term single status. While they all (rightly) pointed out that this person is intelligent, funny, great to be with and physically very nice looking, most of them also felt obliged to add the obligatory "You'll find someone, it just hasn't happened yet" or "He's out there - keep looking" statement that apparently certifies the speaker's ability to see into the future and guarantee a soulmate for the singleton in question. I'd wager that nothing winds a single person up more, not least because these statements often seem to come from the patronising viewpoint of an already coupled-up person, who believes that their lifestyle is so desirable that no one could possibly not want it, and that any poor soul lacking a partner just needs a bit of an ego pat in the form of "There's someone out there for everyone." But it winds me up for a different reason - not just because it's glib, or patronising or presumptuous. But because it is the perpetuation of a myth that I believe sets us all up to fail.

 

What if there isn't someone out there for everyone? What then?

Or, what if there are several someones out there for everyone?

What if some people are better suited to multiple short romances, or lots of brief sexual relationships, or prefer overlapping, polyamorous encounters? What if some people are asexual? Aromantic? Or only interested in sex? Or only interested in romance?

Also, what if finding a partner isn't actually a solution to much at all? Because life will still continue to batter you with its frustrations, and the only consolation you'll have is someone to share your misery with, and it's still not much guarantee you won't end up alone, because people cheat, people leave, and unfortunately, in every couple, someone's going to be the one to die first.

 

My, I am being cheery today, aren't I?

 

Amazingly, the point I'm trying to make isn't that life is terrible and we're all doomed to die alone. What I am doing is deliberately focusing on the negative and scary aspects of life that starry-eyed romantics don't want to think about. And I don't blame them for shying away from these truths, because "negative and scary" is putting it mildly. However, when I sit and listen to people's tales of infidelity, dissatisfaction, broken families, failing marriages and romantic/sexual lives generally spinning out of control, all I can think is how some realistic thinking earlier down the line might have saved these folks a lot of bother. If we considered that expecting sexual fidelity for 60+ years to be easy and effortless may be a smidge ambitious, we might stop making monogamy the benchmark for successful relationships. That's not saying that everyone has to go out and become polyamorous, but at the same time, if you never even discuss the possibility that you or your partner may be attracted to others and may one day want to act upon it, then that possibility may well be what undoes you when the time comes. Especially if you make a long-term commitment with someone whose sex drive, preferences or kinks are vastly different from your own. Thinking that marriage or long term commitment is just going to steamroller such differences is about as sensible as assuming my Ford Ka will run like a Porsche if I just rebadge it. Yet that's precisely what a lot of people do seem to assume.

 

And it's by no means their fault - after all, what fairy story starts with 'They had just got married'? We're not given many life lessons about how 'happily ever after' is actually supposed to go. We're told that monogamous marriage should still be the ultimate aim for all of us (gay? No problem there now!), preferably plus some babies, add water and stir and bingo! Total happiness is the result - apparently. Even though this is a model from an era when we lived half as long as we do now and married for economic and social reasons, e.g. to legitimise children and strengthen family ties - reasons which really don't apply any more, we still adhere to it. Why? Because we've been told that 'love' will take the place of all the other reasons to marry, and love will be what carries us through the bad times.

 

Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. Philip Larkin once reflected that he was too "withdrawn, selfish and easily bored to love", and I'd suggest that unfortunately, many of us are in the same boat. Personally, I'm OK with that. I don't see long term monogamous relationships as something that can fulfil me, so I don't get into them. That doesn't mean I don't have partners, but just not of the type that society tells me should be my ultimate goal. I don't look for a potential husband or future father of my children, because I'm not interested in either of those things. I accept that one day I might be old and unpartnered, but I don't see that as the same as being 'old and alone', nor do I see it as a fate worse than death. I strongly believe that it's up to me to make friendship networks and be part of my community to a strong enough degree that someone will still want to come and see me when I'm 85, rather than just assuming that a partner or children, or grandchildren, will be there to keep me company. Also, I'm a logical gal and I've seen the statistics - at the end of the road, it's still more likely to be us women on our own as the guys unfortunately tend to head off this mortal coil earlier. We're probably all going to end up unpartnered at some point, but what I disagree with is viewing this as a terrible position to be in, or as something that renders us incomplete.

 

So don't tell my articulate, whip-smart, beautiful friend that "there's someone out there for everyone". I don't know if there is and I don't care . I'm not going to set her up to be disappointed by spouting these lazy myths. If she wants romance, if she wants sex, if she wants affection, if she wants children, yes, I don't doubt that she can get those things. But love, soulmates? I don't think any of us have the right to say those things are guaranteed or that we will all find them. What we can definitely find is intense love with the family and friends we already have, and keep showing it to them. We can seek new experiences and new connections. But the idea that "he's out there, just keep looking?". To hell with that toxic platitude. I would say to her "You are perfect the way you are. If someone nice comes along and appreciates that, great. If they don't, you've lost nothing - just keep living your life."

 

Because ultimately, that's all any of us can do.

Musings on polyamory

** PLEASE NOTE - this is not intended as an endorsement or criticism/condemnation of any particular lifestyle, be it monogamous, polyamorous, celibate or 'other'. It's just me thinking out loud **

I'm currently reading The Ethical Slut, one of the most famous books written on polyamory (open relationships, having multiple partners, whatever you want to call it) and often signposted as the Bible for poly people. So far I'm not overly enamoured with the book, for several reasons. One, it's couched in a lot of self-help language, which I suppose I should have expected seeing as one of its authors is a therapist. But the constant affirmation exercises wear a little thin after the first few, and after 5 or so I felt like bawling 'Look, I'm never going to DO any of these, can you just please tell me the answers to my questions and stop wasting my time with these BS 'self-love' exercises!'. And what are my questions? Well, I suppose they're the same questions that most people considering polyamory ask, and most of them revolve around jealousy. Like:
 

How do you not get jealous? How do you stop your partner getting jealous? Isn't it natural to be jealous? Isn't jealousy a sign you shouldn't be poly? Doesn't the fact most people still want to be monogamous, despite the fact we're so crap at it, imply that human beings do have a need to be #1 to someone?
 

And despite being 54% of the way through the book (so my Kindle informs me), I don't feel like the authors have actually addressed those questions, or at least done so in a way that's helpful to me. There's been a lot of talk on loving yourself (and not like that, fnar), but not much exploration of the questions and fears surrounding polyamory. So far the authors' solutions seem to be:

- Talk to your partner (never bad advice, but do any of us really need to buy a book to know that's what we should do whenever we have relationship issues?)

- Make sure your self-esteem is really strong by doing loads of exercises saying why you're great

- Let go of social expectations around monogamy

 

The latter is a pretty tall order, and one that I'd therefore I'd like to see explained further. Although the aforementioned expectations are so deep rooted and so powerful that it would take volumes of books to unpick them all, I'm irritated that this book isn't dealing with them in any more than a superficial manner. Because that's what I, and I suspect most of us, really want to know. Are my poly tendencies merely evidence that I'm wired differently from the dominant model of sexuality, and my difficulty expressing them evidence of just how aggressively the hegemonic model is reinforced? Or are they evidence that I'm weak, greedy or bad at relationships?
 

Those of us who have a vested interest in coming to terms with our poly tendencies are obviously going to prefer the former explanation, but have we truly considered the possibility of the latter? This is what I'd like to hear more of in a book exploring polyamory - not just the authors glossing over the issues by saying 'Some people disapprove of polyamory, screw them and their repressive beliefs, go for what you want'. And yes, that might be all the encouragement some people need, but as a cautious, analytical person who seeks pleasure but not unquestioning hedonism, it's not enough for me.

 

The consensus I seem to keep reading when I research polyamory is that jealousy is not itself a sign that poly relationships are wrong. Instead, jealousy is a 'symptom, not a cause' - usually originating from lousy self-esteem. While there may be a lot of truth in that, I'm not sure that covers the whole gamut of reasons for feeling jealous. If, as a child, you felt jealous of your sibling because your mum was cuddling him/her and not you, perhaps it was because you secretly feared your mum didn't love you because you were an inadequate person. But perhaps, actually, you just wanted a cuddle then and there because it felt damn nice, and you were annoyed someone else was benefiting from the thing you wanted. We're humans - we're greedy and selfish, and we want the things that we want, NOW. We're happy when we get them, and we're unhappy when we don't. Couldn't the explanation just be that simple?

 

The book mentions the 'starvation economy' that the monogamous hegemony teaches us to believe in, whereby we believe that love given from our partners to another is love lost to us. This keeps us in a state of panic that love is going to 'run out', like a finite resource, when obviously that's nonsense, because most of us have more than one close friend who we love, and most people have more than one child and would (hopefully!) say they love them all equally. And yet, that analogy just doesn't feel like it quite holds for relationships. This may indeed be because of socially reinforced tropes - no one expects a parent to 'run out' of love by the time they have to kid # 4, yet all adults ARE expected to be emotionally, mentally and physically fulfilled by one person, and taught to feel monstrous when we can't manage that. Which seems a little effed up, to say the least. However, I still think it's kind of naïve to believe there isn't at least some kind of starvation economy at work. It's a simple matter of maths to work out that you can't give the same amount of attention, affection (and yes, OK, sex) to 10 lovers as you could to 5. Or to 4 lovers as you can to 2. And yes, I know I'm translating 'love', a supposedly infinite resource, into 'time', an obviously finite one. But I'm a realist, who doesn't believe that intimacy, fun and affection can be maintained invisibly. They require time, energy and organisation - otherwise they die.
 

But sometimes they die anyway, and that's the issue upon which I always hit a bit of a wall. Because one of my reasons for thinking I should be poly - and perhaps this is a bad reason, and evidence that I'm doing it all wrong - is that I have always ended up bored and dissatisfied in monogamous relationships. I've never cheated, but I've certainly felt like it, and felt deeply tempted to do so by my attraction to other people. Proponents of monogamy would tell me that's natural, that I just have to work past those feelings, that it's an inevitable part of being in a couple which you just have to deal with. Proponents of polyamory would say the opposite, that it's evidence of how monogamy limits us and leads us to feel ashamed and a failure just because of our own natural attraction to others. In my case, it's usually been evidence that I should leave that particular person because things aren't working, not that I should stay with them and open our relationship up - so that's not an amazingly helpful answer.

 

Now I'm wondering how one stops that dissatisfying situation recurring. Is the answer just to avoid emotional commitments and stay casual (something that's extremely difficult to do, as the more time you spend with someone the more you will inevitably come to mean to each other, unless you conduct your relationship on an extremely cold basis where you never exchange any personal information or even have a chat over a cup of tea, and I can't be that switched-off/disciplined), or is it to allow whatever feelings to come up, and enjoy them while you can? The fact that I've always ended up disappointed by whoever I've paired up with in relationships implies to me that being poly could just be another way of getting disappointed by more people, more regularly! I know having multiple relationships could be a cushion - one let-down might not hurt so much if you are already successfully engaging with someone else - but ultimately it seems that time and boredom is going to knock down all your spinning plates eventually, it's just a matter of when. And in that light, polyamory just seems like a way of distributing the problems with monogamy across more than one person.

 

That's the paradoxical thing though. We have this need to matter to someone and to care about them, and then when it happens, we get bored with it. And then we look for the next person we want to matter to and care about, to make it feel new. I'm not sure that a model of sexuality that indulges this fickleness of humans is such a great thing. That's not a shout in monogamy's favour, but it's certainly a question about the limitations of polyamory to overcome our essential nature, which I do believe is ultimately selfish.

 

And that's what the book ultimately seems to shy away from - asking the question, why DO we want more than one lover? Why do we think we even deserve this? What makes us think that this is an impulse that should be indulged, rather than questioned? How can we be sure it's not just our short attention spans, insecurity and crapness at being alone that's making us think we need multiple partners? This is not judgment of anyone who is poly, but my own questions that I'm demanding of myself. Because I know that insecurity and crapness at being alone have, in the past, made me stay in monogamous relationships when I should've got out, and I don't want these same flaws to be the things that drive me to polyamory thinking it's a solution.

Post-script - poly feminist blogger Charlie Hale took the time to give their answers to some of the questions raised above, here. Well worth a read.