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.

Dating while feminist: Thoughts on "playing hard to get"

Recently, while seeking advice on navigating my increasingly tangled and tumultuous love life, I got told on two separate occasions that I should play more "hard to get." This advice always puts me on the defensive, for several reasons:

 

1) The feminist reason. The very notion that anyone, but especially women, should treat romantic interactions as a game to be played, is fraught with sexist assumptions. Such as the assumption that women are manipulative, dishonest and underhand. Or the assumption that men are big, dumb creatures who can be toyed with as long as you use sex as your weapon and make sure you have them by the penis at all times. It strikes at the notion of love and sex as an arena in which human beings view and respect each other as full and equal people, and instead constructs it as a battlefield upon which we see each other as pawns, conquests or malleable lumps of clay. It also, unfortunately, feeds into the language of rape culture. If women "play hard to get", then surely what they say can't really be trusted? A "no" must really mean "keep pushing me", a "I'm not interested" must actually translate to "I want you to pester me". I know it's not my responsibility to dismantle rape culture through my romantic actions, but I'd be lying if I said that the idea of playing games to get what you want doesn't disturb me precisely because I believe it makes it easy for rapists and abusers to excuse their actions. "Well, we all know women don't say what they mean, right?" is the underlying presumption whenever someone tries to weasel their way out of the fact they disregarded a woman's refusal of consent. Ergo, if I don't say what I really mean in my dating life - i.e. "I really like you and want to do sexy stuff with you," as opposed to "Meh, maybe I'll see you around," -  aren't I just contributing to that myth? Shitty as it is that I even have to think like that, it's a concern and I believe, a valid one.

 

2) The undiagnosed Asperger's reason. I'm very literal minded. I say what I mean, and I believe that this means everyone else must do too. This often leaves me confused when I realise people are joking, exaggerating or simply downright lying. I understand the concept of lying or bending the truth to save someone else's feelings, but I would generally rather avoid a subject than try and employ this skill, as I am not a good liar. I am inherently truthful, and although I'm neurotypical enough to realise that you can deliver the truth without being hurtful (or that there's times when it's best to say nowt), I generally find the socially acceptable codes of dishonesty extremely difficult to fathom. I don't like saying to someone "I'll be back in 5 minutes," if I'm more likely to be 8 minutes, and I don't like it when someone does it to me. I have a need for certainty, and find the lack thereof in every day life extremely anxiety-inducing - although I'd add that, generally I get through and force myself to be flexible, even though I will never be a "chilled" person.

 

But when it comes to romantic interactions, I cannot understand the point of lying or pretending. Why would I pretend I'm less interested in someone than I really am? How is that going to help anything or anyone? If someone cannot find me appealing simply because I'm showing enthusiasm about them, then aren't we kind of doomed from the start? Someone made the analogy to me of how if you have 20 chocolate bars in your cupboard, you're still more likely to go to the shop and buy the one chocolate bar you don't have, because your contrary brain will naturally want the one that's not most easily on offer. Sorry, but if someone's brain operates that way when it comes to choosing a partner, I'm not sure that's a person I want to be with. I believe that life is short, we shouldn't waste time, and if you like someone, you should tell them.

 

3) The non-mainstream sexual culture reason. I've spent a fair amount of time in the kink community, and while it can be a mixed bag when it comes to finding enlightened sexual attitudes, one of the things I really, really like about it is that it forces people to be honest about what they want. If you want to play with someone, you ask. You have a conversation, and if signs are good, then a negotiation. You might talk to that person's other play partners to get feedback on what they're like. Then you play, and hopefully keep talking afterwards. And, if it went well, play again. Look at that, how simple does it sound? Pleasure, fun and all because two people communicated. Crazy thought, isn't it?

 

This is one of the reasons I get irritated when people try to impose mainstream sexual values on me, and tell me to behave in ways that are anathema to the way I operate. I'm highly sexed, kinky, polyamorous and looking. Why the HELL would I pretend I'm not interested in someone when I am? All that's going to lead to is more frustrated nights spent self-loving and wondering why you're alone. If you play hard to get in the kink community, then you will end up exactly where logic would dictate - alone. There is no substitute for simply being an adult and approaching someone.

 

4) The feminist reason, again. The whole notion of "playing hard to get" particularly winds me up because I'm a very sexual woman, driven by my desires to the point where my behaviour and feelings sometimes makes me feel like "the man" in a relationship, if you'll forgive the horrendous gender stereotyping for a second. Sex is important to me, I enjoy some things that would make some people's hair curl, and I look for partners I can enjoy those things with. I am not interested in monogamy, long term couplehood, marriage or babies. I do believe in treating all my partners with respect and care, and enjoy feeling connected to the people I play with, but long-term commitment only holds boredom, depression and resentment for me. I absolutely hate the gendered stereotypes that dictate women want love, commitment, marriage and kids, while men only want no-strings attached sex and only "give in" to women's demands in order to have regular sex on tap - not least because my preferences and those of many other women I've met, fly in the face of it. Yet, the idea of "playing hard to get" insidiously feeds into this idea, because it implies women don't really like sex, but instead we just withhold it and dangle it in front of men to make them pursue us.  

 

Well, fuck that. I do like sex, and I'd like to enjoy it with the people I find attractive. If telling them I find them attractive and want to have sex with them is somehow going to turn them off, then it's probably just as well I find that out sooner rather than later, because they've clearly got a problem with women being honest about their desires. This idea that withholding makes one more attractive is dangerous, but it also does a massive disservice to female desire and agency. Again, life is short - why would I waste a single second pretending I'm less interested in someone than I really am, just to fulfil a toxic stereotype of the withholding woman on a pedestal?

 

All this said, it's hard to ignore the voices, especially when nothing in your romantic life seems to be going right. Due to reason 2, I'm not sure I would even know how to play hard to get even if I had any desire to, because I'm just not wired to be a game-player. I'm instinctively truthful, sometimes clumsily so, and any attempts I made to be 'aloof' would probably end up being like Michael Scott in The Office episode "The Negotiation" where he tries to unsettle an employee by being silent, but can't help himself from announcing "I am declining to speak first." Generally, I'm glad of this, but it can be a lonely spot to occupy when you can't be sure if anyone is returning the courtesy of your honesty, or if they're all hiding the truth from you behind barriers of subtle social codes you're unable to detect. I know they say "love the player, hate the game," but I'm not sure I can respect anyone who thinks I'm something to be toyed with, or who would find me more attractive if I toyed with them.

More on Pleasure and Pressure

I wanted to give a shout-out to this excellent Bustle article, titled "Are Vaginal Orgasms a Myth?" for summing up the conflicting anxieties about their sexuality to which modern women are subjected. Situated somewhere between Cosmo, self-help guides, porn and reality, the pursuit of female pleasure remains a complex one. As Gabrielle Moss points out, even women who feel that they're pretty in touch with their sexuality are still made to feel like failures for not being able to tick certain boxes (pun sooo very intended) "I think of myself as someone with a pretty good handle on my genitals, literally and figuratively — I can knock out as many as 15 normal orgasms a day...But I’ve never been able to quite wrap my arms — or legs — around the issue of the vaginal orgasm. And yes, it bothers me."

 

I think it bothers a lot of us. Considering yourself liberated from the socially imposed toxicity of body shaming and sex negativity, which bombards us with so many conflicting messages that a logician would weep - be sexy but not for yourself! Act sexual but don't have sex! Have sex but only do it to please men! Have multiple screaming orgasms but only so your partner feels manly! Actually wait, don't do any of that, cos that means you're a big whore! - is a precarious state to occupy. It can so easily be unseated by an unwelcome piece of information about the type of sex acts that everyone else is performing, or the kind of orgasms everyone else must be having, or pretty much anything that you're not doing. Because our society is prescriptive. It likes to tell us what we should be doing, and make us feel bad if we're not doing that thing. A big reason for that, I've always been convinced, is capitalism. Satisfied people don't buy stuff. Anxious, afraid people who constantly fear being deemed inadequate buy lots of stuff to try and address that inadequacy. But there'll always be something newer, shinier and better to aspire to. And that's how the money machine keeps on churning.

 

So what is the relevance to sex? Well, as Moss puts it, our culture is highly invested in keeping women in a state of perpetual anxiety about their sexuality. If we were to stop, hang up our vibrators and say "Whew, 15 orgasms in a day, I think I can leave it there!" then Ann Summers, most women's magazines, lingerie manufacturers, porn producers, sex therapists and sex manual authors would all go out of business. As Moss also points out, there is a long and pretty sexist tradition of women's orgasms either being disregarded altogether, or ignored if they don't originate from penetration of the vagina by a penis. Women have both feminists and sexologists to thank for deconstructing this myth, otherwise we might still be lying around wondering why our experiences are nothing like those of the women in porn, who Moss notes always unfailingly "exploded into screaming orgasms if you simply penetrated their vaginas." I'd also like to blame Sex and the City for perpetuating the latter myth, as there seem to be hours of footage of Samantha climaxing from just a few thrusts while magically never touching her clitoris - there may be some ways in which that show was feminist, but in terms of realistic depiction of how women come? BIG fail.

 

And yet, as Moss writes, there's still always another study emerging that says vaginal orgasms are real, and if you haven't had one, well damn girl, you just can't be trying hard enough! And as she also goes on to say, "The problem with most of the advice out there about how to have a vaginal orgasm is that a lot of it amounts to “Figure out how to have a vaginal orgasm, and then go have one.”

 

Yupppp. I'm so glad someone has finally said this. Cos you know what, supposedly friendly dispensers of sex advice? I KNOW where my G spot is. Funnily enough, I know where everything is down there, as one would hope after 31 years in this body. I know what makes me come, and what leave me utterly indifferent, and what actually just chafes. And do you know what pressing on my G spot does?

 

I'll let Moss answer this one:

 

"I read New Age guides to finding your G-spot, but all jabbing around at my vaginal walls ever did was make me have to pee." 

 

And speaking as someone who already has an overactive bladder, that is in no way ever, ever fun.

 

That's the problem, though. Pretty much all sex advice on trying to have a vaginal orgasm ends at the point of finding that supposedly elusive spot. No one dares suggest that once you've found it, touching it may not only not feel orgasm-inducing, but may actually feel kind of uncomfortable and weird. Someone really needs to address the false epistemic leap between "find G spot" and "amazing sensations will follow". After all, given the right instructions, I'm sure I could locate Glasgow city centre - but actually having a good time there? Well, that just may be something you can't guarantee.

 

So why, as Moss wonders, will no advice on vaginal orgasms ever just fess up and say  that if touching your G spot "doesn’t feel pretty darn good, you are shit out of luck; you don’t have any sensitive tissue there, and you’re definitely not going to have a vaginal orgasm. Sowwy!”  Why, she asks, do even supposedly feminist and female-friendly sex toy stores such as Toys in Babeland, refuse to "admit that there is a chance that you are just not built for this?"

 

This is where sex positivity is a double-edged sword. The expectation that our bodies perform like three-ring circuses is not feminist, or sex positive - it's prescriptive, limiting and attempts to shoehorn the preferences of 3.5 billion individuals into one-size-fits-all advice. But being a feminist and having sex with men can be a tricky balancing act. As Moss writes "My boyfriend knows I have stowed away my attempts to have a vaginal orgasm in the same box in the attic where I store my old Von Dutch hat and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle DVD, but I knew part of him was always bummed about it." Yup, I hear that. Sounds like the similar kind of 'bummed-out' that men have experienced when they find that however diligently they attend to me (or think they're attending to me...), they can't get a screaming porngasm out of me without my help. And it is frustrating. It would be lovely for sex to involve simultaneous orgasms, but c'mon, it's like expecting the same behaviour out of a dog and a cat, and whoever propagated the idea that sex is only good if both partners go off like rockets at the same time really does need putting up against a wall and, if not shooting, then at least smacking around with a large vibrator for a bit.

But the guilt is pernicious. Moss says that her partner was clearly subject to a different angle of the same pressure, feeling that "If he were a real man, a “good lover,” he’d be able to “give” me vaginal orgasms, the same way that if I were a “real” woman, I’d be able to have them." As heterosexual feminists, we want to balance the importance of the world knowing "YO, FOLKS! VAGINAS EXPERIENCE PLENTY OF PLEASURE THAT AIN'T GOT SHIT TO DO WITH HAVING PENISES INSIDE THEM!!" with the fact that we have sex with men and we enjoy it. Because it's not a zero-sum game - just because you don't experience vaginal orgasms (or indeed, if like Moss and I, you question whether they even exist) it doesn't mean you don't enjoy penetrative sex per se. C'mon, there's a reason a lot of vibrators are man-shaped - and it's not just about the phallocentric patriarchy, because women don't generally waste their money on sex toys that fail get them off - it's cos they feel good. It was Germaine Greer in the 70s first pointed out that orgasms with something inside you can feel a helluva lot better than ones without, but why has this idea since been twisted to mean that women should be seeing God just because someone penetrates our vaginas but does nothing to our clitorises (or should that be clitori??)?

As Moss puts it, "Vaginal orgasms are like the AP exams of sex: a totally nonsense test that claims to measure your worth and actually measures nothing, but a test that people get obsessed with nonetheless." And it's that kind of obsession that is the most sex-negative of all, because it stops you seeing sex as fun, and makes you start seeing it as a goal-oriented box-ticking exercise. Which is precisely the opposite of what feminists have been fighting for in the battle to free women's sexuality from being viewed as nothing other than something to please men, or something to censor, or repress, or punish, or commodify. Everything else in society is already a test for women - our appearances, our relationships, our careers, why subject our private pleasure to the same insane scrutiny? "Who was I trying to impress with my vaginal orgasms? My boyfriend? The ghost of Sigmund Freud? God? I’m pretty sure all three already think whatever they’re going to think of me, and that a hands-free orgasm isn’t going to change anything. It was just going to change me into a crabby monster who hated sex."

I'm glad Moss wrote this article, because it speaks a lot of sense that's just simply not heard enough among this cacophony of sometimes well-meaning, sometimes deliberately undermining, sex advice for women. So I'll leave the last words to her:

"I can’t have a vaginal orgasm. Maybe you can’t have a vaginal orgasm, either. And you know what? Who cares. 

 

It doesn’t make you more or less liberated, more or less sexy, more or less fun. Being able to have vaginal orgasms doesn’t make you a special little flower — that’s a conspiracy ginned up by old-fashioned sex advice and porn. Don’t buy it. Because whatever kind of orgasm you’re having? It’s already perfect."