May 26, 2007

Something I wrote on Thursday didn't seem quite right to me.

More accurately, there's a lot in that post that needs further exploration, but for whatever reason, one portion in particular seemed to want more immediate attention than the others. Here, let me quote my own damn self:

“‘Till death do us part” was never far off, and it was certainly in society’s best interest to encourage the birth of children and the maintenance of family units that would best enable those children to reach adulthood. All very practical.

After a certain point in the development of Western culture, these practical needs began to recede into the background.

The question left begging here is exactly how it is that "enabling children to reach adulthood" is less of a practical need in modern Western culture.

It remains so, of course. In this 2006 NewScientist article ("Love unlimited: The polyamorists"), Dossie Easton, co-author of "The Ethical Slut", explains what I meant, and broaches the subject of this post:

"In middle-class urban cultures, people aren't marrying for survival any more. They can get divorced, and the kids won't starve. This means we're having marriages and relationships for very different reasons than our ancestors did. We're doing it for emotional gratification." Easton sees poly as a break from the "survival strategy" traditions that created both polygamy and monogamy. "Polyamory is a cultural outgrowth of serial monogamy, or having multiple partners without necessity," she says. "Once you're released from necessity, you can start doing all kinds of original thinking."

Putting this "original thinking" into the service of "emotional gratification," however, requires a level of radical honesty that is difficult to obtain, harder to maintain, and altogether rare. Some of the first-hand accounts I've come across--particularly those of secondaries, e.g., the third partner in a triad--demonstrate a level of insecurity and chaos that, at first blush, doesn't seem worth the trouble. Punkindunkin writes,

When I went to bed last night, I was fighting a mild case of melancholy. I was sick and tired of all the alone time, tired of the highly inadequate and frustratingly garbled phone calls that I endure, and tired of constantly waiting for the next time when I will be held. I didn’t think that the ‘lonelies’ were going to last thru the night and into my morning, but they caught me off guard and roared with a vengeance when I spent yet another few minutes on the phone this morning with poor reception threatening the call, my bad ears struggling to hear, and the announcement that plans for the weekend were changing. It is quickly turning into a bad day.

I read that and thought, "Hell, I can get that with one person." Then, from Ilada's Poly Page for Secondaries, I absorbed this:

Just in case you didn’t notice, I didn’t make any comparisons between monogamy and polyamory. I didn’t because there is no need. Some problems are just universal no matter the structure of your relationship.

So while we are trying to spin our minds to think of the positive, I think we should stop trying to demand absolute separation of monogamy and polyamory relationship dynamics.

There are some differences, some major ones, but all in all the constant us and them mentality sets all of us up to be exclusionary.

By polyamorists touting how different they are, how much they are breaking the mold, etc, we end up condoning that we are somehow defective not only in the minds of monogamists, but in the polyamorist mind as well.

This reminded me of the obvious "People are people" concept. It doesn't really matter whether you're in a binary, trinary, or some exotic flavor of septupletish relationship...in the end there's you, your head, and your heart, all relating to other humans. There's no question that the degree of complexity increases with more than one intimate partner. But as a fellow who occupies a somewhat broader portion of the sexual spectrum than is generally allotted, things are already more complex for me. If I were to return to a committed monogamous relationship (in, say, a decade, when I am no longer an ambulatory pile of well-dressed plutonium), that's still going to be the case. It's not the kind of thing that can go unmentioned. And when it gets mentioned, the questions will start. "Will I be enough for you? Can you be faithful?"

In the past, that answer has simply been "Yes." Anything else seemed too complicated and, more importantly, too frightening. Right now--to indulge in a flight of wildly speculative and highly unlikely fancy--the honest answer would be, "I don't know. Are you OK with that?" That's a big leap to ask someone to make, and the risk would be that whatever might potentially be happening would stop happening, right then and there. But if it did, integrity would remain, and that's the foundation for anything good, decent, and worthy, including friendship.

More to the point--and, furthermore, as a precondition for the thought experiment I'm conducting here--uncompromising integrity is essential for any form of commitment in a relationship, and without such commitment, polyamory in particular is impossible, as far as I'm concerned. This will only seem paradoxical if you're focusing on the idea of having multiple sexual partners as the defining characteristic of a polyamorous relationship. I'm sure that for some people, that's what it's mostly about, and if it works for them, great. But those within the poly community often take great pains to separate themselves from swinging community, and there's a very, very good reason for that.

The critical difference between the two communities depends entirely upon the definition of "love." If you're attending monthly wife-swapping gatherings (and why is it never "husband-swapping," anyway?) for the purposes of bringing a new toy and a different joy into your marriage, then what you've got going on there isn't love, at least not among all parties concerned. That's Serial Monogamy Pro (Service Pack 1). If hubby or wifey falls in love with a weekend paramour, there's going to be a problem. The "seriousness" of the relationship remains reserved for the binary couple.

That "seriousness" is a quality found in genuine love relationships, and is not necessarily dependent upon the duration of that relationship. It entails trust, loyalty, and negotiation. Within polyamorous relationships, there's an extra requirement so unique they had to make up a word for it. I prefer the British term, which is "frubbles." Americans call it "compersion," and the meaning is the same: it's the opposite of romantic jealousy...the happiness a person feels when his or her partner is happy with another partner.

That's a concept that hit me fairly well upside the head. A degree of empathetic love so profound that the happiness your partner finds in another partner makes you happy? Now that's serious. That's commitment. I was Googling a half-remembered quote defining love as "the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own," and discovered that Robert Heinlein said it. This isn't surprising, as it was his "Stranger In A Strange Land" that really kicked off this whole modern polyamory business in the first place. My copy has long since vanished, but there's a shiny new one on its way to me.

It is entirely rational to ask: why is it that concern for your partner's happiness should abruptly stop at the boundaries of your intimate binary interaction? Or, for that matter, your pants?

And: if it is not rational that such concern should be so bounded...how the hell do you pull that off?

I've got some ideas about that, which I shall inflict upon you anon. Nothing new, really, except that they'll be refracted through my own particular wordlens.

But here's a teaser: don't lie. Ever. Especially to yourself.

Wacky, huh?

More later.