Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners (29 page)

I recently granted an interview for a podcast. The interviewer clearly had a negative attitude about polyamory, so I asked her what she thought of when she thought of polyamory. She immediately said, “Thank you for asking me that!” and began telling me that when she asked people what they were looking for in relationships, men usually said that they wanted freedom to date lots of women, whereas women often said they were looking for “the one.” In her own life, she’d struggled with a partner who’d wanted to be polyamorous but whom she didn’t feel she could trust to be honest with her about what he was doing. In addition, she was horrified by the sometimes insensitive and manipulative ways in which she saw men trying to impose their polyamorous agendas on the women in their lives.

She saw polyamory as a weapon in the war between the sexes that was most often employed by men who were “unwilling to commit.” There was no way she wanted to identify herself as polyamorous.

Nevertheless, it turned out that she now found herself choosing to be involved with an openly polyamorous man. “I met him at a party, and he told me that he had a girlfriend and that he wanted to be intimate with me and asked me to call him,” she explained. “So I did call him, and I met the girlfriend, and she was fine with my seeing him, so we got together. We have a great time—he’s fun, he’s mature, he’s sexy. But now he’s splitting up with the girlfriend, and I don’t know how that will turn out. I kind of liked being the other woman. I guess I’ll have to take another look at polyamory.” This woman was more willing than most to let go of a belief that
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was no longer congruent with her experience, but still she was struggling with her identity.

Once you’re clear about who you are, the next important step in coming out is beginning to let other people know you are polyamorous. Whether you choose to label yourself polyamorous is less important than choosing to let others know you are not committed to monogamy, at least on a “need-to-know” basis. Often the first people who are told are people whom you know will support, accept, or at least not care very much about your sexual or relationship orientation. Usually, the last people you’re ready to come out to are the people who count the most—lovers, employers, parents, and family.

For Kelly, deciding who to come out to is not so much a matter of how close he is to people but rather how open minded they are. As he puts it,

“I don’t mind doing something out of the ordinary, but I prepare the context for people before telling them because you have to equip people to be able to hear you, or it’s not worth sharing. If we know they’re just going to be hurt or shocked and we’re not prepared to invest the time and energy to give them a tool kit to understand, it’s better not to tell. The criteria is whether they’ll accept the tool kit instead of seeing us through their lens of fear or judgment.”

Other people find it easier to just stop keeping any secrets from anyone.

Otherwise, new situations continually arise where you will be faced with decisions about how to present yourself, but once all the important people in your life have been told, the fear of discovery diminishes.

Polyamorous people are perhaps the last sexual “minority” to come out of hiding. In an age when homosexuals demand church weddings and some cities have passed domestic partner ordinances that extend spousal privileges to same-gender or unmarried couples, polyamory is still beyond the pale, although it is increasingly recognized as a valid choice. This may be because variations in relationship orientation are perceived as more of a threat to the established social order than are variations in sexual orientation.

WHO IS POLY?

For the rest of this chapter, we will use the word
poly
(the common pre-fix for
poly
gamy,
poly
gyny,
poly
andry, and
poly
fidelity) to refer to the
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relationship orientation of people who love and are open to being sexually intimate with more than one person at a time. This includes people who prefer to limit each individual sexual encounter to one person at a time even though they may have multiple partners as well as people who want to engage in group sex with their partners. It includes people who identify themselves as polyamorous as well as those who reject that label for one reason or another but whose behavior fits the definition of polyamory as presented in this book. It includes people who practice old-fashioned patriarchal polygamy (technically polygyny) where one man has more than one wife and polyandry where one woman has more than one husband.

There is a strong trend in social science research these days not to impose labels or expectations on a target population, but because of the sensitive nature of coming out, in this discussion I think it’s useful to include people who might not identify themselves as fitting into the poly world but who fit the definition I offered in chapter 1 of someone open to allowing love to determine the form of their relationships rather than deciding on one acceptable form and trying to force their relationships to fit into it.

For example, Amanda is a thirty-something-year-old woman reluctant to identify herself as poly because she’s not sure whether she will want to be monogamous in the future, having chosen both monogamous and polyamorous relationships at different times in the past.

“Basically I’m asking myself now whether or not a poly lifestyle was a way for me to ease my way into a more lesbian lifestyle. I’ve considered myself bisexual for my entire adult life, having relationships with men but consistently fooling around with girls or just noticing how attracted I was to them. When I was twenty-two, I began a seven-year relationship with a man, one in which I never felt comfortable being monogamous partially because I was aware of how intensely I desired women. He and I were openly poly for the last four of the seven years. Our relationship ended when I chose to be monogamous with one of the women I was dating.

This relationship with the woman ended two years later, but I still don’t know whether I am poly or mono at heart or if it really has to do with the gender of the person I’m seeing or some other dynamics between me and the person I’m with. Regardless, I know that I am an open, loyal, and compassionate person, willing to work on my emotional stuff, and supportive of others working on theirs—all important qualities to nurture when in a polyamorous relationship.”

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There is a wide variety of lovestyles among people who are inclined toward same-gender partners, with some choosing monogamy, others preferring to have only anonymous encounters, and still others opting for open relationships or multiple committed relationships. Those with a poly orientation are equally diverse in their sexual orientations. They may be gay, straight, or bisexual, and they cover the entire middle ground between monogamy and promiscuity as well.

If we include everyone who’s ever had two sexualoving partners during the same time period, even if they have not been open about it, as poly, we’re talking about a lot of people. If we include people who constantly fantasize about other partners but don’t act out their desires for fear of destroying their monogamous marriage, we’re talking about even more people, so many that we can hardly call it a minority group. And if we include those practicing serial monogamy, which was called serial polygamy until the second half of the twentieth century, it’s clearly a majority. Even if we only include people who have habitually had more than one lover at a time, whether single or married, there are a lot of polys out there. It’s hard to know exactly how many, but current estimates for the United States put that number anywhere from half a million to 10 million people.

People’s sexual and relationship orientations don’t always fit neatly into separate categories. For example, when I was in graduate school studying sexology, I was taught that on the homosexual–heterosexual dimension, there really isn’t a dichotomy but, rather, a continuum. That is, on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is 100 percent heterosexual and 10 is 100 percent homosexual, most people will be somewhere in between the two extremes.

People who are “somewhere in between” may—or may not—identify themselves as
bi
sexual. Until recently, most did not. I had never thought of myself as bisexual at the time, although it was clear to me when presented with the continuum concept that I fit somewhere in the middle.

To complicate matters even more, up until the late twentieth century, many professionals insisted that there was no such thing as a stable bisexual identity. That is, there was a belief that people who think they’re bisexual are really in transition from the heterosexual pole to the homosexual pole
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or vice versa. Only when relatively large numbers of self-identified bisexuals came forward saying that “gender is not the most important factor in whom I love or don’t love, and I consider myself to be bisexual whether I happen to be with a same-gender partner or an opposite-gender partner or none or both at any given time” was bisexuality acknowledged as a sexual orientation. Bisexuals often remind us that our sexuality is more fluid than we like to think and that we all have the potential to love people of both genders. Some would rather not be confronted with this reminder.

Monogamy and polyamory may also be more of a continuum than a dichotomy. Hardly anyone has only one sexual partner for their whole lifetime, especially now that people are living twice as long they formerly did. There is a big difference between being monogamous for twenty years and being so for fifty. Hardly anyone has
never
had an exclusive relationship for at least a brief period. Most of us are somewhere in between.

And while some of those who are in between
are
in transition, others find that having more than one committed sexualove relationship at a time is what feels best to them. This does not preclude choosing to be with only one partner for a period of time; it just means that there’s no expectation that the relationship will remain forever monogamous. Sometimes this in-between group doesn’t identify as poly simply because they’ve never met or even heard of a person who has come out poly. This was certainly the case with me until my early thirties, even though I had a long history of being drawn to multiple partners.

David’s experience also points to the importance of positive role models.

“I first heard of open and polyamorous relationships a few years ago when I met several couples who enjoyed open relationships at a workshop. At the time it made no sense to me, but later I decided to give it a try when I was in love with a woman who only wanted to spend one and a half days a week with me due to a busy work schedule. Rather than resenting her, I told her that we either needed to break up, or I needed to have an additional relationship. Reluctantly, she said she would prefer me having other lovers to ending the relationship, if I would practice safe sex. If I hadn’t met those open couples, I never would have thought of this, but it ended up working out very well for me.”

There’s another strange thing about our efforts to categorize ourselves and others. Not only do we try to make an
either/or
choice where a
both/

and
choice makes more sense, but we tend to put ourselves at the most desirable pole and to put others at the less desirable pole even though
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many of us are in the middle. This phenomenon is most obvious when we look at racial or ethnic identities. A person whose mother is white and whose father is black will be considered black in our culture. In Nazi Germany, a person with even a trace of Jewish blood was considered Jewish.

However, many people of mixed blood “pass” as members of the dominant culture. Similarly, serial monogamists, who might more accurately be called serial polyamorists, pass as monogamists both to themselves and to society at large. And committed polys may reject the poly label because of its negative association with promiscuity in our culture. With models for responsible multipartner relationships still largely invisible, the concept of polyamory has often been seen as a male scam to avoid commitment or as evidence of nymphomania in a woman. Who would want to identify themselves with either of those stereotypes?

There is another factor to consider when looking at sexual and relationship orientations that has been called
sexual fluidity
. Psychologist Lisa Diamond hypothesizes that sexual identity is much more fluid in women than in men. She points out that most of the research on sexual orientation has been done exclusively on men and, after following a group of 100 young college women over a ten-year period, found that 60 percent of women who identified as lesbian at the beginning had some sort of sexual contact with men during the following ten years. Some changed their identity to bisexual or unlabeled, but even among lesbians who remained lesbian identified, 50 percent had some form of sexual contact with a man.1

Cardosa, Correia, and Capella have analyzed the relevance of the sexual fluidity concept for polyamory and conclude that “it seems that the data confirm what we’ve been arguing: the social setting of polyamory encourages sexual fluidity, and it is viewed as empowering and challenging, as having something to contribute to feminism as a social and political movement.”2

If it’s true, as Diamond suggests, that the emphasis on a fixed sexual identity is a masculine construct that is largely irrelevant for many women who place more importance on how they feel toward a particular individual regardless of gender, fluidity very likely applies to the relationship orientation of many women as well. The finding (discussed in chapter 2)
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that women are significantly more likely than men to give “falling in love”