My Misspent Youth (12 page)

It would seem that to become a Ravenheart you’d also have to meet a need that no one else is meeting. The idea that different people fulfill different needs, sexually and otherwise, is an almost constant refrain in the household. In some cases, it’s abundantly clear what one person can bring to the table that another can’t. “Oberon and Jon are over thirty years apart,” says Liza. “Obviously they’re totally different. Oberon has a lot of wisdom and experience. Jon is very loving and playful.”

“The way I make love to Morning Glory is different than the way I make love to Wynter,” says Wolf. “Having to accommodate the needs of different women makes me a better lover. You don’t have to be in a poly relationship to understand that people have different needs sexually or whatever. If I were to go down the line and think of how I was sexually with the different women I’ve dated, being the same with each of them would just not be appropriate.”

Wynter, as Wolf describes her, is “catch as catch can.” She likes to dress up in sexy clothes and seduce him while he’s paying bills. If she’s in the garden, she wants to have sex in the garden. She also likes to do it in the hot tub. “If she says ‘Let’s take a hot tub’ it means ‘Let’s have sex’,” Wolf says.

The issue of privacy is twofold in the Ravenheart household. On one hand, there are plenty of places to be alone. On the other, walking in on someone having sex is not exactly scandal-worthy. “If someone comes up to the hot tub they’ll always say ‘May I join you?’” explains Wolf. “If you want to be alone you just say so. But there’s also no embarrassing social taboo about sex. That dims the voyeuristic thrill.”

The same goes for nudity. Wolf points out that, during my visit, the Ravenhearts have gone out of their way to keep themselves clothed. “When it’s hot, Oberon hardly ever wears clothes,” he says. “We think nothing of walking around in the yard naked. That’s why we have the privacy fence.”

With both sex and nudity stripped of their taboos, the Ravenhearts seem to fall back on role-playing.

“Often Morning Glory and I will dress up and play pirate games,” Wolf says. “We also play a lot of nurse games.”

The fact that Wolf can have spontaneous, hot tub sex with Wynter and preplanned, full-costumed sex with Morning Glory plays right into their central argument for polyamory, which is, essentially, that it takes a village to fill the libido’s every need. “In my monogamous marriage, which was very short-lived, the thing that nearly crushed me was that if I didn’t meet every single emotional, physical, sexual, psychological, and mental need that person had, that need went unmet,” says Wolf. “Here you don’t have that. For example, I don’t like horses. But Wynter and Morning Glory love horses. Well, they can go horseback riding together and I don’t have to.”

This is the kind of argument that can elude those of us who aren’t poly. It seems to me that anyone with any kind of relationship experience at all knows that their beloved can’t be expected to fill every emotional, physical, psychological, mental, and even sexual need. To most of us, that’s what friends, colleagues, psychiatrists, and Internet news groups are for.

“Why do I have to live with someone in order to go horseback riding with them?” says Morning Glory. “Because then my wife and I can go home and have great sex!”

Could it be that great sex is what some polys do rather than going out for coffee? When Morning Glory counts the number of lovers she expects to have this year (“People who if I find myself in any kind of proximity to them there’s a high probability that sex will occur”), she arrives at a number around twenty. This includes people she might run into occasionally or see when she travels out of town. She thinks about this in a manner that I might apply to how many people I’d expect to have lunch with in a given year.

“By becoming sexually involved with someone I feel like I can make a difference in their life,” says Morning Glory. “For years I’ve found people and it’s like I have some kind of calling to help them. It’s like the goddess taps me on the shoulder and says ‘That one over there.’ I’ve never been a prostitute. I’ve never charged for my sexual favors. But I have bestowed them generously all over the planet and tried to do so from a place of energizing people and turning them on and getting them involved with being happy in their own lives.”

Asking a poly whether or not they get jealous is sort of like asking a tall person how the weather is up there. The question got old a long time ago and to the Ravenhearts it seems irrelevant. According to Oberon, the answer again goes back to Robert A. Heinlein’s
Stranger in a Strange Land
concept, which is, as Heinlein wrote, that “love is that condition where another person’s happiness is essential to your own.” In other words, if you love someone, set them up with someone else. The Ravenhearts often introduce each other to new potential sex partners. It’s a kind of mitzvah Liza calls “a conspiracy of heart’s desire.”

“Whenever we start to talk about poly lifestyles the issue of jealousy comes up,” says Liza, who seems somehow less earnest than the other members of the family and has an appealing, self-deprecating laugh. “And that really limits the conversation. Because really jealousy is a response to wanting to get your needs met and clumsily going about doing it. When people have their needs met they don’t give a damn about what other people are doing.”

Unlike Morning Glory and Oberon, who rejected monogamy as early as elementary school, or Wynter, who was raised by poly parents, Liza grew up idolizing her parents’ monogamous marriage. Like many of us, the first time she fell in love she hoped it would last forever. Like just about all of us, it didn’t. And although she says she didn’t enter polyamory because it seemed like a more realistic choice, she admits that romantic notions of monogamy can set nearly impossible standards for relationships.

“Monogamy in the way that we all fantasize it could be is very rare,” Liza says. “Any statistic would bear this out, this is not my perception.”

Like Oberon, who laments “conventional society’s idea that there’s only one way to live and everyone has to be shoehorned into it,” Liza wishes that people could be more aware of their choices.

“What I would like to see is a world where people are able to look at their alternatives,” she says. “They could view their relationships like a work of art over which they have some measure of creative control rather than be plugged into a few options that are unlikely realistically to fit their real temperament and character.”

It would be difficult for anyone with an even moderately progressive sensibility to argue that point. If polyamory was solely concerned with shedding light on relationship options that the mainstream, Judeo-Christian world tends to dismiss as impractical or immoral, I would applaud the Ravenhearts for their magnanimousness and their organizational skills and leave it at that. But for many of the Ravenhearts, especially those who appear to have the most partners, I suspect there is another set of values at work. It has to do with the degree to which they hang their polyamory on their religion and the degree to which that religion is dependent upon the science fiction and fantasy subculture.

When Morning Glory talks about the polyamorous ideas conveyed in Heinlein’s novel, her summary goes like this: “He spun a really fascinating possibility. What if you didn’t have to stop dating? You could continue including your lovers as your best friends and their lovers as their best friends. You could build a whole social structure of a family that was bonded on this profound spiritual and sexual level.”

As nice as this sounds, it seems like a much taller order than even monogamy. For those of us who spend the majority of our time and mental energy wrestling with the conventions and demands of mainstream, heterogeneous society, the notion of becoming best friends with your lovers and their lovers and everyone else who comes down the pike would require suppressing our personal tastes to an almost impossible degree. In other words, most of us aren’t capable of liking that many people, let alone bonding with them on a profound spiritual and sexual level.

But here is where I am reminded of the sci-fi kids in high school and the medieval jousters in college and can finally begin to understand exactly why they irked so many of us “normal” people. We didn’t like the way it was so easy for them to like each other. We were bothered by the fact that their requirements for being turned on seemed to have less to do with things like culturally sanctioned ideas of attractiveness than with their mutual involvement in the subculture. The Ravenhearts are given to statements like “we connected deeply” and “the human capacity for love is infinite.” It’s also pretty clear that most of them don’t often sleep with anyone who doesn’t share their interest in paganism or science fiction, and I can’t help but wonder if, in their minds, a deep connection is as close at hand as the next meeting of the Eleusinian Mysteries. By being polyamorous, they are, in effect, giving themselves permission to sleep with other members of the science fiction club. That would seem to call into question just what “infinite capacity for love” really means.

The Ravenhearts’s relentless references to things like witchcraft and “the goddess” don’t mar the fact that they are fundamentally nice people. Nor does it keep them from being, by all appearances, relatively smart people. Oberon was a leader in the 1960s movement to bring together the various Earth-based religions and unite them under the term “neo-pagan.” He is credited with formulating and publishing the theology of deep ecology, best known as the Gaia thesis. All of the Ravenhearts bring some kind of intellectual component to their conversation. They debate various topics. They rationalize their desires. With their deliberate, rather circuitous speech patterns, they sound a lot like philosophy majors at a college with no course requirements.

But like a lot of people immersed in subcultures, there’s an intangible gaff in many of the Ravenhearts’s perceptions, an imbalance that comes not, as one might assume, from spending more time reading science fiction and fantasy than, say, the newspaper, but from what appears to be a desperate need to compensate for their adolescent nerdiness. Most Ravenhearts talk a lot about feeling alienated in high school. There’s much said about being misunderstood. “I wasn’t very well socialized,” says Morning Glory. “I used to go out into the yard with a flashlight and try to signal the flying saucers to come get me and take me home,” Oberon says. “I was a geeky kid,” Wolf says. “I didn’t lose my virginity until a month before my eighteenth birthday.”

Inherent in the belief that one is alienated and “not like the others” is the equally ardent belief that no one anywhere, except perhaps the members of the subculture with which the alienated person has chosen to affiliate himself, has ever had the same feelings. In order to feel truly alienated one must keep a safe distance from the fact that, as self-concepts go, “not like the others” is fairly standard. This distance leads to the kind of mentality that regards the loss of virginity at age eighteen as a freakish thing. It makes a person inclined, as at least two of the Ravenhearts are, to credit the high school drama club—that haven for “misfits” and “outsiders”—with their deliverance into the socialized American teenager-hood. The need to be different means we must constantly promote our unusualness. Oberon tells me he was telepathic until he was two and that he is the reincarnation of his own grandfather. Wolf sometimes bites people.

This is where the Ravenhearts lose me. It’s not their polyamory I have a problem with. It’s their forced iconoclasm. It’s their paraphernalia. It’s the fact that they don’t seem to sleep with anyone who isn’t just like them. The result is that too often “deeply connecting” seems more a matter of shared membership in a subculture—a subculture that is based around the premise of “not fitting in” and has an entire system of toys and tchotchkes and T-shirts to consumerize the idea of not fitting in—than it does with actually connecting.

But despite their heavy involvement in their subculture, the Ravenhearts make a big point of saying that, at root, they’re no different from most people. Many polys believe Bill and Hillary Clinton to be polyamorous. “She knows he has other lovers and she ultimately doesn’t care,” says Wolf. “They’re just not in a position to be open about it.”

The Ravenhearts pride themselves on their openness. They say they give interviews because they’re one of the few poly families who are in a position to be public. Presumably, that position is one of total immersion in the neo-pagan world, a place where, according to them, “diversity is celebrated” and “all forms of relationships and sexual orientations are honored.” Here they are immune from the kind of hostility they might elicit if, for instance, they were polyamorous but had names like Steve and Joan and Margaret, and spent their weekends skiing rather than attending the Ancient Ways Festival.

But I would surmise that persecution is not the greatest fear. The greatest fear is of losing the stranger in the strange land. The fear is that “the lifestyle,” when it’s stripped of its filigrees, will look less like a lifestyle than a human condition, much like being gay or having a tendency to sunburn easily. That’s because there’s really nothing very strange at all about polyamory. A whole lot of people, in one way or another, participate in it without their friends and neighbors knowing or really caring. The fact that I am interviewing the Ravenhearts and not any of the thousands of other people in this country who probably practice polyamory without knowing there’s a name for it says less about our culture’s obsession with sex than it does about our obsession with labels. I am interviewing the Ravenhearts because they’ve given themselves a name, because they have a Web site and a religion and a family business and have decided to incorporate their polyamory into a larger aura of personal style. The Ravenhearts invented a word for this arrangement and have spent the better part of their lives marketing their invention. Ultimately, this story is not about people who have sex with anyone they want. This story is about what happens when you give something a name and, in so doing, deny yourself the unexpected elation that comes from falling in love with someone whose bookshelves hold none of the same books as your own.