Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners (3 page)

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afraid of ending up divorced. She gradually withdrew from Fred sexually and emotionally, and he immersed himself in his business. Superficially, they look like the perfect couple, but Sheila would leave in a heartbeat if it weren’t for their two sons.

Gina and Eric met while working for the same company. They were attracted to each other but hesitant to get sexually involved in the fishbowl of the workplace. Instead, they developed a friendship and had many long conversations about life and love, discovering that they shared a passion for spiritual matters and personal autonomy as well as cooking, surfing, and mountain climbing. As Gina put it, “I don’t want to hold my partner prisoner, and I don’t want to be imprisoned either.” When they finally transitioned from friendship to romance, they agreed that they would have an open relationship with as few restrictions as possible on the other’s freedom to choose outside sexual partners.

For the first few years of their relationship, neither chose to interact with other partners. Then they met another couple who were similarly inclined and dated for over a year. When the other couple decided to close their marriage, Gina and Eric were grief stricken but happy that they still had each other. Although their marriage continues to be open in theory, they find that with each passing year they are less interested in including others. Eric says, “We have no rules against outside intimacy. It could happen again, but it would take someone very special to get our attention. The truth is, we’re happy with what we’ve got and don’t really feel a need for other sexual relationships.”

Gina and Eric, according to my definition, are actually polyamorous even though the form their relationship has taken looks very much like a monogamous couple. To me, the most important aspect of polyamory is not how many partners a person has. Rather, it is the surrendering of conditioned beliefs about the form a loving relationship should take and allowing love itself to determine the form most appropriate for all parties.

If the truth is that two people freely embrace sexual exclusivity not because somebody made them do it or because they’re afraid of the consequences of doing something else, I would still consider that couple polyamorous.

The intention of polyamorous pioneers was not substituting one “should”

for another. And yet that’s exactly what many people are doing in communities where polyamory has become trendy. Instead of struggling to conform to a monogamous ideal and ideology, they find themselves struggling to conform to a nonmonogamous ideal and ideology. Meanwhile, young
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people who find polyamory either “too mainstream” or “too difficult” are rejecting the whole legacy and creating their own concepts, like
relationship anarchy
and
friends with benefits
, as we shall see in chapter 8. Labels, definitions, and organizations are useful insofar as they help us understand our experience and communicate about it, but what’s the point of trading one rigid belief system for another?

Quite understandably, most people think that polyamory is about proclaiming their right to have more than one sexual partner or to have multipartner relationships. This might take the form of an open relationship where a couple, married or not, agrees to have additional lovers; a group marriage involving three or more people in one household; or an intimate network of couples and/or singles who have ongoing intimate relationships but don’t live together. We’ll look more closely at these variations later, but for now let’s just say that polyamory implies an alternative to both serial monogamy and monogamy with secret affairs, which are the two most common relationship choices in the Western world.

To those of us who coined and popularized the term
polyamory
, the form the relationship takes is less important than the underlying values.

The freedom of surrendering to love and allowing love—not just sexual passion, not just social norms and religious strictures, not just emotional reactions and unconscious conditioning—to determine the shape our intimate relationships take is the essence of polyamory. Polyamory is based on a decision to honor the many diverse ways loving relationships can evolve.

Polyamory can take many forms, but as it was originally conceived, if deception or coercion is involved or if the people involved are out of integrity in any way, it’s not polyamory no matter how many people are sexually involved with each other. These more subtle qualities have often gotten lost in the excitement and glamour of embracing sexual freedom, but they are crucial to understanding the deeper significance of polyamory.

The guilt and shame associated with premarital or extramarital sex and love is not quite a thing of the past, and neither is the lying and hiding that have accompanied these behaviors for centuries. Unfortunately, many old habits and patterns of relating have been translated into the polyamorous arena despite our idealistic vision for a future in which humans love each
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other unconditionally with passion and transparency and without possessiveness and control. Deep cultural change is a long-term affair. The increasing visibility of and acceptance for variations on the “one man, one woman, till death do us part” scenario has certainly decreased the shock value and threat that alternative choices once elicited, but we are still a long way from a true paradigm shift. In fact, few people believe that it’s even possible for unconditional love and erotic love to coexist.

Those of us who are passionate about articulating a new paradigm for love and creating more tolerance for diversity in lovestyle choices agree that while monogamy is a wonderful option for some people some of the time, it’s not the only valid possibility. The reality is that humans are not naturally monogamous. If we were, we would mate once, for life, and never for a moment consider doing anything else.

Polyamorous relationships, like monogamous ones, differ in their basic intentions and approaches. Some polyamorous relationships resemble traditional monogamous marriage in their emphasis on creating an imper-meable boundary around the group, operating according to a well-defined set of rules (sometimes called a social contract), and expecting family members to replace individual desires with group agendas. I call this type of relationship “old paradigm” regardless of whether it is polyamorous or monogamous.

Other polyamorous relationships have a primary focus on using the relationships to further the psychological and spiritual development of the partners. These relationships tend to put more emphasis on responding authentically in the present moment, allowing for individual autonomy, and seeing loved ones as mirrors or reflections of oneself. These new paradigm relationships may also take either monogamous or polyamorous forms.

Many people these days are in transition and find themselves attempting to blend elements of old and new paradigms as well as monogamous and polyamorous lovestyles, but these distinctions are useful in clarifying the direction in which we wish to move.

THE HUMAN ANIMAL AND ALL OUR RELATIONS

By the end of the twentieth century, scientific research on animal behavior and brain chemistry was providing strong confirmation of the troubling observation many of us had already made on our own—that lifelong mo-W H A T I S P O L Y A M O R Y ?

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nogamy is not natural for humans, nor is it for most other animals. Much publicity has been given to the sexual free-for-all enjoyed by our nearest genetic relatives: the bonobo chimpanzee. But nowhere in the animal kingdom do we find anything remotely resembling the phenomenon now called polyamory. Polyamory is a uniquely human phenomenon. Perhaps this is why conscious and consensual love-based intimate relating is generally left out of academic conversations on marriage and family.

For much of our evolutionary past, there were no centralized authorities dictating the terms of our sex lives. Rather, a variety of customs that supported local ecosystems gradually arose. In the last couple of millennia, organized religions, the medical establishment, and governments have increasingly taken charge of both sexual prohibitions and family structures.

Nevertheless, in much of the world, men are still allowed to have more than one wife (called
polygyny
by anthropologists), and in a few places, women can have more than one husband (technically called
polyandry
).

In countries where marriages are for couples only, both men and women often have secret extramarital affairs or divorce and marry another. All these patterns of mating and sexual activity can be found in the animal world. Some are more common than others, and while lifelong monogamy is rare, it does exist.

As David Barash and Judith Lipton discuss in their 2001 book
The Myth
of Monogamy
, the advent of DNA testing to determine paternity was a major breakthrough in the study of animal mating patterns. Many species previously thought to be monogamous have since been found to be socially monogamous at best. That is, they may mate with a single individual, setting up housekeeping, coparenting, and sharing resources. But DNA testing along with more objective behavioral observation reveals that in many species both males and females have “secret affairs” often with other partnered individuals. Serial monogamy also occurs in the animal kingdom with both males and females “trading up” for a better mate when the opportunity arises.

Barash and Lipton’s analysis of the proven absence of sexual exclusivity, even in most socially monogamous species, revolves around genetic programming. That is, both males and females will behave in ways that increase the likelihood of reproducing and the survival and successful mating of their offspring. Parenting and other social behavior as well as sexual habits are all strongly linked to genetic programming. Barash and Lipton also mention ecological considerations, what deep ecologists call the “carrying
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capacity of the land,” as secondary influences on reproductive behaviors, and we’ll return to this interesting factor in a later chapter.

The viewpoint that we could call DNA-driven sexual behavior is by no means new. But twentieth-century male sociobiologists frequently had blinders on when it came to the reproductive advantages accruing to females when mating with multiple males. It took women scientists1 such as Dr. Sarah Hrdy, whose observations and interpretations often differed markedly from those made by men, to give us a more accurate picture.

Hrdy was one of the first to note that among baboons, males would protect rather than attack the young of any female they had mated with. It’s obvious to any unbiased observer that there are many genetic advantages in multiple matings for females as well as males.

Barash and Lipton, who are a male–female team, provide a more balanced perspective, putting to rest the outdated notion that females are naturally sexually exclusive. Instead, their data reveal that females, like males, are motivated to have more than one partner when doing so improves their access to resources and the quality of genetic material available to them.

Barash and Lipton also pose the fascinating question of why monogamy exists at all in any animals, including humans, and even go so far as to compare the reproductive advantages of monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry.

Their new book,
Strange Bedfellows
(2009), focuses on the reproductive advantages of monogamy for humans. The animal behavior studies are illuminating. But while genetic programming dictates much more of our behavior than most of us like to admit, there are at least two serious limitations to animal research—and Barash and Lipton’s analysis—for understanding human sexual behavior.

The first is that there are basically no known precedents either in the animal world or in so-called primitive cultures for mating or family groups that include more than one member of both genders, unless you consider the whole tribe as the group. For example, the concept of two males and two females bonding to reproduce and raise young is conspicuously absent from the literature. And while polyamory does not have to include multiple partners of both genders, it certainly can.

The reason for this, undoubtedly, is that while conflict between same-gender individuals competing to fertilize an egg, control territory, or obtain food and child care is generally present, when one male or female establishes dominance, he or she is able to assert him-or herself over the
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others more or less permanently, resulting in stable relationships where each individual knows how to behave.

But imagine what would happen if the alpha male or patriarch is not only ruling his harem but also constantly competing with another male whom he can’t simply defeat and drive away but one with whom he needs to cooperate on an ongoing basis. A male who willingly submits to another becomes unattractive to females programmed to go for the male with the best genes. Similarly, an alpha female will generally not allow another female into her “home,” and a nonalpha female will not succeed in preserving her freedom to have multiple mates in the face of inevitable resistance from males who want the genetic advantage of fertilizing all her eggs.

I’ve noticed these patterns in the cats I’ve lived with over the years.

Recently, I adopted two female kittens whose mothers were sisters. They had been raised together since birth and were very bonded. Tillie is a very aggressive eater, gobbling her food as soon as it’s placed in her dish and nosing her cousin out of the way. If it’s something she especially likes, like fresh tuna, she makes growling noises while eating and guards the dish against intruders. Frances is quite content with this arrangement and patiently waits until her compatriot is finished eating to have whatever is left. They both love to sit with me and be petted. Tillie always sits on my shoulder or chest, while Frances takes the lower perch in my lap. When they play together, they wrestle and jump freely, but each knows her place when it comes to important resources, and there is never any conflict.