Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners (35 page)

I arrived in Bombay a few weeks after the 2008 terrorist attack that left residents and tourists alike in a state of shock. Sandeep, an Indian man in his early forties who runs a small consulting firm in Bombay, was still reeling and grateful that his immediate family was unharmed. Sandeep has been married to Leela for fifteen years, and they have a six-year-old daughter. Theirs was an arranged marriage, as is still common in India; nevertheless, they came to love each other deeply. Sandeep told me that Leela is his best friend, that they tell each other everything, and that they started their business together as well. Two years ago, Leela told Sandeep that she wanted to become sexually intimate with their good friend Karna.

Sandeep was very uncomfortable about this, partly because Karna was not telling his wife but also because his own jealousy was painful and intense.

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He’d already downloaded my
Compersion
e-book by the time we met and had found it helpful, but he was still struggling.

Sandeep had been introduced to me online through a mutual friend, and when he heard I was coming to India, was eager to meet with me. I had coached many couples in the United States dealing with similar situations and was not surprised to find that poly hell, as some people call it, knows no national borders. I’m told it’s unusual for an Indian wife to openly assert her sexual freedom and for her husband to be accepting of this, but I suspect that Sandeep and Leela are on the leading edge of a growing polyamorous movement in India. Sandeep is a thoughtful, insightful man and a professional communicator with a Western education. He is a student of Bombay advaita master Ramesh Balsekar, who teaches that it is only our thoughts about what should or shouldn’t be happening that disturb the natural state of peace and happiness. Leela and Karna also have an affinity for advaita, and the threesome have attended many
satsangs
(literally translated, this means “meetings in truth”) together, so I figured that they had at least some chance of working this out.

I began by acknowledging Sandeep’s courage and willingness to let jealousy be his teacher and then inquired about his family of origin. As I’d guessed, Sandeep’s relationship with his wife mirrored that with his mother, who was a fiery and dominating figure. His father was amiable but distant, much like Karna. Clearly, this triangle offered Sandeep an opportunity to do the inner work of healing the past, and he had the necessary skills and motivation to move through these old issues quickly, but still his marriage was at risk because Sandeep and Leela had never established a satisfying sexual relationship. I suggested that he ask Leela if she were willing to invest some time and energy in creating a sexual connection with him as well as with Karna. In India, as in the United States, it’s sometimes easier for people to access their eroticism with a new partner than with the spouse they know so well.

It always seems ironic to me that, Khajuraho, Kama Sutra, and Ghotuls notwithstanding, many modern Indians have yet to undo the heavy burden of sexual repression. Yet there is evidence that this is changing. Facebook now has a “Polyamory India” group, and upper-class Indians have discovered swinging. I met Chitvan and Suresh in southern California, where they had gone to visit Sandra and Jack after meeting at a lifestyles convention in Las Vegas. Both Chitvan and Suresh are medical doctors in Delhi and have been married for fifteen years. They are an affluent, upwardly mobile, high-energy
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couple in their early forties who are anything but sexually repressed. Jack described his first meeting with Chitvan at one of the many lifestyles parties:

“I was resting on a couch next to Sandra, and Chitvan sits down and starts fondling me. After a brief conversation with Suresh and Sandra, she grabbed me by the cock and dragged me off to the group room where she had her way with me. She was an extraordinarily skilled lover. After I came twice, I told her, ‘I think I’m done.’ But Suresh, who was engaged with Sandra a few feet away, heard me and said, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll get you hard again,’ and he was right, she did! I’m looking forward to visiting them in India. Chitvan has promised to throw a swing party for us there.”

Dossie Easton, therapist and coauthor of
The Ethical Slut
, gave the key-note address at the First International Conference on Polyamory and Mononormativity held at the University of Hamburg, Germany, in 2005.

Scholars from all over the world gathered to discuss the variety of ways that people in many communities structure their relationships. Organizers Robin Bauer and Marianne Pieper, who originated the term
mononormativity
, say that they wanted the conference to combine activism and academia. Dossie reports that “the German academics were concerned that I did not present a unified economic theory that addressed socialism, capitalism, class issues, and the potential for polyamory to create economic and political equality for all. They wanted to know how polyamory will help solve social problems beyond individual relationships, and I suspect they thought I was remiss in not developing such theories.”4

Many organizers and researchers outside the United States have echoed this observation, confirming my own impression that in Europe and the United Kingdom, the polyamory movement is less focused on personal growth and more focused on the political and ecological implications of relationship choices. It also appears that the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and queer community in Europe, the United Kingdom, and Australia are more likely to have embraced polyamory in their activism and research than their counterparts in the United States, resulting in a stronger presence abroad for polyamory within academia.

According to Robin Bauer, a gay, transsexual poly researcher, Germans use the term
polyamory
mostly to refer to committed multiple partner
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relationships rather than
nonmonogamy
, which is primarily sexually motivated. Robin finds that gay men and other sexual minorities who have been predominantly nonmonogamous in the past perceive the term
polyamory
to apply mainly to heterosexuals and bisexuals who have not been part of the alternative sexual community up until now and see no reason to identify with this foreign term.

The ZEGG community hasn’t embraced the word
polyamory
either, but they are a good example of the way in which many Europeans seem more inclined than Americans to place polyamory in the context of a wider movement for social change. They acquired a former Stasi camp in Belzig, formerly in East Germany, outside Berlin just after the Berlin Wall came down, that they have built into a successful community, now numbering about sixty adults (60 percent female) and fifteen children. ZEGG is well known for advocating nonmonogamy, although their members are free to choose whatever lovestyle they prefer.

ZEGG founder Dieter Duhm was active in the German leftist student movement in the 1960s, but as a young radical sociology professor in the 1970s, the mainstream left rejected him because he criticized Marxism for its use of violent revolution. In the mid-1970s, he left academia to explore alternative communities, including what is now the Osho ashram in India, and set about creating his own vision of a “humanistic” community of people “with whom we can explore the interfaces of love, fear and truth.”5 While the group began by focusing on organic agriculture, art, ecology, and renewable energy technologies, it soon became apparent that they would have to resolve conflicts around sexuality, jealousy, and possessiveness. Duhm was strongly influenced by Wilheim Reich, another German socialist ostracized for his views on sex, health, and social change. ZEGG soon became notorious for its practices of free love, and while they received much negative coverage in the German press, they also attracted thousands of visitors from all over the world who came to participate in their seminars and summer camps. At ZEGG, free love is considered an essential step toward a new culture of peace, partnership, and sustainability. Their belief is that the only way to a free society is to create a world where love is freed.

ZEGG first came to my attention in the early 1990s when they sent a team of organizers to the United States. They sought the support of the growing polyamory movement that we had established in the United States but had a disdainful attitude toward both the spiritual and the indiC R O S S - C U L T U R A L P E R S P E C T I V E S

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vidualistic, apolitical brands of polyamory, which they felt predominated in the United States. Despite their socialist roots, they lost no time in competitively striving for their share of the newly booming polyamory seminar market in good capitalist fashion. In an interesting cycle of cross fertilization, their group process (called ZEGG forum) for resolving interpersonal conflicts, which incorporates elements of psychodrama, gestalt therapy, and body-centered therapies developed in the United States, caught on among a new generation of Americans who were too young to remember the encounter groups and consciousness-raising groups, not to mention the

“oil parties” popular during the sexual revolution of the 1970s in the United States. ZEGG also inspired an annual two-week “Summer Camp” in the United States where the forum is taught and practiced and polyamorous people can have a brief taste of living in community with each other.

I spoke recently with ZEGG member Ina Meyer-Stoll, who, together with Achim, her partner for twelve years, now leads workshops on liberat-ing love around the world as well as offering seminars to visitors at ZEGG.

Ina is now in her late forties and has lived at ZEGG for twenty-five years.

When she was a college student, she fell in love and lived with two men for a year but could not break through the personal and social conditioning against loving more than one. When a friend told her about this new community where they were teaching people how to get over their jealousy, she decided to investigate and immediately felt at home. Ina says that in her twenties and thirties, exploring sexually with different men was important to her, but then she became more interested in deep intimacy, communication, and continuity and is very satisfied with her single working partnership with Achim, although she still has a number of ongoing erotic friendships with men in the community. More recently, she has begun to feel the lack of new sexual adventures in her life and is wondering what a satisfying erotic life in the second half of life might look like.

Achim also has other lovers, and Ina admits with some embarrassment that she still experiences jealousy but that she now sees jealousy as being like having a cold, only it’s her heart or her soul that’s ill instead of her body.

So she just slows down and takes care of herself until it passes. Knowing that her jealousy has to do with childhood wounds and feeling competitive with other women whom Achim might find sexier or more attractive doesn’t make the jealousy stop, but she does find it’s much easier when the other woman is someone she knows in the community, and she can go to her and talk honestly about it. Achim has suggested that they could marry
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so that she would feel more secure, but Ina says that she already knows he’s committed to their relationship. They’ve tried living together with another man, but she says that one relationship is time consuming and richly nourishing enough and that she doesn’t want or need more.

In the mid-1990s, Dieter Duhm and his partner Sabine Lichtenfels withdrew from ZEGG and founded Tamera, a center for humane ecology in Portugal. Perhaps because of their treatment by the media in Germany, who made them out to be a sex cult, or perhaps because they want to emphasize their underlying mission of world peace and ecological living, Tamera keeps a low profile as far as the lifestyle of its residents. However, my contacts in the polyamorous community in Portugal tell me that experiments with polyamorous relating are very much a part of the Tamera ecovillage as well.

Daniel Cardosa is a twenty-three-year-old graduate student in communication at a university in Lisbon, Portugal. Last year, he and two female colleagues presented a paper about polyamory at a European sociology conference. He describes the reaction of his colleagues to his research as “blank stares” because they don’t understand it and don’t take it seriously, but so far it’s not hurt his career. Daniel is in a triad with his live-in girlfriend of six years, Sofia, also twenty-three, and for the past year with another woman who is a few years older. Daniel told me that “we’re open to other relationships, of any kind. We usually discuss what we feel for someone else, and we tend to take things slowly so people can get comfortable with everything, giving/getting reassurance, stuff like that. So far, there’s been some insecurities but nothing too gigantic that would cause a breakdown.”

In early 2009, I was profiled by the Portuguese newsmagazine
Visao
, which also ran a story on Daniel and his triad and which gave a positive report on polyamory according to my Portuguese translator. Daniel says that polyamory in Portugal is probably fifteen or twenty years behind the United States as far as public awareness and acceptance goes, but he is doing his best to change that and has given many print and broadcast media interviews. While the Portuguese poly community is still small, Daniel reports that it’s a “very tight and cohesive group of politically and socially motivated people” who host a blog (http://polyportugal.blogspot.com) and a website.

Daniel concurs that the political aspect of polyamory is very strong in Europe, although not all European polys are politically motivated. He feels
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that the crux of the issue is how to make polyamory work in a fast, ever-changing, and cosmopolitan world where, in his opinion, feminism, queer theory, and philosophy are more relevant than spirituality. Perhaps this is as much a generational factor as a cross-cultural one, but polyamorous folks in neighboring Spain feel that even though Spain (and Portugal) are predominantly Catholic countries, there is a more “live and let live” attitude toward polyamory than in the United States or the UK.