Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners (36 page)

In the Netherlands, Leonie Linssen and Stephan Wik have coauthored
Love Unlimited: The Joys and Challenges of Open Relationships
(as of this writing, due out in August 2010) in both Dutch and English. Linssen is a relationship and stress management trainer and coach. At a
Loving More
conference, she explained that the book will be based on twelve case studies from her practice involving people in open relationships and “people dealing with the fact that they have feelings beyond their own partner.”

Earlier this year, she published her poly autobiography in Dutch, and she is a well-known advocate for polyamory awareness in the Dutch media.6

The Swiss have a reputation for being among the most proper and conventional people in all of Europe. But even in Switzerland, polyamory has a significant presence. Samuel Widmer is a cutting-edge psychiatrist perhaps best known as a pioneer in the authorized use of psycholytic substances in psychotherapy. He lives with two women and their ten children.

Dr. Widmer is not making a cause out of polyamory, but he has written some books on it that I haven’t read because they have not been translated from German. Even without personally experiencing his work, I’m sure that his expertise in the use of substances, which readily make conscious the deep conditioning and fears that prevent so many people from realizing embodied love that goes beyond the dyad, is not coincidental to his exploration of polyamory. His website states, “We are lovers. Our guru, whom we serve, is the power of love. We are no longer in competitive relationship with each other, we have envy and jealousy behind us. We have learned to rejoice in the happiness and success of others. That is why love and intimacy between us is possible, a common flowering, in which we share all the happiness and love together. Those of us who have become a vessel of love are kings and queens. Because they are the love, they are our gurus, our teachers.”7

Dr. Widmer says that his family has attracted a lot of attention, some negative from “the normal society around us” and some from a growing community of people who are experimenting with triads and other
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multiple partner relationships as well as Tantric ritual. Not surprisingly, his circle includes some members of the ZEGG community in Germany, and he is also connected with several groups in India, which is how I first heard about him.

Christine is an American woman in her fifties who has lived in Switzerland for the past fifteen years. She originally moved to Switzerland with her former husband Hans and felt that they had an ideal relationship for ten years until he fell in love with a much younger American friend of theirs. Christine did her best to allow Hans the freedom to explore this relationship within the context of their marriage, but she struggled with jealousy and resentment toward the other woman, who seemed immature, irresponsible, and inconsiderate toward Christine. She was determined to take the whole situation on as a spiritual challenge and consulted me for help in managing her emotions.

While supporting her willingness to grow, I encouraged Christine to set some boundaries on what she would and wouldn’t tolerate and to give herself the option of withdrawing from the marriage if her boundaries were not respected. I also recommended that she attend a seminar with Byron Katie, whose work was discussed in chapter 4. Christine took my suggestion and is now in training as a teacher of “the work.” She also fell in love with a woman at the seminar and eventually decided to leave her husband and set up housekeeping with her new girlfriend Jeanette. Jeanette had identified as a lesbian all her life, but Christine had never before felt any sexual attraction toward women. All four lived together fairly harmoniously for a time, but Christine says that she is happily monogamously married with Jeanette now and has no interest in getting involved with other women—or men for that matter. Meanwhile, Jeanette has another girlfriend who has another girlfriend, and it’s working out for everyone.

Since experiencing both a male and a female European partner, Christine reflects that they’ve provided her with a doorway into enjoying life and feeling expansive in ways that her American partners never did. “They seem to be wired differently, and simple things like taking the time to enjoy food and eating to being so playful and inventive with sex and pleasure have me completely enamored,” she muses.

Komaja, based in Croatia but with representatives in many countries around the world, is another polyamorous European community. Unlike the ZEGG community, Komaja embraces bisexuality, homosexuality, and Tantric spirituality and has a clearly identified leader. While people
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in Komaja have a variety of lovestyles, the community feels that
zajedna
, which is their term for “group marriage,” is the most desirable. Makaja, the group’s founder and spiritual teacher, lives with three wives in his
zajedna
in Switzerland, and all share responsibility for parenting their four children. The group is organized into four “Tantric circles” with open marriages, group marriages, and singles making up each circle. The spiritual practices of the community, including both heart-centered singing and sexual encounters, are led by female priestesses. But while Komaja promotes sexual liberation and the art of love, it is also a very structured community with strict guidelines, including a ban on infidelity, violation of which can lead to immediate expulsion. As it says on their website, “Instead of free sex, we need free love,” and, lest this be misunderstood, it then says that while love needs no restrictions, sex should always be under control.

Partners are bound by “love-erotic contracts” and are expected to follow the community’s sensible prescriptions for expanding sexual love without risking the well-being of partners or the security of their children.8 I find myself put off both by guru worship and by extensive rules, but I’ve also noticed that strong leadership is often essential for people who are in the process of questioning their conditioning around intimacy if chaos—and dissolution—is not to prevail.

In 2003, one of Makaja’s wives sent me a copy of a new English translation of his book,
Eros and Logos
, and invited me to come visit their summer school on the Croatian coast. I was curious but had other priorities at the time and so declined. However, my colleague Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, author of
Gaia and the New Politics of Love
, which is discussed in chapter 11, was able to spend ten days with the Komaja community in 2006.9 She noted the slower and gentler rhythms of Europe relative to the United States and found Makaja’s facilitation to be sensitive and effective.

She also admired the communication skills and willingness of the Komaja members to address whatever challenges arose in the group.

After teaching all over Europe, Dossie Easton, coauthor of
Ethical
Slut
,10 reports that she was impressed by the willingness of Europeans to talk about their deep emotions. She had imagined that in Germany and England, people would be less willing to self-disclose but instead found that “they dove into talking about the emotional realties of their most painful experiences of jealousy as if they were diving into a pool in an oasis in a huge dry desert.” She continues, “Europeans in my classes have been incredibly appreciative of our California human-growth-potential
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approach to talking about our feelings. I hear it is a new experience for many of them.”

Easton also commented that access to universal health care throughout Europe and the United Kingdom supports the freedom that people have to experiment in their relationships. People in other countries can leave relationships with which they are unhappy, and they still have health care, and so do their children unlike in the United States, where leaving a marriage or a job can leave you without health insurance, she points out.

In addition, Easton found that in some cities, such as Amsterdam, women seem to feel safer and freer in expressing their sexuality than in the United States. “They had no fear that opening up about their sexuality, their fantasies, or their histories, would in any way expose them to anything intrusive or unwelcome. I was touched almost to tears by the freedom and ease with which they expressed themselves, with words and with body language. . . . In London, people were more likely to set boundaries and maintain distance to avoid potentially difficult connections.”11

Dr. Meg Barker is a thirty-five-year-old college teacher and psychotherapist based in England who is one of a handful of academic researchers, including several in the United Kingdom, to take on the unfashionable topic of polyamory. She’s published a number of articles on polyamory herself and is coeditor of a new anthology called
Understanding NonMonogamies
,12

which is intended to bring together academic papers on polyamory, swinging, and gay open relationships from researchers in a variety of disciplines.

She’s also been involved with the polyamory activists in the United Kingdom who organize an annual PolyDay event in London. Dr. Barker observes that more queer activists and political people are participating in this event than in the past. In her view, “Polyamory is an interesting umbrella that includes everyone from those who want to open their relationships up sexually for very personal reasons to those who want to explore new ways of relating and change current systems for very political reasons, and everyone in between.” She says that some people are questioning whether polyamory is a useful umbrella term for all those exploring “consensual nonmonogamies”

or whether some people, such as swingers or gays, feel excluded or exclude themselves because they don’t identify as polyamorous.

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Dr. Barker says that she’s “keen to keep conversations going about how people manage their relationships in these changing times.” She feels it’s important to demonstrate and support the diverse approaches people are taking to relating and to keep questioning the barriers and boundaries that are created and whether they serve people. Dr. Barker says that she’s “drawn to ways of relating which recognize the value in various relationships rather than prioritizing sexual, romantic, or partner relationships over others.” Influenced by anarchist theory as well as the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence, in recent years she’s moved away from the

“rigid counting of the people I was sexual with” to an awareness that all her relationships are flowing and changing and include a number of valued connections with “people and groups and places and other creatures” as well herself and the world at large.13

Graham Nicholls is a thirty-four-year-old artist who started his website on polyamory (http://www.polyamory.org.uk) about a year ago because he felt that the British/European perspective was a little different from what seemed relevant for Americans. This was a theme I kept hearing from Brits and Europeans, but until I chatted with Graham, I didn’t have a clear idea of what was meant. He divides his time between London, where he was born; Finland, where his two bisexual female partners live; and Estonia, where he is starting a new business and two new relationships. According to Graham, Scandinavians have a greater affinity for polyamory than is the case in other European countries. He grew up in a working-class family in London and naturally gravitated toward polyamory without knowing the word or the concept. He initially heard about polyamory through websites on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer issues and feminism but now emphasizes a spiritual approach. His introduction to the idea of nonmonogamy first came from reading the infamous Marquis de Sade, but he didn’t like Sade’s violence and negativity. After reading radical feminist Andrea Dworkin’s chapter on Sade in her book on pornography, he became interested in radical feminism.

For Graham, the key issue in polyamory is not sexual morality but, rather, being open and honest in relationship. He feels that things like the pickup artist scene and the old-fashioned drunken one-night stand have sexually negative undertones but at the same time is more attracted to concepts like “relationship anarchy” than hierarchical relationships. On the basis of Internet posts and websites, he sees a greater emphasis on marriage in the United States and more interest in casual sex and general
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sex-positive attitudes in Europe. Graham’s hope is that polyamory can be a way of raising consciousness about sexuality and relationships, not just a new form of relationship.

When Graham asked me in an instant-messaging interview what I thought about relationship anarchy, I decided I’d better get up to speed with this new term. So I contacted Andie Nordgren, a twenty-eight-year-old artist and software product manager who currently lives in London and is credited with creating and popularizing the concept of relationship anarchy in her native Sweden.14 Andie agreed that there was little if any difference between relationship anarchy and polyamory as I defined it in my book
Polyamory: The New
Love without Limits
over a decade ago: “I use polyamory to describe the whole range of lovestyles which arise from an understanding that love can not be forced to flow, or not flow, in any particular direction. Love which is allowed to expand often grows to include a number of people. But to me, polyamory has more to do with an internal attitude of letting love evolve without expectations and demands than it does with the number of partners involved.”15

Her complaint about polyamory is that by focusing on the number of partners, it still upholds the idea that “normal” love is only between two people. In other words, even though the word
polyamory
has been substituted for
nonmonogamy
, she still sees polyamory as a variation on the monogamy/marriage paradigm. Andie, who identifies herself as a gender queer, explains, “You can compare it to the way many queers don’t use the term
bisexual
even if they have relationships to both male-and female-bodied people, as the term itself indicates that there are only two genders and three sexualities (straight, bi, and gay) to choose from. The other aspect that was frustrating to me was that the polyamorous community in Sweden was still upholding a clear difference between
relationships
and friendships. Even if there was a lot of talk about not falling into the monogamous traps of wishing/demanding that another person be everything for you—and of course about how love was not restricted to one person—there was still a strong distinction made between those you had a relationship with and those who were just friends.”