Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners (6 page)

They began by checking out swinging. Nancy continues, “Swinging was
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easily accessible. We were uncomfortable with the idea of having sex with strangers, so we chose off-premise clubs, which meant we got to dance, flirt, chat, and get acquainted with potential partners. We both preferred to become friends before making love. The owner of our chosen club explained at the start of each dance, ‘When you want to cum, you need to go.’ That was fine with us!

“I also ran an ad in an underground paper and met a woman with whom I hoped to discover that elusive chemistry so we could become lovers.

Instead, she became my best friend as she and Darrell became lovers, and we established a polyamorous trio. We experienced a sequence of three trios, two of which lasted many years.” Nancy is careful to let me know that they’re still friends with one of these women after twenty-four years, although she is now in a monogamous marriage. Another has been part of their lives for twelve years, although it’s been eight years since they’ve been lovers. Nancy and Darrell also have relationships with several couples that have gone on for anywhere from two to twenty years, so she’s had many opportunities to explore making love with women.

While Nancy and Darrell consciously chose polyamory as an opportunity to grow together and to deepen their own bond while exploring committed sexualoving relationships with others, they didn’t immediately realize that polyamory would become a spiritual practice. When I first met them about fifteen years ago, they were seeking help in releasing and transforming jealousy. Nancy appeared the more emotional of the two, but both exuded a sensible, good-humored sincerity. Through cultivating compersion (a term describing an emotion that is the opposite of jealousy and discussed further in chapter 6) and incorporating the concept of “honoring the Divine in each other and in every one of our partners,” polyamory became a doorway into spiritual growth for Nancy and Darrell, leading Nancy to write an article, “Spiritual Partnership,” for
Loving More
magazine, in which she writes, “Within Spiritual Partnership, mutual spiritual growth takes precedence over comfort and security and total honesty becomes part of the bond. Spiritual partners are committed to a personal growth dynamic, even if it is not ‘comfortable and secure.’ Within this paradigm, monogamy becomes a choice instead of a mandate and nontraditional relationships naturally evolve through partners becoming committed to honestly sharing at a heart level.”1

Nancy continues, “Our relationship has been open for about thirty years now, and we are still deeply committed to each other and to our extended
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family. Sometimes that commitment means listening lovingly to someone who has lost his job; it may mean my accepting that Darrell will spend time loving a woman who has decided she no longer wants to spend much time with me. Although her decision may have bruised my ego, becoming peaceful despite that bruise is part of my own personal growth process. If poly is a spiritual path, my ego is less involved when personal and spiritual growth remain paramount. This makes it easier to let go of jealousy and allow compersion to counter fear, which results in less drama.

“We’re now in our sixties and retired, which allows us to have a lot of time and energy for extended relationships. Ironically, during the summer, I am pretty much monogamous by choice as Darrell continues his relationship with two women. One of those two is a heart-centered friend of mine; the other prefers to have her connection limited to Darrell. In the other seasons, we share loving energy with several other couples and an occasional single.”

Nancy is a retired therapist, so she and Darrell sometimes act as coaches for couples who want to explore how to have an open, loving relationship with each other (and include others) with minimum drama.

She feels that “one extremely important part of practicing successful polyamory is the recognition that change is the only constant in multiple relationships. Inherent in each polyamorous beginning is an unplanned ending. As we age, lovers die, become geographically challenged through moving away, or decide to become monogamous, which means we shift into a nonsexual friendship or lose the relationship.” Nancy and Darrell also value their spiritual partnerships with polyamorous friends who have never been lovers but where the love is deep and complete nevertheless.

Kamala and Michael are a happy and successful thirty-something-year-old couple with a three-year-old son. They’ve been in an open marriage for seven years and have a large extended family of friends and lovers.

Kamala is also a relationship coach and poly activist who has made many media appearances in recent years. She is following the trail I blazed a decade earlier, braving the slings and arrows of those who believe strongly in monogamy as a religious ideal. She’s been accused of trying to convert others to nonmonogamy, trying to prove something to the religious right, and taking advantage of the free publicity to market her books and DVDs. Kamala retorts, “I have no idea what difference it will make in the long run. What I know is that I love my life. My husband, my
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son, and most of my lovers are truly happy.” Kamala says she’s motivated by a strong desire to be a “voice for freedom and love in the world. I’m willing to be misunderstood, misquoted or misrepresented, whatever it takes. . . . I’m willing to show up and be seen” if it makes the world a better place.2

Sonia Song grew up in Communist China. She was raised to be a good party member but lost faith in the Cultural Revolution after the horrors of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Eventually, she found her way to California, where she first sought me out about ten years ago because she was looking for an ethical way to expand beyond a loveless and sexless marriage with a husband who didn’t want to divorce for practical reasons.

Sonia has long since extricated herself from that marriage and found more compatible partners but continues to choose polyamory because it feels right to her. We’ll hear more about Sonia’s polyamorous life in a later chapter, but for now the conclusion from her book,
Donkey Baby
, is an eloquent expression of the idealism that inspires some people to choose polyamory.

“In the Orient the butterfly is a symbol of love and sex. In the West it’s a symbol of transformation. I feel like a butterfly in both senses. My life journey began being carried in a basket on a donkey’s back in China during my parents’ march to Beijing with the People’s Liberation Army. Today I am actively involved in the global peace, justice, and environmental movement in California. Have I found love? I think love has found me. And I have gained a greater appreciation of the human spirit that carries each of us in search for our own path. For me, the polyamorous way of relating to people is my utopian dream come true, a revolutionary approach in human relations, as well as a powerful political statement: If we love and feel loved, we will be peaceful; furthermore, if we can bring that spirit of love and peace to formulating and implementing social, economic, and political policies, positive changes will follow. Today I’m living my values by enjoying a joyful polyamorous lifestyle, politically active, ecologically conscious, and spiritually grounded.”3

C. T. Butler, who is now in his fifties, has lived polyamorously and been actively engaged in working for social change for his entire adult life. In 1981, he cofounded the Food Not Bombs collective, which is still going strong around the world as a grassroots organization to provide free veg-etarian meals for the hungry and raise awareness about homelessness as well as protesting war and military spending.

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C.T. reports that for two years in the early days of Food Not Bombs, the collective was run by three men and three women who shared a large house and whose relationships included sexual involvement with each other in one way or another. They went so far in challenging the status quo that they had the experiment of not having their own personal bedrooms in the house. C.T. recalls, “Downstairs, we had the kitchen, dining room, living room, and study; upstairs, we had the sleeping room, the sex room, the library/meditation room, and the music room. We all slept together in one big bed in the sleeping room, and sometimes, some would sleep in the sex room or music room. There were others moving in or moving out of the collective all the time.”

While many of the young people who formed the Food Not Bombs collective were already lovers, they were “seasoned activists” who viewed their sexually radical lifestyle as a precaution against infiltration. C.T. recalls that “we were quite concerned about infiltration at the time and felt that the willingness to be sexual and deeply intimate with everyone else in the collective was a way to prevent infiltration. Obviously, we did not think it was absolutely foolproof; we just thought it was helpful. However, that does not mean we required everyone to have sex with everyone else in the collective; it was that we were interested in experimenting with sexual relations in an outside-the-box way, and we saw the usefulness of this experimenting in strengthening our bonds and our effectiveness as political activists. Therefore, in practice, if someone was unwilling to experiment, they were not suitable collective members. If they were comfortable with open relationships and had a willingness to experiment sexually, as demonstrated by their behavior, then we assumed they were very unlikely to be an agent of the state.”

In keeping with their anarchist politics, the collective were strong adherents of consensus decision making. Any member could call a meeting called a group-group, where everyone would engage in a discussion that could not end until everyone agreed on a resolution, which might mean two or three days with breaks only for eating and sleeping. C.T. reports that these group-groups were called only maybe five times in two years to address things like “dealing with a sexual predator, kicking a member out, and sexism.”4

C.T. says that jealousy was never much of a problem for him because of his “political analysis of life.” He explains that, “from early adulthood, I realized that possessive behaviors and the idea that one person could control
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the behavior of another because of the concept of marriage was really just another form of slavery, one person owning another. I have never wanted to control or have another person all for myself. With regard to the jealousy my partners would feel, I was very patient and clear that jealousy is primarily based on fear. I would take the time to help my partner uncover her fear and manage it so that it would either go away or, at least, not destroy our relationship. Generally, that worked pretty well.” During the 1980s and 1990s, he helped start polyamory discussion groups throughout New England, lived in a series of polyamorous families, and fathered several children. For C.T., polyamory was as much a tool for political activism as a means of personal gratification.

Not all polyamorists claim to be as well prepared or idealistic in their motivations as Nancy and Darrell or Kamala and Michael, Sonia Song, or C.

T. Butler. In some cases, polyamory becomes a context for the unconscious playing out of the classic addict and codependent drama; in others, the dynamics show a mixture of conflicting motivations to satisfy an addiction alongside more altruistic, growth-oriented, or utopian agendas.

Thelma first sought my advice on informational resources about polyamory because a year or so into their relationship, her boyfriend had come out to her as polyamorous, and she wanted to learn more about it. “I am
not
polyamorous,” she told me. “I have enough difficulty with one relationship at a time, and I would go completely unconscious in a number of simultaneous relationships. But I’m in love with him, and he wants polyamory, so I’m trying to be open minded about it.” I suggested a few books and websites, offered to put her on my mailing list, and suggested she let me know if she wanted some coaching in navigating this unfamiliar territory. About two years later, Thelma sought help from a therapist.

Several years after that, Thelma looked me up again, asking what I thought about sex addiction. I responded that I was very disturbed by the presence of sex addiction in the polyamory community, saying that while most polyamorous people are
not
addicts, it was a significant problem and one that often came up for discussion in my workshops. Although I wish sex addiction was never an issue in polyamory, the truth is that polyamory does provide a convenient cover story for addicts who are generally in de-W H O C H O O S E S P O L Y A M O R Y , A N D W H Y ?

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nial about having an addiction. It’s easy to justify sexual obsession by calling it polyamory. A handful of sex addicts can wreak havoc in a community, especially when people are still operating out of conditioning that forbids the sharing of “family secrets” out of misguided respect for confidentiality. Polyamory offers a venue in which sex addicts can begin at least to tell the truth about what they’re doing instead of carrying on secret affairs. I prefer to put a positive spin on it by seeing that bringing their destructive, addictive behavior out into the open is the first step toward healing, but unfortunately it can get messy and hurtful for those who are hoping for love and instead find callousness.

After hearing my opinions, Thelma decided she’d like to tell me about her own experience. “I can well describe what it is like, how it feels to be the substance that a sex addict uses to engage in his addiction. If I could curtail even one person’s suffering by doing so, it would be worth revisiting the whole ugly mess which I finally put behind me two years ago,” she told me. For Thelma, the idea that she was attempting a polyamorous relationship that would involve a potentially painful confrontation with her own jealousy but would be well worth it in the end allowed her to be drawn into an abusive relationship. A man with more empathy and integrity would have either told her about his sexual activity with other women before she became so deeply involved or curtailed his sexual adventures until he had disengaged with her once it became apparent she was suffering so intensely. Here is her story in her own words.