Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners (9 page)

Katie
: So sweetheart, “You need him to be monogamous”—is that true? Or

“You want him to be monogamous”—is that true?

Ellen
: No. I think I will get bored.

Katie
: So he has the perfect partner, and you have the perfect partner. How do you react when you believe this thought “I want him to be monogamous,”

and he hasn’t been—for fifteen years?

Ellen
: I get really frustrated. I try all kinds of things. I try to be open and nice and say okay, do it, and then I hide my jealousy. Or I have tantrums and scream and try different ways to manipulate him.

Katie
: So does that thought bring peace or stress into your life—“I want him to be monogamous”?

Ellen
: Stress.

Katie
: So “I want him to be monogamous”—turn it around.

Ellen
: I don’t want him to be monogamous.

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Katie
: Now give me an example of why your life is better because he’s not monogamous.

Ellen
: I have many! Okay, it keeps me on the track of watching myself and my thoughts. I don’t get bored. He comes back much more loving.

Katie
: Now why is
his
life better because he’s not monogamous? Reasons that you’re thankful for. The things that you like about it in his life. Advantages to
him
that really are advantages to
you
.

Ellen
: Oh. He doesn’t get bored with me.

Katie
: Yes, when he’s gone, you’re not arguing.

Katie
: Because
his
life is not monogamous, and that’s how he’s living it. He does what he has been doing for fifteen years, and you have continued to accept him back into your life and that tells me that it is okay with you that he isn’t monogamous and you’re fooling yourself, lying to both of you, when you say that it isn’t okay, and that is the pain that you both feel.

Katie
(
To Charlie
): Why do you need more than one woman, in your relationship with her for fifteen years? Why do you prefer nonmonogamy?

Charlie
: It’s more fun.

Katie
(
to Ellen
): So look into his eyes, honey. You wanted to know. So there is his answer.

Charlie
: And there’s more. I find that there’s something. . . . I feel like when I limit myself to one woman, I feel like I’m in a box. . . . It’s almost like it doesn’t feel like love to say that I’m just with one woman. I feel that if I deny myself being open with other people, and that includes sexually . . . , I’m denying something that’s quite natural in me. And I tried monogamy, and it didn’t work for me. I noticed that I punished the woman that I was with, for me not being able to live the life that I wanted to live, I blamed her for the decisions I was making.

The simple but structured format11 that Byron Katie uses to help people stop arguing with reality and make peace with whatever is happening whether or not they ultimately decide to change things may sound a little odd to those unfamiliar with it. However, it’s a very useful tool that can be applied in many situations to resolve both inner and outer conflict. In this case, it quickly moves Ellen out of her unquestioned assumption that she wants her partner to be monogamous and brings her to the realization
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that while she’s been resisting nonmonogamy, it’s only her resistance and fear that are causing her to struggle. When she opens her mind and gives up the struggle, it becomes apparent that, on the whole, she likes having a nonmonogamous partner, even though she is apparently monogamous herself because it makes for a livelier, more interesting relationship with more opportunities for personal growth.

Psychologist David Ley has studied couples in which the wives are nonmonogamous with the approval and encouragement of their often monogamous husbands. His 2009 book
Insatiable Wives
12 offers evidence that those who practice nonmonogamy tend to have extremely effective communication skills and relationship skills and are no more or no less pathological than any other group. Some of the husbands enjoyed vicari-ously experiencing the sexuality of other men and welcomed the opportunity to explore their bisexuality from a safe distance. In chapter 8, we’ll discuss how polyamory can provide a context for people to directly explore bisexuality or to dip a toe in the forbidden waters of homosexuality or heterosexuality depending on their existing identity. Ley points out that many of the things that make polyamory exciting and compelling are linked to biological, neurochemical, and evolutionary processes that underlie human behavior. For example, “The biological effects of sperm competition

[discussed in chapter 10 of this book] and other evolutionary mechanisms that were intended to prevent or control the risk of cuckoldry are being subverted by couples in a fashion they use to reignite and maintain high levels of sexual excitement within their marriages,”13 according to Ley.

One woman he interviewed put it this way: “I’ve never met anyone I respect and love more than [my husband]. So it’s not about seeking something that’s missing. It’s about added fun and enjoyment. It keeps our sex more alive, because it’s not the same, it’s broken up, variety in between. I think that’s one of the reasons why sex is just off the charts for us.”14

MANAGING TRAUMA, INTENSITY,

Keeping erotic love alive and maintaining a healthy sense of separateness motivates some long-term couples to adopt polyamory. Both singles and couples often enjoy the greater intensity of having multiple partners.

Polyamory can also serve singles who find exclusivity to be an emotional
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challenge, especially in the early stages of relationship when trust, compatibility, and commitment are still being tested. Dane’s reflections illustrate all these motivations.15

Dane is a tall, slender man in his mid-thirties. Everything about him is intense, including his sexuality. “In some ways I prefer monogamy,”

Dane admits, “and right now I’m mostly monogamous, but most of the dating world doesn’t have time for the deep one-on-one cocoons I enjoy, so it’s easier to find lovers if I don’t require so much undivided attention with me. The first woman I explored open relationship with noticed she was opening up to me more than she had to any other man, in part because she didn’t feel on the spot and had a back door herself. Some women have time enough but get overwhelmed by the energetic intensity that deep communication and lovemaking often brings. I discovered when I had more than one lover my sex drive increased due to the wonderful feeling of being wanted by two or three women rather than being overwhelming for one woman. It’s a real turn-off for me to have energy to give that a partner has no room to receive, which would happen for me 90 percent of the time in a monogamous relationship, simply because I prefer more intensity and have a lot of time and energy I enjoy investing in relationships.”

Dr. Ley, who specializes in treating trauma, believes that in some cases nonmonogamy is not a symptom of trauma or emotional disturbance but may actually be an adaptive mechanism that allows individuals to overcome effects of trauma and loss. He feels that one of his interviewees who was abused as a child was able to have a truly intimate emotional relationship only in a polyamorous framework. He suggests that monogamy was simply too threatening and restrictive for her to tolerate emotionally.

Psychologist Peter Thomas emphasizes the importance of developing an internal working model of an effective protector in order to establish and maintain healthy boundaries, a crucial developmental step that is often missed in adults with a history of childhood abuse.16 As a result, these individuals can be easily retraumatized in polyamorous relating because they tend to dissociate and become passive when they feel threatened, making them easy prey for the sexual predators who sometimes show up at sexually open gatherings as well as becoming victims of well-meaning but insensitive partners. However, they can also benefit from interacting with a committed partner who is caring, nurturing, and protective without being possessive. In a committed polyamorous relationship, adults who are
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recovering from childhood abuse can reap the benefits of developing trust in the reliable protector they missed as children and eventually develop this protective agency within themselves.

Alex and Janet Lessin are a good example of a couple who are committed to the practice of polyamory as one tool in healing the wounds from Janet’s childhood sexual abuse. Shortly after Janet and Alex got together about ten years ago, Alex arranged an evening with another couple who’d been his longtime lovers. Janet took to Altheia right away but experienced an intense revulsion to Hercules. Earlier that day, she’d learned that her mother was dying but decided to go ahead with the date that meant so much to Alex. Later that evening, Alex, a professional therapist who’d trained in holotropic breathwork with Dr. Stan Grof and G-spot massage with Charles Muir, was using these techniques with Janet when the long-repressed memory of being orally raped and suffocated at the age of four by her mother’s boyfriend, who was bald like Hercules, surfaced. At the time, Janet had left her body and, while presumed dead for more than thirty minutes, observed dispassionately from above while the adults struggled to revive her. She reports that angel-like guides showed her several alternate futures that led to her deciding to remain among the living to protect her mother from prosecution for murder.17

Alex subsequently applied all the tools in his therapeutic tool kit, including psychodramatically reenacting the rape while he played a protective father role, to help Janet heal from this and other childhood traumas. He reports that her lifelong aversion to oral sex, along with her distaste for Hercules, eventually dissipated. Because of Janet’s unconscious negative associations with bald-headed men, it’s unlikely that she would ever have chosen to become intimate with one outside a circumstance like this.

Janet’s childhood wounds have posed challenges to her ongoing efforts to establish healthy relationships, but with Alex’s loyal support, she’s overcome many of her fears and enthusiastically embraced polyamory.

There have been two surveys of the American polyamory community and one in the United Kingdom within the past two decades all relying on demographics gathered from self-identified polyamorists who attend events or participate in online discussions about polyamory. In my experience,
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people who are active in the polyamory community are not necessarily typical of those who are actively polyamorous but choose not to associate themselves with those groups. My impression is that neither the more socially conservative nor the more socially radical individuals are well represented. In addition, people of color, those of lower socioeconomic status, young people, gay men, and, to a lesser extent, lesbian women are under-represented in the self-proclaimed polyamory community, although I find abundant evidence, both direct and indirect, that these groups are at least as likely to be involved in polyamorous relationships.

Walston18 distributed a questionnaire via polyamory e-mail lists on the Internet in 1999 and received 430 responses.
Loving More
magazine collected data from 1,000 people attending polyamory conferences in the late 1990s.19 Barker surveyed thirty poly people via the Internet in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States.20 All these studies report similar results, except that Barker’s sample was almost entirely bisexual, and the motivations they identified are essentially the same as those put forth by those whose interviews I’ve shared here. Walston reported that more than half the respondents reported that their reasons for practicing polyamory included openness and honesty, personal growth, personal freedom, sexual variety, romantic variety, philosophical ideal, sense of community, and needs not being met by one relationship. Fewer than half the respondents gave these motivators: protest against cultural norms, falling in love, additional adults to help with child rearing, economic reasons, partner falling in love, and other unnamed reasons. Interestingly, the only significant gender difference was that women were more likely than men or transsexuals to say that they had chosen polyamory because of falling in love.

Both surveys found that polyamorists were more highly educated than the general public and that the majority were no longer identified with the religion in which they were raised, although most had some spiritual affilia-tion. Both also reported a high incidence of bisexuality, although nearly 30

percent of the
Loving More
respondents didn’t identify their sexual orientation at all. The
Loving More
survey found that while individuals had incomes comparable to the national median, 78 percent of households were way above the national median for households, and more than a quarter reported six-digit household incomes, although only 44 percent were married, and only 20 percent were in live-in poly relationships. I suspect that the high household incomes are more likely influenced by high numbers of affluent two-career professional couples than the combined incomes of
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three or more wage earners, but both factors probably contribute. Walston did not inquire about income but found that 16 percent lived with three or more partners, while 30 percent lived alone, and more than half were married or cohabiting couples.

Eighty percent of those who completed the
Loving More
survey admitted that they had experienced jealousy, a topic not included in the Walston report, and 93 percent were concerned about discrimination against polys, with 43 percent reporting that they had directly experienced prejudice, although only 17 percent had gotten negative responses after coming out to spouses, with lower percentages of negative response from others. Almost all the respondents in both studies had come out to their partners, and most who had children were also out to their children but were less likely to tell parents, employers, and neighbors.