Are We Ready for This?
an essay by Jim Lockhart
The American family is in flux. We all know that, and are aware of the rise in single-parent families, same-sex partners in family with or without children, people who choose to live alone, and the myriad of other choices people make in defining their own families.
While the debate rages as to whether humans are naturally monogamous, the question ultimately is moot. If monogamy is our nature, we're not very good at it. Reliable numbers are hard to come by, but the frequency of extramarital affairs that people will admit to is something like 50%. The frequency with which people abandon perfectly good relationships because they have fallen in love with someone else and feel they must choose between their two lovers is also very, very high, though nearly impossible to quantify. This can be further complicated when the attraction is to someone of a different sex from a current partner, and the presumption is strong that one must abandon a perfectly good sexual preference identity along with the perfectly good relationship. All around you, all the time, people you know are choosing to terminate loving relationships (or equivalently, cheating on and lying to their partners) simply because they have absorbed the notion that there can be only one special person at a time, and they give priority to that message over what their hearts are telling them.
We believe strongly that there is another valid choice.
There is a growing movement of people who have embraced the notion that love is in abundant supply and that cultural trappings that separate us from the full expression that our heartfelt connections deserve, at the very least, a very critical analysis. These people, called polyamorists, believe that total openness and honesty is a form of love and that fidelity has to do with honoring negotiated agreements rather than with some presumed ideal. We believe that a truly sustainable, committed relationship depends on embracing the paradoxical notion that only by being true to ourselves, and encouraging our loved ones to do likewise, can we be good partners. All of these ideas together imply that when connection happens it is a family matter. The term polyamory has come into use to express this notion of loving more than one. The polyamory movement with which I and most other members of our group identify is something fundamentally different from the pervasive casual free love of the sixties, or the anonymous casual sex of swinging. It is different from the oppressive patriarchal polygyny that is many Americans' understanding of polygamy. Polyamory is about relationships, about sustainability of intimate connection, and about reclaiming the right to decide for oneself who one calls spouse (or spice, which is the plural form of spouse).
We are here. We live among you, and have, some of us, for many years. And you have not known us. We are among your close friends and valued parishioners, but there are essential things about who we are that you probably have never known. Unless, of course, you are one of us, yourself. Families with more than two adult members exist in our society, and have in many cultures and in many forms for a very long time. It is an idiosyncrasy of our Western culture that the unexamined assumption of life-long monogamous heterosexual pair bonding as the "norm" has so deeply rooted itself in our psyche. Of course, the reality has always been something different from the facade. We tend to say that "the marriage failed" but maybe it's the assumptions that fail.
You may be saying to yourself right now, “Oh, yes, I know about them; they’re the swingers, the free-love people.” Well, no, we’re not them. Or at least not all of us.
Swinging, as distinguished from polyamory, is one style of nonmonogamy which emphasizes extramarital sex for primarily recreational and social purposes. Some polyamorists do enjoy such activities, but most of us seem to focus on having enduring, intimate, romantic and passionate relationships with our multiple partners. Quite often we think of our collections of lovers as families—open marriages, group marriages, line marriages, expanded families, intimate networks, or intentional tribes. And yes, there are children growing up right now in households where there are more than two parents.
We polys are a diverse community. There are no templates and no preconceived assumptions to guide us in structuring our love lives and our families. We are called on, quite consciously and intentionally, to make our lives up as we go along. Probably no two of our creations are exactly the same, and some of them look very different indeed. Some of us may have built up one family arrangement, tripped over something that didn’t work for us, picked ourselves up, and tried something different. Then, too, some of us have lived very happily in the same basic mold for decades.
There appear to be three things that polyamorists do hold in common. The first is an awareness that the exclusive pair bond is not the only garden in which the flowers of true love can blossom and thrive. The second is an experience that jealousy, common as it is, is not an unconquerable demon that inevitably destroys love and life. And the third is a reverence for integrity and adherence to ethics. Whatever odd arrangements we have set up in our love lives, they have been agreed to consciously and responsibly by everyone involved. Deception and cheating are as unpopular among polys as they are among monogamists—perhaps even more so. Coercion, domination, and abuse are intensely disliked and loathed.
Since 1991, there has been a burgeoning in America of what might be called polyamory consciousness. One reason for this is that the very word polyamory was coined in 1991 in an essay entitled “A Bouquet of Lovers” by a woman named Morning Glory Zell. Another reason is the internet, through which polyamorous people who thought they were hopelessly alone in the world were suddenly able to connect with each other and develop a sense of community. And a third reason is the organizational and networking efforts of a group called Loving More, who have been holding annual conferences for over ten years and now publish a national magazine on the subject of responsible nonmonogamy.
We don’t know how many people now identify as poly, but it seems clear that our numbers are growing. Attendance at conferences is up, e-mail lists and websites are proliferating, and poly support groups are growing in number and size.
"Your love is located within you. It is yours to nurture and savor, to give to others in any way you choose. Love must be without qualifications or demands. You must learn to find ecstasy in other people's happiness. Once you feel love for yourself, it is quite normal to give it away." - Wayne Dyer, Gifts from Eykis
"Love one another but make ot a bondage of love." - Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
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