Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners

by Deborah M. Anapol

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

  Anapol, Deborah.

  Polyamory in the 21st century : love and intimacy with multiple partners / Deborah Anapol.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4422-0021-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4422-0023-4 (electronic)

  1. Non-monogamous relationships. 2. Sexual ethics. 3. Open marriage. 4. Homosexuality—Psychological aspects. I. Title. II. Title: Polyamory in the twenty first century.

  HQ980.A536 2010

  306.84'23--dc22

  2010014094

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Printed in the United States of America

  WHAT IS POLYAMORY?

  Polyamory is an invented word for a different kind of relationship. Poly comes from Greek and means “many.” Amory comes from Latin and means “love.” Mixing Greek and Latin roots in one word is against the traditional rules, but then so is loving more than one person at a time when it comes to romantic or erotic love.

  The word polyamory was created in the late 1980s by Morning Glory and Oberon Zell. This couple, who have been married since 1974, continue to enjoy a deeply bonded open relationship that has morphed in many directions over the years, including a live-in triad lasting ten years and a six-person group marriage that recently dissolved after ten years.

  The Zells did not invent the lifestyle, which has come to be known as polyamory, nor did I, though we are among a handful of pioneers who have mapped this new territory and thought deeply about its implications over the past thirty some years. I use the word polyamory to describe the whole range of lovestyles that arise from an understanding that love cannot be forced to flow or be prevented from flowing 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 or demands that it look a particular way than it does with the number of partners involved.

  Few people would deny that there’s been a significant shift in the way marriage and intimate relationships have evolved over the past few decades. Most observers agree that traditional marriage is floundering. While some couples still manage to thrive, they are in the minority. Rising divorce rates, declining marriage rates, and the skyrocketing incidence of infidelity on the one hand and sexless marriage on the other have many people concerned about their prospects for marital bliss and newly curious about alternatives.

  More and more people find themselves facing the discovery that lifelong monogamy is more of a mirage than a reality. At the same time, most experts on marriage, family, and sexuality continue to write and speak as if all extramarital sex falls into the category of infidelity. Sometimes it’s acknowledged that an affair may inadvertently have a positive impact on a troubled marriage, but as far as the authorities are concerned, polyamory or consensual inclusive relationships do not exist. End of conversation. The losers are those adventurous souls struggling to make sense of their ever-changing relationships. We are all understandably confused by unspoken and uncharted shifts in the ways we mate, but trying to deny this is happening will not help us adapt to the changes already under way, nor will it help us evolve new ways of relating that are truly appropriate for the twenty-first century.

  It’s often been noted that changes in belief systems frequently lag behind changes in behavior, and nowhere is this more evident that in the realm of erotic love. Meanwhile, people are voting with their search engines. Fueled by the power of the newly expanded Internet, the concept called polyamory has spread like wildfire. A recent Google search turned up over 1.8 million entries. In less than two decades, the use of and the meanings attributed to this newly invented word have taken on a life of their own. These days, polyamory has become a bit of a buzzword and often means different things to different people. So if you’re perplexed by polyamory, you’re not alone. Some people are still confusing polyamory with polygamy, which technically means to be married to more than one person, regardless of gender, but which has come to imply the patriarchal style of marriage in which a man has more than one wife while the women are monogamous with their shared husband.

  The Oxford Dictionary defines polyamory as “(1) The fact of having simultaneous close emotional relationships with two or more other individuals, viewed as an alternative to monogamy, esp. in regard to matters of sexual fidelity; (2) the custom or practice of engaging in multiple sexual relationships with the knowledge and consent of all partners concerned.” These two alternate definitions are themselves a source of confusion for many. Jenna had the impression that polyamory refers to the “simultaneous close emotional relationships with two or more others” and, when she got involved with Gary, was intrigued by the prospect of exploring how this worked. But when Gary described himself as polyamorous, he had the second definition in mind and was intent on engaging in multiple sexual relationships regardless of the degree of emotional closeness. Neither was aware that they had very different expectations about their relationship, and both were shocked and dismayed when they discovered they were operating according to different game plans. Resentment toward the other for having a different agenda was quick to undermine their budding romance.

  Considering how few people risk having any conversation at all with a prospective partner about their intentions around sexual exclusivity, it’s not surprising that Jenna and Gary failed to recognize that they had different expectations about polyamory. They were headed in the right direction, but without some guidance, they didn’t quite arrive where they wanted to go.

  FORM VERSUS VALUES

  Because so much of the discussion about polyamory has focused on the form of the relationship rather than the underlying values and belief systems, such misunderstandings are all too common. Two different relationships can look pretty much the same from the outside but will be experienced entirely differently from the inside, that is, by the people who are engaged in them.

  For example, let’s take two married heterosexual couples. Both couples married in their early thirties and have been together for ten years. One couple has the traditional “forsaking all others till death do us part” agreement, but neither partner is emotionally or sexually satisfied. Sheila’s biological clock was ticking when she decided to marry Fred. He is a good provider and enthusiastic father but prefers golf to sexual intimacy and avoids conflict whenever possible. Sheila’s increasing sexual frustration and loneliness soon had her fantasizing about having an affair, but she was afraid of ending up divorced. She gradually withdrew from Fred sexu
ally and emotionally, and he immersed himself in his business. Superficially, they look like the perfect couple, but Sheila would leave in a heartbeat if it weren’t for their two sons.

  Gina and Eric met while working for the same company. They were attracted to each other but hesitant to get sexually involved in the fishbowl of the workplace. Instead, they developed a friendship and had many long conversations about life and love, discovering that they shared a passion for spiritual matters and personal autonomy as well as cooking, surfing, and mountain climbing. As Gina put it, “I don’t want to hold my partner prisoner, and I don’t want to be imprisoned either.” When they finally transitioned from friendship to romance, they agreed that they would have an open relationship with as few restrictions as possible on the other’s freedom to choose outside sexual partners.

  For the first few years of their relationship, neither chose to interact with other partners. Then they met another couple who were similarly inclined and dated for over a year. When the other couple decided to close their marriage, Gina and Eric were grief stricken but happy that they still had each other. Although their marriage continues to be open in theory, they find that with each passing year they are less interested in including others. Eric says, “We have no rules against outside intimacy. It could happen again, but it would take someone very special to get our attention. The truth is, we’re happy with what we’ve got and don’t really feel a need for other sexual relationships.”

  Gina and Eric, according to my definition, are actually polyamorous even though the form their relationship has taken looks very much like a monogamous couple. To me, the most important aspect of polyamory is not how many partners a person has. Rather, it is the surrendering of conditioned beliefs about the form a loving relationship should take and allowing love itself to determine the form most appropriate for all parties. If the truth is that two people freely embrace sexual exclusivity not because somebody made them do it or because they’re afraid of the consequences of doing something else, I would still consider that couple polyamorous.

  The intention of polyamorous pioneers was not substituting one “should” for another. And yet that’s exactly what many people are doing in communities where polyamory has become trendy. Instead of struggling to conform to a monogamous ideal and ideology, they find themselves struggling to conform to a nonmonogamous ideal and ideology. Meanwhile, young people who find polyamory either “too mainstream” or “too difficult” are rejecting the whole legacy and creating their own concepts, like relationship anarchy and friends with benefits, as we shall see in chapter 8. Labels, definitions, and organizations are useful insofar as they help us understand our experience and communicate about it, but what’s the point of trading one rigid belief system for another?

  Quite understandably, most people think that polyamory is about proclaiming their right to have more than one sexual partner or to have multipartner relationships. This might take the form of an open relationship where a couple, married or not, agrees to have additional lovers; a group marriage involving three or more people in one household; or an intimate network of couples and/or singles who have ongoing intimate relationships but don’t live together. We’ll look more closely at these variations later, but for now let’s just say that polyamory implies an alternative to both serial monogamy and monogamy with secret affairs, which are the two most common relationship choices in the Western world.

  To those of us who coined and popularized the term polyamory, the form the relationship takes is less important than the underlying values. The freedom of surrendering to love and allowing love—not just sexual passion, not just social norms and religious strictures, not just emotional reactions and unconscious conditioning—to determine the shape our intimate relationships take is the essence of polyamory. Polyamory is based on a decision to honor the many diverse ways loving relationships can evolve. Polyamory can take many forms, but as it was originally conceived, if deception or coercion is involved or if the people involved are out of integrity in any way, it’s not polyamory no matter how many people are sexually involved with each other. These more subtle qualities have often gotten lost in the excitement and glamour of embracing sexual freedom, but they are crucial to understanding the deeper significance of polyamory.

  A NEW PARADIGM FOR LOVE

  The guilt and shame associated with premarital or extramarital sex and love is not quite a thing of the past, and neither is the lying and hiding that have accompanied these behaviors for centuries. Unfortunately, many old habits and patterns of relating have been translated into the polyamorous arena despite our idealistic vision for a future in which humans love each other unconditionally with passion and transparency and without possessiveness and control. Deep cultural change is a long-term affair. The increasing visibility of and acceptance for variations on the “one man, one woman, till death do us part” scenario has certainly decreased the shock value and threat that alternative choices once elicited, but we are still a long way from a true paradigm shift. In fact, few people believe that it’s even possible for unconditional love and erotic love to coexist.

  Those of us who are passionate about articulating a new paradigm for love and creating more tolerance for diversity in lovestyle choices agree that while monogamy is a wonderful option for some people some of the time, it’s not the only valid possibility. The reality is that humans are not naturally monogamous. If we were, we would mate once, for life, and never for a moment consider doing anything else.

  Polyamorous relationships, like monogamous ones, differ in their basic intentions and approaches. Some polyamorous relationships resemble traditional monogamous marriage in their emphasis on creating an impermeable boundary around the group, operating according to a well-defined set of rules (sometimes called a social contract), and expecting family members to replace individual desires with group agendas. I call this type of relationship “old paradigm” regardless of whether it is polyamorous or monogamous.

  Other polyamorous relationships have a primary focus on using the relationships to further the psychological and spiritual development of the partners. These relationships tend to put more emphasis on responding authentically in the present moment, allowing for individual autonomy, and seeing loved ones as mirrors or reflections of oneself. These new paradigm relationships may also take either monogamous or polyamorous forms. Many people these days are in transition and find themselves attempting to blend elements of old and new paradigms as well as monogamous and polyamorous lovestyles, but these distinctions are useful in clarifying the direction in which we wish to move.

  THE HUMAN ANIMAL AND ALL OUR RELATIONS

  By the end of the twentieth century, scientific research on animal behavior and brain chemistry was providing strong confirmation of the troubling observation many of us had already made on our own—that lifelong monogamy is not natural for humans, nor is it for most other animals. Much publicity has been given to the sexual free-for-all enjoyed by our nearest genetic relatives: the bonobo chimpanzee. But nowhere in the animal kingdom do we find anything remotely resembling the phenomenon now called polyamory. Polyamory is a uniquely human phenomenon. Perhaps this is why conscious and consensual love-based intimate relating is generally left out of academic conversations on marriage and family.

  For much of our evolutionary past, there were no centralized authorities dictating the terms of our sex lives. Rather, a variety of customs that supported local ecosystems gradually arose. In the last couple of millennia, organized religions, the medical establishment, and governments have increasingly taken charge of both sexual prohibitions and family structures. Nevertheless, in much of the world, men are still allowed to have more than one wife (called polygyny by anthropologists), and in a few places, women can have more than one husband (technically called polyandry). In countries where marriages are for couples only, both men and women often have secret extramarital affairs or divorce and marry another. All these patterns of mating and sexual activity can be found in
the animal world. Some are more common than others, and while lifelong monogamy is rare, it does exist.

  As David Barash and Judith Lipton discuss in their 2001 book The Myth of Monogamy, the advent of DNA testing to determine paternity was a major breakthrough in the study of animal mating patterns. Many species previously thought to be monogamous have since been found to be socially monogamous at best. That is, they may mate with a single individual, setting up housekeeping, coparenting, and sharing resources. But DNA testing along with more objective behavioral observation reveals that in many species both males and females have “secret affairs” often with other partnered individuals. Serial monogamy also occurs in the animal kingdom with both males and females “trading up” for a better mate when the opportunity arises.

  Barash and Lipton’s analysis of the proven absence of sexual exclusivity, even in most socially monogamous species, revolves around genetic programming. That is, both males and females will behave in ways that increase the likelihood of reproducing and the survival and successful mating of their offspring. Parenting and other social behavior as well as sexual habits are all strongly linked to genetic programming. Barash and Lipton also mention ecological considerations, what deep ecologists call the “carrying capacity of the land,” as secondary influences on reproductive behaviors, and we’ll return to this interesting factor in a later chapter.

  The viewpoint that we could call DNA-driven sexual behavior is by no means new. But twentieth-century male sociobiologists frequently had blinders on when it came to the reproductive advantages accruing to females when mating with multiple males. It took women scientists1 such as Dr. Sarah Hrdy, whose observations and interpretations often differed markedly from those made by men, to give us a more accurate picture. Hrdy was one of the first to note that among baboons, males would protect rather than attack the young of any female they had mated with. It’s obvious to any unbiased observer that there are many genetic advantages in multiple matings for females as well as males.