In my own experience, people are very quick to make the leap from “open” to “slutty” without a whole lot of examination. Savage has a newspaper column and a podcast that are mostly about sex; as he has come to be a sort of poster child for the modern-day polyamory movement, I can understand why people might equate polyamory with sex. I’m of the opinion that there is nothing wrong with wanting to jump into bed with tons of people—so long as everyone is communicative and responsible and everything is consensual. That isn’t, however, how all polyamorous people—or even most polyamorous people—live their lives. Savage told me that he feels sad for people who think the poly lifestyle is “about fucking and nothing else.” For Savage and his husband, polyamory is about building meaningful and lasting relationships with people inside and outside of their primary partnership.
So you’re saying everyone should just throw their wedding rings in a nearby creek and be polyamorous; is that it?
No, I don’t think polyamory is for everyone. I don’t believe that if couples were to open up their relationships and love freely, the world would automatically be a better place. People are different, and as such, they love differently. The characters of Cory and Topanga from the TV show Boy Meets World are not cut out for a polyamorous relationship, and the (fictional) world is better for it. (More on that later.) But I do think polyamory is right for me.
Is this book a memoir? Is it a research-y type of book? Is it a pop-up book? Where are the pop-ups?
This book is, mostly, a personal exploration of polyamory. It’s about my own small journey through the good, the bad, and the ugly relationships that led me to live with a partner, regularly visit another long-distance partner, and redefine for myself what the word “partner” really means. I’ve also included some anthropological and anecdotal research that I found helpful while choosing my own romantic adventure.
Aren’t you a thirtysomething bisexual white woman whose experiences are mostly heterosexual? Isn’t that a narrative we’ve all already heard?
Totally, and thank you for bringing it up! I’ve enjoyed a lot of privilege in my experiences around choice.
When I asked the people in my life who know a lot about polyamory to suggest words that would be good to clearly define in a book like this, a lot of their answers had to do with privilege. Here are just a few of the many terms that are important to know and pay attention to when talking about polyamory:
Class privilege: With the choice to be polyamorous comes the need to be flexible with one’s time. That isn’t always possible, particularly for people who aren’t paid a living wage. Having multiple partners is a privilege that, like so many things in our world, is not afforded to everyone.
Heteropatriarchy: This is a term coined to describe a social system that favors men and heterosexuality over women, gender-nonconformists, and people with nonstraight sexual orientations. The heteropatriarchy is why so many of the polyamorous relationships that are visible in the media are ones in which a man in a relationship with a woman asks to open it up, and the woman agrees. In my conversations with women over the course of writing this book, I found that the vast majority were frustrated with the way polyamory has been conveyed in the media. Stories about functional nonmonogamy are rarely about the desires of women, and it’s even rarer for those stories to feature women primarily dating other women.
Transphobia: Many people worldwide express profound dislike for transgender and transsexual bodies. This dislike and fear leads to a skewed representation of the sorts of people who are “allowed” to be in polyamorous relationships.
White privilege: On television shows about polyamory like You, Me, Her and Polyamory: Married & Dating, one thing is automatically and abundantly clear when it comes to casting: poly folks are pretty much universally depicted as white. Because of racial privilege, it’s possible for white people to enjoy alternative relationship models without facing the same kind of persecution marginalized racial populations do. Whiteness makes it easier to go public with alternative relationship structures because white people face less judgment and oppression overall. Most of the people I’m dating are white. While there are a few people of color at the poly cocktail events in my very diverse city of Chicago, the folks who come out are overwhelmingly white. It’s crucial to note that being “out” as poly is more dangerous for some people than it is for others, and, sadly, the level of danger often runs along racial lines.
One of my intentions in writing an account like this is to flex the possibilities of what can be meant by the word “relationship”—in other words, how can our friends be a part of our love lives? Women loving other women are at the center of this exploration for me, but be warned that most of the sex discussed here is, nevertheless, predictably heterosexual. To that end, I should also mention that in working on this book, I found again and again that much of the scientific research on love, sex, sexuality, and polyamory involves mainly socially dominant population groups. I wish this weren’t true, but it is. I apologize on behalf of my species.
Have you ever even been in a long-term, monogamous relationship?
Hey, I’ve dated a lot. And when I say “dated,” I mean it in the least casual way possible: I’ve had a ton of boyfriends, and I stayed with them all for long periods of time—long enough to consider marriage. Because I don’t want to waste your time, I’m writing about only a few of these relationships—specifically, I’m writing about the ones that helped me, if inadvertently, stumble into the whole polyamory thing. On the previous page, I’ve provided a comprehensive time line of the people I’ve seriously dated in my life. This is important because, time-wise, I jump back and forth a bit in this book. Feel free to refer back to the time line if you ever feel confused. The drawings are extremely accurate, so if you see these people on the street, try not to be too obvious about knowing who they are.
PART 1
Happily Ever After?
I learned about love from my parents. They have the model nuclear relationship: they’re still married (forty-eight years and counting), they have two children, they’ve pretty much always had a dog and a cat (or two cats, depending on my mom’s zeal for cats at any given time), and they own the house they live in on a quiet street in a pleasant neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. I don’t think either of them believed they would end up nested inside the house-husband-wife-kids model; they were both sort of rebels when they were younger, attending UC Berkeley in the late 1960s and doing all the things that came with that (pot, parties, and protests). But getting married, it seems, changed things for them.
My parents got married when they were twenty. They’d been dating off and on, but my mom wanted to travel internationally, and she felt that if she was going to travel with a man, it would be prudent to tie the knot. She was a progressive woman, but she still didn’t feel that women and men should be gallivanting across the country all are-they-or-aren’t-they. My dad, as the story goes, was not ready to get married. So my mom said she would go to Japan without him. He said that was fine. While she was in Japan, she got a job as a model (a model! that wasn’t hard to live up to or anything) and met a lot of nice-looking men who were interested in her. She sent my dad pictures of herself in scandalous skirts with her legs curled around chair legs or propped up on counters, and wrote notes on the backs of them: “Hiroji took this picture of me.”
My dad flew to Japan as soon as he had the money, bought a flea-market wedding band, and proposed. A boat captain on a cruise ship married them on their way to Russia. Then they hitchhiked across Europe married, the way my mother believed people who traveled together ought to be.
Like I said, my mom is a progressive woman, but there were still a lot of “ought to”s that she held on to from her own upbringing. You ought to clear the table after dinner if you did not cook the dinner. You ought to send thank-you notes for everything from a birthday card to a phone call on Christmas. You ought to offer to pay when you go out for lunch with anyone, even if you can’t really afford it an
d they invited you, because it’s polite to offer. And every romantic prospect ought to be at least in the running to be “The One.” There is really no point in dating if you can’t see a potential long-term future with the person.
So when I told my mom that I was in love with Kent Jackson in second grade, she told me that he was definitely “marriage material.” She started calling him “The Big Mr. K” and asked me what we would name our kids. All my elementary school girlfriends also discussed marriage with the same fervor that they discussed Polly Pocket and grape Capri Sun (which is to say, a lot). In fact, I lost my best friends in third grade because it came out that I (still) wanted to marry Kent Jackson, and one of my best friends also wanted to marry him, and our friendship could not survive this potential conflict of interest.
My mom talked about love more than most moms probably did, though. The Big Mr. K was a constant topic of conversation, and she also had a habit of talking about other mothers’ marriages. Once, in the car on the way to Baskin-Robbins when I was eight, she began ranting about all the other moms her age who were getting divorces.
And then there was the subject of birds.
My mom was (and is) an avid bird-watcher, and I grew up learning the more technical names of “little brown jobs,” as they are commonly called (sparrows, wrens, finches, that kind of thing). Central to the conversation about birds, for my mom, was the subject of their mating habits—especially how birds, model citizens that they were, mated for life. This was a very big deal. It was repeated in the morning as we sat around the bird feeder, and it was repeated on vacations to places like Wisconsin or California, where there were new and exotic sorts of birds. All birds mated for life, and we humans ought to take note.
I worshiped my mom. I tried to do everything she did when I was growing up. When my mom told me that I should marry Kent Jackson, for example, I got it into my head that I had to marry Kent Jackson, or I would be letting my entire family down. At a very young age, I clung to my mom’s obsession with birds, and I loved the stories about how they mated for life. Today, I even have a bunch of bird tattoos. (I know, I know: how very Portlandia of me. I liked birds before they were hip, okay? I was six years old when I started to love them.) I got the first tattoo after a man I had decided to marry dumped me unceremoniously over the phone. The bird was meant to symbolize my ability to find mate-for-life-style love, regardless of this traumatic breakup.
The trouble with worshiping birds for their model relationship-having skills is that birds don’t, generally, mate for life. Most birds, according to scientists, are socially monogamous. Another way to describe that would be to say that they are functionally monogamous: they form pairs and work together to raise their young, but they certainly “date around,” to say the least. The father of a female bird’s babies isn’t necessarily the male bird who helps rear them; likewise, that socially monogamous mate might very well have eggs in someone else’s nest on the other side of town. Sometimes a mother bird will even lay her eggs in someone else’s nest. Once the eggs (no matter whose they are) have hatched, a male and a female bird work together for a season to feed the babies and protect them from harm. They are not, however, sexually faithful. Birds are not the species of fairy-tale love after all; they simply can’t raise their families alone.
My parents are still married, which is a feat, considering that people who get married between the ages of twenty and twenty-four make up the highest percentage of divorced couples in the United States. Their marriage has not been, by any stretch of the imagination, easy. My mom, who was at the top of her class in her PhD program, moved across the country from New York to Oregon when my dad got a job at a college in Portland. She became a banker and worked her way up into increasingly powerful and lucrative positions. She hadn’t necessarily dreamed of working at a bank, but she liked the way people looked at her when she gave them a business card. When she was thirty-six—which was, especially then, a little late in the game—she thought that it was time to have a baby. My parents tried and failed for a while, then decided to get a dog instead. They loved the dog so much, though, that my mom said she wanted to redouble the baby-making efforts, and when they were thirty-eight, my parents succeeded.
My mom kept working for a while after I was born, but she had a second child two and a half years later (children ought to have siblings, she said), and things got more difficult. She was promoted at the bank, and for a time, my dad was tasked with watching the kids. But my dad never wanted to watch the kids. He hadn’t actually wanted to have kids at all. Once, while my mom was at work, my dad accidentally let go of my baby sister’s stroller at the top of a big hill, and she crashed into the guardrail at the bottom. It was a small miracle that she survived. After that, my mom felt she couldn’t trust my dad to watch me and my sister anymore, and she felt cornered into quitting her job—a job, she told me years later, that she not only loved but was also insanely good at.
A year later, my dad got a job at a college in San Diego, and my mom felt forced to uproot her life and replant her family. In San Diego, she saw a therapist who told her she didn’t need my dad; she could “give him permission” to leave. So, on a beach somewhere, she told him just that. But he didn’t leave, and the two of them climbed deeper into a marriage filled with ever-widening chasms and arguments sparked by short tempers. I’d hear them shouting in the kitchen; one of them would slam a dish against the counter, and the other would storm out. The tension was often palpable at dinner. We became a family that played card games at the table to avoid uncomfortable conversation.
My mom told me a lot of this just recently, and I know it’s not the whole story. It’s not my dad’s side of the story, for one thing. Two years ago, over the holiday jigsaw puzzle, I asked my dad if there had ever been any problems in his marriage. He deflected: “Your mother is the love of my life. Do you have any idea how amazing she is?” He’s in his late sixties now, and his marriage is in a radically different place than it was thirty years ago: his kids have left the house, he’s retired, and my mom is the primary (and often only) person he sees every day. My dad has never been a person to talk about his feelings. In fact, he’s never been a person to talk about much at all. Growing up, I seriously doubted that he remembered my birthday. It just didn’t seem like raising a family in a suburban-looking house was of critical importance to him. There were times when the pain of that reality would be written plainly on my mom’s face; she would get tight-lipped while scrubbing the dishes, the echo of a recent argument pinging around the dining room.
I wondered, always, if there was another way to be in love.
On a recent trip home, I discovered that my mother had brought out the diaries she kept when she was in high school. She left them in the kitchen by the toaster, maybe accidentally but probably on purpose. I read them in one sitting and marveled over how smart and weird and thoughtful she had been, even when she was young.
I was also surprised to find that her diary was full of sex. She was seeing one guy pretty exclusively at the time, but she would still go out with other guys (she even kissed them!), and she had a massive crush on the older blond who worked at the swimming pool. I had thought of my mother as a person who had only ever really been with my dad. I mean, she was twenty when they got married; how much romantic experience could she—the valedictorian of her high school class, who went to college on full scholarship and got into one of the most prestigious doctorate programs in the country—have really had?
She had a lot. On one page in her diary she wrote, “I think [name redacted] thinks I’m naïve. I’m not naïve. The guy in Berkeley, what’s-his-name, told me I was the least naïve girl he’d ever met.” She was tough; she was more self-actualized at fifteen than I am at thirty-one. She dated and fell in love fearlessly. In 1963, my mom was an experimental, thoughtful polyamorist. At the time, she called it “dating.”
This was all surprising to me, because until I was a card-carrying out-of-college adult, my mom had made monogamy
seem like the only viable—even ethical—relationship option. I felt that if I didn’t get married by the time I was twenty, I would be a failure.
I thought about marriage all the time. I still wanted to marry Kent Jackson at fourteen, and finally told him I liked him. When he said he didn’t like me back, I was legitimately not sure how I was going to survive. It was the first night in my whole life that I couldn’t sleep; I stayed up through the small morning hours sobbing and watching the Home Shopping Network. (I had once liked to watch the show about rings so I could fantasize about Kent Jackson proposing to me; now that he had rejected me, I watched the show to torture myself.)
This rejection was especially bad because all the girls in my group had just started dating boys. We had initially become friends because we were the girls who didn’t date boys in middle school; those girls, the ones who did date boys in middle school, flattened their bleached hair with irons and wore shirts from the mall that tactically let slip little flashes of their lower bellies. The girls in my group wore clothes from discount stores that were designed to look like they came from the mall and carried tubes of dollar lipstick in the front pockets of our back-packs that we swiped across our mouths after our moms dropped us off at school. For the longest time, we were stuck with one another and PG-13 movies where the teenage boys took their shirts off. The reason I told Kent Jackson I loved him was because my friend Kara had gotten a boyfriend, and I saw that if there was ever a moment to go for it, now was that time.
Many Love Page 2
