Polyamory and Being a Romantic at Heart
By: Joe Duncan
Tags: Relationships, Love, Sex, Sexuality, Polyamory

Being in a polyamorous relationship, I tend to get it from both sides…not like you’re thinking…don’t get ahead of me now…what I mean is, that there are certain notions from both the non-poly crowd of monogamists and the polyamory community that I usually avoid whenever possible that can tend to make people raise an eyebrow when I speak. One place that this is particularly pronounced is the intersection between polyamory and romance.

Whenever I speak of romantic ideas, like lifelong partnerships, successful marriages that contain dedication, love, and self-sacrifice, I’m accused of appreciating a toxic culture that should be left behind.

Whenever I speak of polyamory, loving and building solid, emotional, romantic relationships with more than one person, people look at me like such relationships are loveless, careless, and are basically just wild sex parties where the people go home afterward and sit in silence where they stew over the jealousy they’re masking from their partners.

Neither of these two ideas could be further from the truth. It’s important to say that a lot of what people call “polyamory” is really just swinging, a totally different concept and experience. Swinging takes place when people in a committed relationship allow others into their sex lives, be it individually or as a group, but there is no element of connection or commitment. Polyamory, on the other hand, doesn’t even need to be sexual, so long as there are a romantic relationship and a commitment for the future with more than one person, a relationship qualifies as polyamory. The notion that “polyamory means different things to different people,” definitely distorts this difference.

It’s one thing to have casual sex with someone, even repeatedly, while maintaining one relationship, it’s a whole other dynamic to maintain two or more complete relationships. One is dabbling on the side, the other is having two main courses.

I don’t personally see polyamory and romance as mutually exclusive, but rather, very complimentary ideas. Monogamists often wonder if they have the guts to allow someone they love deeply and have built a life with to date other people on a deep level, and this concern is healthy and understandable: I’d be hesitant, too, to risk my relationship to chance, possibly opening the door for destruction when my seemingly-natural jealousy comes out. Humans, according to the monogamist, should only be attracted to one person primarily and should keep to them. Polyamorists, on the other hand, tend to think that humans are always going to be attracted to more than one person. For them, any notion that we should only want one person is either unhealthy or dishonest and should be met with skepticism.

But, I don’t think the situation is either/or. The problem with both approaches is that they prescribe to know a fixed state of human sexuality, a subject that is anything but fixed. Not only are humans capable of a wide array of potential dating styles which have been with us since our humble roots of being hunter-gatherers, but most people can be most things in different situations. I’ve been more than capable of being monogamous and committed with one partner, at one point in my life, and more than capable of being polyamorous with others. Some relationships develop in such a way that polyamory just compliments the dynamic between the two people better than monogamy, and vice versa. Further, different participants in a poly situation may have different roles: in my current situation, my girlfriend is married, she has a husband, yet, our relationship is closed — neither he nor I am looking for any additional partners, we’re content with what we have and want to enjoy it.

So, while the relationship is polyamorous, on a whole, and the dynamic is experienced by all of us as poly, two out of three of us are monogamous. Not everything is so simple as slapping a label on it and calling it something.

There’s nothing wrong with him or me for not wanting any additional sex or romantic partners. There is such a thing as being satisfied with what we have in life and not needing anything more, no matter how much this weird, American, consumer culture wants to tell us that we always need more, bigger, and better — that’s not the way life works, balance is important.

And there’s nothing wrong with her enjoying and loving deeply two different sets of traits in two different people. The amount of human traits which we might find appreciable are near-infinite, and each individual only possesses a select few of those traits. As polyamorists, it’s not a competition of who’s “better” or “worse” it’s about understanding that even two very excellent people might differ in their excellences.

In this sense, polyamory is deeply romantic, it’s loving your partner so much that you wish not to deprive them of the possibilities which lie outside of yourself, supporting them in finding the types of people that make their lives more rich and full. Polyamory says that the hit that our ego might take in admitting that we aren’t everything that our partner might want in someone is less important than them being free to have what they want in their lives.

But, this should never lose sight of the virtues of deeply-convicted monogamy, virtues like endurance, willingness to put your relationship first and your own needs second when the time comes, self-sacrifice, caring, a willingness to accept inconvenience if it helps better your other half or third or what have you. We manage to cover all of these things quite perfectly. Personally, I don’t recommend polyamory reaching beyond 3 or 4 partners, but maybe others can find a way to manage the time to dedicate to that many partners; and I say this because we can only divide our time, energy, and focus up among so many people before it becomes diluted and impotent. There’s nothing wrong with being deeply committed to and loving more than one person at a time, but there’s similarly nothing wrong with wanting deep commitment and love. I think the latter might be a prerequisite for the former.

We can still have fairytale endings with more than one person. Polyamory and romance aren’t mutually exclusive…in fact, they’re very wonderfully complimentary #relationshipgoals.