On Definitions of Polyamorous
Solo? Like… You are single? You live alone? You are romantically closed? What?
“I’m poly,” said Maya. The 2 girls that had stopped to ask us for a lighter outside the Century Club on Shaftesbury just stared at her. They’d only asked if Maya and I were together.
“Er… I like your trousers, that’s what’s happening, girl!” Their confusion was a deep as my patience with her. As deep as my loathing for the ridiculous shiny gold trousers she had on. Garish and thin as her understanding of non-mono. She wasn’t non-mono, but rather non-amorous.
When people talk about being poly they mistake the 4 following modes:
Nature — are you polyamorous as a person?
State — are you in love with 2+ people?
Desire — do you want to be in love with 2+ people?
Policy — do you have freedom from your existing 1 partner to fall in love with another?
Let’s discuss these:
Nature. If you’re still in any doubt that humans are polyamorous, then you haven’t learnt a thing about generations of romantic infidelity, other cultures, your own culture centuries back, our closest primate cousins, our reproductive physiology, and human mating rituals, even before you start listening to anecdotes and the voice in the back of your mind saying, “Wow I really like my friend, Jacky. In another timeline, they and I would have been a thing.” You only need to turn to Sex At Dawn and Sperm Wars to understand about the different tribes and generations where polygyny is/was accepted, or to understand how the size of the human testes is closer to that of the mate-swapping chimp than the mate-guarding gorilla. You will find how. But polyamory isn’t a nature. It’s a…
…State. Are you in love with more than 1 person? No? Then you’re just in a ‘normal’ monamorous relationship. What? You’re not in love with even one person?! You’re single? Then how useful is it to say you’re poly? Oh you’re saying that you COULD be in love with more than one person quite easily if you found them? But I just explained that’s in human nature. You’ll just find a hell of a lot of fellow humans who won’t use that word to describe human nature because they’re scared, of their spouse’s wrath, of their vicar, of having to deal with society-inspired jealousy should our beloved start dividing time and attention.
Desire. Do you find yourself saying that you want 2+ loves? I find that such declarants aren’t able to tell me why that would make them happier. They are able to say why it would make it more exciting, but that’s in the context of how they are seen. Put them on an outer world in their thruple and it loses its appeal. In fact we see that thruples suffer from more stress and are wobblier even than FF relationships, the least stable of the 4 monamorous dyadics. So, as it taught in Buddhist teachings that say that to want, by definition, is to be lacking, and to be lacking is to be unfulfilled, I promote not utterances like “I want to be in a polycule/ love”, but “I am open to and more fulfilled in a polycule/ love” or “I’m maximising opportunities to be in a polycule/ love”. This way we are going through life with open arms and not empty arms.
Policy. I dissuade people from talking about whether they have permission to do things in their relationship, rather they should be thinking more about is it in keeping with the terms of the relationship and the consistency of my behaviour and words so far? I write further about Boundaries and so we can classify this 2nd person instruction (control not a boundary!) to be . Less “Don’t fall in love with other people”, and not even “Back off them or I’ll back off you”, but more “If you fall in love with someone else, then we will have to redefine this relationship”. Again this isn’t because the love is divided or diverted, but because time (how many nights a week are spent together), attention (how can you afford to spend energy and money on 2 people) and incoming opportunity (how many ‘plus one’s to a mate’s wedding are going spare) is.
