Over the last six months, I’ve written two pieces about my being polyamorous— “Polyamorous Reflections” and “Polyamorous Reflections: Continued.” Both explored the nature of love outside of societal constraints and how beautiful love can be when it’s just allowed.
I asked ChatGPT to read these and give me ONE paragraph comparing the two.
It wrote:
In a candid exploration of personal identity and relationship dynamics, the author delves into the complexities of polyamory amidst societal expectations and judgments. Through introspective narratives, they challenge linear thinking and rigid categorizations, advocating for authenticity and openness in love and life. The author's journey unfolds with a blend of frustration, relief, and defiance, highlighting the emotional depth and growth that come from embracing non-traditional relationships. These pieces serve as a powerful testament to the resilience of personal identity and the pursuit of genuine connection in a world often bound by conventional norms.
Look at this list:
Challenging linear thinking and rigid categorizations
Advocating for Authenticity
Openness in love and life
Frustration, relief, defiance
Resilience of personal identity
Pursuit of genuine connection in a world often bound by conventional norms
Taking the talking point of love out of it, this analysis alone unsurprisingly and accurately aligns with who I am as a human being; it’s a broader look at me.
Complementing my pieces about polyamory, my friend
wrote a wonderful exploration entitled “Sexual Monogamy Isn’t Natural.”One of the things I loved that she said was:
“We’re not adult enough for non-monogamy.”
She went on to write:
From my own open marriage, which ended with my heart broken and a divorce, to the experiences I’ve had with others in ENM relationships it’s clear to me most of us (myself included, at least at one point) aren’t emotionally mature enough, good enough communicators, or willing to be honest and vulnerable enough for those kinds of relationships to work long-term—at least not in a cultural that prioritizes monogamy and marriage.
Couples need to be prepared for what they are going to do when, not if, but when someone gets jealous, when someone develops feelings for a person outside of the relationship, and when a person in the relationship is feeling neglected. I’ve seen couples I thought were incredibly self-aware and amazing at communication struggle with these things, and have their relationship break down over these issues. Jealousy is a bitch, and neglect quickly turns into resentment.
That brings me to where I want to focus today, which is how and why we fuck this up.
Thanks Paige for the springboard.
I wrote in my previous reflections, “Another thing people confuse nonmonogamy for is some sort of sex fest.”
It isn’t a sex fest, and it seems that any time you mention polyamory, people’s minds tend to “go there” right away.
“Oh, this person would like to have sex with someone else.”
Sure, possibly. And if you want to know all the reasons why sexual monogamy is not natural, I’ll refer you back to Paige’s exploration.
I don’t talk about sex as much as I talk about love. Sex can complement love, and I find that when I’m in love, the way I want to express that love includes sexuality. There’s nothing I desire more than to look deeply into someone’s eyes while they’re quite literally as far inside of my body as they can be.
Without deep love, I’m not interested in sex. Maybe that’s because I’m female, and sex for me is not primarily about physical attraction. Although, that’s not true of all women. Some women have voracious sex drives. I just… outgrew that. But I also outgrew fancy restaurants and alcohol culture, so this could just be my 6 line development after age 30.
I digress.
Love is meant to be expressed and experienced freely. Even if you have a primary partner you consider yourself “monogamous” with, loving someone else will likely enhance that relationship. But here’s the kicker: everyone has to play.
I was having dinner with my friend (who is married) a few weeks ago. I mentioned that many people believe polyamory “takes” from relationships. He said “I think it adds.”
“I think so too,” I said. “Tell me why you think so.”
We were sitting at The Smith (a popular NYC restaurant) and between us was some amazing fucking mac and cheese.
“Take this mac and cheese for example,” he said. “If we look at this mac and cheese, and say ‘OK, this is our mac and cheese and only ours, you get half and I get half,’ that’s all there is. But say two people sit there and say, ‘Hey, can we share your mac and cheese?’ If we share with them, they’ll know how good it is, and they’ll come back, and the kitchen will make more and more mac and cheese.”
I thought that was a pretty cool way to show how shared love expands, grows, and continues to impact others.
If you learn to love in a certain way with me that perhaps you didn’t know before, you’ll take that love and love others with it. If you’re in a relationship, you’ll bring that love to that relationship. (If you have a primary partner, you’ll be more loving to them!)
As I look at my own evolution, I see that when you love a person deeply, you get to experience parts of yourself that you never did before. With each addition of every love that you have the courage to enter into, you get the prime beautiful experience to shed layers of ego that keep you fearful and ugly.
But, as I said earlier, everyone has to play.
It is unethical, in my opinion, to not be honest will all parties in relationships like this.
As Paige wrote, we’re not adult enough for it.
People tend to move into the fear zone when they begin exploring nonmonogamy and the first thing they want to do is hide it. Hide it from their partners, spouses, etc. Hide everything. Hiding is the fastest way to hurt and disrespect others.
The fear zone says, “If I continue to explore this other love, I’m going to lose everything else. I only have so much mac and cheese here. If I share some, someone else is going to go hungry. If I create with you in the world, someone is going to lose something.”
This is the Western “lack mentality,” and it implies that love is limited. It implies that there’s only so much, only a finite amount to go around, and if you share with one, you take from another, etc.
This is why everybody has to play. People don’t fall in love with new partners because of faults in who they are currently with or have been with. People fall in love because the universe does it so we can rest in the essence that we truly are. We fall in love to get closer to the God place inside of us. Eventually, we just become love.
Ram Dass says it so beautifully in this lecture about love and death.
He says:
"First of all, most of our images of love in our society have to do with romantic love. They are poetic love, they are interpersonal love. I love you. You love me. We love each other.
We all give lip service to, but hardly ever really acknowledge that there is another kind of love. That is not interpersonal. We call it conscious love or Christ's love, God's love. And the image I have is that when you grow up in a society of conditional love, which most of us have grown up in and because of the way in which we are socialized, we end up very needful for love. And that's why a lot of the literature is about love and affection.
It's as if there's something in us that's very hungry.
We're on a deprivation diet.
And so when we meet somebody who has the key to unlock something in us, we experience that we are in love, and we say "I am in love with you."
What we're really saying, another way of saying it... is, "You are the key stimulus that is releasing the mechanism in me that allows me to be in love. You're my connection, and as my connection I want to possess you because I'm hungry to be in this state in my being. I have come into the place of love in my being. And everything is beautiful suddenly... but it only happens when you are around.
...So where will you be Thursday? …and where will you be Friday? And where will you be for the rest of my life?
And the tendency is to want to possess the beloved which you and I both know is one of the quickest ways to destroy.”
I didn't have a deep understanding of love or death until I found Ram Dass. This is one of the more profound lectures I have listened to, and it helped me understand that so much of my natural way of looking at love is … just that.
Please do have a listen, starting at minute 34:30 if you want to hear the rest.
He goes on to say that when you possess, there’s an inherent fear because someone is going to die, go away, etc. That’s interpersonal, romantic love. (Attached love.) He mentions that’s why there’s much poetry written about it; that fear, and the internal turmoil of possession.
But when we are love, and we become rested in love, we can fall in love freely, with so many.
As he says, “The eyes are the windows to the soul, and the soul rests in love.”
He also says it can become problematic if you’re working on an old deprivation model because you’ll “want to collect them all.”
Perhaps this is why I haven’t chosen to collect at all… At least not on paper.
I haven’t, by and large, seen great examples of marriages in my life. Those I have seen tend to be second, third, or even fourth marriages. Ironically, those people are usually staunch advocates for monogamy, still. It seems a little odd as they’re not monogamous — they just involved lawyers in their polyamory.
How do we fuck up polyamory? Moving into the “fear zone.”
“The fear zone.”
I have done my own share of destruction in monogamous relationships, moving very much into that same place. When I met Martin, for example, he was so loving and beautiful that I became utterly terrified if he spoke to another woman. I was on a deprivation diet, and I thought if I lost him, I would lose everything, and I’d never experience deep love again.
Turns out, that fear made me angry, jealous, and ugly. That ugliness ended up losing me the relationship anyway. I created what I wished to avoid by living in fear, and restriction.
The same becomes true with polyamorous relationships. I’ve had some tear themselves to pieces when people would love me, freak out, and just peace.
“Well it’s me and you or me and her.”
“Well, sure, but what about her and him? Or her and her?”
“I can’t bear to think about that.”
“Alrighty then…”
As I wrote in “Polyamorous reflections"
Women haven’t always been able to take care of themselves, and deeply woven into the mental fabric of our subconscious minds, whether we like the idea or not, is this understanding that we need support, and someone to be our caretaker.
Men generally want/need/desire more than one woman, but from my observation, their “woman” finding/seeing another man can be perceived, subconsciously, as “not enough-ness,” that they aren’t worthy as a provider or a lover.
I have learned that you can’t play the game of loving many unless you’re comfortable with those you love, loving many.
You don’t have to hear about it. You don’t need to listen to the gooey details of their sex lives. You don’t need to pry about their exploration together deeply, but you have to, at a bare minimum, be OK with it.
If you are in a space where you fall in love with a person outside of, say, a long, monogamous relationship, I am going to wager a solid chunk of change that they’re in the same place.
Throwing more chips on the pile, I’ll say that you can double down in your grit about your monogamy, “work on it,” or do whatever weird thing Westerners do to “fix the problem,” but the problem is almost always a symptom of the soul’s desire to expand. What isn’t working isn’t working because you’ve been only eating mac and cheese for 20 years, and now, your body needs some broccoli.
“Oh look- the table over there has broccoli! I really need some of that broccoli. I am going to die if I don’t get some broccoli.”
How does that look with humans and not restaurant dishes?
Let’s say you’ve spent your entire life with a people pleaser, but you’ve hit the point in your spiritual curriculum where you need to learn self-advocacy. WELL, you might not get that from the people pleaser. You might not light up the same way.
Or maybe you’ve spent your whole life in a utilitarian relationship with someone you deeply care about, families intertwined, etc, but now you’re ready to explore the depth of your emotions and spirituality. Well… that utilitarian relationship might not cut it.
Sidebar: I told Mario (my utilitarian) that I took my client on a sensory deprivation float the other night and his response was, deadpan:
“Riveting.”
He’d rather go throw an axe.
I love that axe thrower with all my heart. His name is on my RoadID bracelet. I’ve been on his HIPAA forms. If I die, he’s one of two people who will know what to do. He’s the ONLY ONE who knows where my landlord’s office is. But … I can’t be in a monogamous relationship with him. He’s cried three times in the last ten years: once for a death, once for a birth, and once for the Astros winning the World Series.
I cried that many times yesterday.
As Paige mentioned, we also fuck up polyamory by being poor communicators.
You have to talk about stuff.
You have to.
It’s a non-negotiable for any healthy relationship. Lying is not loving. Hiding is not loving. Not sharing our inner worlds with people we become romantically involved with… is not loving. Ghosting is definitely not loving.
Wants, needs, desires… These are all things that have to be shared openly with people you enter into a relationship with. We are here in life to learn, and we do that through the mirrors of others.
I, for example, truly do not want to be married. I also have absolutely no desire to break up any marriages. I have done that once; it was horrific, and as I stated before, I’d rather have an unsedated colonoscopy than repeat it.
I love to live alone, love freely, and love uniquely. Every love is beautiful in its own right, and I have had those experiences. However, I’m not interested in shacking up with you or adopting an entirely new family.
I am upfront and honest about this. I keep it real.
If there’s fear on my end, I’m honest about that too. You have to know why I’m acting like a piece of garbage from time to time. People being honest about their fears shines a better light in the ways they may not be loving.
For polyamory to work, EVERYBODY has to play.
I mean this societally. I’m not saying “do away with marriage.” Just, a little more honesty would be nice.
Most people can’t get everything they need from one person…not anymore. Maybe 100 years ago, sure, but it was a denser time. We worked on small problems. Humanity is evolving in its complexity. We are moving into a consciousness where love is not restricted but rather abundant. For that, things are going to start changing.
Gen Z is much more fluid with love, gender, etc. Gen Alpha will probably be even more so.
The time has come to grow up and ditch the parochial boxes.
If you’re open, and your partner or spouse is on the deprivation diet, believing and adhering to the fact that they can get everything they need from you… My friend, that’s just illogical. You know it, and so do they.
It’s like ye olde saying:
There are two types of people: those who piss in the shower, and liars.
Where’s the honesty? Let’s get more of that in our experiences. Please. Please please.
Stay beautiful
Andee
Edit: I made a VERY egregious typo and wrote: And if you want to know all the reasons why sexual nonmonogamy is not natural, I’ll refer you back to Paige’s exploration.
That should have read MONOGAMY. It has since been fixed but I thought required an editor’s note JIC.
The perfect response for those who claim to see no proof of evolution. Would that they could recognize it. But societies evolve much, much slower than individuals. Kudos on another remarkable piece, Andee.
Thanks for your engaging and introspective reflections on polyamory. Your candid exploration of love beyond societal constraints is refreshing. I like your writing, where you challenge conventional norms with authenticity and openness and offer valuable insights into the complexities of modern relationships.