Book Day 12: Why I talk about Monogamy when I talk about Polyamory
This blog post is interesting to me. It is a blogpost I probably wouldn’t write, except there is a “mono+poly” Facebook group that I am in. One time somebody asked me why I am in something like that. Seems like a mess, definitionally. “You’re not in a mono+poly relationship, are you?”
I am not, but I find reading that group very useful, and I find the frame of thinking about monogamy when I’m thinking about polyamory very useful as well. There is a bit of “fish in water” syndrome here. Let me try to explain what I see, in case there are insights here, content for an introduction later, or if anybody has questions.
There are “implicit invisible shapes” that are present in monogamy. There are also “implicit invisible shapes” that are present in polyamory. Both tend to borrow from the tradition of the other. In writing this book I hope to investigate both the visible and invisible structures in both, in order to see what the actual building blocks of relationships are, in order to find the leverage points where you can either change yourself, or find the relationship that you want to be in, either the person you want to be with or the shape of the relationship. Sometimes you want to be with a different person, and cannot explain to yourself why. Sometimes you want to be with your person, but change the shape of your dynamic to be different, either having greater autonomy or greater intimacy.
A lot of people either do what they want, or defer to their partner’s wishes, and then maintain that holding pattern for a long time, in order to either not push themselves, not offend their partner, or avoid looking at things that are painful to look at. This book is meant to show you what you can look at; whether you choose to look at it is up to you.
I want to both to find the nodes and the edges.
There are people who have been polyamorous in the entirety of their sexual development, since they were preteens or teenagers. They have never been monogamous with anybody. The occasion never occurred. Perhaps they found their main person young, and both grew up exploring their sexuality together and staying together through that exploration. Perhaps they didn’t have any drive for a monogamous partner, and so never ended up with one, and their sexual development got in the poly community, and then they only had poly partners.
Other people have been monogamous one or more times, with various people. Perhaps they had a monogamous relationship for a long time, 10 years or more, and then their partner wanted to “open up.” Perhaps they are divorced, and now do not want to be monogamous again, but met someone they like and so have to contend with what to do. Or they find the poly community at a more advanced age.
Perhaps you are monogamous, but encountered someone who is poly, and had questions for them. If you are poly, you generally encounter monogamous people *all the time* and either are “out” as poly or you are hiding this part of your life from people.
Polyamorous people have had to engage without monogamous structures at some point. They have a relationship to these structures. Perhaps they borrowed something they like from monogamy. The idea of “faithfulness” perhaps, or some ideas of romance and devotion. Perhaps their relationship is entirely structurally antagonistic — “I am polyamorous because I am not monogamous.”
One of the points of my upcoming “Layers of Legibility” post is to talk about how if you want to interact with other people, being legible to both *your partner* and *other people* ends up being important. If you are “poly” but your boyfriend looks like he’s going to punch everyone in the face, good luck. Hell — even if you’re “single” and are hanging out with a guy who looks like he’s going to punch anyone in the face who looks at you — good luck getting those guys past that specific hurdle.
Part of legibility ends up being your relationship to monogamy and why you have it in part because monogamy is a legible point for many people to talk about and have conversations about.
Often some kind of polyamory ends up blossoming out of some relationship with monogamy.
I mentioned disaster before. What’s that about?
The polyamorous people who are smart know not to go after monogamous people.
“I am poly and fell in love with the husband in a monogamous couple, now what?”
Now what, what?
Now gauge if the husband seems like somebody who wants an enormous amount of new drama in his life, or extensive conversations with his wife, about you. If the husband falls in love with you and wants to start a process of exploration with his wife, that’s a different thing. But even then, prepare for an intense process, and also be prepared for the husband to potentially cut you out of his life if it doesn’t work out.
A lot of the experienced polyamory people start to realize that there are many shapes of circumstances where even if the relationship starts out nicely, the likely outcome of heartbreak means they’d rather not have entered the relationship in the first place.
“Every relationship brings its gifts” is an ethos in poly communities, sure. But there is also a big pain around having something better to do with their time than getting involved with a person, becoming emotionally invested in their life and well-being, and then being “cut out” by that person for a reason that they don’t even get to talk about.
An example of this would be in a triad between a single person and the couple, something could be happening inside of the couple, or one person in the couple, that leads to the third person being cut out *pretty abruptly and then never learning what ever happened.*
There is a version of “you talked to your therapist about me, rather than talking to me about me, decided you don’t have any options other than ghost me or write me a letter than to ghost me, but if you had taken even a small step towards me so that I knew what was going on, I have many more skills and affordances that would have been helpful. In fact, some of the things that may have been a bit painful for you were there to have much more affordances for when much bigger issues come up, such that the small pains were not a signal that something would be wrong, but rather a preventative measure for much bigger losses.”
It is less the fact of the breakup that is painful, but more that the couple are having joint discussions about it, and are healing each other, supporting each other, and are “making it make sense” while you are left in an epistemological black box. And then they move on, because they made it made sense for themselves, and you are still in that black box. Generally speaking, other people on earth, and not even your therapist, will be able to “fully” fix it. A really good coherence therapist might be able to help you. I happen to know one. He works here. If you have a black box in your mind that is a tangle of wires you do not know what to do with, he is the type of engineer that can help.
Some people can do this kind of work on themselves pretty well. Maybe they have had the types of life experiences that give them the tools to do this kind of thing — to integrate black boxes as something that can come up in their life that they know what to do with. Still — even these people find it hurtful and annoying.
And so they have ways of avoiding those kinds of situations. If you are poly and fall in love with a really monogamous person, you can probably find find cool ways to interact, but there will be a set of problems that will come up.
What are those problems? I am not sure if that is worth writing about, and I have met my word count for today.