Book Day 28 - When you tell someone you are polyamorous, what do you mean?
There is an element of illegibility when telling somebody you are poly.
It is important to know yourself what you are trying to communicate, when you are communicating this.
Are you saying that you do not believe in marriage, or that marriage is not a priority with you?
Are you saying you do not prioritize having a normative nuclear family?
Are you saying that you don’t want to have your most serious romantic and emotional entanglement break under pressure around “not cheating”?
Are you saying that you are hypersexual and you will never “not want to” have sex with other people, no matter how much discipline you put into it?
Are you saying that in your ideal life, you would have more than one serious romantic partner, that you split time between?
One of the reasons to say you are polyamorous is so that people are surprised when you do something or want to do something that might be seen as unforgivable in some communities.
If you have a partner and are in monogamous communities, heavy flirting with other people could be seen as incredibly bad form, and you will become the talk of the town.
It seems like there have been cultural norms and ideals around what polyamory entails, and what kind of openness, and openness to “what” that are mixed.
When it comes to their own dating life or themselves choosing somebody to tango with, even within “sex-positive” or progressive spaces, people hear “I’m poly” through layers of their own bias, fear, and cultural priors.
For one person, it can be about radical honesty; for another, about hedonism; for another, about rejecting the emotional logic of ownership, for another, about being seen fully, including in their full authentic sexuality.
The statement is deeply illegible because it collapses multiple projects into one phrase: moral, romantic, sociopolitical, even existential.
It also undermines the idea of partnership and romance as a civic virtue, and instead is a proclamation that you have a different kind of project in mind.
(There is a way in which musicians and artists and politicians being polyamorous is “legible” in that for musicians and artists, they are already part of a project of rebuilding civics, and for politicians, there is already an understanding of corruption — a hypocrisy around civics.)
When you tell someone “I’m poly,” you’re probably trying to communicate either something far more precise, or a cluster of ideas. But this may be highly illegible to somebody who is not of your social culture. Some possibilities:
A value statement: “I don’t believe exclusivity is the best measure of love.”
A practical truth: “I will likely want to have sex with more than one person over my lifetime.”
A boundary gesture: “Don’t expect me to feel guilt for my attractions or connections.”
A relational ideal: “I aspire to live in a network of love and interdependence, rather than a dyad.”
A warning or honesty move: “This is how to interpret my behavior, so I’m not misread as unfaithful.”
Each of these has very different emotional and social consequences, and would attract different people as potential partners.
Many people disclose polyamory preemptively because they want to inoculate against moral surprise. You want to protect against the accusation of betrayal before it happens — to establish, “what looks like cheating to you isn’t cheating in my world.” “the emotional cluster I have when I take this action is an entirely different emotional cluster to the cluster when a person is cheating.”
Disclosure is an act of self-definition. It reclaims authorship over what behaviors signify what in your relational ecosystem, rather than letting your community or partner’s previous assumptions dictate them.
James C. Scott writes about “illegibility” as a form of resistance to state surveillance; relationally, that can also apply to the way we resist the moral surveillance of the couple-form.
But legibility is always double-edged: once you make a pattern visible, people may use it against you. Disclosure helps some people trust you — but it can also mark you as transgressive, unserious, or volatile.
At the same time, total illegibility is lonely. You don’t want to be misread by everyone forever. The art, then, is strategic legibility: deciding who gets to understand you, how, and on what terms. “I’m poly” can be a shorthand for a nuanced worldview that will take time to unpack (like a signal versus a full manifesto) — but you will still want to keep in mind if your partner or the people around you understand what you hope for them to understand.