There are about a million pieces of content everywhere about ethical polyamory. There are people’s personal stories all over the Internet (for better or worse), dating apps that front and center polyamory, editorials extolling the virtues of polyamory, and let us not forget the libraries full of books about polyamory.
It is absolutely not a fringe lifestyle any more. It is so mainstream as to be almost boring at this point.
What the majority of those resources have in common is a consistent narrative – a) that polyamory is an evolution of monogamy, and b) that monogamy should be demonized whenever possible.
Bullshit.
Just as with polyamory there are many permutations of relationships that are monogamous, based on one’s own upbringing, culture, religion (or lack thereof), life goals, etc.
Of one thing I am certain – polyamory and monogamy are orientations, not choices. Just as being gay is an orientation, not a choice. If you have been monogamous, but give polyamory a try and like it and decide that’s your paradigm moving forward, congratulations on coming out of the closet – you have always been oriented that way, you just didn’t know it. If you’ve been giving poly a try and you’re miserable, you don’t need to try harder – you are most likely monogamous.
You are not less evolved of a person if you can’t wrap your head around polyamory. You are not missing out on anything if you’re happy with being monogamous. Most importantly you are not a horrible person if you want a monogamous relationship. That’s one that hits close for me. I’ve been accused of trapping someone in a monogamous relationship and that would be the antithesis of who I am. That’s a “people hear what they want to hear” situation. When you live in the poly world you just assume everyone is the same.
The problem is not monogamy in and of itself. It’s people believing that an outdated monogamous relationship model is what monogamy is.
Updated monogamy is tossing out the idea that you can’t have a life outside of a partner. It’s about seeing your partner as a wholly formed human being with agency. It’s about realizing that nothing lasts forever and as long as no one gets more than their feelings hurt it’s all growth opportunity. It’s understanding the more you try and force that hold – through obligation or emotional guilt or subterfuge – the smaller that connection becomes until it implodes.
Poly people argue that’s what they are talking about, and I agree that those are things anyone in any type of relationship should be doing and thinking about. But we are talking about monogamy – the state or practice of having only one sexual partner at a time [Mirriam-Webster]. That’s it – that’s literally the definition.
That’s poly’s sticking point – the sex thing. When poly pundits cry “It’s not just about the sex with multiple partners!” I feel they doth protest too much.
No one these days with any kind of intelligence says that if you’re monogamous you have to be best friends, take all your vacations together, live together, get married, buy a house, have kids. There is no required escalator in monogamy (unless you want to get on one of course). You can be monogamous for a month or a decade. You can be serially monogamous, which I think these days is kind of the norm.
The ethical part comes in by not cheating – by not having sex with someone else without first ending the relationship. Monogamy, even at the root definition, contains an explicit covenant. All the rest of it is just the messy human experience.
If you want to have sex with more than one person in a given time frame, you are polyamorous. If you just want to have sex with one person in a given time frame, you are monogamous. Polyamory is no more inherently ethical than monogamy.
You don’t get to be married for decades, cheat on your spouse for years, get caught and suddenly say it’s because you are polyamorous. That’s unethical in monogamy and unethically using polyamory to whitewash your cheating.
As a monogamous person I just want to have sex with one person who just wants to have sex with me. That doesn’t mean we’ll be together until death do us part. That doesn’t mean that we can’t have best friends that aren’t each other. I go on vacation by myself. I own my own house, I have my own friends and hobbies. I love being single for fuck’s sake!
But when I’m ready for emotional intimacy as well as physical intimacy I’ll take all I have AND one sexual partner who feels the same.