One of the topics we cover at Planet Waves is ‘alternative’ relationship choices, one of which is polyamory. A reader sent in this link from Psychology Today by Deborah Taj Anapol, a psychologist and pioneer of the poly community with whom I’ve worked in several different capacities since 1997. Deborah is a clear thinker and this article is a good example. She takes up a vital question — why do people choose polyamory?
She writes:
Just as there are many different forms a polyamorous relationship can take, there are many different reasons people choose polyamory. We’re not always conscious of the reasons we do things, and sometimes we even make up reasons which have little to do with our real motivations. I’m not saying that we intentionally lie to ourselves, and to others. Rather, we find ourselves doing something and then make up a story to explain it. We may sincerely believe this story, or we may suspect it’s fabricated. Either way, it’s not always easy to discover the reasons people choose polyamory. However, if you watch them over time, as I have, you can often determine their motivations by observing the results of their choices. And of course you can listen to what they say and what they report in anonymous surveys. I’ve employed all these methods to compile a fairly comprehensive view of possible motivations for choosing polyamory.
I invite Planet Waves readers to comment — I’ll write to Deborah and let her know the comments are collecting, so you may reply directly to her on this page.
efc
Well Said:
“I’m not saying that we intentionally lie to ourselves, and to others. Rather, we find ourselves doing something and then make up a story to explain it. We may sincerely believe this story, or we may suspect it’s fabricated.”
I couldn’t agree more.
As for polyamory, I just received in the mail yesterday the book, “Polyamory: The New Love without Limits” by Deborah. I look forward to reading it.
MoonRose
Hi Eric and Halfie,
After I wrote that I kept thinking about just basically what Eric describes — the potluck. And I kept thinking, well there’s nothing wrong with a potluck is there? And no of course there isn’t. My meaning I think is that some people, especially young ones who’ve come of age in a world where there are groups for just about everything, have the idea that if they’re not inside the realm of the community then they can’t do anything. So what happens if you live in some place where the community really really doesn’t exist? Are you confined to confining relationship models? I’d hope not. Do you have to relocate within a 10 km radius of the poly potluck clubhouse? Maybe, maybe not. I’d hope that whether our beloveds are hip-to-the-scene Americans or nomadic yak herders we could say to them what we want. I don’t call that being someone’s therapist. Because isn’t the whole point that the way of relating to a beloved that feels good originates from within the human breast, not from the pages of this text or that text? Some people (yeah and I know maybe I’m wasting too much time fretting about some people) would instead spend time seeking out or constructing the community in which they feel they can then go ahead and express what they want. Now that I’ve written all this I can plainly see it’s just not all that black and white, but I wanted to emphasize that it’s possible to step up and be real in places where there’s no poly potluck chapter. Eric, aren’t you living proof, brother?
@Sam: Sex has been ripped from the fabric of the natural and been sanitised and caged, such that it cannot perform culturally liberative functions. Sex is controlled. We regulate it from within through a filter. I am reminded of the old King James Version of the Bible, wherein at the outset, Adam ‘knew’ Eve. Carnal knowledge seems to be validated in the language as a viable form of knowing. Now, how can it be that we have arrived at the place where we must have a relationship of undying eternal love, signed and sealed in blood as perpetual guarantor, before we get to know them in the carnal sense? Well, of course it is religion and its cohort..
Consequently, there will not be any individuated transformation without a people movement. You cannot expect continually to be everyone’s therapist, just so you have a realistic chance of their guilt not stopping the both of you (as adults) getting into bed (as soon as you feel like it) to get to know each other or have fun because you can and you want to.
@Eric: Jealousy as a species of insecurity gets a yes from me. Insecurity has many facets. This problem goes much deeper than an individual’s jealous feelings. Most sedentary people have jobs with a fixed base. They live in relative proximity to their work if possible. There is an economy of scale around managing such anchors. Within that geographical security there is economic security and the fact that agreements are easiest to make between two people. Two people make a child – it is not any third party’s child. The desire in each party to protect that fabric is a species of security economy – everything gravitates around protecting such units and structures.
For this reason, polyamory always offers options that will prove hard to sustain as an enduring modality. When fluidity replaces fixity you are asking people to remain continuously flexible and open to change and to live freely with the uncertainty of others’ similar processes. This is living, evolving, non-attached connectivity. Humans currently lack the wherewithal to carry that off.
Probably therefore, polyamorous arrangements currently offer better long term prospects for monogamous folk, because one has more scope to explore a range of people openly (with more experiences offering more scope of finding oneself and one’s optimal monogamous arrangement).
Polyamory should probably be seen more as an exercise in cultivating personal and societal maturity than some Utopian vision of a superior model of sexual and interpersonal relations. In that regard, I can acknowledge Sam’s idealism!!
Hi Sam,
I appreciate your sentiments.
But I’ll tell you, I wish there was so much as a monthly Poly Pot Luck in my community. There isn’t. Would that qualify as building intentional community, or providing a place for people to get together?
Alex, the answer to your question is — jealousy.
One of the biggest discomforts I have with the contemporary American cultural environment is the pervasive illusion that to do anything different you have to construct a Society for the Sake of Doing That Thing. Now, of course we need supportive friends (and lovers) to talk with and to do with. But in America “building community” is actually something of a fetish; it often takes the place of the precise thing it ought not take the place of. This is also not to say that I don’t intend for my most heartfelt actions and desires to have an impact on The World. Oh I truly intend that they do. It’s precisely the intentional forming of subcultures that I think tends to mitigate that impact, deadens the thud, so to speak. I believe the power of love is that even without an umbrella we might dare risk telling the truth and embracing the truth out in the wild wild world, wherever that may be.
@ half — though you write the way i used to write and you hurt my head… i have to agree. why don’t people choose polyamory? that is the question. for me, anyway. thanks for that.
“Why do people choose polyamory?”
Interestingly, this question qualifies as an abstraction – because it becomes necessary to construct interpretations from inference.
Much more conducive would be the theme “Why people don’t choose polyamory”.
The first approach attempts to tease out the volitional concomitants, whereas the second opens up the door to a more direct form of honesty in people about the socio-cultural aspects of the question.
At the moment, it is necessary to create a distinct (and somewhat homogeneous) sub-culture or counter-culture of polyamory, in order for people to address the availability conundrum. Values and expectations must be aligned in order for there to be fair comparison between two ‘at odds’ models. Monogamy has a tremendous head start, in terms of shaping people’s volitional economy.
In order for folk to be able to make a meaningful choice within a monogamous cultural hegemony they have to ghetto-ize themselves. Otherwise they keep running into a ‘values incongruence’ trap. I might think it’s a great idea to explore (a key word it seems to me that differentiates the spirit of monogamy from that of polyamory – a bit like becoming an inquisitive adventurer; eager to learn etc) but I simply would not be able to secure a meaningful supply in the mainstream without myriad honesty gymnastics.
Monogamy is a bit like a huge building that everyone senses is fragile because the bricks have no real mortar to bind them together. The mortar is an externally supplied morality that everyone must buy into, in order to provide stability. The stability does not come from the interconnections but from some forced, heteronomous code which has nothing to do with a real person’s embodied needs and wants.
We jeopardise the whole structure, the concept of families and child rearing etc when we deviate from the straitjacket model. The critique by the establishment is always of loose sex, but really it is about relational honesty and integrity and personal authenticity; expressed through sexual ‘glue’ (at its best). This moral reflex is how sex has been successfully decontextualised from the rest of life (aka someone else’s moral code supplants my reality and ‘violates’ me).
It seems to me that although I’ve just now outlined a theory and the lead article purports to offer research evidence, I would suggest that asking the question of “why not?” rather than “why?” is one more likely to attract the sorts of necessary discomfort and visceral honesty we are looking for in this debate.
got it
It would be great to read her or hear about her (?) compilation
Forever, it seems, it just didn’t make sense that one person could provide one with everything one needed to be a fully existing person — including one’s own self. This is an uber-complicated topic. I can be myself. But others add to the mix in fabulous ways. Unfortunately, sharing myself amongst others always seems to be a non-starter. Bad bad day to talk about this. I don’t know who to push off the deck — me or some other person(s).
Hope you had a good holiday!
xm
Please thank Deborah for the quote you posted. Volumes in a a few sentences. Can see how you come to call her a clear thinker. Will styudy to imrove from her example. Motivations revealed by choices, actions and words. What a concept.