Note: This post by Maria originally ran Dec. 8, 2012. With Venus in Capricorn — a more reserved sign for the goddess of love — and about to station retrograde, it seemed a good time for a reminder that erotic love runs in cycles. We can’t command it, but we can be open to its surges and guide its flow with awareness. — Amanda
By Maria Padhila
One of the things I love most about polyamory is that people in it acknowledge and even celebrate that there are different kinds of love at different times. And what’s more, they don’t put a value judgment on it — or when they do, that judgment and what’s behind it has to be examined.
I don’t want to go into anything that touches near to some kind of ‘poly people are more evolved’ nonsense. But even the most monogamous or solitary soul would probably admit that in at least in this one way, poly people seem to have more fun.
In the world of ‘normal’ love and marriage — well, the image that a percentage of the world likes to project as normal, let’s call it that — love is defined as follows: there’s a strong, wild first stage, but that’s just infatuation. (Pause for eyeroll, tsking and sighing headshaking.) It’s immature. It’s silly and worthless. It’s the kind of thing you don’t give in to. You just wait for it to pass and try not to make a big ass of yourself.
Then, you buy a sofa together and a TV and/or other electronic devices and you sit down on it in between working to buy things and you stay there and get your instructions about new things to buy. That’s true love. That’s mature love. Once in a while, the man begs for sex and the woman gives in. That’s normal love.
Even many of those who don’t buy into the entombed version of ‘mature love’, even those who keep on with their energy and interest and juice into the end, still often have a distrust of ‘infatuation’. It’s as if it is fool’s gold, a big phony fake of an illusion that has to be seen through and denied and fought down to get to the real stuff.