Every Sperm is Sacred. Really!

Editor’s Note: This column originally aired in October 2011. As regular readers know, Maria lives and works in the greater Washington, DC area. Events this week had her overloaded at work, but we anticipate her back next week. — Amanda

By Maria Padhila

A woman at a local poly dinner told me: “I don’t have any more relationships than someone who’s monogamous. I just never break up with anyone.”

To me, that chain of one, plus one, plus one would be one of the happiest aspects of polyamory. I don’t like losing people. With the exception of two abusive psychos — and they were doozies — and one person who felt it was too painful to continue to see me — I’ve managed to stay friends, at least, with exes. There are a few I wouldn’t mind having ongoing relationships with, though I’d never presume to impose that on them or on their present partners.

Even the short-term or one-off events, the ones you part from with both of you thinking, well, um, that wasn’t really such a great idea — even these people manage to be kind and polite when we meet socially. I can’t imagine having a real flameout, burn the bridges, months of pain goodbye. At my age, I really couldn’t stand it — not so much because of the drama and stress, but because having these people in my life is too much of a gift, too precious, to cut anyone off entirely.

Ironically, it was Isaac I almost parted from forever, once, when I was much younger, and I thought it would be something I could live through. I had moved, and I didn’t want a long-distance friendship. I wanted to be with him as a lover or not at all. And after almost a year apart, that’s what happened. I came home giggling and margaritaed after a several-days-long work stretch, ready to finish off a night off with a fun guy I’d been seeing, and hit the blinking light on the answering machine. We had those back then. It was Isaac, and the message was, in effect, that this is bullshit, let’s be together. Fun Guy raised his eyebrows and said “well,” and hopped on his skateboard and darted away.

And Isaac and I got legally married.

Breaking up because of abuse has to be done, of course. Then there’s also the breakup that happens because you realize you just aren’t really compatible. Others grow apart — that’s what happened with the one who chose not to be friends afterward. I felt like my love for him was dying because I felt like he was dying — letting his world become more and more cramped and constricted, too much television and junk food. I felt guilty for working, going out, meeting people, trying things. He liked stuff; I’m not much for stuff. I was afraid we’d end up buried in toys. So I can see how this kind of breakup can happen.

But I also wonder if my wanting to hold on to relationships is a kind of denial, an immaturity. Is it an inability to find ‘closure’, a fear of death, a fear of letting go?

A friend recently ended a seven-year relationship with a man who was married to a don’t-ask-don’t-tell wife. My friend and he eventually started thinking they wanted to move in together — but that was where the limits of DADT [the poly kind, not military], and what I see as its un-sustainability, come through clearly. In the end, he couldn’t stand living away from his children, not being there every day. My friend, as she always had been, was gracious — she had always said he was free to work out anything that worked for him. She could not stand seeing his unhappiness and indecisiveness. She had to end it so he would go. It was painful as hell, and Issac and I hurt for her, not least because we liked the guy, too. It didn’t make a bit of difference that she had dated and even had some longer-term relationships with other men over the course of those seven years. A person is a person, and no one is interchangeable.

As she started to heal, we were talking one night about a man she was going out with — a ‘secondary’, though she doesn’t use those terms. Anyway, she said something to the effect that you’d think she’d spend more time with Secondary Guy now that she’d broken up, but that it just didn’t work that way. It’s not like you’re some minor-league player who gets a call one day saying “Pack your bags, you’re going to the show!” Some people are going to be Secondary Guy, whatever happens, and that’s OK as long as they know the score. Some of them want to be Secondary Guy, because that’s what works for them. They’re not interchangeable.

I got pregnant pretty late in life, after thinking I wouldn’t be able to. As I talked to other older mothers, I found out we were thought of in two terms: “elderly pregnancy” and “premium pregnancy.” We’ll leave that first term alone. As for the second, the thought is that medical workers would take extra care and caution with the “premium pregnancy,” for instance, going directly to a c-section if there were even a hint of trouble in labor, because this was one’s only chance for a child. I have this feeling that people with more than one child think of each child as a ‘premium’. Where could this institutionalized belief that it’s OK if you’ve got another one to ‘fall back on’ come from? Deepest evolutionary instinct, maybe, but then again, there are also deep within us ways we can tell at a sniff every unique individual who comes near us, tell precisely who they are and even what’s on their minds. We know that no one is interchangeable.

This poem is part of a series on Lilith myths, and it’s about that idea.

III. Abundance

“Said the Holy One to Adam: If she agrees to come back, what is made is good. If not, she must permit one hundred of her children to die every day.”
—The Alphabet of Ben Sira

They say I agreed to it:
In exchange for my freedom,
Every day, they get to kill
One hundred of my children.
Really, believe me,
One is all it takes.

Some people have told me it must be easier not to worry about breaking up if you have another lover in your back pocket. No. Even if you have more than one partner, it’s not easy to lose anyone. Never.

I think this thinking comes from the same place that compels people to unite themselves with someone, anyone, just so they can be coupled; not alone. It doesn’t matter who you drag along as your date to that wedding or class reunion, right? I’ve always been one who would rather go alone. People aren’t just props for photos.

Some people I’ve heard and read say polyamorists tend to break up more — it’s all the drama and complications of scheduling, maintaining. Swimming against the tide gets exhausting. They don’t leave enough time to talk, love, check in; jealousy and dishonesty start to get a foothold, like mold on a basement ceiling. Some people are polyamorists because they’re addicted to excitement and adrenaline, but I’d bet there are no more of these types in poly than there are among monogamists. Either way, some people won’t be happy without a flameout.

With polyamory, you don’t necessarily have to break up in order to have a new relationship, or in order to get something you feel you need but aren’t finding in your present relationship. So there are fewer reasons to break up, and for that reason, I think you get to feel these reasons very acutely.

I read a blog entry that explains this very well recently. She’s starting a podcast soon and it looks like it’s going to be interesting.

Love is not enough. This is a truth that goes beyond polyamory and nonmonogamy, but seems to be more obvious in polyamory due to the fact that love isn’t thought of as a finite one-recipient only emotion. …

The truth is that relationships take a lot of different resources to be sustainable, not just love. You need proper timing, you need all parties to be on some sort of symbiotic developmental/maturity/lifecycle phase, you need time and energy … you need money and transportation and logistics. You need some really fucking unromantic things to pull off a sustainable relationship. …

Poly people find themselves with a very large struggle. There is no lack of love or want that keeps them out of certain relationships. But that doesn’t mean that they should stay in these relationships, either. A lot of genuinely loving relationships can end up being disruptive to the people within those partnerships when those other resources are lacking. And let’s not get into how disruptive they can be for the people around them. That is when the logic wins over love.