{"id":20599,"date":"2009-12-27T18:27:59","date_gmt":"2009-12-27T23:27:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=20599"},"modified":"2011-06-03T19:10:22","modified_gmt":"2011-06-03T23:10:22","slug":"an-oldie-evolutionary-tendencies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/an-oldie-evolutionary-tendencies\/","title":{"rendered":"An oldie: Evolutionary Tendencies"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am researching Mars retrograde in Leo, which I am casting as a subtle polyamorous revolution, and I found this article, called Evolutioary Tendencies<\/strong><\/a>, which is currently hosted on Sexuality.org.<\/em> This is an excerpt of an article written in approximately 1999.<\/em> – efc<\/em><\/p>\n

FOR SOME REASON it’s still controversial to openly admit to having or wanting more than one long-term intimate partner. It has sizzle. The idea can make you angry and nervous, or hot and curious, or both. Jealousy can arise like a reflex, or more accurately, reflux. Eyebrows go up. Your credibility is on the line. You’d better have a good explanation.<\/p>\n

“You may be in a conversation with a seemingly rational person when the topic of non-monogamy comes up,” says Brett Hill, co-editor of the quarterly Loving More magazine, a Colorado-based central information point and philosophical forum for the polyamorous community. “Your friend’s demeanor changes. What was a decent conversation suddenly becomes a verbal assault, and it’s personal. It’s as if there was a military unit that trained each U.S. citizen in the defense of monogamy to bring out the big guns and annihilate discussion of anything else.”<\/p>\n

Hill sees part of his mission as keeping that discussion going, and debunking the myth that monogamy is the only moral or spiritually legitimate way of life. It’s fine, he says, if that’s what you want, and if that’s what you’re really doing, but quite often it is neither. “In many ways, people function in two separate and often contradictory spheres,” says Hill. “One consists of a set of proscriptions concerning what behavior ought to occur. The other consists of what people actually do in concrete instances when overt behavior is observed. The two are in direct conflict in most every aspect of sex, marriage and family life.”<\/p>\n

Hill agrees with the position of some anthropologists that cultural norms, that is, the rules themselves, serve the function of obscuring the actual behavior. The taboo around even discussing polyamory appears to be a veil drawn not over polyamory itself, but rather what it exposes about the way we were taught to have our monogamous relationships, and what really happens within them. To discuss one is to drag up the other. Honest talk about polyamory quickly transmogrifies into investigating the sticky wicket of what it really means to think you possess another human being. A lot of people have been waiting a long time to cut loose on that subject. Or it means exploring the idea of being a diverse person with several distinct sides that could relate to several different intimate partners – a discussion that might need to happen, perhaps, with your lover sitting right there.<\/p>\n

Exploring the mere idea of opening your life to other partners involves honestly investigating what our real needs are, and admitting how they might not be being met in our current situation. Yet almost by accident, polyamory exposes one little problem with monogamy the way it’s frequently practiced. Often, one-to-one pairing implies not just exclusivity with one lover, but also curtailing other freedoms and friendships that “threaten” your partner, cutting off ties with old flames, not going to art school, not taking vacations by yourself, not masturbating, not moving to Europe, not sharing your authentic life goals because in some way they conflict with your current reality structure, and moreover, not mentioning anything that might threaten the tenuous state of the partnership – silent needs, unspoken resentments, unanswered questions and so on. Such failures-to-mention could be called withholds, and these withholds are the boards and beams out of which our houses of bullshit are built. And Lord knows, they are lonely dwellings.<\/p>\n

Even discussing this thing called polyamory blows the doors off that kind of house. At the same time, another question is addressed: polyamory conveniently provides a legitimate way to expand our idea of partnership, recognizing that humans have legitimate needs for variety and community. It’s healthy for us; we are tribal animals. Sometimes I think we are all just waiting for somebody to give us permission.<\/p>\n

Of course, there is always jealousy. Well, what about jealousy? This thing that kills us a thousand times, and still we come back for more, never asking the question. I haven’t seen polyamory answer the question, but I’ve seen it asked with heart-felt meaning, and I have seen many people make progress not just escaping from its ravages, but also opening up to the much deeper spiritual questions involved. In most relationships where the partners are any less neurotic than Woody Allen, discussing jealousy honestly, speaking about our quite legitimate fear of abandonment, of the relationship changing or ending, of opening up about how we feel about the people in our lives, all bring us closer. Barriers vanish. Bonding becomes deeper and more clear.<\/p>\n

Honesty, practiced as a daily yoga, creates shared lives based on authentic understandings. And herein may lie the heart of the controversy. If there is something about the way we are currently taught to relate that so often causes us to keep secrets, withhold our feelings, deny our desires, want to own and control our partners and blatantly lie about what we actually do – then frequently split up – perhaps this new thing called polyamory is dangerous because it makes us face each other. We have to look straight within and be who we are, and see our partners for who they, in actual, fact truly are. In that environment, intimacy is a difficult thing to escape.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am researching Mars retrograde in Leo, which I am casting as a subtle polyamorous revolution, and I found this article, called Evolutioary Tendencies, which is currently hosted on Sexuality.org. This is an excerpt of an article written in approximately 1999. – efc FOR SOME REASON it’s still controversial to openly admit to having or … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20599"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}