Thinking through polyamory

Wife is fond of saying that she is polyamorous as an excuse for her affairs. She brings this claim into the discussion as if it some kind of medical excuse, like diabetes or asthma. “But how can you expect me to be faithful when you know I am polyamorous? I can’t help falling in love with multiple people at once!”

As an aside, I have to wonder if this makes any sense at all. Is polyamory an attribute of individuals or of relationships? The explanations I have seen on polyamory websites make me think that it is really an attribute of relationships, so that it is just as much a category mistake to speak of Wife (as an individual person) being polyamorous as it would be to speak of her being dyadic or triadic.

What I mean is that these websites characterize polyamory as a relationship where the (sexual) partners themselves have other (sexual) partners, and where all interactions among all these partners are open and above-board, and where the primary concern of each member in the relationship is that the other members not be hurt by anything that is going on. These features – mutual openness, mutual respect, and a reciprocal concern not to hurt each other – sound to me like features of relationships and not individual virtues; and this is part of why I think that Wife’s describing herself (rather than some relationship, like our marriage) as “polyamorous” is just an error.

And is our marriage polyamorous? I don’t see how it can be. Wife has other partners, but I don’t. Wife may not lie about the fact that she fucks other men, but she lies about little things like how much of the day she spent IM-ing with Boyfriend 5. Wife knows that what she does hurts me, but it doesn’t stop her. And one website I found says flat out that if you fuck multiple people but you are secretive about it and you hurt your partner, that’s not polyamory but cheating.

OK fine, so I’ve succeeded in scoring a trivial grammatical point against Wife. So what? The fact is that Wife is trying to get at something concrete; arguing that she used the wrong word for it is just pedantry. And we all know how successful pedantry is in navigating personal relationships.

The point she appears to be making is that “some people are just capable of loving more than one person – even romantically – at the same time.” And because she is one of these special people who is capable of loving more than one person at once, her current tangled love life is a natural consequence.

But how special is this?

I concede that some people are capable of loving more than one person romantically at the same time, but I would go one step farther: I think almost everyone on Earth is capable of this. It’s nothing special. Parents can love more than one child; children can love more than one parent. And if most of us couldn’t fall in love with more than one person at once, volumes and volumes of stories and songs throughout the ages would lose their point.

So if it’s that easy – if it is nearly universal – to fall in love with more than one person at a time, where did monogamy come from? Isn’t it therefore unnatural? And why do we find any culture at all (let alone several) promoting an ideal which looks so unnatural?

The answer is that monogamy truly is unnatural. What is natural is the behavior driven by our instincts, and monogamy is obviously not an instinct. But that does not necessarily make it bad, nor even suspect. Many good things in human life are non-instinctive. Some of them, like fire and tools, are more or less essential to survival; others, like music and art and literature, do not so much enable us to survive as make it worthwhile to survive. Either way, to say that something is unnatural (in the sense of being counter-instinctive) says nothing about whether it is good or bad. Indeed, if I stop for a moment to think how dreadfully impoverished life would be without fire or tools or art or music, I could almost join Katherine Hepburn’s character in “The African Queen” when she says, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put on earth to overcome."

Is monogamy something like art, then? Not really. Think about it for a minute and it should be clear that monogamy is a form of social organization. That means it is less like art and more like government. Monogamy is a human institution, like democracy or the rule of law. Now democracy, too, is unnatural, as the long struggle to create stable democratic states should attest. The “natural” political order, if there is such a thing, is probably permanent war and the rule of the stronger, which makes the life of man “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But I don’t hear anybody calling for us to abandon democracy because of its unnaturalness. That has to mean that democracy, although it is artificial, counter-instinctive, and a purely human creation, is nonetheless better than any more “natural” form of government.

I’m not really trying to write a blog on political theory, but there is a point here. This whole discussion of democracy is an endless analogy. The critical part is that democracy is better than nature by virtue of putting constraints on our natural political instincts, because when those instincts are unbridled they are so catastrophically destructive. And monogamy, to get back to the real topic at hand, works exactly the same way. Monogamy is better than nature by virtue of putting constraints on our natural sexual instincts because when those instincts are unbridled they are equally destructive.

Let me be clear: there are a number of sober and boring arguments in favor of monogamy which argue that it is conducive to a stable and wholesome social organization. These are arguments which point out that a society typically has about as many men as women, and that any serious disproportion in how the sexes are allocated to each other is likely to deform other parts of society. And that’s fine as far as it goes. But there is another side to the discussion – the personal side, which is the part that is relevant in this blog. And on the personal side of the equation, the argument in favor of monogamy has to be that any more “natural” arrangement is horribly destructive.

But how can this be? If falling in love with multiple people is so easy, where can the problem possibly be?

The problem is this: it is very easy to fall in love with multiple people; but for most of us, it is very, very hard to have our partners fall in love with multiple people! The whole point of monogamy turns out not to be about us at all. The whole point of monogamy is that we forego some desires that call to us profoundly and insistently – and we swallow the pain that this causes us – in order to avoid hurting other people.

Anybody who doubts all this should make up a bunch of popcorn and rent “Othello” this evening to remind themselves. But I hope you don’t mind if I don’t join you; I find it way too painful to sit through.

Great theory. I wish it helped me any.