What Polyamory can learn from Polygamy

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month, the PMM bloggers will write about their views on one of them. Links to all posts can be found at www.polymeansmany.com. This month, our topic is "types of non-monogamy".

(For this post, I will be discussing polygamy, even though it would be more semantically accurate to say 'polygyny'. I know that etymology is against me, but I'm going to stick with cultural usage.)

It would be very easy for me to write about why I think polyamory is a better model for relationships than polygamy. I find the 'one penis policy' to be on shaky moral ground even when the women subjected to it are allowed to be involved with other women. Polygamy generally brings along with it judgemental attitude to sex outside of marriage, and regressive, restrictive gender roles. But there is a lot of criticism fired at polygamists that the polyamorists are attacked with too. And when you come down to it, we have a lot in common.

Yes, I know that polygamy has been used to oppress women, but so has monogamy, and I don't have a problem with people choosing that. In a patriarchal world where the men hold much of the power, just about anything can be used to oppress women (including polyandry, from what little I know of it). When it comes down to it, a polygamous marriage is just a relationship between one man and several women, and there are many polyamorists in that position.

Christine Brown, whose polygamous marriage was the centre of the reality TV show Sister Wives desired a husband with multiple wives so much that she actively sought the role of third wife. She wanted, what polyamorists can probably understand pretty well, to fall in love with a family, not just one person. Vicki Darger, when suffering from debilitating postnatal depression, found that being in a polygamous marriage meant that she had not just her husband, but her 'sister wives' to support her, and help with her other children. Speaking as a woman with two male partners, I'm obviously not going to want a relationship structure like Brown's or Darger's, but I can relate to the reasoning behind their choices.

Have you watched Big Love? I'm surprised at how many polyamorists haven't, and who assume that what polygamists do is very different to us. One scene in the first episode involves the three wives sitting down to organise their calendars, planning which night their shared husband will be spending with which wife and reorganising for birthdays. If you're polyamorous, you might be surprised at how much of their lives you recognise.

I was surprised at how much of it I actually envied. More than two parents for the children, regular family meals around an enormous dining table, shared finances, a communal back garden, and the ability to plan face to face, rather than just through Google Calendar. My husband and I talked about how although we were basically happy as a twosome, maybe someone or some people might come along that changed that. Maybe we'll have the chance to live more communally with secondary partner(s), or maybe one or both of us will find someone who wants to commit to our family as we have committed to each other. And despite being vocal about how my husband and I do practice hierarchical polyamory, it's been watching and reading about polygamy that's given me a less hierarchical model that I think would work for us.

Karaite Jews (for whom polygamy is rare, but permitted), some fundamentalist Mormons and Pakistani law all allow men to take a second wife, but only with the consent of the first wife. This effectively gives the first wife veto power, but not indiscriminately: you can demand that your husband breaks off his courtship of a potential new wife, but you can't demand that he break up with her once they are married. The characters in Big Love vote on whether or not to include a new wife. Although my husband and I have never felt the need to officially grant the other veto power, I would need him to consent if I wanted to bring anyone else into our family as a permanent spouse. A clear difference between our views and polygamous views on relationships is that we don't need marriage or co-primacy with our other relationships to consider them sucecssful, and we're not going to end them just because they aren't heading that way. But if our one of our other relationships did head that way, then that would be the end of hierarchy between the three of us. As Darger says about Val, the third wife in her family, once she was married to their husband, 'she instantly became a full and equal partner.' Equality between the wives is a common requirement in polygamous doctrines.

Perhaps this post doesn't make it sound this way, but I really am blissfully happy with one husband and one boyfriend, and so I'm not looking for either my husband or I to marry again, as much as I am attracted to larger family models. Even if I actively wanted it, it seems unlikely, considering how little space we have left for anyone new. But putting aside my feminist disapproval of polygamy to find out about those who actively chose it has been enlightening for me. I may be happy in my own form of non-monogamy, but other people's choices have a lot to teach me too.

Scaffolding, by Seamus Heaney

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

from Death of a Naturalist.

The space that's left

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month, the PMM bloggers will write about their views on one of them. Links to all posts can be found at polymeansmany.com. This month, our topic is "the bad stuff".

I was pregnant only a few months after meeting my boyfriend. And if you know me, or have read any of this blog before, you'll know he is not the father. I'd been living with the father, my husband, for 5 years at that point, and we owned property together, not to mention cats and a lifetime of plans for our future.

When I met my husband, I was single, living alone in a rented flat, starting my first professional job, and had no fixed plans beyond the next 12 months. Neither of us had put down roots. The only things restricting our relationship were our desires, and once we were clear that they aligned, we headed pretty quickly towards the things we both wanted out of life and love: cohabitation, marriage, mortgage, cats and children. There was very little in our way.

When I think about the "bad stuff" in polyamory, it's hard for me to pin it down, because I'm really very happy with my lot. I have all the important things that I ever wanted, and plenty that I didn't think I could have. But I think that the more entangled we become, through living our lives, falling in love, putting down roots, making commitments and plans, the less space there is for these new connections that we've opened our hearts to.

Love isn't enough to sustain a relationship. We all know relationships that ended despite the love, not because of the lack of it. To grow, develop and thrive, a relationship needs space.

So not only was the space in my life pretty inflexible when I met my boyfriend, but it was about to become a lot more rigid, as I began to devote my energies to my daughter, even before she was born. The space available for our relationship to grow into was shrinking, and if that hadn't been enough for either of us, that would have been it. And once she was born, he found me retreating from him even further, as my time, energy and focus went into parenting.

These big life decisions - starting a family, moving house, settling down or shaking up your life-plans completely - are more of a risk and a limitation to polyamorous relationships than they are to the monogamous. What happens if one of your partners doesn't want to have children with you, but another one does? What happens if you and your partner plan to move across the country (or the world), but then you fall in love with someone new? What if you want to live with your partner, but the house they own with their other partner isn't big enough? What if you fall in love, but the person you fall in love with really doesn't have the time, or emotional energy, to make the connection with you that you're yearning for? If you have more than one relationship, these life decisions, both past and future, are more likely to come up, and love isn't going to be enough to fix them.

Luckily for me, he waited, and I came back to him and found our bond stronger than ever. Eventually, the space that my boyfriend and I had for each other turned out to be just right for the relationship that suits us. But I can imagine that if he hadn't seen the long-term view of wanting to be a part of my family, or hadn't loved children as much as he does, or hadn't enjoyed seeing how my life was developing, or hadn't been willing to support me when I had nothing to give back, or hadn't generally been as patient and understanding as he is, I might not be writing this blog from such a happy position.

So if I fall in love again, good luck to whomever that is. If they don't fit into my family, my two existing relationships, and aren't happy for our relationship to grow into the left over gaps and spaces that the rest of my life hasn't eaten up, it's probably not going to work out. But at the moment, problems caused by me having everything that I want don't seem too bad. I'll take the bad stuff when it leads to all this happiness.

Three years

Three years ago, to my complete surprise, I started developing feelings for the warm, sharp-witted man who is now my boyfriend. That makes it not only three years of a happy relationship, but three years since I considered my marriage not just non-monogamous, but polyamorous. It is a measure of how much I love and admire him that our relationship has changed me so fundamentally.

And not just me, but as the title of this blog suggests, my whole family. My husband and I don't want to be just a nuclear family any more. We don't want our connections to be just about love, sex or romance, but about drawing these connections into our family. We can now see how much our daughter thrives from these connections, and the attention of so many wonderful, loving people. This is a big change from how this blog started, when I just didn't know how having a child would affect my relationships, or quite what role our friends and lovers would play in her life. And as I wrote there, in the first entry in this blog, even that was a change from how my husband and I began, where we were (quite frankly) non-monogamous purely for the sex. I was so settled with my husband that I couldn't imagine falling in love with anyone else. I not only didn't desire it, I didn't think I was capable of it.

So I have grown in many ways that I am grateful for, and I am full of appreciation to the two most important men in my life for their role in this. To my boyfriend for giving me the love that proved me wrong, and my husband for being nothing but supportive and encouraging when he saw me falling for someone else. Thank you to them both for the best three years I've had so far.

"Trust your instincts"

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month, the PMM bloggers will write about their views on one of them. Links to all posts can be found at polymeansmany.com. This month, our topic is "finding what works for you".

Trust yourself.

You know more than you think you do.... what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.

- Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care, 1946

When it comes to natural human behaviours, like parenting, sex and relationships, we're often told to trust our gut. We are animals, after all, and animal instincts have been honed by evolution over millions of years. Other animals don't worry about how to raise their young, they just do it. They don't worry about what form their relationship should take, or write blogs about it, or read advice columns. They follow their instincts.

Parenting, as one of the most basic and essential behaviours in any species, should be instinctive, as Dr Spock wrote, but what I think he is missing is that we are not an instinctive species. Like other primates (more so than other primates) whilst evolving our capacity to learn, our basic instincts have been eroded and overwritten.

Harriet J. Smith is a clinical psychologist who adopted several tamarind monkeys when they were no longer needed for research. When they started to breed, she realised that the monkeys that she had raised herself had no idea what to do next. The parents didn't understand why they had these tiny, baby monkeys clinging to their backs and would try to bite them, or flick them away. The only adult monkey who showed an interest in caring for the babies was one that had been captured from the wild, and who wasn't even a parent. In other words, it wasn't enough for these monkeys to trust their innate instincts. Successful parenting has to be taught.

This explains why something as natural as breastfeeding feels so unnatural to most mothers when they try it, and also why at 6 months, only 1 in 4 babies are breastfed at all, only 1% are breastfed exclusively. Of all things, lactation should come easily to mammals, but we're not the only species that can struggle. Maki, a chimpanzee born in captivity, was unable to breastfeed her baby, despite the baby being able to latch on and feed when her mother was unconscious. A gorilla in a zoo, who hadn't managed to breastfeed her first child cracked it with her second, after the local La Lache league fed their babies in her sight during her pregnancy. When you consider how rare (and stigmatised) breastfeeding is, and how much rarer it is that we actually see it, it shouldn't be a surprise that human women struggle as well.

If something as natural and necessary to the survival of our species as caring and feeding our young doesn't actually come naturally, how can we expect our relationships to work if we just "follow our gut"?

Like these other primates, we don't know instinctively what is going to work and what isn't. What feels like trusting our instincts is really trusting what we've learnt from our environment and upbringing, and this can lead us into relationship models that just don't suit us. This is why monogamy is our romantic ideal - it isn't because monogamy is natural or best for us as a species, it's just because that's the model we see around us. It's the same reason why we feel that feeding a baby with a bottle is more natural than with a breast, or why transporting our babies in prams and buggies, rather than carrying them (like every other primate), feels like the right thing to do.

Smith turned her research into a book called Primate Parenting, where she attempts to take the parenting techniques of our closest relatives in the wild and use them to guide "civilised" humans. I don't believe that natural is always best, but I do think it's often a good starting place. As Smith explains in her book, there are good reasons why keeping in physical contact with our babies, breastfeeding them on demand, and sleeping with them close by, as other primates do, are both natural and desirable behaviours, and working from that point is a good way to figure out what works best for your individual relationship with your unique child. Unfortunately, what comes most naturally to human relationships is less easy to piece together, and anthropologists are far from a consensus. And while there are many similarities between the ways that primates parent, there are wild differences in how they organise their sex lives, making it far harder to extrapolate from them to us. (Our two closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, are almost polar opposites when it comes to sex and relationships.)

Finding what works for me has been a long process of picking this learning apart. When making predictions about what is going to work well for me, how much of my thinking comes from what I've inadvertently learnt from society, and how much of it comes from my own, rational thinking?

The only way for me to work it out has been to give it a go. I wouldn't have thought that I had the capacity to love more than one person at a time before meeting my boyfriend, and I would have assumed that I'd be tormented with jealousy if my husband had sex with someone else before he actually did it. These beliefs were so ingrained they needed to be demonstrated to be untrue for me to discard them. Similarly, I hated the idea of co-sleeping when I was pregnant, and insisted on having a moses basket by my bed. It became a laundry basket three days after Small was born, and she is still sleeping next to me nearly two years later. I'm not suggesting that polyamory and co-sleeping are going to work for you, but I do think some of these decisions have to be tested in the field before locking down your options. Especially if you're making plans for relationships before you've met the people you'll be having these relationships with (before they even exist if you're talking about parenting.)

I'm pretty sure, based on the available evidence, that monogamy isn't natural, but it's unlikely that the pair-bonding-based polyamory that I've settled myself into is natural either. So if we don't know what is natural or what is a "best-fit" for our species to use as a starting place, we have a lot more work to do in making these decisions. But also, I expect, a lot more freedom.

(N.B. I don't mean to come down quite so hard on Dr Spock. Despite my criticism of his basic argument, he really did challenge the rigid norms of parenting at the time, empowered parents, and was the catalyst for a lot of positive change.)

Why you should lie to your partners

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month, the PMM bloggers will write about their views on one of them. Links to all posts can be found at polymeansmany.com

Captain Bluntschli: You said youd told only two lies in your whole life. Dear young lady: isnt that rather a short allowance? I'm quite a straightforward man myself; but it wouldnt last me a whole morning. - Act III, Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw

If you're reading any "how to" guide to polyamory, you're going to be told (in a variety of words and ways) time and time again that you should talk honestly about everything. I broadly agree, but I think this zeal for being honest and communicating about everything can be taken too far. In fact, one of the key skills in communication is knowing when not to communicate and when not to be honest.

All good parents lie to their children sometimes. Unless there are people out there who are genuinely never bored by reading the same, sodding five page cardboard book a dozen times in succession, or who really enjoy standing around in the cold to push their child on swing for twenty minutes, we all do it. We all want our children to feel that their parents love spending time with them, and that their feelings and interests are important to us. So we read the book again (doing the voices, of course), and we laugh and smile and sing and play, even when we'd rather not. Even when we're bored, frustrated or even on the edge of losing our tempers.

Usually, these lies are really just moments when we push aside misleading or counter-productive thoughts and feelings, and choose to act out of love instead. Losing my temper, or denying my daughter my company might feel satisfying in the moment, but once that moment has passed, I'd not only feel guilty, but I'd have hurt someone I love. When I'm able (and I'm not always able) to push aside these destructive thoughts and force myself to act out of love, even when I don't feel it, I feel better about myself than if I'd succumbed to cheap honesty.

Dr Laura Markham, who writes the amazing Aha! Parenting describes this process as mindfulness. She says that "Being mindful means that you pay attention to what you're feeling, rather than just acting on it," and so taking a pause, allowing the emotion to pass through you, and not acting until you are more in control. It's a key skill in parenting, she believes, not least because it's a skill we should all want our children to have. It's a myth that you should express your anger expressing anger actually makes you more angry. So if you express your anger to someone you love, whether that is a child or a partner, not only might you have thought of a better way of dealing with it if you'd just waited a moment, but you've made yourself more angry, and probably upset or riled the other person up as well. Honesty - not always useful.

On rare occasions, the best way to communicate is to lie. Or at least, to keep the truth to yourself for now. Suppose your partner is about to go out on a date, which you have had plenty of notice for and have happily agreed to, but just before they go, you have a pang of jealousy. You're not okay. You don't want your partner to fall for this new person. You don't want them to kiss or hold hands. Do you call them up to say this? Or perhaps you hear your partner and their other lover's sex noises, and although you said it was fine for them to stay over, you feel left out and lonely, and just want them to stop. Do you interrupt?

If you pause and allow the emotion to pass through you, you might find that dealing with the feeling yourself is the best way of handling it. Do you really want your partner to go on their date thinking that you are unhappy? Will you be glad tomorrow if they've cancelled the date on your behalf? Do you want your metamour to feel awkward and unwanted in your house? How would you want them to behave if the situation was reversed? It might be better to generously lie and say that you hope they have a lovely night, or to distract yourself with a hobby and play music loudly. You might find that once the emotion has passed, you really do want them to have a good time, and you're glad you didn't spoil it for them. Or maybe you talk about it later, when your emotions have cooled, and you are better placed to rationally consider what you want them to do differently next time, if anything. You don't need to bury your feelings, just find a better time and way to deal with them.

Analysing your own thoughts and feelings in this way is hard. That's why toddlers can't do it: they are relentlessly honest with their emotions, screaming with rage, hitting people who annoy them, throwing things they don't want and weeping at temporary separations from the people they love. I don't expect my daughter to be able to manage these difficult feelings based on how they might make me feel yet, but I do think it's fair to expect adults to be at least try to do this for each other. So when I find myself tempted to say something hurtful or selfish, my goal is to push that aside and to think, instead of being honest, can I act out of love instead?

New Relationship Energy

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month, the PMM bloggers will write about their views on one of them. Links to all posts can be found at polymeansmany.com. This month, our topic is "NRE"

"New Relationship Energy" is a term that polyamorous people use to define a feeling that is familiar to most people - the rush of desire and excitement that kick starts a new romantic relationship. When you become infatuated with someone, neuro-transmitters such as dopamine and serotonin can result in the other person being almost an addiction - with all the pleasures and torments that suggests. Sometimes, once all this has burned away, there isn't anything left, but sometimes it ignites a long and loving relationship.

For monogamous people, feeling this way about someone other than their partner is a problem - it either means that the new feelings must be ignored or suppressed, or it means the end of the existing relationship. One or the other must go. But for those of us in non-monogamous relationships, these complicated, often delicious feelings are an unavoidable complication of starting new relationships when others are also on the go.

The excellent blogger The Goddess of Java, who blogs at The Polyamorous Misanthrope wrote about how having a baby might affect a poly relationship , describing the feeling of becoming a parent as that "like being in NRE up to eleven". It's a great article, but I think that the analogy leaves a lot to be desired. Although the new feelings of parenthood are also hormonally driven, I don't think the feelings are at all similar. Unlike the mellowing of infatuation into love, nothing about that early passion I had for my daughter has diminished. The biggest difference between my feelings now and then is that I'm no longer in shock. (I'm sure it was prolactin and oxytocin that caused me to fixate on caring for her, because my brain definitely wasn't working that well.) The analogy suggests that there will come a time when the parent will stop placing their child at the centre of their universe and stop thinking that their child is something supernaturally precious. They won't. The only thing that will change is the practical demands the child places on them.

And the key difference between the new relationship between parent and child and the thrill of a new romantic contact is the uncertainty of it all. Let alone from her birth, from the moment of taking that pregnancy test, I knew how our relationship would turn out - I was going to love her for the rest of my life. And those feelings of love (more crucially, unconditional love) were there within a few days of her birth, and have neither grown or abated.

NRE isn't like that. When I started falling for my husband, I didn't know what our relationship would become. I could see that we were likely to fall in love, and I hoped that marriage and children were in our future, but I couldn't know for sure. To be honest, I didn't like it. I hated the uncertainty. The possibility of not only heartbreak but having the future with him that I wanted taken away made enjoying our NRE difficult for me. I wanted him too much.

So it's possible that the NRE I had with my boyfriend is the first time I've felt free to really enjoy it. I was already married, and already planning a family. I didn't have a preconceived role that I was hoping he'd take up, or a schema I wanted our relationship to grow into. I hadn't expected to ever fall in love again, and so it was nothing more than a delight to find out that there was more happiness to be had. Perhaps the lack of danger made it less exciting, but I was far more free to enjoy it, and let it be whatever it wanted to be.

It's possible that I'll never feel that thrill again. Maybe that's a shame, as I've only recently learned how to enjoy it, but I'd be okay with that. I know from how I feel about all three of them that love is far more valuable.