It’s becoming difficult to do this blog.
We’ve moved from the occasional chat to weekly updates over lunch where I need to record the conversation with Poly. I’m amazed that she is OK with this and feel honoured that she trusts me with the recordings. After the conversation, I transpose the recording before deleting it. Sorry about that if you were hoping for more, but the good news is that Poly wants to do a podcast at some point in order to help explain how her life has changed and continues to change.
With the notes and transcribed material, I extract what stands out as the most relevant and meaningful points and write the entries. However it’s taking a real toll on me and the best way to describe the nature of this burden is to quote Samuel Coleridge and the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink”.
So it begs the real question of why I am putting myself through this. I’ll be honest there is titillation sure, it is very interesting content and I am fundamentally challenged by a women who clearly enjoys sex and forming that strong connection with other people. But in addition to these things, there also appears to be a tsunami in the making as I’m seeing people begin to address their preconceived notions of what relationships are. When I discuss relationships with other people the same issues keep coming up. People are happy when they first meet someone and get the rush of hormones, and for the honeymoon period all is good with the world, but inevitably this feeling dies away. Sure people will say this is normal, but the question I’m asking myself if “Why ?”
Why does it go stale? Why do we need more and more? Why do we get bored?”
Some relationships become stable over time, but it seems more just move from stale to broken. You can address this with counseling and add things to spice up the love life, but apart from being fodder for glossy magazine covers, do these interventions actually address the underlying problems. You might turn to porn or toys, but the “Why” is still there. You might try sex with new people, but the why is still there. You might have been cast as hetero by your family but then come out as gay, but the “why” is still there. You might get into fetish, you might try orgies or any number of other escapes. But the “why” around the loss of desire and the gaining of new desire is still there.
What has amazed me more and more is the degree to which some people find a solution to this dilemma of disinterest by shopping around and cheating on their partner. This annoys me for a couple of reasons, firstly because they should be grateful they even have a partner as many people do not, and secondly this is rank dishonesty not only against their partner but also against themselves.
The reason Poly broke off things with James is because he was clearly in a monogamous relationship with his girlfriend and lying to her about it. He would tell Poly that “Oh no, she is OK with the open relationship” but when you dig deeper, and Poly did, it became apparent that James and his girlfriend Susan had come to the conclusion that whilst their relationship was important, James had greater sexual needs than Susan.
When Poly described this to me and it seemed that Susan is putting up with James’s behavior out of fear that he will leave all together. She blames her IUD for the low sex drive, and I’ve heard other women say the Pill can also have this effect. It may also be the case that not everyone is going to have the same level of libido, but whatever the cause, James is claiming that Susan is OK with the “open” part of the relationship because otherwise “he won’t get his needs met.”
Let’s be clear, if this is what’s happening, then this is abuse.
Its abuse because Susan is essentially stuck in a co-dependent relationship and James is taking advantage of it. Hang-on, that may be a bit unfair to Susan, let’s say that again. Susan wants to have an exclusive trusting relationship with one other person. If your partner want’s monogamy then guess what buster, you’re monogamous. It’s that simple. It’s not “open” just because you want it to be. This is because the other person’s subjectivity is involved. It’s not polyamory, it’s cheating.
It’s probably clear that I have pretty high opinion of Poly, but it increased when she explains to me the depth of the connection with James, about how much it hurt to push him away, and one of the reasons for doing this was because she did not want another woman to be suffering on her account. Of course the other reason was because James was lying and basically being a dick.
We know that he lied to Susan which means he’s probably also lied to Poly. However, what’s also clear is that James is lying to himself. He should be doing his own “work”, that is the inner work we all have to do in order to make sense of the world we are in. Instead of coming to terms what it means to be polyamorous, if indeed this is what he wants, I get the sense that James enjoys “the game” of it all.
The game here is the conquest of women, and it is a particular form of misogyny that relegates women to being objects of desire. The philandering around is just a way that he delays doing his own inner work around connection, or intimacy, or shame, or that deep self-loathing he has, or whatever.
You can’t run from the “why”, it’ll just keep coming to find you.
Poly made the point the other day that being Polyamorous still means you have to do the inner work. Often in the media, and in the world “out there” (you know, Norm’s world), we get the impression that once you’ve got all the boxes ticked, then it should be all good. Once you have a partner, the house, the job, the car, the kids, the 15 foot High Definition TV with polyphonic surround sound, once you have all these things then it should be OK.
But it isn’t.
And deep down, in the recess of our mind, we know that isn’t. You know that it isn’t. This is because the pull to do the inner work is still there. Monogamy can sometimes become co-dependence and it can put a fresh coat of paint over the rising damp on the wall of our inner world. We can fall back on that person we are connected with, in that bed of each other’s company, in that safe groove of familiarity. And slowly that groove becomes a rut, which deepens and widens to a hole that becomes a dark chasm, and you are stuck down the bottom of that pit with the lyrics from Talking Heads rolling around, you ask, “well! …how did I get here?”
Sure, you can still try to avoid your stuff AND be polyamorous, which is maybe what John is doing, however it becomes more difficult to run away from your stuff. The nature of multiple parallel connections means that your stuff is thrown into contrast. How you are with one person will differ to how you are with another person. It is this contrast that offers you a perspective denied the couple in a monogamous relationship. You could develop this same contrast within an open relationship or through cheating, but Polyamory has a lot more integrity because you’re being honest with other people, just as you’re being more honest with yourself.
The gradual awakening in Poly was that she realised she not monogamous. Poly found that a deep connection was available with more than one person, and these very different connections began to show up different perspectives on herself through the inherent contrast they offer. It was in this way that Poly has been able really hone in on her own stuff around intimacy, independence, abandonment, lust, jealousy and even love.
But the work doesn’t end there.