Re: “Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad”
When I saw Tyler Austin Harper's piece "Polyamory, the Ruling Class's Latest Fad", I sighed deeply. A brief glance at the comment section below the link on Facebook suggested this would be a monogamous forward take, that decried any form of polyamory. I was surprised when I found I was actually enjoying what I was reading.
Overall, I think Harper's piece is great at scratching the surface of what plagues Molly and others who dive into polyamory like it's going to solve all their problems. But I don't think Harper's piece goes far enough. (But they covered a lot in this one piece!)
The piece focuses on a memoir by Molly Roden Winter "More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage" that Harper summarizes as "... an unsparing account of a polyamorous life—at least, a polyamorous life as lived by a white, wealthy, heterosexual Brooklynite." It really does set the tone for the specific perspective of polyamory we're looking at. We're getting a perspective of dating from someone who isn’t experiencing the misogynoir, ableism, biphobia, and transphobia (for starters) that can come with dating in America in general, never mind in polyamory.
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What do you call a group of people looking for polyamory to solve their problems without actually solving the problems?
Even now as I hold the pen, I feel hesitant to continue writing my thoughts about polyamory knowing good and goddamn well that people who are here for the thrill and novelty of polyamory will be put off by not seeing themselves featured predominantly in those thoughts. Polyamory is so rarely presented as simply having multiple romantic relationships because you care for multiple people. I dislike how refreshing it is to be around polyamorous people who just casually mention they have partners and it's not a big deal. I don't want to feel relieved when someone doesn't make it their whole identity. I want to get on with my day. But it is refreshing.
I find that many conversations about polyamory treat it as a personal statement. To be in an open relationship of any kind is rebellious, interesting, a statement to spit in the face of monogamy. It must become your identity, in a similar vein to how monogamous relationships and all that comes with them are treated as measures of self-worth. How much sex you have, are you desirable (to a very specific, cartoon-ish type of person), is your partner desirable to others, how will you defend your relationship if they stray, how do you control your partner, do you see where I'm going with this?
I personally think that has less to do with a “look how interesting I am” approach and instead speaks volumes of how expressions and understandings of personal identity are put under pressure within the context of capitalism and utilitarianism. Relationships can easily become a means to an end and/or affect your status or reputation and thus your social mobility on numerous levels. Sometimes in looking for something different, people can come to the conclusion they have to sell it or convince others who aren’t engaging in different of its worth. And sometimes the people who are selling (a watered down, superficial, appearances centered version) of different do it to convince themselves of its worth. But that very much feels like a story for a different day. Back to polyamory.
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Who is the real you?
One of the main themes of Harper's piece is self-actualization. "Indeed, the desire to discover her true self is Molly’s stated reason for engaging in 'ethical non-monogamy.' When she prepares to go on one of her first extramarital dates, she thinks, 'Who is my "self" if not a mother and a wife? I honestly don’t know. Perhaps it’s time to find out.'" I feel like there's a lot to be said about this idea of roles in relationships, in marriage, in family. One of my more significant relationships was with someone who very much wanted a family. I did too, but I wasn't ready to have one right then. I tried talking to them about what us starting a family would look like. They very much had the idea that I, a person who has never imagined being a stay at home parent, would become a stay at home parent. That somehow I would be fulfilled having a house and raising the kids mostly alone since they traveled for long periods of time for work. My personal goals and wants for myself in relation to starting a family were never discussed. I would have a home after all and raising kids is meaningful work.
I think our relationship ended much earlier than we actually stopped being a couple. And it's also this relationship where I wanted to be fully polyamorous. But not because I was polyamorous. I didn't hate my current partner, I didn't want to end the relationship. I thought this hurdle was something we could work through or compromise on...if I had a relationship where I felt like a person instead of an object. I told myself that this is just what comes with wanting to start a family. And my partner wasn't terrible, they didn't hit me or say the MOST misogynistic things, just the occasional ones that were like nails on a chalkboard. Super common and the pickings are slim, so I'd better just make it work. On top of it being damn near impossible to find polyamorous people in Los Angeles who don't immediately scream at the idea of starting a family, so I settled and coped. Until I couldn't cope with it anymore.
I think Harper means this in a kinder way that it might initially come off, "It seems to make her miserable, while taking her attention away from the real issues: a husband who behaves like an asshole, an unbalanced division of household labor, an unorthodox childhood, a desire to please everyone no matter the personal cost. Her attempt at finding a “deeper truth” through sexual enlightenment not only provides little truth or enlightenment; it keeps her from seeing her problems clearly." Harper later goes on to say "In his 1978 best seller, The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch argued that American narcissism should not be understood as simple self-obsession. Narcissism is a survival strategy: If we are fixated on finding fulfillment and endless self-reinvention, it is because our own inner lives feel like the only thing most of us have control over. The therapeutic cult of personal growth is a response to external problems that feel insoluble, a future that feels shorn of causes for hope."
I’ve heard too many arguments that maturity for women is something along the lines of eventually coming to their senses and giving up ideas of freedom. These arguments revolve around maturity is a women realizing their greatest joy and purpose will be found in the life threatening process of giving birth regardless of whether not they want to. (Queer and transgender people are rarely thought of in these conversations because of the one track fixation on adhering to heteronormative nonsense, so...) Even if you and I think this is a nonsense idea, there are people who have gone through life through that lens. What does self-actualization look like for them? What does recovery or developing personal stability look like for them? I don't think it's that hard to imagine that sexual freedom after going through all of that would be finding partners they enjoy having sex with. But nothing we experience as humans exists in isolation. Sex, relationships, emotional fulfillment, pursuing ambitions, identity, gender roles, all of these are tied together and shape how we recognize problems and solutions.
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Growth is a messy business
Embarking on the path of polyamory eventually leads to a pivotal turning point where you have to be honest with yourself about what path you're really on. I don't know if it's a result of the work that comes from having multiple significant relationships at the same time, or the natural progression of developing understanding, but if you're going to succeed in polyamory, you are going to have to be honest with yourself. Because whatever you hide from yourself while pursuing multiple relationships is eventually going to be revealed in those relationships. Where are you finding compatibility and do you like the results you're getting? Are you going after the same type of person and then generalizing that it's all men, all women, all whoever? Are you running yourself ragged trying to chameleon into a different personality for several relationships trying to make other people happy? Are you looking for short term flings knowing full well other people are pursuing long term relationships and avoiding serious conversations about those relationships? What we doing?
Polyamory in general has become a beautiful buzzword, another pin to put on to market yourself to the world as alternative. Hating monogamy, and all that we've inherited with it, is not being polyamorous. If you were struggling with respect, building trust, approaching your partners with curiosity in monogamous relationships, you are still going to have those problems in polyamorous ones. Finding other people to fulfill your needs can only take you so far when the need you’re looking to meet is avoiding yourself.
I love this explanation from Harper, "We might call this turbocharged version of authenticity culture “therapeutic libertarianism”: the belief that self-improvement is the ultimate goal of life, and that no formal or informal constraints—whether imposed by states, faith systems, or other people—should impede each of us from achieving personal growth. This attitude is therapeutic because it is invariably couched in self-help babble. And it is libertarian not only because it makes a cult out of personal freedom, but because it applies market logic to human beings. We are all our own start-ups. We must all adopt a pro-growth mindset for our personhood and deregulate our desires. We must all assess and reassess our own “fulfillment,” a kind of psychological Gross Domestic Product, on a near-constant basis. And like the GDP, our fulfillment must always increase."
I love it because I don't know how to eloquently explain that tangled line between working on yourself and actually being present in your relationships. In order to work on yourself you're going to need room to be vulnerable, and sometimes in the process of working on yourself you might find you're around people you can't be vulnerable with. Sometimes people will work on themselves in a way that can be observed by other people (can be observed by other people), but it's not to improve the relationship. It's to maintain the relationship long enough to keep being served by that relationship. "The attitude is therapeutic because it is invariably couched in self-help babble." is so loud to me because people really do pick up nonsense takes and readily internalize them because they have no real personal frame of reference for what they want and no discernment with which to filter out bullshit. This seems to be only magnified by pursuing polyamory mainly as a route of self-discovery and self-actualization.
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There’s more to polyamory than just sex.
There are parts of Harper's piece that talk about the descriptions of Molly's sexual experiences. I will say that I didn't start having good sex until I stopped tolerating bad sex. Polyamory did help me feel far more comfortable with saying no to sex I didn't want to have, which was a big change considering...all that comes with monogamy. It also showed me that I don't have to tolerate being misgendered constantly in a "loving relationship" as if success in our relationship rested strictly on my tolerance and patience with disrespect. But the quality of my sex life did not improve in the pursuit of polyamory. It improved because I broke up with falling in love with potential, the comforting familiarity that comes with hopelessness and making myself smaller as a way of coping. It improved because I found people who actually cared about me, our relationship, themselves. And the way I found that was by caring about myself instead of waiting for permission to do so or waiting for other people to be comfortable and secure while I was doing so.
Harper comments on the difference in approaches to polyamory between different classes, "Meanwhile, others have turned to ethical non-monogamy precisely because our society is not set up to their advantage. They practice it not as part of an individual journey of self-discovery, but as a way to have more support, materially and emotionally. In 2022 the writer and disability-rights activist Jillian Weise wrote a thoughtful essay, also for New York magazine, exploring the freedom polyamory provides to her as a disabled person. " Honestly I'm having flashbacks, not because of what Harper wrote, but because I'm reminded of how other people tried to sell me on their idea of polyamory, usually marginalized white people. That to build these meaningful, supportive connections would benefit all of us involved in so many ways, when myself and other Black femmes were somehow once again assigned the role of mammy. Or left cleaning up convoluted messes and told we didn't communicate when we had, called difficult when we had directly. Or somehow othered and treated differently from lighter skinned partners who were put on pedestals, offered more in effort and support, and deemed more attractive. It’s giving more of the same utilitarian, “Everyone has their roles to play. Mine is delegating orders, yours is following my orders.” I can't help but wonder if there are other people who went through a period of diving deep into hyper independence because polyamory had turned out to be a exponential increase of the monogamous nonsense.
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Polyamory is work.
I love the polyamorous relationships I'm in, but my god they took work. And I get a little uncomfortable when the prevailing idea of polyamory is this glamorous oh so seductive intriguing vacation spot from "real" or "serious" relationships. It somehow has a vibe of "Oh you need a break from monogamous relationships to find yourself before you inevitably return to a serious long term monogamous relationship."
I like polyamory because I finally feel fulfilled in a real meaningful way as opposed to finding that one person I can tolerate being in an oddly specific and limited role for. And I have multiple people I care for deeply without ever feeling trapped. But it was less of a question of finding the right people and more of actually developing my idea of relationships, what I wanted, and myself. In a self-discovery kind of way? No. I just really didn’t like what I was experiencing and got tired of asking, waiting, hoping while my life passed me by. So I had to become the person who was compatible with what I wanted. I had to become incompatible with what I no longer wanted. You see?
Framing monogamy and polyamory strictly as an individual’s grandiose statement of some kind of social commentary is strange to me. Not that Harper did this, just I find this is what a lot of people who sort of lack self-awareness do. I thought we were working towards these things being healthy possibilities of relationships styles, not recreating a weird us vs them. And I say that because focusing on the us vs them, treating these relationship styles as something to embody, glosses over the fact that a lot of the ideas of love and relationships we grew up with are unhealthy and rob us regularly of meaningful relationships, monogamous or polyamorous, romantic or platonic.
Give yourself room to grow.
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