This is a guest post by my sweetie Shelly. She sent it to us as an essay a few weeks ago, and it blew us away so much we asked her if we could reprint it. We’ll be drawing on these ideas in the book, possibly even using parts of the essay. – Franklin
“You’re selfish.”
I’ve heard that charge from people on the Internet, usually folks who read one of my blog posts and say, “You have five girlfriends? That’s so selfish! You’re hogging all the women for yourself.”
A lot of folks have compared being polyamorous today to being gay several decades ago, before the GLBTQ+ movement became a major civil rights campaign. The comparison is apt in some ways; for example, there is still little social acceptance of polyamory.
It’s also flawed in some ways. Polyamorous people rarely face the same level of discrimination that gays and lesbians have faced, and it’s rare to see violence directed against people for being polyamorous, as has and continued to happen to gays, lesbians and transgendered people.
Polyamorous relationships come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, with all sorts of configurations, arrangements and agreements. From closed triads to sprawling networks, from tightly nested live-in relationships to aggregations of long-distance relationships, from fleeting to long-lived, from consensual power exchange to egalitarian, I’ve seen polyamorous groupings with just about every structure possible.
Given that variety, it’s clear there’s no one right way to “do” polyamory. But that doesn’t mean all polyamorous relationships are happy or sustainable!
One of the rewards for the More Than Two crowdfunding campaign is that, at $500 and above, we’ll answer a question on the blog (or write a post on the topic of your choice). This post presents our first backer question–and naturally it’s a doozy, with no easy answers. It also happens to be a topic we’re planning to cover in much more depth in the book.
If you venture into the organized polyamory community for long enough, or even talk to people about polyamory online for long enough, eventually you’re bound to encounter someone who describes polyamory as the Next Stage In Human Evolution…assuming you don’t first encounter someone who says that poly is fine in theory, but human beings simply aren’t evolved enough to make it work.
CAPTION CONTEST!
We’re giving out a signed first edition of Dr. Elisabeth Sheff’s forthcoming book The Polyamorists Next Door–normally one of the $500 perks of our crowdfunding campaign–to the More Than Two backer who writes the best caption for this image.
Polyamory writer and activist Louisa Leontiades has published a piece on the Huffington Post called The Hell of Monogamy. In it, she describes her own experiences trying to force herself to fit a model of relationship that wasn’t a good match for her.
This essay got me thinking about my own past, and how it is I have never faced trying to squeeze into a monogamous relationship.
It’s something I hear every day: “Relationships take work.” “Being in one relationship is hard work; being in more than one relationship is even more work.” “Polyamory takes work.”
I have been thinking a fair bit about relationship work these days, particularly since the stress of doing this crowdfunding campaign and working on the book has been taking me away from several of my partners, who would like more time with me. (Who knew that trying to change the world would take this much time?)