yotogi.net

On Friday, July 26, 2002, at 09:32 PM, Aaron Walker wrote:

so i started a thread on my site about poly relationships. feel free to check it out and chip in your thoughts.

and of course from there it has gotten out of hand. the thing is, i like the ideas that the conversation is exploring. and so here is the exchange with some editing so that it makes a bit more sense. stacey's comments are in blue, mine are in red.

doesn't polyamory refer to loving more than one person? as opposed to, or at least not necessarily inclusive of sleeping with more than one person? i believe it's highly possible to love more than one person, but i think it's less likely that the objects of that love will be as open to the concept of being one of two, or three or whatever. it's easy on the giving side--to be the one who is in love with (who loves, if you make that distinction) more than one, but to be one of the receivers can be painful at the least. don't you think?

i've never seen it in practice. not a healthy polyamorous relationship. multiple sex partners--i've seen and it can and can't work, depending. that's a given. but i think society has imposed some rules and ideas (ideals) on us that make it difficult for us to see love objectively, or to grasp the possibility that you speak of. our society. there are those that accept polygamy, which i assume should first involve polyamory.

yeah, you are pretty much right on with your definition of polyamory. there are a bunch of really good definitions on this page:

http://members.aol.com/abbyanjack/polydef.htm

yeah, the key difference between say being a swinger, or in just something loosely defined as an open relationship, and being poly, is the amount of emotional commitment to the people involved. poly relationships seem to be based upon an open understanding that, for some people, one person cannot be the "all" for the other person. as we seek to fill the emotional, physical, and intellectual needs in our life (that whole validation trilogy) we might find that one person does not complete this. as we get closer and closer to our friends we might find that in some facet we have a love for them. if that means that you have the desire to express that in some physical way, a traditional relationship might be too limiting.

i think that it is interesting that you say "concept of being one of two, or three or whatever". this seems to imply that love is a divisible quantity. like we have some amount of love to give (independent of time to give it in). i am not sure that i agree with this idea. i mean i love so many people at so many different levels. even people who have hurt me. each person that i have love for does not somehow make me love the other people that i already love less. i guess it is that i don't have to surround myself with people that i love, although i would love to.

i am not sure if it is painful to be one of many that is loved. i mean we all need or at least want to feel loved, but i think that as soon as we expect some kind of unconditional love and an exclusive love from another, we are putting expectations into a relationship that might not accommodate that too well. don't get me wrong. i am not sure what will end up working for me today, this week, over the next couple of years. i am not saying that i am poly or that i am proposing that this is the way that things should work. in fact, i would go so far as to say that i have absolutely no idea what i am looking for in relationships with people besides the fact that i want to be able to communicate with those involved and feel a sense of understanding. i would also like to be able to get past all of the bullshit that most people continually throw up to mask their insecurities. anyway, tangent...

i have never seen a health poly relationship either. i have seem multiple partners work, but of course the person was really just biding his time waiting for someone to really knock his socks off. this gave his relationships such a temporary air. not temporary in terms of they were passing flights of fancy. something slightly more off. how well it works, i agree with you on this one. it is so dependent on the people involved and what they think they are getting into (expectations revisited). if everyone understands and can avoid the trappings of traditional relationships, then i think it can work great.

so in essence are you saying that everyone is polyamorous in some respect, unless he/she has only one person in his/her life that he/she loves? (can i just say "he" and know that you know that i know that, for the purpose of this e-mail, "he" encompasses both men and women and that i'm just too lazy to account for both sexes everytime i refer to them?) particularly with regard to seeking various fulfillments from various people, presumably people that you love in some respect. we must all be polyamorous, or at least have the ability to be polyamorous, given that we can love many people for many different reasons.

i should probably clarify the "concept of being one or two, or three..." statement that i made. i was not trying to imply that love is divisible. that we all have a certain amount of love to give and it diminishes as we find more people to love. i just meant that being in a relationship with someone, beyond that of a friend, like a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship, for example, being one of the two people that the other person shares the same love for would be difficult to deal with. i guess that applies specifically to a relationship that is both love and sex. there is love without sex. there is sex without love. but sharing a love and sex relationship, i believe, is hard for the person who is having to share, rather than the person who is sharing himself.

does this make sense? it's sounding kind of convoluted to me.

ok, well i just now checked out the link you sent and their definition of polyamory includes sex. which i thought would have been excluded from that definition, given that the root is amor--love. i believe that our capacity to love is infinite. but i don't know that we are all capable of having a polysexual (my word!) relationship. i think that sex becomes the dividing line here. for some, i should say. i realize that there are people out there that have successful, happy, healthy, polysexual relationships. this could circle back to the second paragraph, but i won't go there again.

it's all so confusing. is monogamy nothing but a concept that society (religious society) imposed? or is it a reality that humans can actually be happy being monogamous? (not mono-amorous, as it were. this isn't love i'm strictly speaking of, although it certainly plays a huge role in this.) i don't know what i believe. there's something comforting in monogamy, but there's obviously something missing, too. and who are we to say that humans are supposed to be faithful? or that being faithful means what it has come to mean within the confines of marriages and monogamous relationships?

all i truly know is that relationships of all kinds can be so very confusing.

no, i don't think that i think that everyone is polyamorous despite what i wrote. i might have been a bit too vague for sake of clearity. what i think is that, while most everyone shares love for more than one person (family included) it is not the romantic love that polyamory seems to focus on. i think that what ends up happening is most people have a mechanism wherein they will only take the love that they have for others so far as not to ruin the monogomist lifestyle. i think that it is safe for most people to do this, alhtough i wish that we didn't have to do it. i mean on paper polyamory seems like the best thing since sliced bread. in practice it seems to fail pretty bad for most people. i don't think that our love for other should necessarly be restricted because of a monogomist lifestyle decision that we really didn't make. of course will this work? no telling until you happen to get involoved in one, right?

ah, so you don't think taht love is divisible. then that we my misunderstanding. i can imagine that if one of the people involoved in a polyamorous relationship did not feel like they were getting all that they needed out of it (a very real and possible situation) then they certainly would be let down by the quality of the relationship. i don't think that this is avoidable very easily. i think that you are right on with you take of it. the person sharing themselves is giving everything that they can while the person being shared with could possibly be not getting what they need at all.

i like your word polysexual so i did some scouring. it would seem from other usage that the word is unfortunatly in use already (no suprise, all of the good words are used up, so we are stuck using the old words in new ways). here is a link to one person talking about their personal experience being both polyamorous and polysexual.

http://www.cavegirl.org/poly.html

and don't hessitate to close the circle on thought. just because a conclusion is reached does not mean that the explanation is complete. more on this in a bit. so there is a difference between just being polyamorous and have polysexual relationships. it seems that many are both, but they are not mutually inclusinve. good catch, glad to get that distinction cleared up for sure. i think that even if we practice monogomy in our sexual realationships (for many reasons this seems like a valid decision for many), we are not bound into monogomy in terms of the love that we give. i think that many people withhold a certain level of emotional attachment to people because they believe that the the two are linked, which in my opinion they need not be.

and i certainly believe that it is amazingly confusing. we all like to wax intelecutal about these things but then we wonder if they would work for us, and then we get caught up in the idea that it would be nice if they could maybe, beginning to question the trappings of monogomist relationships. i don't have any of those answers or know where to start looking to be honest. i think that monogomy could be a result of biology, althogh there are many animal species that don't share that same view. of course that is a breeding thing and less of a love thing (i suspect) so it is really not a valid argument in this context, just food for thought. i just don't know.

i think that this part of the conversation is wrapping up. hopefully to be put under our lids and stewed for a while to come out some wonderful idea stew to fuel future conversations. not saying that you or i are not coming up with good ideas. and it is odd, i never really intended for this one little idea to go so far, but boy has it got me thinking.

and at this point the conversation diverged into other things.