In Praise of Monogamy
2011 9 Jun
There are lots of different ways of approaching non-monogamous relationships, such as:
+ Polyamory: Usually emphasizes developing full-on romantic relationships with more than one partner. Lately I’ve been pondering and working on a number of tricky questions about implementing polyamory. (I’ve been researching polyamory since my teens, but only in recent years did I decide to actively pursue it.)
+ Swinging: Usually emphasizes couples with their own close bond, who have relatively casual sex with other partners. (Another difference between swinging and polyamory is that swingers tend to be more at home in mainstream culture, whereas polyamorists tend to be geeky or otherwise “alternative”. Here’s a great, long piece on poly culture vs. swing culture.)
+ Cheating: One partner does something with an outside partner that wasn’t accepted or understood in advance. In monogamous relationships, cheating usually involves having sex with an outside partner. Cheating exists in polyamorous or swing relationships as well: for example, a person might cheat on a non-monogamous partner by breaking an agreement — an agreement such as “we don’t have unprotected sex with other partners”.
Just in case it needs to be said: I never advocate cheating, ever. As for the first two, I know both poly people and swingers that I consider totally decent and wonderful folks! I have more personal experience with and interest in polyamory, though.
Yet one thing that often gets lost in conversations about all these options is the advantages of monogamy. Of which there are many. Although I don’t currently identify as monogamous, I had a very strong monogamous preference for years. I knew that polyamory existed, and I thought about it a lot, because it’s interesting — but I just didn’t feel like it was for me. (In fact, my most adamantly polyamorous friend used to call me his “reasonable monogamous friend”. He said I had examined polyamory enough to reasonably reject it, whereas he felt most people never consider polyamory deeply enough to have a thoughtful opinion.)
And lately lots of my monogamous friends have been getting married. So I’ve been thinking about the positive aspects of their relationship choices as I dance at their weddings, devour mini-quiches, flirt with their brothers and try to avoid offending their parents. (Okay, I’ve actually only flirted with one brother. So far.)
A Few Advantages of Monogamy (this is not a complete list)
+ Jealousy management. Some people experience jealousy more than, or less than, or differently from other people. Plenty of people in non-monogamous relationships experience jealousy — and plenty of non-monogamous people handle it just fine, through open-hearted communication. (Often, jealousy is managed through very detailed relationship agreements such as this fascinating polyamory “relationship contract”.)
But there are also plenty of people who appear to lack the “jealousy chip”.
And then there are plenty of people who experience so much jealousy, who feel that jealousy is such a big part of their emotional makeup, that the best way to manage it is simply through monogamy.
Personally, I used to get a lot more jealous than I do now. I think I’m less likely to get jealous these days partly because I’ve gotten better at finding low-drama men. Jealousy has a reputation for being an irrational emotion, and sometimes it genuinely is an unreasonable, cruel power-grab. But I think jealousy is often quite rational, and often arises in response to a genuine emotional threat … or deliberate manipulation.
There’s another reason, though … I’ve also noticed that some switch in my brain has flipped, and I’ve started to eroticize jealousy. I occasionally find myself fantasizing about men I care about sleeping with other women, and sometimes the fantasy is hot because I feel mildly jealous. I cannot explain how this happened. It surprised me the first time it happened, believe me. What’s really fascinating is that I think the same part of me that eroticizes jealousy, is the part that used to make me feel sick at the thought of my partner sleeping with someone else. Masochism: the gift that never stops giving!
I think it’s important to note here that I didn’t become less jealous because I felt like I “should”, or because I was told not to be jealous. In fact, I had an early boyfriend who acted like I was a hysterical bitch every time I got jealous … and he made things much worse. With him, I just felt awful when I got jealous; I couldn’t get past it. I felt like he was judging me for something I couldn’t help; I felt like my mind was fragmenting as I tried to force myself to “think better” without any outside support; and worst of all, I felt like I couldn’t rely on him to respect my feelings.
It was the men who treated my emotions like they were reasonable and understandable who decreased my jealousy. It’s much harder to be jealous when your partner is saying, “I totally understand,” than it is when your partner is saying, “What the hell is the matter with you?” Maybe that’s what makes monogamy such an effective jealousy-management tactic: monogamy can be like a great big sign or sticker or button you can give to your partner that says, “I respect your jealousy.” Which is not to say that monogamy is always effective for this — we all know that monogamous people get jealous all the time! (Which only adds to my point that monogamy might be viewed as just one of many tactics, rather than an answer, when jealousy is a problem.)
+ Focus. There’s an oft-repeated joke among polyamorists that “while love may be infinite, time is not.” And sometimes, I’ve found it a little difficult to “switch gears” to a different partner. New Relationship Energy can be a little harder to manage in the polyamorous context than it is in serial monogamy.
I’ve heard of polyamorous couples who specifically take periods of monogamy when one partner really wants one. This seems like it could be problematic — for example, if my hypothetical primary partner wanted a period of monogamy, and I had a secondary partner (or partners) with a serious emotional connection, then I probably would not be cool with straight-up ignoring my secondary for weeks or months. There’d have to be more of a conversation about it. But regardless, this whole line of thinking makes an interesting showcase of how sometimes, people feel like they just have to focus on one relationship.
Personally, I’m quite interested in S&M games of orgasm denial, though I’ve never had a chance to mess around with it as much as I’d like. I’m also interested in long-term lust management strategies like karezza, where the partners involved choose not to have orgasms — instead, they maintain a low level of mutual arousal at all times. I have no moral problem with my partners looking at porn or having orgasms on their own, but sometimes when I hear about the effects of choosing not to do those things, it sounds like there’s really powerful bonding potential there. Something to keep in mind for the next time I’m really serious about someone, I guess. Monogamy isn’t necessary for these things, but it would definitely make doing them less complicated.
+ Societal acceptance. Straight up, monogamy is the Western societal default. In some ways this makes monogamy hard to understand and communicate about — because there are so many assumptions and built-in expectations, and folks don’t always agree on those expectations! A recent study found that 40% of young couples don’t agree about whether or not they’re monogamous. That amazes me, because I have never assumed that I was monogamous with a partner until we had a conversation establishing that we were monogamous … but I guess I can see how it happens, if people feel anxious about communicating and fall back on assumptions instead.
Usually, however, being the societal default makes monogamy easier. Heterosexual monogamous people can get married with no problem, for example, and while marriage is obviously contested territory for non-hets, it’s instructive that “gay marriage” is such a big political issue (while “polyamorous marriage” is currently nothing more than a specter right-wingers use to scare people about gay marriage). Outsiders usually assume that you’re monogamous when you introduce your partner. Romantic comedies exalt monogamy; the media, and many people around us, associate monogamy with love. When you’re monogamous, you never have to articulate your weird relationship structure to your parents. You rarely have to think outside the box about relationship problems, and you can go to any Western advice columnist or therapist and be sure that they’ll recognize your relationship as legitimate. (Those of you who like privilege checklists might enjoy this monogamous privilege checklist, which is patterned after Peggy McIntosh’s classic essay and white privilege checklist.)
+ Some people just like it better. Occasionally, people will toy with the idea of an “orientational” element to polyamory or monogamy: some folks just plain feel aligned with monogamy or non-monogamy. (I have similar thoughts about this as I do about BDSM as a sexual orientation.)
Personally, I always think it’s really key, during any sex-positive critique, to emphasize from the start that whatever you like is cool as long as the actions you take are consensual. I know people who act all apologetic for being monogamous, usually because they’ve been overexposed to “polyvangelists” who argue that non-monogamy is “better” or “more evolved”. This is silly! Liking monogamy doesn’t have to be justified, as long as you don’t turn around and claim that non-monogamy is bad and wrong. And liking monogamy is a perfectly awesome reason for preferring monogamy!
Tags: communication, monogamy, polyamory, preferences, privilege, swing, terms
I think jealousy is the main one for me. I and my then girlfriend once thought about it and role played sex with a guy and, another time, a girl and it was funny/instructive that we’d get jealous of the fictional characters that we’d invented.
But yeah jealousy can be eroticised, partly because it shows how much you care, but then also you care enough about them to want them to be able to fuck other people, which triggers your jealousy, which shows how much you care, but you want them to be able… gah.
I love this post, Clarisse. For me real sex positivity isn’t about privileging kink or polyamory, nor is it just about acknowledging the variety of “non-traditional” orientations or sex work. It’s about acknowledging that not everyone is drawn to the same things we’re drawn to and that others are drawn to things that don’t draw us. (Standard caveats about active and competent decisions to participate obviously apply.)
Which in my book makes this post wonderfully and authentically sex positive. Because while obviously more people are shoehorned into monogamy than would like to be in it, and therefore there’s a lot of guilt by association surrounding it, it really is a popular choice. For the entirely sensible reasons you’ve articulated. And that’s true even if others are drawn to other, equally sensible reasons for preferring their arrangements. (Or, since sex positivity means accepting “no thank you” as readily as “yes, I’d like that,” the real thing also acknowledges and embraces asexuality, disinclination, and the inevitability of individual squicks.)
figleaf
My thing isn’t so much jealousy as just that I find two people relationships to be quite hard enough (while being infinitely rewarding and worthwhile – put a lot in, get a lot out). I think it’s not just in physics that the ‘three-body problem” is hard. It’s great that people can and do manage it, but I haven’t got the brainpower to handle it. On my OkCupid questions, when these come up I nearly always say “I’m open to it, but in practice would probably avoid it unless everything felt really good and natural”.
It’s strange to me that you call these points ‘advantages of monogamy.’ If jealousy and ‘focus’ aren’t issues for you, where’s the advantage of monogamy? If we lived in a sex-positive culture, where would the advantage of social acceptance be? Why is ‘liking it better’ an ‘advantage’? Something about the language here strikes me as off.
Thank you for this. I get, well, exhausted of reading/hearing about how wonderful (and “evolved”) nonmonogamy is. It’s as good for some people as monogamy is for others, nothing more and nothing less. Having known lots of nonmonogamous people, and having been in a couple nonmonogamous relationships, I came to the conclusion awhile back that it is an orientation sort of thing (which is how I feel about BDSM, too).
If I might add an advantage: one need not worry about [new] STDs being introduced in the relationship, so long as everyone has been and is honest. Seriously, I cannot tell you the peace of mind I have developed over the last several years with my partner, not having to worry about STDs. (I am probably more neurotic about this than most people, admittedly.) On the same note, I also don’t have to worry about my partner becoming involved in pregnancies that I’m not also involved in.
Well, that’s got to be interesting post!
Hmm. Advantages of monogamy… well, that should be easy! After all, monogamy is basically a small and obscure subset of polyamory, a polyfidelitous relationship that’s only two person big, isn’t it?
(yeah, that was serious, in a way)
So, the advantages compared to people in more extensive relationships? More time for pursuiting other things, less responsibilities for other people and more freedom when it comes to time. And that’s it. Basically, the same advantages single people get over people in serious relationships.
Oh, of course, there are other things like having world tailored to monogamous couples, from marriages, dealing with administration to people’s habits (inviting people with their partner and not partners, for example).
But these things are purely incidental and not inherent to monogamy.
So, going down to Clarisse’s list.
Jealousy? Hm, i don’t agree. I actually did a workshop on jealousy last saturday, so it’s sort of fresh for me. I would say it’s the opposite, if anything – that the traditional response to jealousy, encouraged by popular understanding, is controlling your partner’s behavior, and that’s counterproductive to actually solving the underlying problems of insecurity, whereas when you’re thrown into situation where you can’t do the controlling thing you have a chance to work on the real issues.
As they say, the other name of the crisis is a opportunity (i have no idea who says that actually)
But that’s, again, incidental. For example, i easily imagine non-monogamous arrangement that have strict and stiff assumptions about jealousy management that could be even worse than ours.
I also don’t really agree that there are people that don’t feel jealousy. There are people who weren’t in a situaion that could make them jealous and there are (very few!) people that react to feeling fear not with control but with things like self-analysis and communication naturally, so they don’t look like they feel jealousy, but that’s only because they don’t act the way people usually act – they feel the same fear others do, or are at least capable of it.
Or there are people repressed enough and fearing intimacy so much that they don’t even come close to fearing loss because they don’t get attached in first place :D
On a side note, i was very jealous when i was in my late teens. I made a long journey since then.
The eroticization of jealousy you (uh, meaning Clarisse) write about is interesting. I’m not sure i understand it, and can only imagine this feeling a bit… but i thought of your BDSM part even before you wrote about it, so perhaps it’s indeed something like that. I seem to remember that sort of feeling years ago, but it didn’t happen often enough and wasn’t analyzed for me to remember it.
That said, i am of the opinion that emotional arousement (excitement, the physiological reaction of your body) is about the same for (almost) every feeling – and it’s the interpretation, based on the environmental signals we receive – that converts that arousement into fear or excitement.
Short story – a month ago i rode the motorcycle (as a passenger) first time. At first i feared the speed and then remembered what i wrote above and “realized” (actually that was a trick i played on my mind) that i am not afraid but excited of the speed.
Back to jealousy. And pressure. Yes, the pressure and ridiculization is the worst response to someone’s else jealousy (including your partner). Just think, if you fear something and feel vulnerable, how fucked up is to get a reaction from your trusted partner that basically says “eh, you’re hysterical and thinking things up” (of course non-verbal cues are the most important – after all, you can say “bitch” as a cuddly word ;)). I remember stating this at the start of my workshop, that we won’t talk about the response to jealous partner and we assume that that response is the appropriate one – but we should remember that it is of crucial importance to handling of jealousy.
But that is about all feelings not jealousy actually. Clarisse (and everyone else), if you haven’t read anything by Alice Miller already, try it. You should fall in love with what she writes, i think.
Enough of the green-eyed monster.
Focus. True. Absolutely. Time is not infinite, emotional capacity isn’t (by that i mean sometimes people – me included – need time alone and don’t want to take care of others. It’s very exhausting if you do it for too long without pauses).
And i agree with monogamy period being no-no when there is a “secondary” (gross word) involved. That’s really, really fucked up thing.
Orgasm denial is fun thing! Almost exclusively theoretically speaking, unfortunately :( I remember reading Franklin Veaux BDSM scenarios and this one was one of the few that caught my eye :)
Digression: I finally wrote something about masculinity, and i’d like to say that it strongly influenced by Clarisse’s blog posts about masculinity (that includes commenters). It’s not in English but my native language, so it’s useless to link, but it was about what we talked that men have to be sexually active stallions for their sense of worthiness. Long story short, i’m on serotonine, and it made wonders to my libido. Namely, it killed it (well, not really…) and coupled with the realizations from the text i wrote, i suddenly found myself in situation where the pressure to perform is like 5% of what i felt before. Which means i don’t orgasm during majority of “sexual” encounters anymore, and i like it. Very much. And that includes the after effects (continuing low level of arousal)
Societal acceptance, yep, true, nothing to add here, really. Although, it makes standart monogamy, which could not necessarily be the type of monogamy people involved would actually like… but yeah, it’s big.
And i totally agree with your last paragraph. I’ve seen it many times, sometimes wrote in response, and it’s important to remember that often some – or many readers will understand our texts as critique of the other ways if we don’t make sure it’s clear.
(last note: STDs worries are not the advantage of monogamy, but also of polyfidelitous arrangements of any kind, which i think monogamy is part of ;))
Damn that was long.
It’s interesting, I had always had trouble staying committed and faithful in my monogamous relationships, so discovering polyamory felt like a Godsend.
But after dabbling in it, it actually gave me a lot more appreciation for monogamy that I took for granted before. And it also made me realize that maybe I wasn’t “born for polyamory” like I had assumed, but that I actually just sucked at being in relationships.
I confess to handling other’s jealousy poorly. I think a source of my lack of empathy is that I don’t feel jealous myself, nor am I fearful of loss. My problem with jealously lies not so much in the insecurity but the expression thereof. In my limited experience, it is not sufficient to simply validate a person’s feeling of jealousy, you have to conform your behavior to the concomitant demands of the jealous. It is not the responsibility of the jealous to be introspective, but of others to be deferential.
Why should we privilege jealousy (is it truly an emotion or a reaction to other emotions) as worthy of validation? Why not privilege lust as worthy of validation? There is more evidence for lust being universal than for jealousy. While jealousy prompts us to want to control others, lust admits of no such impulse.
I freely admit that my contempt for jealousy is not the most effective way to promote my goal of reducing it. I try to temper that by acknowledging the insecurity which underlies it and allaying it by behaving as honestly and openly as I can. I just don’t have the energy to manage someone else’s jealousy – it sucks the joy right out of me.
For me, it’s honestly an “I like it better” issue. I’m just a very monogamous person! When I’m in love, I even find myself being attracted to other people who remind me of the person I love… my type is basically “whoever I’m in a relationship with right now”. Jealousy – personally I don’t feel much of it. But nor do I have the urge to cheat.
I can definitely imagine this changing over time, and I think in a long-term partnership I might be interested in having / allowing a limited pass to go out and have one-night stands, or something like that. I can even imagine finding it hot to hear about a partner’s dalliances or to tell him about mine. But full-blown polyamory would probably break my brain. My erotic imagination just doesn’t work that way. It keys into one person and gets blissfully stuck there.
Clearly written by a straight person. Normally I despise the saying “check your privilege,” but really, were you not thinking of monogamous same-sex couples at ALL when you wrote this? Wow.
I fully agrees with Coquette that less STD risk is an advantage that monogamy has over polyamory and (especially) swinging. While Tolmek is correct that STD risk is not a necessary pitfall of any single given polyamorous relationship, the overall numbers still don’t look good. More people leads to more opportunity for and damage from infection, basic epidemiology. E.g. while I don’t think that monogamous individuals are any more likely to be faithful to each other than polyamorous ones, a relationship between 2 people will (on average) contain fewer opportunities to do so and likely a smaller pool of people to do so with, than a relationship with 4. Further, if one partner in a monogamous relationship is infected they are most likely going to infect their one partner, but if a member of a polyamorous relationship is infected, then the entire rest of the group is at direct risk.
Which is not a reason not to pursue a poly relationship. With any relationship structure you need to keep aware of both the good and the bad both of the individual partners and relationship as a whole.
Thanks, Erica. Post edited for het privilege. Sorry about that. (And here I thought I was being good about privilege by noting the Western thing … ;)
@LoriA — The reactions to this post have been interesting. Some people love it, while others, like you — especially people with a lot of exposure to these concepts — respond with confusion or suspicion to the framing.
I think the part that you’re bothered by, the “advantage” framework, arises from me kind of specifically pushing back against typical polyvangelist formulations. (Figleaf and Coquette seem to have a lot of exposure to those formulations, for example, which may be part of why they reacted so positively to this post.) In a way, I was also kind of trying to be subversive by framing monogamy as having certain advantages, rather than just being “the way people are”. I think there’s a lack of sex-positive voices writing happily (or even respectfully) about monogamy, so I wanted to do that, but I also wanted to gently point out that monogamy is socially quite privileged and worth questioning for that reason alone. Does that make sense?
That said, I don’t think this post is one of my best … I kind of settled for it, because I felt like it was good enough, but I wish I’d been able to get my points across while framing it more neutrally. On the other hand, it’s hard to write about stuff like this with frustrating someone.
@Mark — Yes, I actually think it’s a really bad call to view polyamory as a “fix” for relationships. If a person is bad at respecting a partner’s emotions or talking about their own feelings or maintaining a relationship in general, then they are going to be worse at polyamory than monogamy, not better. I’m curious about what you found most rewarding about monogamy after coming back to it.
@corn walker — The “jealousy is about control” argument is one that I don’t really like … I tried to note it as a possibility in the post, because I think sometimes people use their own jealousy as a kind of power-grab, but much of the time I really do think it’s about a partner who is accurately sensing issues in the relationship, or who generally feels a lack of control.
It’s interesting that you’ve experienced jealousy as something where the partner expects you to conform to their demands. I’ve had quite the opposite experience — I usually felt awful and guilty when I got jealous, and in the past I’ve defaulted to assuming that I was “just being ridiculous”, when in fact my jealousy was pointing to serious and genuine problems. It was a real revelation to me in my monogamous days when I realized that the girls I felt most jealous of were, in fact, the girls who ended up blatantly trying to interfere in my relationship — or who actually were cheating facilitators for my boyfriends. It revealed to me that my feelings weren’t “just ridiculous” — and that the partner who consistently disrespected my feelings was actually just being dishonest, aggressive and controlling in the guise of telling me that my jealousy was “irrational”, aggressive and controlling.
@clarisse — I imagine jealousy as a “dishonesty detector” would be both useful and validate the experience of jealousy. That hasn’t been my experience because I have never been dishonest, manipulative, or deceitful in my relationships. Studies of confirmation bias suggest that we’re more likely to remember those cases where our jealousy has been validated and forget those where our feelings of jealousy were unfounded.
I don’t want to misinterpret what you wrote, so I’ll ask whether you disagree with my contention that one aspect of taking your partner’s jealousy seriously is changing one’s behavior to avoid causing the feelings of jealousy. If my going to the bar after work with a female co-worker is causing you to feel jealous, would you not expect me to curtail that behavior as part of “understanding” your jealousy? What words would be reassuring enough that you would be fine with me continuing to meet her at the bar, particularly considering that your being jealous indicates that some part of you doesn’t fully trust that I can keep things platonic?
If your jealousy is abated by a patient partner that will hear your concerns and talk them through with you, I think you’re managing your jealousy quite well. In contrast, if you need your partner to change their behavior to assuage your feelings of insecurity, perhaps it’s time to change your partner. Personally I wouldn’t want a partner I had to keep on a leash of any length.
Well, I currently practice polyamory, and I haven’t felt meaningfully jealous of a partner in years (although there’s always time for it to happen, I suppose). But I can say that when I was younger, when I got jealous, it was almost always abated by partners who just talked about it with me. There was a case where a partner (the aforementioned one who told me I was hysterical) actually cheated on me, and I asked him not to hang out with the woman in question so much after doing that, and he didn’t agree … which was his prerogative, I guess, but I do think that if you’ve actually cheated on a monogamous partner, then it’s reasonable to change your behavior in deference to that partner if you want to keep the relationship together.
Even when I was insanely jealous I never tried to control a partner’s behavior unless he’d actually broken our relationship rules. That just seemed over the line, and I would have been angry if someone tried to do it to me.
I tried posting this on feministe and it disappeared, so I will honestly try here.
Well, this probably won’t get pass moderation but I want to ask a few questions and I will be nice.
A few questions about polyamory/monogamy.
Have you given any thought to the wider implications of institutionalized polygamy?
If we start with the model of 50/50 male-female numbers in society, and women flock to men with other women then this will eventually create a large number of men who can not have any partner in society.
This is seen in China, not due to polygamy so much as skewed birth rates. What are those other men supposed to do for reproduction and sex and attachement and so on?
On the other hand, if a group of women monopolize the men, then what are those other women supposed to do and how is custody supposed to work? There are a lot of men pissed off about their exs allowing a bf to raise their, the mans, children.
I know there are other ways to open this up, prostitution or wife sharing or relaxed attitudes towards homosexuality to name a few.
I am just curious if these types of conversations are had in poly circles you are familiar with.
On the other end of the spectrum, what about a woman with multiple men.
What happens if she gets pregnant by her non primary partner. Are there unspoken or spoken rules on paternity?
I think these two issues are what puts many people off of polyagamy.
Women tend to not, I said tend and am not trying to make blanket statements, to want to share the resources of her primary with another partner. By resources, I don’t just mean money but also love and parenting. There are only so many hours in a day and if a man has multiple children with multiple women then he has to divide up his parenting time, I know many feminists already complain about lack of male parenting, among the children. Now, this assumes that the relationships with the women are separate and hetero but still.
On the other hand it seems like most men wouldn’t want to raise another mans child and many would have problems with that.
That is before we even get into the paternity issues. Are most poly relationships clear on rules for paternity tests?
I know that this assumes a primary relationship with one or more people having a secondary or tertiary relationship and I know there are other models but I am genuinely curious???
I have heard that there are longterm poly relationships but in my life all I have seen is one partner not wanting to be held down with the other going with it to make the partner happy and then it eventually blows up with hurt feelings on both sides.
FTR, I have seen this on both sides of the spectrum, but from my experience it has typically been a young woman wanting to explore and the male just going with it and the hand ful of times I have seen this she has always had more sex partners than him and often she took his vcard. Just what I have noticed.
I have also seen guys wanting some and pressuring their gfs into it. I have also seen a girl go with it a few times and then finding out that she liked it more and the relationship ending because she got more than him.
Again, doubt this will make it past moderation due to me being a MRA but I am just curiuos.
Do you think the number of partners plays any role into whether or not someone was poly? Or interested in it? I don’t neccessarily mean too many sex partners either. From what I have noticed in my peer groups is that it is usually the person with fewer partners than their partner wanting to gain experience.
Uh, I guess the only other pertinant info is that what I have observed was HS and college age people.
I think there’s something to be said for the level of commitment that develops when you know there’s no alternative outlet for your emotional needs than your monogamous partner. That level of commitment is something that I always shied away from and I think at times being polyamorous aided in that avoidance for me.
I am one of those who is born without a “jealousy chip.” I couldn’t tell you the last time I felt more than slightly jealous. I also know I’m capable of having strong emotions for more than one person at a time. But I think the parameters of monogamy, the “this is it; this is everything” aspect of it, fosters a level of commitment that while it’s not as sexy or exciting or glamorous as a polyamorous lifestyle, there’s something more gratifying about it.
Ironically, back then I was all gung ho about poly and my primary girlfriend was hesitant. Now she’s very gung ho about it and I’m hesitant. I think I’d be fine diving into it again if it arose naturally out of a relationship I was in. But I don’t think it’s something I would ever consciously push for.
corn walker, I have to say that the scenario and reaction you describe in #13 could be something that might set off my jealousy meter, though I’m not a very jealous person at all. Not because it’s suspicious to go out for drinks with a female coworker – though, that’s pretty vague. Are you talking, like, 1 cocktail after work, or are you stumbling home wasted at 2 in the morning?
However, if my boyfriend responded to a situation that I was uncertain about by saying something like “What words would be reassuring enough that you would be fine with me continuing to meet her at the bar, particularly considering that your being jealous indicates that some part of you doesn’t fully trust that I can keep things platonic?” I frankly would become concerned. I’d be wondering, what about the going out for drinks situation is meriting this kind of lawyering?
To give an example of how I deal with jealousy, once I started to get a vibe between my (monogamous) boyfriend and one of his female friends that kind of confused me. I asked him about it, framing it in terms of their bond seeming different than the friendships he has with other women. He explained that yes, I had been seeing something, because the two of them had had a casual relationship before he met me. But they both decided it wasn’t working out, and kept things platonic.
I didn’t expect him to change his behavior at all; what I did expect is that he would talk through it reasonably with me. If he’d said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about” then it would’ve been fine, but maybe not assuaged my doubts as much. If he’d responded “What’s it to you? Why does a part of you not trust me absolutely?” my alarm bells would’ve been going off to the extreme.
@k
I didn’t mean to imply that I would use that language to confront a partner’s jealousy, rather I intended it to be a direct question as to whether and what words alone could provide assurance to the jealous partner. My experience, both personally and as an observer of others, is that jealousy is rarely so easily tempered.
Co-sign K, for sure!
@Mark — I think the parameters of monogamy, the “this is it; this is everything” aspect of it, fosters a level of commitment that while it’s not as sexy or exciting or glamorous as a polyamorous lifestyle, there’s something more gratifying about it.
This was a factor I used to emphasize when I was very insistent on being monogamous. I called it the “devotion factor” … as a mono friend of mine said, “I just do better with devotion”. I hesitated to put it in those terms in this post, though, perhaps because I wasn’t sure how to phrase it. I’m still looking for that level of commitment with a primary partner, and I’ve seen primaries who have a huge level of commitment and devotion with each other. A good primary relationship, it seems to me, is likely to be on a similar level of commitment as a good monogamous relationship. So I don’t want to give the wrong impression here, like I think that commitment is unique to monogamists. But it does seem to me that the structure of monogamy encourages that.
@troll king — Read Sex At Dawn by Cacilda Jethá and Christopher Ryan.
@Clarisse — That is the type of relationship I’ve longed for. I’m completely devoted to my partner but she has license (that she professes no interest in exercising) to see others if she desires. But how much of this idea of having a “primary” partner is an artifact of our social organization? Is this inherent to our nature that we seek one person to provide for our emotional needs?
While monogamy encourages this type of devotion, I also think this is what dooms it for many couples. By tightly binding our sexual, emotional, and physical needs into one relationship, that relationship becomes vulnerable when any one of those needs is not being met.
Troll King,
You’re starting from a lot of premises I disagree with, but I don’t delete comments here, or at least I haven’t yet. Keep it polite and I’ll keep my record.
I’m just going to ignore questions that I think are starting from faulty premises, because I don’t have the time or inclination to debate MRA premises here.
Have you given any thought to the wider implications of institutionalized polygamy?
No one is promoting institutionalized polygamy.
This is seen in China, not due to polygamy so much as skewed birth rates. What are those other men supposed to do for reproduction and sex and attachement and so on?
“Skewed birth rates”? That’s one way of describing it. Actually what happened was that female babies are considered so worthless that thousands of them were pre-emptively aborted.
I am interested in how the “sexual economy” of China will work itself out, and I’ll be watching it, but frankly, people aren’t entitled to partners. Period.
I am just curious if these types of conversations are had in poly circles you are familiar with.
No. In my experience, poly circles usually talk about (a) the fact that poly is not widely accepted by society, (b) strategies for conducting a polyamorous relationship that’s egalitarian and deals well with everyone’s needs.
What happens if she gets pregnant by her non primary partner. Are there unspoken or spoken rules on paternity?
Poly people tend to be extremely good about safer sex and relationship communication. I don’t know that many poly people with kids, and I’ve never talked to them about paternity concerns, but being as the main pillars of polyamory are open and honest communication, I guarantee that experienced polyamorists would promote open and honest communication about it. Preferably before the question arises, so everyone’s on the same page.
FTR, I have seen this on both sides of the spectrum, but from my experience it has typically been a young woman wanting to explore and the male just going with it and the hand ful of times I have seen this she has always had more sex partners than him and often she took his vcard. Just what I have noticed.
Great. Lots of other people claim that what they’ve “noticed” is “mostly” men pressuring women into being poly. Welcome to the world of anecdotal evidence and confirmation bias.
Do you think the number of partners plays any role into whether or not someone was poly? Or interested in it? I don’t neccessarily mean too many sex partners either. From what I have noticed in my peer groups is that it is usually the person with fewer partners than their partner wanting to gain experience.
I’ve met polyamorists with few partners in their pasts, and polyamorists with many partners in their pasts.
@Clarisse
Yeah, I’m coming at this as someone who isn’t well-acquainted with “polyvangelists” but who is fairly well acquainted with the disadvantages they face. So framing monogamy as an ‘advantage’ kind of comes across as framing heterosexuality as an advantage- like, obnoxiously obvious. And ‘praising’ it makes as much sense as ‘praising’ vanilla sex. Yes, it’s a perfectly fine thing that most people do, and it is tremendously privileged everywhere in society except the sex positive blogosphere, where it is only slightly privileged. So does it really need to be ‘praised’?
Yeah, I’m coming at this as someone who isn’t well-acquainted with “polyvangelists” but who is fairly well acquainted with the disadvantages they face. So framing monogamy as an ‘advantage’ kind of comes across as framing heterosexuality as an advantage- like, obnoxiously obvious.
I’m extremely well-acquainted with polyvangelists; I was specifically alienated from polyamory by polyvangelism for a long time; and I know for a fact that my experience is not unique. Polyvangelism is a major and common complaint about much of the most famous writing on polyamory. Polyvangelism isn’t even my word — in fact, it’s a word that I first heard from polyamorists who were irritated that polyvangelists were fucking up their subculture.
Also, I’ll just reiterate that I did have other reasons for structuring the post that way. They were, as I already said:
1) I was also kind of trying to be subversive by framing monogamy as having certain advantages, rather than just being “the way people are”.
2) I think there’s a lack of sex-positive voices writing happily (or even respectfully) about monogamy, so I wanted to do that, but I also wanted to gently point out that monogamy is socially quite privileged and worth questioning for that reason alone.
I get that some poly people don’t think this post was WOO POLY IS SO GREAT enough, but if our actual goal is a world in which monogamists accept poly as an alternative option and don’t feel freaked out about it, then there needs to be more communication attempting to actually help monogamists see their own social default framed as an alternative rather than the default.
And ‘praising’ it makes as much sense as ‘praising’ vanilla sex. Yes, it’s a perfectly fine thing that most people do, and it is tremendously privileged everywhere in society except the sex positive blogosphere, where it is only slightly privileged. So does it really need to be ‘praised’?
This reminds me of my “entitled cis het men” series, where I got a ton of blowback from people who couldn’t see the semi-irony in the title. I will never learn.
I’m aware that I probably sound more irritable in this comment than I should, but most of that irritation is not directed at you.
AB recently made an observation about Troll King’s comment over in another thread, which I thought was interesting. It was:
He talks about ‘wife switching’ not ‘partner switching’, as if two men just lent each other their wives for a while. If women are considered the property of their husband (which is/was a pretty common assumption), it makes sense that some husbands would want more of them, and would be disinclined to to share, just as is the case with every other kind of property, and female choice doesn’t enter into it. (Notice that he also brings it up as a unique problem if a woman has a child with a man who’s not her primary partner, as if a man having a child with someone other than his primary isn’t in the same category.)
corn walker, point taken, but I have to say I’m not really down with your dichotomy between “words” and “behavior”. To come back to my example, I appreciated the way my boyfriend behaved in being open about the fact that he had had a sexual bond with his female friend, and explaining how their relationship ended. That isn’t just “words”. It’s making an effective case for why I should trust him, both in what he said and how he said it.
I’ve had a partner who used jealousy as a controlling tactic, and ironically enough, he was very into the idea that words don’t count as actions, and indeed are worth less than actions. So whatever I told him about how I wasn’t attracted to my male friends, suggested that he come and hang out with my friends and get more comfortable with them, etc, it was meaningless because my actions in going out for drinks with male friends undermined my words.
Maybe you’ve experienced the same, I don’t know… in any case, words ARE behavior and shouldn’t be considered useless in re-establishing trust between partners.
Also, Clarisse, I definitely agree with AB and I caught the same tone in troll king‘s comment. It would be nice if he’d come back and talk to us a little about that, especially because his entire comment read as if reliable birth control didn’t actually exist…
Pepper Mint, a fairly well-known polyamory advocate, just posted a comment that explained my goals better than I have, over on the Feministe mirror version of this post. He says:
Certainly, if we are talking about monogamous privilege, then it is everpresent and generally understood. Though like other forms of privilege it is purposefully not talked about, so Clarisse’s listing of privilege as an actual advantage can only be done if one acknowledges nonmonogamy as a real possibility first.
If we get away from privilege and talk about other advantages of monogamy, they are simply not discussed in the mainstream. Monogamy is a hegemonic requirement, not an option that should be advocated. So when people espouse monogamy (which is rare, since it is hegemonic), they do it by claiming that anything else is impossible or they do it by making moral statements. I challenge you to find a mainstream article that actually lists out the pragmatic benefits of monogamy, like Clarisse has done here. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. Indeed, when monogamy is explicitly discussed in the mainstream currently, it often seems to be in “is monogamy realistic?” articles.
Note that this is all to the detriment of monogamous people as well as nonmonogamous people. When I talk to people about polyamory, I get a lot of defensive responses, for the simple reason that monogamous people are often monogamous because they did not know there was a choice, rather than monogamous by inclination or what have you. Discourse that presents monogamy as an actual choice and lists out the pros and cons of that choice is nonmonogamy-affirming in my book, unless it is hugely one-sided.
We have a problem in the poly communities I engage in, where people new to polyamory spend a couple years unfairly trashing monogamy. This is partly out of anger from their history and partly because they’ve finally found what they are looking for and everything else looks shabby in comparison. But it creates ill-will where none need exist, it screws up people’s approach to relationships, and it bites people later if they want to go back to monogamy.
So as a polyamory activist I’m very glad this essay was written, and I’ve posted similar things myself in various forums. It addresses a hole in the discourse that is very important to fill.
Along those lines, Clarisse missed a huge advantage for the monogamous: free time. I’m a very busy poly person, and happily so, but sometimes I dream about all that extra time I would have if I was only dating one person (or hell, two people). Though knowing me, I’d just fill it with organizing work. There are ways to do nonmonogamy that leave one with lots of free time, but on average I would say that monogamous folks have more time for hobbies and other non-dating interests, and that’s a straight-up advantage.
@k — I think words are important, but insufficient for most. In part this is because I believe those expressing jealousy often focus on the trigger for their reaction rather than the root causes. Therefore if a partner is concerned with my meeting my female coworker for drinks, it’s not because meeting her for drinks is such an outrageous thing to do but because there is some underlying insecurity that gives rise to perceiving the behavior as threatening. But if the jealous partner is unaware of or unwilling to address these underlying causes, in my experience the “fix” usually takes the shape of requesting the partner to cease the triggering behavior. In this case words of reassurance are insufficient until the root issues are addressed. If my partner is feeling generally secure, and there is a triggering event, then words probably are all that is necessary to quell the nagging doubts.
A very wise post, Clarisse. I think there has been a big trend lately in kinky circles not to make monogamists feel like their kink is “wrong” any more than polygamists like to be told that being kinky in general is “wrong.”
There are pros and cons to both, and it is a personal choice each one has to make. Of course, I think there are moral and ethical implications to be considered both ways.
Hi, Clarisse. I love your post about monogamy and would be interested in syndicating it at BlogHer on the Love & Sex section next week. If you are interested, please send me an e-mail at the address provided and I will give you all the details, from the rights you retain to payment. Thank you so much for your time, and as always, great work. You’re a great voice on the web.
The orgasm denial/choosing only to have orgasms together thing is an interesting point! My dominant partner and I have a sexually open (but not poly) relationship, and he controls when I get to orgasm or not. There was a time when he was restricting them pretty severely and it really did make for some awkward moments with the friend-with-benefits I had then. My sweetie eased up after a while for unrelated reasons (not having orgasms, it turns out, is bad for my mental and emotional health) but if I hadn’t had other partners it might have been doable for shorter periods of time.
It’s always really nice for me to read a post that isn’t beating the idea of monogamy to the ground. I’m always hearing how it’s not a natural state for humans, men can’t be bound, etc. etc. but I’ve never participated in anything but monogamous relationships. A lot of it for me is the jealousy management as well as knowing that I don’t want to balance multiple partners (and along with them multiple personalities and feelings). Sometimes I have enough of a hard time negotiating with my one partner’s needs and my own. I really enjoyed reading your post and seeing that not everyone is down on monogamy and those of us for whom it is the natural choice.
Gosh Clarisse this was just beautifully done. I am one of those monogamously but slightly poly oriented people who shudder at monogamy bashing because much of heart feels so delighted from the idea of sharing my life and adventures with one person.
It seems so unfair that people would bash monogamy as a selfish bad choice when the GOAL is to expand understanding of peoples difference preference and REDUCE putting people down for kinks, desires, weird fetishes, relationship styles.. etc etc. It’s more about finding a match between people who are happy (or I guess not happy if that what’s they mutually want LOL)— with the way the relationship is working.
You handled this so well and I just thank you thank you thank thank you. And just to say, I’m kind of like you in that when I’m around people who are deeply understanding of my monogamy desires then I start thinking, yay people can accept my desire for monogamy!Awesome! Now let’s all get naked and have an orgy! LOL (No… seriously. Obviously only with people who consensually would like to run around naked and have orgies.)
LOL, not to say that you like orgies that came out wrong… LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I mean that I am like you in the sense that the more my monogamous leanings arerespected the more comfortable I feel to dabble in other forms of intimacy.
hahaha, no worries. I did not at all get the impression that you were informing me of my preferences ;)