A cultural critique of polyamory

As someone who has for a long time intellectually moved beyond inherited notions of monogamy, and who certainly subscribes to the sort of ethical precepts people who expound polyamory defend, I have often wondered why the notion itself is not one that appeals to me more.

Perhaps it starts with the word itself: the blend of Greek and Latin is itself disturbing. Why can’t it be “multiamory”? Or “poly-“…?

Well, poly-what? The inability to decide if it should be “polyeros” or “polyagape” together with the technical/commercial connotations of “multi”-anything no doubt explain this unhappy (not so) neologism. We think we know what “amor” is, and we very “nobly” want more of it in our lives.

But actually we do not know what “amor” is, no more than the ancients. We do not even know what “eros” is (and we are so far from understanding “agape” that it is no more than a hypothetical alien lifeform to most of us, inconveniently embedded in our superego).

Polyeroticism scares us, while poly- (so-called Platonic) love sounds like such a no-brainer that, if we called it this way, there would be no imaginable need to promote it. The church has seemingly been doing so since ever. When Jesus was asked which were the most important commandments, he had a pretty damn good answer. The first is to love God, that is, to pursue the spiritual path that nature reveals to us. And the second is, Love thy neighbor as thyself.

Actually Jesus missed commandment 1.5 here, without which the second commandment offers little comfort to any neighbors you might have. It is no good unless you love yourself. A lot of people hate themselves, and follow this second commandment to the letter. Arguably they are skipping the first commandment by doing so, but a little more clarity on the part of someone intent on founding a major world religion (which of course he wasn’t) wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Perhaps Jesus was a bit shy because he figured people would latch on to the potential for his words then to be interpreted as saying that erotic self-love – the place where everyone’s sexual experience begins – should go on to be practised also on all of those people who fate has decreed live their lives in your geographical vicinity. Or was he just the first polyamorist, nervously hinting at a world of sexual experience far beyond the confines of first-century Jewish social convention?

The ease with which one can rapidly spout nonsense on such a topic is certainly an indicator of the cultural contradictions inherent in it.

And so, what is polyamory exactly, descriptively? It seems to be either (i) an inordinately tedious attempt to build or adapt moral-ethical codes to the vision (and frankly fact) of non-monogamy, or (ii) a similarly tedious attempt to document styles of relationship and community which fall outside the dominant cultural monogamous discursive norm (which seems to qualify almost all styles of relationship and community) with all the eye for detail of an intrepid anthropologist discovering that primitive society can also be observed in urban America, but no moral sword.

By its attention to detail and descriptive agenda, polyamory cannot offer any vision at all of what human relationships should be about and how community should be constructed. Since pretty well everything goes, a lot of things go which are hugely dysfunctional in fact. As Deborah Anapol has bravely pointed out, distancing herself from any utopian agenda (if polyamory as such ever had one to start with), this is because (prepare yourselves…) a lot of people import all their childhood baggage into poly relationships and, I would add, are driven to constitute such relationships in the first place by the very same baggage. Ethical precepts are not going to cut it faced with these forces of nature, and you are going to find situations which may often be even more abusive than traditional relationship models.

Understandably enough, I am not drawn to promote anything like this at all. At most, it is an interesting field of anthropological, sociological and ethical enquiry. It seems to lack all force to overthrow the tyranny of our inherited institutions.

And this is because it defines itself in opposition to those institutions, that is, negatively. It is defensive, with more than a hint of residual shame. It is pleading for acceptance by mainstream society, not striking off in a whole new direction. It takes as a starting point my “needs” for some form of gratification, and then proceeds to enquire how I can ethically pursue those “needs” given the unfortunate fact that they are incompatible with inherited institutions.

It’s frankly a bore.

And so you will never hear me qualify myself as “polyamorous”, and if you have a goal of being in a polyamorous relationship, I think you should not: as soon as I hear this, it sets lots of alarm bells ringing. It probably means you should sit down by yourself and get into a relationship with yourself.

Yes, I have needs, drives or desires which are incompatible with inherited institutions. But the egoistic quest to fulfil them, even if I fully hope and intend to fulfil them, is not the starting point of my vision of society. Such an approach is just too transactional and banal, it misses all depth and spirituality. Traditional constraints on erotic expression may melt away in the course of self-discovery; but this is an effect, not an agenda.

In my opinion, we need to construct community from the bottom up and the inside out – starting with ourselves. Adding one more person into the equation is already more than most of us can handle. We need to integrate that person fully. Then, perhaps, we can move on, and add more. If this is not our idea, and polyamory seems to us a convenient antidote to the inevitability of boredom and a way to wriggle out of facing up to what one partner has already shown us about ourselves, we are going to fall flat on our face and make a big mess of lots of people’s lives and dreams in the process.