So, am I poly?

Why entering a polyamorous relationship is like coming to terms with your sexuality, and why it’s not.

I am a liberal arts student, which means that I essentially earn my (currently metaphorical) bread and butter by finding a way to make simple things complicated convincingly. It’s not difficult, mainly because I find that a lot of the simple ways people describe things can get pretty complicated.

Take sexual orientation, for example. People talk as if – and I know I’m not the first to make this point – you just wake up one morning and realise, possibly with angelic choirs and a strategically placed sunbeam, that they’ve found their sexual identity, and that’s it: they’ve found the place in that part of their lives where they belong. Sexual Orientation Level: Cleared. Congratulations! You’re queer, or het, or ace, or otherwise. Right – on to the next level.

I’m sure some people do have that experience, but I didn’t. Realising I was a lesbian was very much a two-steps-foward-one-step-back process; even after I came out I spent a good long while Not Being Sure and wishing I’d stuck with calling myself bisexual even though it didn’t really feel right, because most days it was fine and then some days I’d look at a guy and feel a flutter in my chest and hey, is that attraction or just the beginnings of a panic attack? But then the feeling doesn’t really lead anywhere, it’s different to what I feel when I’m with a girl I like and anyway you just walked past a guy and felt a bit weird, is that really anything to worry about? What if I’m lying to myself and the rest of the world by accident? Oh God, is this what the rest of my life is going to be like? Am I ever going to be sure?

I chose that example because that struggle is still vivid in my mind, despite the fact that it ended five years ago, but the fact is that I find it true of a lot of things in life – it’s easy to talk about things as if somebody flipped a switch and suddenly the world settled into a magical shape that was Right For You, but the fact is that, broadly speaking, figuring out what feels right for you is about as linear a process as constructing DNA. (Go look at a double helix if you don’t believe me. They’re twisty.)

All of this is a very long way around of saying that although I’m currently in a polyamorous relationship, I have no idea what that means about how I identify.

See what I mean about the liberal arts degree?

I had polyamory in my life long before it was a realistic possibility for me. I grew up, as a lot of people do, with a very strong sense that monogamy was Okay, and anything involving more than two people was Cheating and was Not Right. A couple of times someone brought up “but what if everybody knew about everybody else, and they were okay with it?” and then, well, my answer was “I suppose that would be okay, but how often does that really happen? Really?”. My first experience of polyamory in media was Anne Rice books, for crying out loud, and that was just confusing.

And then, like the curious little geek I was, I stumbled across Dan Savage. (Someday I’ll blog about my myriad feelings about Dan Savage – I believe he does some really good stuff, but he also infuriates me – but he gets full credit for introducing the concept of ethical non-monogamy to my teenaged self.) And then I grew a little older, and I started to have poly friends, and I saw with my own eyes people having committed, caring relationships with more than one person at a time.

Some people talk about monogamy or polyamory as hard-wired parts of a person, as much an orientation as hetero or homo or othersexuality, and while I’m not sure I agree with the theory, I can follow its logic. In a very generalised, over-simplified way, much of what I’ve heard or seen or read of people’s experience of conducting relationships might go something like this:

“I am monogamous because when I fall in love with somebody, I don’t want to be with anybody else, and the idea of them being with anybody other than me romantically makes me very unhappy. It’s just the way I feel, and I can’t imagine being any other way. To me, commitment means giving sexual and romantic exclusivity to one person who I feel especially close to.”

Or:

“I am polyamorous because I cannot confine feelings of attraction or love to just one person, and it feels wrong to me to try. I would be unhappy trying to love just one person, because a part of me would grow frustrated and resentful. To me, commitment is not something that necessarily means sexual or romantic exclusivity, but rather making individual commitments to the people in my life that I feel close to.”

I can see values and potential difficult points in each of those statements and each, up until a few months ago, filled me with confusion. How can you argue with that? Is it wrong for two people to only want to be with each other? No, of course not. But, then, is it wrong to want to be with more than one person while still honouring the commitment to that other one person you really want to commit to? Again, no. Is it wrong to openly commit to more than one person, because that’s what makes you all happy? What could possibly even be wrong with that?

So how can you argue with any of these things? You can’t, is the answer, and nor should you try, because these are not arguments that really need to be made. Which is where I can see the point of people who argue the idea of a relationship orientation, because in many ways deciding on a polyamorous or monogamous relationship is no more a decision than deciding whether you’re het or queer is.

So far, so good. But then I ran up against the other problem in how a lot of identity discussions seem to resolve themselves: the binary problem.

This problem permeates a lot of conversations, the best documented of which are discussions about gender and sexuality. Since I started reading about this stuff – again, about five years ago – we’ve moved as an Internet from talking about gay versus straight and male versus female to the fluidity of human sexuality, genderqueer people, genderless people and non-binary gender identities. But binaries are difficult to shake off; a lot of people, for example, still don’t really believe in bisexuality, presumably because the word suggests perfect binary behaviour but the practice very rarely complies. (Well, and because people can be very difficult when it comes to accepting the world as it is according to people who aren’t them. But, you know, probably also the binary thing.)

I faced this problem as a teenager coming to terms with being queer, and I faced it again when I took a long, hard look at polyamory and realised that it was looking right back at me.

I had, after quite a lot of agonising, cleared all this in my head; on principle, I had no problem with monogamy or polyamory – or open relationships or the rather charming “monogamish” thing that I hear the cool kids are using nowadays or anything else, as long as everybody involved is informed about and okay with what’s going on. But – now that I thought about it – where was little voice in my gut telling me which identification was mine? That told me one path or the other was right for me? The part of my brain that woke up when all my hormones did, gave a wearied sigh and said “Dude, you’re as queer as the TARDIS” – where was it now?

Probably worked to exhaustion, to be honest. Or maybe it was just that I don’t have a “relationship orientation”, although I do have quite a strong sexual one, which for a long time was – and, in many ways, still is – a strange and confusing position to be in. Things like who you love and how you love them are so very personal – and I had been so used, up until then, to knowing exactly who I was and what I wanted and how I wanted it – that without that lens to view polyamory through, and in the absence of any particular opinions about which style was morally better, I didn’t know what to do. (I did spend a lot of time wondering about what I should want, which is perhaps a story for another time.)

So I don’t know whether I’m polyamorous or monogamous; I don’t know if I’m the kind of person who falls in Love with a capital L with only one person but can have relationships with many, or if I’ll end up in several mutually loving, committed relationships, or if I’ll eventually find myself with one other person only.

What I do know is that I am in a loving relationship that makes me happy, that it’s a polyamorous relationship, and that I analyse stuff way too much. So from here on out what I intend to do is be good to my partner, try to keep my relationship a happy place to be, and keep analysing things, possibly out loud.

The future is an adventure!