I often write about non-monogamous relationships. My latest novella, Crossing Lines, revolves around such; a young man’s love for his friends, an older established couple, and the lines they all cross to finally be with one another. Let’s face it, in my erotica, I almost exclusively write about non-monogamous relationships, possibly because monogamy is not something I’ve ever been particularly comfortable with myself.
Look, I tried it a couple of times. I gave it a go. My first couple of early relationships were indeed monogamous. But it felt a little too much like I was fighting my own instincts. I don’t mean in regards to sex—I never cheated, never felt temptation to. I did, however, feel like a fraud. As if I was lying, to them, to myself, in pretending to be happy with someone else’s expectations for what my life and love should look like.
It probably didn’t help those early relationships were both vanilla and heteronormative, of which I am neither. They conformed to all the usual assumptions about a life trajectory I was supposed to want: find a man, fall in love, get married, buy a house (i.e. take on massive lifelong financial debt tying me to another), have kids (an even more serious lifelong commitment with another), grow old side-by-side, and then die, after being with only one person for a whole lifetime (not counting a few teenage sexual fumbles in the dark to try things out prior to settling down).
No thank you. Even just writing it down like that now brings me out in a cold sweat, as if I’m suffocating, and these days I’m a middle-aged woman who has lived a life of her own choosing for some decades. Including kids and a mortgage, before you go accusing me of being commitment-phobic.
I simply don’t get monogamy. By which I don’t mean it’s a bad thing—some of my best friends are monogamous! It’s just not for me.
So what is? For a long time, I didn’t have any language to describe that. And that was a problem.
We cannot fully understand what we cannot articulate, and we cannot articulate what we have no language for. This was years before the phrase ethical non-monogamy came to prominent usage, or at least hit my awareness. Back then, there was only one term I’d ever heard for someone like me, and unfortunately, I learned fast that it was not meant for, well, me.
I’m talking polyamory.
To be upfront: I was young and misled, and I don’t eschew that label now. Some of my best friends are polyamorous! And so am I—these days, I identify very much with that word as a meaningful way of describing my choice of lifestyle.
But back in the first days of opening up my relationships, I was given to understand that there was a certain way of ‘doing’ polyamory. A ‘right’ way. Which was about as authentic for me as monogamy, in the end.
You see, I got…jealous.
And in the circles I was hanging in all those years ago, that was the ultimate sin.
Jealousy was considered a bad, manipulative emotion, with the obvious implication that only bad, manipulative partners felt it. Nobody who was truly polyamorous would allow jealousy into their hearts, so I was told. Unfortunately, I didn’t yet have the self-awareness, or the confidence, or indeed the language, to articulate how wrong it was to ascribe to an emotion an inherent moral value. As if it was ‘bad’ simply for the feeling of it, thus a reflection on the character of the person whose experience it was.
Behaviors, often emotionally driven, can certainly be bad or good or anything in between. Actions or judgments or decisions based on upon feelings may have a potential moral value, of course. But an emotion, in and of itself? A feeling that an individual can in no way help, regardless of how they act upon it? Sorry, but telling anyone that the emotions they feel are wrong and invalid leads into very dangerous territory.
It certainly left me believing I mustn’t be polyamorous after all. All I could do was blame myself for screwing up my poly relationships just as I’d screwed up my monogamous ones.
Some of my best friends are… but what else was there? I had no words left for what I was, and seemingly, no other options.
Community is critical. And finding your community, especially for anyone marginalized from the mainstream, can be lifesaving. That can only be achieved if we are able to articulate who we are in a way that recognizes who else is like us, so that we know we are not the only ones who feel like we do. So we know we’re part of a larger, supportive group. That there are others who understand.
Humans are social animals. Communal animals. We need each other.
But when a community is defined less by who is included, and more by who is excluded, that gets seriously problematic.
Polyamory does have room for all kinds. My early partners, who defined their polyamory with such rigidity I couldn’t find a place for myself in it, weren’t bad people, and I don’t believe they were representative of polyamory more broadly either. Their relationship needs did not match mine, we had different styles of poly that weren’t necessarily suited to each other. Instead of recognizing that and going our own ways, we all struggled in a battle over language. Trying to determine who was worthy enough to claim the label, and who wasn’t.
In all the years since, I’ve come to understand my own needs a lot better. I know I need a primary committed relationship that provides a center, no matter how many friends, lovers, loves or secondary partners revolve around us. Is that still poly, if different relationships are given different weight? If there is still one that is prime, and others less equal? Maybe it’s not. But it’s not monogamy either, and it’s a style that works for me, and for my current partner, and for our other partners with whom we get involved.
Human beings are messy, individual, changeable creatures. We don’t always fit into strictly defined neat little boxes. For all our yearning for clear classifications and identifications—and I’ll happily rattle off that I’m a bisexual, kinky, submissive, queer, cis-gendered, and yes, polyamorous, woman, before I even let you buy me my first drink—that language can’t support us unless it’s as flexible as people themselves. As full of variety and individual idiosyncrasies and as unique as we all are, for only then can we build genuine and inclusive communities based upon our commonalities.
I’m a writer. Language is where I dwell. That novella of mine, Crossing Lines, centers a young man, kinky, bisexual, a switch, trying to figure out what he wants, desperate not to disrupt the established relationship of the friends he loves so much. It’s those friends who show him that he shouldn’t try to be what others want, but should only be himself, even if it doesn’t conform to expectations or labels or fits in any neat little boxes.
Community, one of them tells him. You need to find your people. The ones who love you for who you are, in all its unique variation.
Crossing Lines is available from Amazon.