Monogamy?

A friend asked me a question the other day…

“DO YOU EVER WISH SOMETIMES YOU WERE MARRIED WITH A SPECIAL PARTNER THAT YOU GOT TO WAKE UP WITH EVERYDAY?"

The short answer is “yes.” The long answer is something along the lines of “no.”

This question came from a dear friend of mine I’ve known for decades, and I know it’s one a lot of people have for me.

I’ve practiced polyamory for almost a decade. People ask, “when did you know you were poly?” My answer is “some people just know they’re gay. I always knew I wasn’t monogamous.” When I started to explore my sexuality, I wondered why people only chose to make love with one person. It didn’t make any sense to me then, and still doesn’t now. (I do understand why people choose monogamy and, while it makes sense to me, it doesn’t resonate with me in the slightest. That’s a whole other conversation.)

Here’s the thing about humans. We want:

security AND freedom

intimacy AND desire

love AND lust

novelty AND comfort

dependency AND autonomy

Each of those are opposites and have an inverse relationship with each other. When the intimacy goes up, the desire goes down, when the comfort goes up, the novelty goes down, etc. (Ask anyone who’s been together for over a decade and they’ll tell you there’s an ebb and flow. You can also read Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity if you want expanded explanations.)

For the past eight years, I’ve explored a plethora of different ethically non-monogamous relationships, including a six-year polyamorous relationship, which had a beautiful blend of security and freedom.

Right now, in my poly V (I have two partners, who don’t have a sexual relationship with each other), I feel like I have an extraordinary balance of both autonomy and intimacy.

I get to choose who I spend time with and how we spend our time together.

Sometimes I don’t wake up with someone and I’d like to.

Other times I don’t wake up with someone and I’m glad I didn’t.

Many times, I do wake up with someone (or two someones) and it’s amazing.

Never do I wake up with someone and wish they weren’t there.

If I’m with someone, it’s because I *want* to be, not because I *have* to be. I’m the extroverted type of person who is thrilled to be with someone most of the time, and I’m also content to have my time and space to myself (a recent development), and this is a luxury most marriages don’t have. That’s why my short answer is “yes,” and my long answer is “no.”

My question back to my friend was “how often do you wish you had the freedom to make love with whoever you want?”

The irony is that most of us want both. It is socially acceptable to want the partnership, but socially wrong to want the sexual freedom.

I’ve pretty much given a big “fuck you” to anything society has ever told me to do (ask my parents, thanks for your endless love and support guys!), which led me to relational anarchy, the act of developing relationships that don’t have an arbitrary, default set of rules on how to be together. We co-create agreements that work for each of us based on what our desires are and continue with a flexible container that adapts with whatever surfaces in our lives.

If you want to hear more about relational anarchy, keep following.