Polygamorous Relationships and Their Obstacles

Berit Brogaard D.M.Sci., Ph.D The Mysteries of Love

Polygamorous Relationships and Their Obstacles

How to avoid the oppressive tendencies of attachment relationships

Posted Jun 11, 2016

 Source: Wikimedia Commons

Romantic love often is replaced by attachment love, at least when romantic couples settle down. This replacement can have devastating consequences ranging from female oppression to ugly breakups. How can we avoid these grim consequences? One way to minimize the oppressive tendencies of attachment relationships involves reinventing the idea of an attachment relationship by parting ways with conventional family and relationship structures and the traditional notion of the family.
Unconventional family structures can take a variety of forms. One newer form of unconventional relationship/family structure is that of polyamory, a practice characterized by simultaneous consensual romantic, sexual, and/or affective relationships with multiple partners. Polyamory differs from swinging in focusing on long-term, emotionally intimate relationships, from polygamy with its equality of access to others for all gender and from adultery with its emphasis on honesty and full disclosure of the relationships to all participants. The structure of polyamorous can take various forms, ranging from a core relationship with ancillary lovers, triads and quads with three or four people constituting the core unit to V-structures where one individual is equally romantically involved with two or more people who are not themselves romantically involved.
One of the goals of this type of family or relationship structure is to combine romantic love and emotional intimacy with equality and compersion, two ideals that traditionally have been in stark opposition to each other in Western culture. Compersion refers to the positive feelings one gets when one's lover or partner is enjoying sex with another person or is getting pleasure from being in love with another person. It is consistent with also experiencing feelings of jealousy (also known in poly communities as "wibble") but in order for it to be genuine it usually requires an absence of jealous feelings.
Another important hallmark of polyamory is that it encourages women’s sexual subjectivity. Deborah Tolman defines sexual subjectivity as "a person’s experience of herself as a sexual being, who feels entitled to sexual pleasure and sexual safety, who makes active sexual choices, and who has an identity as a sexual being" (pp. 5-6). Women without sexual subjectivity are sexually silenced in the sense of being defined by masculine desires and ideals. In the context of polyamorous relationships, women are sometimes able to regain their sexual subjectivity, transgress standard gender roles and power relationships and recreate their own social roles.
Two of the main challenges in polyamorous relationships are exactly those ideals that these communities strive toward, viz. equality and compersion. Equality ideally requires disavowing secret hierarchies, e.g., not favoring or being more affectionate toward new loves, as well as a mutually understood opposition to traditional masculine power structures. Compersion effectively involves eliminating our (cultivated) feelings of jealousy and betrayal when a romantic partner is being emotionally or sexually intimate with another sexual partner.
One major argument for compersion is this: sexual and emotional satisfaction is a good thing. So, denying one’s partner this pleasure outside of the narrow context of a monogamous relationship is inconsistent with the core feature of romantic love, which is having a genuine concern for one’s partner’s well being.

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One of the dominant reasons cited for not wanting to be in a polyamorous relationship and for prohibiting non-exclusivity in relationships is that non-exclusivity leads to jealousy, which is potentially destructive to the relationship. It is questionable, however, that jealousy alone can justify an exclusivity requirement. Although jealousy is a powerful emotion that can be destructive to relationships, not all jealousy is justified. Being jealous whenever your partner has a drink with another person without you being present is clearly unjustified. This raises the question of when jealousy is justified.
As I have argued elsewhere, jealousy is a justified or appropriate emotion when it is directed at a situation in which there is a genuine risk of loss of the beloved to another person. This would seem to make jealousy an unjustified emotion in many circumstances of extra-relatal sex. If your partner has anonymous, non-emotional sex with another person that he or she cannot contact again, this event is not likely to lead to a loss of him or her to another person.
People in polyamorous relationships typically introduce a multiplicity of rules in order to constrain or eliminate destructive (and potentially justified) emotions like feelings of betrayal and jealousy, for example, employing sharp distinctions between love and sex to prevent emotional bonds to form with new lovers. Other rules and boundaries may include a formal introduction to new lovers, full advance disclosure, not having sex with a new partner more than once, not spending time engaging in intimate dining or intimate face-to-face or electronic conversations with new lovers, not spending the night with new partners, restricting visits with new lovers to designated times, viewing new lovers merely as a sex toy and disallowing certain forms of sex (e.g., unprotected sex, full penetration, anal sex, genital sex, BDSM, deep kissing, intimate caressing, fondling, intimate sexual positions, fluid-bonding—for example, ejaculation inside of a lover or female ejaculation). Many of the rules that poly individuals create seem to help protect against the threat of losing one or more core partners to outsiders.
Even though jealousy often is unjustified, it may be thought that poly relationships inevitably provoke this emotion in one of the partners and that this by itself may destroy the relationship. This observation is no doubt correct. But it does not provide a good reason for frowning upon poly relationships or demanding sexual exclusivity. Take the case of a morbidly jealous partner who requests that his partner only ventures outside the house in his presence. We can imagine that not granting this request can be destructive to the relationship. Even so, the partner’s morbid jealousy is not a reason to implement the rule. In fact, the requirement is unreasonable and may be a reason to end the relationship.

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The same line of argument against jealousy being a reason for sexual exclusivity can be provided against the thought that not being sexually exclusive increases the risk that the straying partner(s) will want to leave the relationship in favor of a new relationship with their lover. This risk can be eliminated by the sorts of protective rules poly individuals implement to help prevent feelings of betrayal and jealousy. One-off sex with a stranger on a business trip, for example, would not by itself increase the risk that the straying partner leaves the core relationship.
Despite reasonable in one respect, however, poly rules may be problematic in the sense that they defeat one of the purposes of engaging in a polyamorous relationship. The focus on permitting highly restricted forms of sex while disallowing emotional intimacy is likely to perpetuate conventional androgynous relationship and power structures. Whereas sex with new individuals in some cases can help people undergo personal liberation and transformation, romantic love is more likely to do so. Indeed, poly individuals often realize that their relationships have failed to change traditional power structures and gender dynamics, partly owing to overly restrictive rules preventing new romantic love and the personal autonomy and transformation this may lead to.
The alternatives to a consensual non-monogamous relationship that avoid the pitfalls of attachment, it seems, are limited to serial monogamy and romantic compromise. One of the most difficult aspects of relationships are their likely end. Most people in traditional relationships cope with this often inevitable issue by bracketing the limited duration of most relationships and continuing as if the relationship will last for a lifetime. This often leads to romantic compromises of the wrong sort. In a survey conducted by AOL Living and Women’s Day in 2009 fifty-two percent of women surveyed said that their husbands were not their soul mates, seventy-two percent of the women said they had considered leaving their husbands at some point, more than fifty percent said that they were either bored in bed or couldn’t remember the last time they had sex, sixty percent rarely or never had date nights, more than fifty percent wished their husbands either made more money, or made more time for them, and nearly fifty percent said their husbands had changed for the worse since they got married. Despite all this, seventy-one percent of the women surveyed expected to be married to their spouse for the rest of their life. One reason for this may be that these women have realized that once you choose to maintain a long-term monogamous relationship, you are in some sense settling or compromising.
Not everyone views romantic compromises as a bad thing. Like all compromises, romantic compromises require settling for an option that is inferior to one you envisaged or hoped for. It involves giving up the pursuit of a better and more satisfying romantic circumstance. A romantic compromise could well serve an overall more satisfying life, provided that it leaves space for pursuing other options that otherwise would need to be sacrificed, for example, having children, avoiding loneliness, or securing greater financial stability. Romantic compromises, however, far from always help secure a more satisfying life. We all have limited time and resources available, and, as philosopher Marilyn Friedman points out, if our time and resources are primarily devoted to the needs and goals of our partner, then our own autonomy is thereby severely compromised. In their study of women’s conception of romantic relationships Aron et al. found that women often got ‘seduced’ into giving more than they received. As they put it:

All of the women interviewed commented on the power imbalances they had experienced in romantic relationships, and the difficulty of having to constantly struggle for equality. They thought that they had to give more on emotional levels than their partners and several felt uncomfortable about how easily they got seduced into giving too much and ending up drained of energy (p. 193).

Romantic compromises can benefit both lovers only if both parties’ needs, concerns and perspectives are given equal weight and making efforts to avoid a power structure where women are "the emotional laborers of love" (Cranny-Francis et al., p. 232). Often achieving these goals will require shared decision making, shared financial and domestic responsibilities, emotional equality, equal attention to both parties’ sexual subjectivity and equality with respect to alone-time and time spent with others outside the relationship. It is important here to recognize that the individuals in a relationship may not desire the same degree of connectedness and emotional togetherness, which makes romantic compromises particularly difficult. One major risk in making relationships work through romantic compromises is that women often are brought up to want more emotional connectedness than men as part of part of women’s socialization into "appropriate femininity" (Schäfer, p. 194), but then end up being chastised in light of this socialization later when they seek it in their relationships. Women more often than men risk being labeled “co-dependent” or “insecure,” when they express their deepened needs for intimacy and emotional connectedness--just as they were socialized to do. Romantic compromises will in most cases need to cater to this socialization while avoiding letting the unequal need for emotional connectedness be a source of further exploitation and female oppression.
Berit "Brit" Brogaard is the author of On Romantic Love.

Source: Oxford University Press, used with permission