Good Boundaries Are Needed to Have Actual Freedom
Hedonism won’t bring happiness
People who don’t know much about polyamory often imagine that it’s a bit like Spring Break for adults, with players following every lustful urge while giving no thought to tomorrow — just running wild. But nothing could be further from the truth for the people who practice ethical non-monogamy (ENM). Getting rid of all social contracts isn’t a path to freedom or happiness. It’s a path to nihilism. In order to have real freedom, you need to understand what both your needs and your boundaries actually are and then co-create social contracts that actually work for you. Also, polyamory isn’t only about sex. It’s about different kinds of intimate relationships.
Last weekend James and I got together with our lover, Tamara. We had invited her pansexual friend Lane to join us. It did turn into quite the party, but before we even got into the bedroom, we all had a conversation about hard and soft boundaries. Soft boundaries are the ones that you might have some flexibility on, depending on the situation. Hard boundaries are hard nos. Since there are no inherent rules or roles (particularly when 4 people are having sex together) it’s vital to the later fun and spontaniety of the party for everyone to know up front what is on and off the table. This was the first time that James was going to have any sexual intimacy with a man, so it was an even more important conversation this time around than usual.
There are a lot of tales from the free-wheeling days of the 1960s and 70s about how messed up and markedly unloving that era actually was. It was a time of counter-culture, of open sexuality, of freely breaking the rules that had governed society for so long. Long-haired hippies tripping on drugs, with a flower in their hair is the image, but the reality is, breaking the rules without creating any boundaries leads to selfishness, abuse, chaos, and disarray — and history reports that it quite often did.
Long before James and I ever invited somebody else into our bed, we had a series of discussions about what we wanted opening up to look like for us. Having too many rules can actually work against you in that instance, because you can’t legislate or predict emotions, and situations that you hadn’t yet considered and made a rule for will crop up. Rules that are meant to control rather than support typically don’t work out very well. We found that out first hand when I discovered that I was deeply in love with a man that we were seeing. We had to work through the parameters of that in ways we’d never anticipated, but we did, and it actually brought a lot more expansiveness and trust to our relationship. What’s better than rules is to understand yourself and how that relates to what you’d like to see in the relationship.
For example, James and I decided to only see other people together. This was in part because we had chosen to have sex with other people as a way to enhance our sex life and our relationship. It was not for the purposes of having more independence, although we did actually discover more independence and freedom in our couplehood as we moved together into a place that no longer supported the type of marriage paradigm that we’d unconsciously bought into when we said, “I do.”
As time has gone on and we’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with our non-traditional way of being partnered, we’ve talked about circumstances where being intimate with someone without the other one present would actually work for us. In other words, our social contract is not set in concrete. It has room to grow and evolve as we do. Rather than trying to build a fence to keep out intruders, we’ve built real trust and appreciation of each other’s needs and desires. We are very close and in love, but we no longer have co-dependent elements in our relationship, and we don’t have any kind of power struggles any longer. We pretty much never fight at this juncture, in part because there is the emotional safety to really name our fears, our needs, and our desires before it turns into conflict.
I don’t necessarily believe that you have to become non-monogamous to get to this place, but it certainly helps to dismantle unconscious power dynamics to no longer be traditionally partnered. There’s just something about including other people in your relationship that forces you to stand as an individual who is consensually connected to other individuals in ways that have been intentionally created — not just fallen into because that’s what relationships are supposed to be and look like based on outside constructs.
Dismantling the old rules and paradigms only works because we’ve created a framework for our newfound freedom to flourish in ways that enhance both of our lives; all of our lives. There is incredible mutual respect because we no longer operate from a place of “you are my husband/wife/partner and so you are supposed to X,Y,Z.” We know some people who are no longer monogamous, but who haven’t really undertaken this level of honesty and co-creation and it shows in their relationships. Just like the flower children of the 60s, if you break all of the old rules, but don’t have any other social contracts in place for support, you end up with self-indulgent kind of hedonism instead of the kind of freedom that brings actual happiness.
© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.
