I Want It All: Abundance Versus Scarcity in Poly Life
It’s an ongoing conversation with my poly-kinky co-conspirator and writing partner, about whether non-monogamy offers abundance or if it’s an illusion.
He is a single black man who lives alone in a big city; I am a married white woman who lives in a smaller town. There are, admittedly, differences in the ways we each experience the dating market at this point, variations in who is available, who is also non-monogamous, age, location and where they are in terms of sexuality, identity and range of relationships. He did not have time to write this with me (but he did approve of my stances) so I took both sides of the issue, debate style!
The Possibility vs The Promise
Polyamory has at the heart, the ability to love many people at the same time.
No one says it’s equal love, or that you can divide your heart in any kind of fair way, but the promise is often — it’s possible. Just like you can love all your children, just like you can love your parents, your friends, your family without restricting that love to just one. That’s the theory, and now that we have a bulk of experiences to use for reflection, here’s what I’m seeing:
Opportunity: Your Way
Design your life how you want, and invite partners to join you…rejecting the idea that you need to mold your life to The One partner you select. (We are already seeing this to some degree, in people marrying older and having a list of dealbreakers because they know what they want and don’t want in a life partner.) Polyamory offers a model of concurrent partners as well as consecutive partners without the search for only one as a distraction. It can be extremely freeing to decide for yourself who you want in your life, and how, without following the default path.
I like the phrase: “Build your relationships around your life, not your life around your relationships.”
Danger: Constant Change
Enter a new partner, in addition to an existing partner. It’s stressful, because the existing partner(s) don’t know what’s going to happen, and even without any threats of change of any kind, just that sense of uncertainty can be stressful. There’s also the opportunity to have more than two partners and there’s a delicate Jenga-like balance to managing multiple romantic and sexual commitments. Everything moving and shifting, that freedom, that flow — it can be destabilizing and that can create stress in addition to additional communication and reassurance needs.
In addition to everything else in your life, work, school, kids, hobbies, family, car maintenance, chores, Father’s day presents, taxes, reading…near constant change can be a lot to manage.
Opportunity: Love More
You can not only have more partners, they can be different kinds. You can practice bisexuality in a more conducive environment, dating a mix of as many men and women as you like. You can open yourself to attraction to anyone, regardless of gender, and see how that works for you, without necessarily changing your own identity.
There are a variety of group play options as well, offering more arrangements of people and activities, all of which are quite stimulating. This can lead to long-sought adventures, self-knowledge and exquisite pleasure. (It can also lead to all the other thing inherent in relationships, multiplied!)
Danger: Polysaturation
Abundance is great in concept but it can overwhelm people who aren’t good at assessing their people-pleasing habits and the optimism about how many partners they can handle, along with rest of life. They may have various reasons for this, some FOMO mixed in with irrational confidence, some ego-feeding or some honest hopefulness that it’s possible to, say, maintain six romantic partners. (It’s *possible* but they have to be tiered levels of commitment and engagement, I’d say with at least two as occasional comets.)
This means that people who don’t really have room for a new partner might still be looking for one and see what happens. This can lead to hurt feelings, and it can also be an unintentional sign of polysaturation — where you really don’t have room for anyone else right now, for whatever the reason. This takes time to learn, and there are still obvious reasons that now might not be the right time to add anyone else, not because you have enough partners, but just because of life and how it also demands more attention at different times.
I see lots of terms on the dating advice sites about new terms, like cushioning and benching, that basically mean “keeping people on the hook in case you want them later.” I think there’s a risk as the poly relationships shift and change that some people end up as back-up options, and while it’s clear and consensual that people have multiple partners, sometimes the intentions for that particular relationship aren’t clearly stated. (Or, it’s unknown for too long.) It is actually okay though to consciously seek lower engagement relationships, and to have a variety of levels — just be clear about it.
Opportunity: The Best People
Not like, the hottest people, but that can be true, but one of the amazing abundances of this lifestyle is that you meet open-minded people who actually live the way they want to. They have great insight into philosophy and ethics sometimes. They have good boundaries and coping skills and wicked senses of humor.
You can also — BE FRIENDS! You don’t have to seek only sexual partners in the lifestyle, you can make lots of friends. They can be people you went on dates with but didn’t click sexually. They can be sometimes former lovers who you stay in touch with. They can lend you sterilizable sex toys or recommend sales at their favorite shops. You can introduce them to their next great partner. You have people to ask advice from when you run into a specific poly-kinky-dating-sex conundrum that no one else will be as helpful in answering because of the different structure.
This is an overlooked kind of abundance, with less of the concern of polysaturation. You can have lots of friends, as long as expectations are in line on both sides, and they tend to be more minimal.
Danger: Drama
Not everyone can be chill all the time. There are things that set us off, things to be expected and things to learn that are new. This is a journey, a process of self-exploration as well as communication that is constantly being refined.
When there are interconnected relationships, there is an increased risk of things affecting the chain that ordinarily wouldn’t, like if you and your partner want to tell the kids about your polyamory but your spouses’ partners’ spouse absolutely doesn’t want you to, because they aren’t ready to tell their kids. In monogamy, that’s less likely. (^^^It’s hard to follow, isn’t it?)
There will also be times where someone needs more time to work something out, because someone’s feelings are hurt, and that means being generous. It may mean meeting just to talk through something and that can be time-consuming, something already in short supply. There can also be reversions to heteronormative and compulsive monogamy ways of thinking, where someone decides they want something against the agreements that changes other relationships. People also do uncharacteristic things under the influence of NRE — that’s why poly people often caution about making big decisions when you have intense feelings.
Opportunity: Self-Reflection
It seems like drama gets a bad name when it can actually be just a spike in sharing feelings, taken to extremes sometimes. But expressing feelings and asking for what you need can be an amazing life skill. Some of the things I’ve learned about dating negotiations and boundaries have been tremendously helpful in the rest of my life. Learning what triggers us and how to cope in a healthy way can be a good growth experience.
It’s also a chance to see what your partners can’t actually fix for you. They don’t complete you — that’s your job. Seek to understand why you feel incomplete and where you need to shore up aspects of your own life. (Yes, of course, care and connection and belonging are human needs that others can provide but the current state of this in monogamy looks a lot more like codependence.)
Danger: A Better Fit
Here’s one that I didn’t really see coming, which is that there can end up being some comparison without competition. The new relationship shows some cracks in the old one, basically. Not that they are better and take their first place spot, but that the existing relationship may not have been on as solid ground as it appeared. A small concern, say, about time spent together without an overnight option, can be magnified when a new partner is available and you identify that it’s something you really want.
There’s also a risk, unintended most likely, where a newer partner treats you well and thinks that’s normal — because for them, it is. Which in turn, adds some scrutiny to the existing partner’s inability or reluctance to rise to that level of care. Something like, “Of course I text you good night every night.” It can always be something you chalk up to individual differences, and that may be just fine — but it can also reveal something you hadn’t noticed before.
Which means one of two things, usually: you can ask for more from a partner who is not rising to your desired level, or you can elevate the partner who does to have more of your time and energy. This can change dynamics and cause some pain in the process, but ultimately, it’s clarifying for what works for you.
Opportunity: Independence
When you have multiple partners, there is an ability to feel more secure that you aren’t going to lose them, like you might if you put all your eggs in one monogamous basket. It reminds me of the difference between a full-time job and a freelance career, in which one of the most convincing things my mentor ever said: “Your job can lay you off at anytime but you’re unlikely to lose all your clients at once. There’s more security in multiple options.”
This way of thinking can offer some independence, where you move through your life in the way that suits you, building the relationships into what you want at the time. When someone doesn’t work for you anymore, you can kindly release them. You can add new partners in different places where you travel. You can decide whether to have a long-distance relationship or not without it being the only one. It offers real choices, unconstrained by the wraparound core framework of monogamy.
Danger: Free Float
Fact is, if you don’t live with or co-parent with a partner, it can be easier for them to drift away. I’ve had months-long relationships that broke up over text and there wasn’t even anything to retrieve from their house. Took their permissions off the Google calendar and, that’s that. It can be easier in polyamory to let people slip away, in a way that is not typical in the legal and domestic entanglements of monogamy.
Multiple times, I’ve been dating someone for several months, getting into a habit of seeing them and all the little details that accompany that. Knowing their gate code, the time they get out of work, their brother’s name, how they like their coffee…and then it’s all delete-able because they’ve moved on, I changed my mind, something has intervened. It can be kind of sad to realize how ephemeral our connections can be, and hard sometimes when you didn’t want it to end, or you didn’t want it to end that way and it’s just gone with the wind.
Conclusion
Well, I’m not sure I have a conclusion for you, except that I am willing to accept the hazards of the freedom of polyamory over the restrictions of monogamy. For me, it’s a no-brainer. I know why I’m here, I know that I will grow with this relationship style and I believe it has a lot to teach me, about myself and human nature.
There are tradeoffs and you may not want to make them, but I hope this lays it out with some nuance.
