Monogamy Mindset

One of the primary ways to sabotage a poly relationship

We live in a deeply monogamy oriented culture, and even as polyamory and various forms of consensual non-monogamy become more popular and less fringe, it’s still difficult at times to completely move beyond the culture and mindset of monogamy. In my experience, one of the chief issues with trying to make polyamory work smoothly is the creeping specter of old ways of thinking that are still hanging on for some people, sometimes quite subconsciously.

Polyamory is the practice of having more than one intimate relationship at a time, with the full consent of the parties involved. Unlike polygamy, the practice of having more than one husband or wife at a time, polyamorous relationships come in all kinds of configurations, which may have varying levels of time or emotional investment. They may have a sexual component but the relationships are of a romantic nature and can simply be emotional connections such as the one I have with my long-distance partner Nat. They aren’t just friendships, or friends with benefits, which is what swinging tends to be.

Different polyamorous partners meet different needs, and as such, each relationship is its own individual entity, unlike polygamy where all wives or all husbands play a similar role and the relationship is closed to other people. Closed polyamorous relationships do exist, but they tend to be more like polygamy than typical polyamory where there’s a lot of freedom in being able to co-create your own relationships in the way that works for you.

But for many people, the safety of known boxes is a hard thing to completely dispense with. Even though they want to embrace non-monogamy, the mentality of monogamy still creeps in. This can be one of the things that most sabotages polyamorous relationships, leading to drama or unsustainability. If you are trying to insert a round peg into a square hole, it’s just not going to fit right.

The first year that my husband James and I opened up our marriage we dated quite a bit. Now, 5 years in, we have a few relationships that we are very invested in, and we aren’t actively seeking any others. This is in part because we enjoy the relationships that we have, but it’s also because of some of the bad experiences that we had in that first year with ostensibly poly people who were still operating out of a monogamy mindset.

As we were talking about opening up, we read a book called Opening Up: A Guide To Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships. There are several such books, and they all help previously monogamous people begin to understand the ways that polyamory is different from monogamy and give good tips about the kinds of things you need to think and talk about when changing relationship styles. I’m very glad that we had those conversations long before we ever were actually intimate with anyone else. It’s clear to me now that some people never have them, or only have ones that are fairly superficial.

My partner Nat isn’t the first person that we dated (James and I only see other people together), but he was the first person that we developed a strong bond with. James and Nat weren’t intimate, and our relationship was what might be characterized as a V. Around the time that we started seeing Nat, James and I also started dating another couple on a regular basis. Again, the guys weren’t sexually involved, but it was otherwise a foursome and not just a type of wife-swapping. We saw Cody and Shelby about once a month, meeting up at a lifestyle club that was half-way between our houses, which were about two hours apart.

We saw Nat about once a month also, even as that was rapidly becoming a more serious relationship. Cody and Shelby were more like play partners, although it’s often difficult to truly give names and labels to these things. We cared about them, but the relationship was primarily sexual. However, we communicated often in between dates and had talked about going on vacation together. The four of us were looking forward to meeting up for the big Halloween bash — a time when the club community took over an entire hotel nearby and made it a weekend blowout. We had done a hotel party with them once before and had a great time.

During that earlier hotel party, we spent a lot of time together, but they also wanted some time to play with another guy they were involved with, and so off they went, no big deal, and we did our own thing. This was my understanding of how polyamory works. You act like adults and have honest conversations about what you want and need and then you come to agreements that suit all parties. If you can’t do that, you either figure it out or you find someone that you are more compatible with.

When it came time for the Halloween weekend, we kept getting messages from Cody and Shelby that they hadn’t arrived yet, and then that we shouldn’t come down to their room when they did finally get there, as we typically did. We should just meet them at the club. When they finally showed up there, they were obviously high and drunk and were in the company of several people we’d never met before. We kissed Shelby hello, but when I went to kiss Cody, he literally pushed me away. Ouch!

They had decided that they wanted to spend time with some other people they’d met and rather than just tell us that, as they had done at the first hotel party, they told us lie after lie instead. Monogamy mindset had set in. It was fine by them to be casual when we were very casual, but once we had a more established relationship, they felt that they had to “cheat” on us.

There was no room for both, or even to tell us that they thought our relationship had run its course, although 3 weeks prior we had been talking about taking a vacation together. They just couldn’t conceive of a situation where there was more than one relationship going on at a time. We knew they hooked up with other people all the time, and that was fine. We were seeing Nat and sometimes a woman as well. We had never been exclusive with Cody and Shelby and it never occurred to us that they would think that they needed to lie to us.

By contrast, we had met a woman at the club named Carrie. She had gotten out of a bad marriage the year before and was now living with a woman that she was very in love with, but Carrie still really liked having sex with men, which was OK with her girlfriend. When we met her Carrie was at the club with her boyfriend, who was tending bar that night, and so she was free to meet and play with other people while he was busy. He checked on her a few times to make sure she was having fun, but otherwise, Carrie was doing her own thing.

This is what polyamory means to me. Carrie had co-created relationships with both her live-in partner and her boyfriend that worked for all of them. They were different kinds of relationships that met different kinds of needs. There was no possessiveness or monogamy mindset in play. If Carrie had tried to get all of those needs met in a monogamous construct, it never would have worked, but fortunately for her, she didn’t have to.

Polyamory is a mindset. It isn’t just sanctioned sexual infidelity. It’s a way of thinking about relationships that is expansive, rather than restrictive and it doesn’t work well with either co-dependence or controlling behaviors. Most of the time when I hear about trouble within a polyamorous relationship, it’s because monogamy-oriented ways of thinking are in play.

Monogamy is so culturally ingrained that I think most people who want to engage in consensual non-monogamy really need to actively deprogram themselves and learn about polyamory as a different relationship style first. Whatever form of polyamory that you engage in, it is bound to be significantly different from monogamy in many fundamental ways. I think it’s important to poly relationship success to acknowledge that.

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