Polyamory Taught Me a Few Things About Love
How new ideas about love from polyamory break toxic beliefs and can benefit monogamous people
Polyamory is about love, not about sex
It was great to fall in love head-over-heels when I was 58. Middle-age men fall in love all the time, but they often pay a high price for it. Maybe they have been alone for a while. Maybe they just went through the heartbreak of divorce or the death of a loved one. Maybe they are cheating.
Not me. Polyamory allowed me to fall in love while continuing my long-term relationship with my wife. Ethically, without cheating, without lying, without secrets. I could fall in love with another woman while still loving my wife. And without risking our relationship.
Polyamory is about love, not sex. An open relationship allows you to have sex with several partners, but if you love two or more, there will be trouble. Your wife may be okay with you having an affair, but if you tell her you have fallen in love, she will think that you are about to leave her. Because how can you be in love with two women at the same time?
Well, you can. The revolutionary idea behind polyamory is that you can experience romantic love for more than one person at a time. In fact, loving multiple people is not only natural, it is highly desirable. Loving our father does not mean we can’t love our mother; our hearts can hold love for all our children and friends. None of these loves detracts from one another, nor from our love for our spouse. But most people believe that romantic love is different, a love that can only apply to one person at a time.
There is some truth in that: sex creates a special, intense kind of bonding. However, not always! You can have sex without love and love without sex. New words like “bromance” denote intense, sexless experiences of friendship.
Falling in love is not the same as loving
Polyamory allows you to have the unique experience of falling in love with one person while still loving another. It can be quite disconcerting. In the polyamory world, there is a special word for falling in love: NRE — New Relationship Energy. It denotes the intense, obsessive feelings that you have for your new partner. And you had best not discount your love for your other partner because of it!
In his book The Compass of Pleasure, neuroscientist David Linden summarizes research that has shown that falling in love is a temporary phase that usually lasts about five months. Only a few individuals can sustain such intense feelings for a longer time. In fact, it is not desirable for the falling in love phase to last longer. It is like a drug because it engages the ventral tegmental area (VTA) — nucleus accumbens “pleasure” pathway that mediates drug addiction. This neuronal pathway does not really produce pleasure; rather, it is in charge of motivation. That’s why your drive to do other things may decrease when you are falling in love. Some studies suggest that you may even become less intelligent.
Some people break up when the falling in love phase wears out. They think that the love is gone, that there is no reason to continue together. But this is not necessarily so. What should happen is that falling in love gives way to the loving phase. In it, the dopamine high is gone and love becomes more intentional and less physical.
Love is an emotion, love is a choice
Love is an emotion, like fear, joy, anger, sadness, curiosity, shame, empathy, etc. However, love is a powerful social construct as well as an emotion, and this construct can cause much suffering. The pain we feel at the lack or loss of love, or the fear of such loss, harkens back to our beliefs about love.
Love is a choice. We can choose to feed this emotion with our thoughts and our actions, or to starve it to death. When we feed love, it becomes intentional. Once the falling in love part is over, caring for the other person, wanting her happiness and helping to ease her suffering, builds the habit of loving her. And it awakens the reciprocal feelings and actions. This is how love is maintained.
Another important component of love is shared history: the joys and pains that we have gone through with a long-term partner. As we go through life together, we adapt to each other, sometimes becoming more similar, sometimes becoming more complementary. A newer polyamorous partner will not have that shared history with us, which balances the powerful pull of the NRE. Newness is exciting, but also more prone to conflict.
What polyamory teaches us about love
Back to polyamory: you can still feed the love for your previous partner while you fall in love with a new one. However, this requires mindfulness. You need to be aware of your feelings — all of them, not just the shiny new ones. But, most important, you need to respect your previous commitments and obligations. Polyamory doesn’t mean that jealousy vanishes; if you are so wrapped up in your new love that you neglect your existing partner, complications arise.
Some polyamorous people become love experts because of the many opportunities they have to experience the different facets of love. But polyamory is not easy. It takes a lot of self-awareness and emotional control to navigate its many pitfalls.
For example, falling in love is depicted as inevitable, a force stronger than we are. However, I found that I can decide to fall in love. Before my marriage transitioned from an open relationship to polyamory, I could have fallen in love with some of my sex partners, but I did not. Only after negotiating with my wife, I let myself fall in love with another woman.
One paradox in polyamory is that, while sex with a new partner is more exciting, when we go back to make love with our regular partner, sex is more exciting as well. The newness spreads to both relationships. Something similar happens with love. As we fall in love with one person, the dopamine high spreads to the former relationship, reinvigorating the older love. The reason why we think one loves detracts from the other is that the usual context for having multiple partners is infidelity or competition. In those cases there is so much conflict, fear and guilt that it keeps love from growing. Instead, drama and trauma bonding encourages the most toxic aspects of falling in love.
There is no One True Love
The One True Love is one most powerful myths of the monogamy culture. It is the idea that there is someone out there who is the perfect match for you, so you need to date many people until you find that special someone.
It didn’t use to be that way; through almost all of human history, most people were in arranged marriages or coupled more or less at random. Being exposed to a multitude of people in big cities, and more recently through the internet, made it possible to screen many prospective partners in search of the perfect match. The upside is that we may end up with somebody more suited to our personality than may have happened back in the day. The downside is that many people feel frustrated because they can’t find that perfect match. Or, even after we settle into a relationship, we still have doubts about whether we made the right choice. Our One True Love is supposed to fill all our needs, emotional and sexual, but what if it doesn’t?
The hard truth is no one person can fill all of our needs. There is always a compromise. And, even if you were a nearly perfect match at the beginning, people change with time, and so do their needs and their ability to fulfill yours. Polyamory solves this problem by allowing you to start new relationships that cover your unfulfilled needs. For example, your polyamorous partner may do outdoor sports that your regular partner doesn’t like. Or you may experiment with kinks in one relationship that you don’t get to do in the other.
In the search for the One True Love, we shop for partners like we shop for everything else in this capitalist society. We objectify people, not sexually, but by assigning them a value. That woman is beautiful, smart and financially independent. That guy is athletic, funny and has a great career. The problem is, will I be able to get them with what I have to offer? Or are they “out of my league”? Love starts looking too much like a competition for a job, like a transaction.
When you can love several people, love is no longer a competition for that special place in your heart. There is more room, enough to give love without having unreasonable expectations that one person will fulfill your every whim. You can love imperfect people. I dated some of my polyamorous partners, not so much because of what they could give me, but because of what I could give them. That makes love much more humane, filled with empathy and compassion.
Heartbreak
The flip side of falling in love is the heartbreak of breaking up. This is one of the biggest sources of suffering in our modern lives. The pain of heartbreak is almost physical. In fact, if the breakup happens during the falling in love phase, it may have some characteristics of drug withdrawal. The dopamine high comes to a sudden end, triggering all those nasty biochemical reactions in our brain.
But here again, false beliefs and cultural constructs play a large role in that suffering:
- The One True Love was not the person who we thought would be, so we need to start our search again. Perhaps we will never find it.
- Relationships are supposed to last a lifetime, so when they don’t they become a personal failure.
- Romantic relationships are considered more important than friendships and other relationships, so our social network may not be there to support us.
- We are supposed to suffer from heartbreak; all the novels, movies and TV shows say so.
- Our self-worth is tied up to the quality of our partner. If we are single, we are worthless
Of course, breakups and heartbreaks also happen in polyamory. In fact, because we have more partners, they are more likely to happen. However, when we lose one partner, we may have one or more lovers left over to support us. Often, these people are closer to us than regular friends. Still, some situations may leave a polyamorous person utterly alone, like when a triad rejects one of its components.
However, a polyamorous individual is better equipped than a monogamous person to deal with heartbreak, because she has rejected some of the pernicious myths of monogamy. He does not believe in the One True Love. She doesn’t tie her self-worth to her partners. More subtly, polyamory does not create the sharp distinction between romantic love and friendship that monogamous culture does. For a polyamorous person, the “friend zone” and the “love zone” are not all that different. So, hopefully, he will have a social network wide enough to help him through the heartbreak.
Modern culture idealizes romantic love
Since early childhood, we have been bombarded with myths about romantic love in tales, movies, songs and TV shows that shape our expectations when we embark on our love relationships as adults. We learn that we must seek our One True Love, that jealousy is a sign of love, that pressuring somebody to love us is romantic, that love should last forever, that we should neglect our friends in favor of our lover, that breaking up should be devastating, that we should give a second chance to a lover who has treated us wrong, and similar toxic beliefs. Polyamory challenges many of these ubiquitous beliefs of monogamous culture.
As polyamorous people create new beliefs and new narratives, these will slowly permeate the culture and benefit monogamous people as well.
Many thanks to my wife @Lilith Blackwell for her great corrections.