It is easy for polyamory to get attention. You just talk about orgies and hookups and all kinds of promiscuity and people notice. I pay a lot of attention to how poly is portrayed in media and I certainly notice articles that lean that way, especially when they pitch it as being full of jealousy and drama. That happens a lot.
Not all the time though. I ran into a BBC article from a couple years ago on poly and I was so happy to see how it unfolded. It did basically everything right, and that takes some doing because there are a lot of ways that you can do this wrong.
There are so many ways to get it wrong:
Poly is about M/F couples looking for a girlfriend.
Poly is about orgies and kink.
Poly is about married couples looking to alleviate boredom.
Poly is just better than monogamy.
Poly is just a coping mechanism for people who can't commit fully.
Poly is a new thing, just recently invented, and all the cool people are doing it.
There are more things that you can easily get wrong but generally they boil down to treating single examples as representative of the whole - stereotypes. There is nothing wrong with married people having casual reletionships because they are bored, or couples looking for a unicorn for threesomes, or orgies, or just being monogamous. All of those are fine, but they should all be seen as simply examples of ways to do relationships, not the only way.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that even if you don't want to be poly there are lessons that it can teach you about the ways our culture screws up relationships. Poly people tend to have much less explosive breakups and be much closer to their exes both because they have more options for relationship styles and don't need to fit into uncomfortable boxes as well as not buying into the myth of "The One". No matter your relationship style it is helpful to accept the reality that your partner is not destined to be with you and they won't be perfect. It is also great to examine how the two of you could be together and decide on a relationship style with an open mind.
As an example, there are people out there who are married but live apart, quite on purpose. That isn't poly of course but deciding to live this way requires that you reject some of the norms our culture normally imposes on relationships. Thinking about what you want and how you and a partner work together and finding unique solutions gives you so many more choices, and that is a good thing regardless of exclusivity.
I find a lot of poly people feel pressured when they talk about themselves to portray things in a certain way. They often feel like if they admit to struggles of any kind it will immediately bring a response of "Well, obviously these problems are all because you are poly" even though those exact same problems regularly occur in monogamous relationships. We all know that jealousy is a regular feature of monogamy, and yet the first response to admitting feeling jealous (or any other issue) when you are in a non standard structure is to blame the structure instead of just addressing the problem directly.
That makes writing pieces about poly really difficult. People want to portray themselves in a positive light so that others will see that you truly can walk off the beaten path, but they don't want to lie and pretend that it is some kind of guarantee of eternal bliss; it most certainly isn't that. I think this article did a good job of writing about the potential positives without overselling poly, pitching it as a viable alternative but not a panacea. I try to do the same in my writing but it is difficult because writing about new relationships and fun sexytimes is easy but talking about conflict and breakups is hard, not least because the other people in the conflicts usually don't want that information public.
I do often wonder if the people who write such articles are actually poly themselves and try to distance themselves from their own experiences to write objectively or if they simply do a lot of talking and research to try to figure out what to say. I suppose people might have thought the same about me when I was writing about alternative relationships structures a lot but not out of the closet on my blog here.
No comments:
Post a Comment