On Polyamory

Turning love into a political ideology is just as damaging as moralizing against it.

More than a decade ago in an urban west coast condo, I found myself unexpectedly sitting in a gay men’s heart circle. I’d been invited on a date, and this was part of it, but he’d really not been clear about it.

Even less clear had been the specific topic for the circle: non-monogamy. He, myself, and eight other men were to sit quietly, passing a baton to each other while divulging our deepest feelings about polyamory, security, and the freedom we’d all discovered through rejecting the over-culture’s “jealousy programming.”

It was … awkward. It wasn’t that the topic was foreign to me, and this wasn’t my first heart circle. What made it awkward was that the facilitator of the heart circle, a licensed therapist, was sitting next to his partner who was most definitely not happy to be there. Watching the partner’s body shrink into itself as the therapist spoke of how “liberating” his explorations in multiple love relationships had been, and how much he’d finally “found himself” sharing his body with others, I really wanted to get out of there. Worse came when it was the partner’s turn to speak: he whimpered weakly, and said only “I’m still learning to be free.”

Once it was over, I did my best to leave as quickly as possible without seeming too rude. On my way out, I looked one more time at the spread of food the host —my “date” — had laid out for the event, and shook my head. He’d put out soybean hummus, quinoa tabbouleh, spelt pita, and chips made from root vegetables rather than potatoes. Everything was a twist on something else, with its primary ingredient replaced by an ersatz variant. It was as if he’d been trying to make a point: you can still have what you want, even if the very thing you’ve come to expect gets substituted by something else. You don’t need chick peas to make hummus, you don’t need fidelity to have love. But still — none of this felt right.

My longest, most stable, and most loving relationships had been polyamorous. Maybe because of this, I’ve become increasingly allergic to public discussions of polyamory and those, on either side of the matter, who attempt to make a politics, ideology, and identity of it.

As with other skirmishes in the culture wars, we are each constantly demanded to stake out a position and to make a political program of our very being, as if all of life and our most intimate relationships must become a matter of cultural identity and political strife. These battles, though, are really just proxy wars. They’re symbolic stand-ins for questions of material conditions for which no current political formation offers coherent and workable answers.

Parallel to the overblown strife over gay, lesbian, and gender-variant practices exacerbated by activists and cultural commentators on both sides, non-monogamy — despite being an issue relevant to at most 5% of Americans — has been made to appear much more common and culturally relevant than it really is. If so few actually practice polyamory in its varied forms, we might be forgiven for wondering why it’s suddenly become a political terrain. We might then ask ourselves if something else is really at stake, larger questions about social cohesion and material conditions which no one dare ask directly.

Of course, there’s always been the hyper-traditionalist right moralists who quickly dismiss any form but the ever-faithful one-man, one-woman marriage scenario as antithetical to “god’s plan” for humans. Their views dominate doubly, first in their express prohibitions against all other forms of relations, and secondly in inverse rebellions against those prohibitions. As in the tired trope of the teenager embracing Satanism because he or she wishes to rebel against Christianity, the moralists of anti-monogamy merely invert the traditionalist paradigm and call it revolution.

Particularly irksome are those who attempt to frame non-monogamous relationships as part of a larger radical liberation project, rather than mere private agreements reached between intimate partners. In these political framings, “poly” becomes something you are, an identity to be proclaimed alongside preferred pronouns and political affiliation on social media profiles. Further, they narrate non-monogamy as a revolutionary political gesture, born from critiques of “cis-heteropatriachy,” colonialist impositions of monogamy upon conquered peoples, and oppressive “toxic monogamy” culture.

Many of these framings are situated within subsets of non-Marxist (and often anti-Marxist) leftism, particularly queer theory and family abolition. Those within these subsets produce articles decrying how polyamory has been “co-opted by whiteness and white queerness,” leading to situations where even those in non-monogamous couplings exert invisible “couple privilege” over those in less stable ones. From family abolitionists, we read calls for the end of “enclosed passion” that will herald the arrival of a future in which the pursuit of sex and sexual pleasure “become collective concerns.” Taking a cue from intersectional feminism, in which “toxic masculinity” is constantly decried without its non-toxic versions ever being described, ideologues list warning signs that “toxic monogamy” and “mono-normative programming” might be manifesting in our relationships.

Very often in these framings, monogamy is described as a Western colonialist imposition on conquered indigenous peoples who more frequently engaged in plural marriage. But unlike more esoteric politicizations of polyamory, here there is some historical evidence available. Unfortunately, this evidence doesn’t square with other aspects of intersectional feminism or social justice.

In fact, most of these indigenous non-monogamous institutions favored men, not women.

While polyandry has occasionally existed throughout history and in a few people groups, the much more common form was polygyny. The norm in non-monogamous societies has been the taking of multiple wives, not multiple husbands, and at least two anti-colonial uprisings against Spanish colonists were led by those trying to hold on to this male-centered arrangement. Thus, the complaints of indigenous polyamory being co-opted by “whiteness and white queerness” might more accurately describe the polygamy of Brigham Young and other early Mormons, not the more current forms.

Attempts to institutionalize polyamory and to turn sexual liberation into a political project can be traced to the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier. Fourier believed that society, human relationships, and labor could all be reconfigured in such a way to maximize personal pleasure and thus minimize inequality and strife. To reach such a utopian state, large communal compounds — the phalanxes — would need to replace family dwellings, and mass civic orgies would need to be organized. Also, the sexual satisfaction of each citizen would be elevated to a guaranteed right, rather than just a personal goal.

As if completely forgetting that Fourier also believed the oceans would eventually become sweet rather than salty, that there would be one day such a thing as “anti-sharks,” and that Jews were “the leprosy and the ruin of the body politic,” socialists and anarchists since his day have astonishingly taken his ideas quite seriously. So persistent were Fourier’s ideas by the middle of the 19th century that Marx and Engels needed to devote quite a bit of ink distancing themselves from his visions and those who continued them, especially the anarchist Proudhon.

Despite Marxist pushback against his ideas, Fourier’s utopian socialism has persisted within leftism from its first articulation up to the present day. Echoes of his ideas manifested especially within the Frankfurt School’s obsession with understanding the “libidinal” roots of fascism and capitalism, and Wilhelm Reich’s psychosexual theories were a clear continuation of Fourier’s belief that societal strife was rooted in the lack of individual sexual fulfillment.

In the radicalism of the 60s and its sexual revolution, we see Fourier’s fantasies appear again, especially in communal living experiments founded upon political ideologies. Two of the most notorious of these communal experiments were the short-lived Kommune 1 and its (confusingly older) sibling, Kommune 2, both in West Berlin. In these communes, adult members were expected to share their bodies sexually with each other without restraints or inhibitions, all towards the ultimate goal of liberating themselves from sexual repression the Frankfurt School identified as the cause of fascism. Kommune 2 also hosted a children’s school — Rote Freiheit (Red Freedom). As with other schools associated with the Kinderladen movement, the children were encouraged to liberate themselves from sexual inhibitions — including those involving incest and adults — so to lay the groundwork for an eventual socialist utopia.

Fourier’s belief that sexual fulfillment and the maximization of pleasure were the keys to creating utopian societies manifests again in current iterations of family abolition, especially in the bizarre work of Sophie Lewis and M.E. O’Brien. Both argue that the family is actually the engine of reproduction for capitalism and human repression. Thus, all parts of that engine, including the “enforced” monogamous relationship of the parents — and their sense of responsibility for the children born to them — must be dismantled in order to liberate us all, whether we wish to be liberated from it, or not.

But lest anyone be misled, Fourier’s ideas are not just the inheritance of the utopian extremists plaguing the left. Though he doesn’t directly address the persistence of utopian socialism, Tyler Austin Harper’s description of recent celebrations of polyamory by upper class elites as a form of “therapeutic libertarianism” is incisive. The urban professional-managerial class’s search for authenticity, as well its relentless maximizing of personal value, virtue, and pleasure — has clear roots in Fourier’s utopian ideals. For Fourier, as with the PMC, individual fulfillment —including sexual fulfillment — is the key to harmonious living with others.

This prioritization is the inverse of Marx’s understanding of the relationship between material conditions and individual happiness. For Marx, it is not the individual’s lack of self-fulfillment which causes unequal social relations. Instead, unequal material conditions create situations in which some can pursue their personal goals and others cannot. A working class single mother supporting her children on two jobs has very little time to pursue her own pleasure or self-fulfillment. No amount of orgasmic release could change that situation for her, but a change in her material conditions certainly might.

However, Harper’s suggestion that this current celebration of polyamory in journals and books is a ruling class “fad” is only half-correct. Alternative family relations are quite common among the lower classes, possibly even more so, a point made by the Marxist philosopher Harper cited in his essay, Daniel Tutt. Tutt suggests that significant changes in what is expected of a family within neoliberalism have further worsened the material conditions of the working classes, thus leading them to “abandon the family” and to instead pursue alternative arrangements.

Unlike the children in the professional managerial class, children born into lower class families have very little to look forward to in the way of material resources or inheritance, nor will they get any of the guidance and knowledge conveyed by upper-class parents. Therefore, even if their parents are happily married and fully faithful to each other, the children’s lot in life won’t improve by this fact alone. While the monogamous strategy of love relationships at best makes their childhood more stable, it does nothing to better their material conditions.

In other words, the material benefits of monogamous sexual arrangements and the nuclear family do not actually manifest for the lower classes, nor are they readily available to them. While conservatives tend to see moves away from monogamy and the nuclear family as a problem of morality, and while queer theorists and family abolitionists celebrate the situation as a step towards utopian socialism, the problem can much more accurately be explained by the material conditions influencing these decisions.

The disappearance of the family wage, the erosion of societal support for families, and the continued dissolution of social cohesion significantly affect the lower classes. Very few within the middle class, let alone those in the working class below them, can afford to support a stay-at-home parent in the work of caring for children. Likewise, the extended or multi-generational family in one home isn’t possible within the overpriced and cramped apartments of urban areas, which is unfortunately where most of the avaliable work is. And the much maligned nuclear family — a (generally) monogamous couple and their children — is an increasingly impossible situation to attain. Thus, there’s hardly any need for queer theorists and family abolitionists to dismantle the family: neoliberal capitalism is doing the job for them.

In light of this, the pursuit of alternative relationship and family structures — including polyamory — is an inevitable and understandable adaptation for the lower classes. As Samuel Biagetti noted in his essay about the internal tensions within homosexual activism, these types of strategies arise specifically out of the differing circumstances of specific groups. For homosexuals, for instance, agreements such as open relationships and other forms of polyamory are neither acts of protest against oppressive monogamy culture, nor willful rejections of moral standards. Rather, they’re a practical strategy for creating stability in increasingly alienated societies.

Strict monogamy works out quite well for certain classes and for certain situations. Especially on the disappearing village level of societies, exclusive couplings are quite abundant, and are supported by and supportive of community life. In the small village in which I live, the older generations never needed to deal with what Barry Schwartz called “the paradox of choice,” a situation in which so many options were available that a person might constantly doubt their choice of husband or wife they chose. Also, infidelity is quite difficult to keep secret in communities where everyone knows everyone else’s business, and where social stability is a clear matter of the community’s physical survival.

Polyamory as a strategy seems to work best in its “open relationship” forms, and this form can make a relationship more stable. For a couple in urban situations where the benefits and concerns of community are absent, a tacit acceptance of infidelity as something that need not end a relationship can actually help the couple persist. This is especially the strategy of many homosexuals such as myself, a situation the sex columnist Dan Savage called “monogamish.”

In such scenarios, the “primary” relationship or marriage remains sacrosanct, and any other relations are mediated through this lens. Despite being derided by the utopian socialist ideologues as an inferior, “hierarchical,” and “couple-centric” form, these arrangements can be seen as a realpolitik of relationships. They start from the assumption that one or both might at some point like to be (or are likely to be) with another person sometimes. Therefore, why not decide together what might be acceptable to both in such situations?

At least for myself and for many friends of mine, at least half of whom are in similar relationships, this strategy seems actually to strengthen our core relationships. And though it’s not quite possible to psychoanalyze oneself, I suspect this is really the reason I — and perhaps many others — opt for non-monogamy. Rather than as some act of political liberation or a rebellious rejection of societal norms, we make agreements which make the relationship more stable, not less.

I, for one, prefer being with my husband, and he does with me. Our marriage to each other, and all the agreements that marriage entails, gifts us a stability increasingly difficult to find within fragmented capitalist societies. Though ideologues on both the right and the left might try to suggest otherwise, we’re in the same situation as those in “traditional” arrangements, and have the very same goals.

Rather than an identity, and definitely not because of a deluded fantasy of sexual revolution, non-monogamy is one of the ways we organize and protect our relationships. Family — traditional or otherwise — is how we find shelter in alienating societies full of nomadic, loveless consumers. Turning love relationships into a political ideology is just as damaging as moralizing against it, and neither get us any closer to building communities that can withstand the ravages of capital.