I’ve been interested in polyamory for several years now, firstly out of curiosity like many people – you know yourself 😉 but mainly because I’ve been asked the question many times and asked what I thought about it. In this article I’m going to give you some of my own thoughts on polyamory and in particular the limits it can present. If you are happy in a polyamorous relationship, don’t feel attacked, live your life as you please without worrying about others.
A recent entry into our culture
The entrance of polyamory into mainstream culture is relatively young, I seem to have read the term for the first time in a women’s magazine in 2016 (rather Grazia than Marie-Claire). A quick search on google trends, a marvellous tool that, unlike polls, reveals people’s real interests and concerns, shows that there was a clear progression in the US from 2009 onwards, and then that the term progressed more and more, with a very clear increase around 2016-2017.
Physical limits
There is a very real physical difficulty in polyamorous relationships: our time is not infinite. In our days, in our weeks, we have a certain number of limited hours that we can devote to our relationships: couple, flings, friends, family, the rest being devoted to our rest, our work and also a little to ourselves (well, I hope you do).
The first criterion for working on a relationship is the amount of time you’re going to spend on it, which is just as vital in your relationship with your children as it is in your love relationship. There is a minimum amount of time below which the relationship will regress. For example, if you’re dating someone you’re interested in and you’re forced to give them just 2 hours of your time a week, there’s a good chance that the relationship will never progress.
So by opening a relationship and seeing new people, either the time given to these people will always be limited by the first relationship and in fact will prevent progress towards greater intensity, which risks provoking the same frustration as a mistress who would like to spend more time with the person she loves; or this time will be taken away from the main relationship, which in the same way can create frustration for the person who feels he or she is being demoted from the main relationship to a secondary one. In short, at one time or another, one or more people are likely to be frustrated at seeing their relationship stagnate or slip backwards, and feeling that you’ve reached a limit with someone can also lead you to lose interest in them.
The groundswell is less strong there, but there is also an evolution that tends to take place in ‘spikes’ that are most often linked to a news item, a press article or a television programme. Whatever the case, the point is this: over the last two or three years, the idea of polyamory has begun to take hold in our minds as a reality and a possibility. More often than not, the subject is dealt with through the words of those who practise it, through accounts of very good or very bad experiences. It’s much rarer to hear about average experiences, because that’s not a very attractive angle from which to present an article.
Long-term planning
The second obstacle, which follows on from the first, is that it’s complicated to take a long-term view with all your partners. Let’s say you’re seeing three men, you won’t be able to live with the first, have children with the second or open a restaurant in California (your dream) with the third. Human beings need projects, they need stimulating objectives, new things to do, to work on. You could retort that “yes, you can have a primary relationship with all these projects (house, children, restaurant) and then secondary relationships”, but then you have to imagine yourself in the secondary relationship because polyamory is not what you would call an egalitarian system. If this were to become the norm, then some women who are less fortunate than others would only cultivate lighter secondary relationships with limited access to their partner. They will have diversity but not the quality of a relationship that takes time.
Managing emotions (jealousy, withdrawal, anxiety)
I’m going to skip over this point very quickly, even though it’s the one that comes up most often as an obstacle in the accounts of people who have tried polyamory: the difficulty of managing one’s emotions and those of others. I don’t think that’s a real limitation, it’s more a factor in whether you succeed or not (or whether you experience it quite badly), just as someone who’s afraid of heights will have to work a lot harder to parachute than someone who’s looking for thrills.
It also takes extra time, time during which we discuss the rules we’ve set ourselves, communicating to reassure and support each other, a bit like companies when they’re in crisis management and have to suspend their efforts to ensure that the difficult turning point is properly negotiated.
Double standards
Inequality or imbalance in a relationship is a danger, even in the most trivial aspects of everyday life, and forms a slippery slope to resentment. For example, if I feel that my partner pays less attention to me than I do to him, or if I spend a lot of time looking after the family and he doesn’t contribute enough.
With polyamory, other imbalances can arise in the relationship, such as the fact that a woman finds new partners easily and the man doesn’t, or only with great effort. Don’t laugh, I’ve encountered just such a case in coaching. You can always discuss these imbalances to try and get them accepted, but talking doesn’t always solve a problem. In fact, if you talk to a set of scales that’s out of balance, it’ll stay that way, you just need to put a counterweight on the tray to bring it back into balance.
A two-speed dating game
Who is going to feel the benefits in their lives of becoming polyamorous, namely access to new people and interesting relationships? Is it the men? The women? For me, reading is not gendered, polyamory will above all benefit people who have the most dating opportunities. People who are the most attractive, who know how to create opportunities easily, who are attractive, who know how to flirt and seduce and who know how to promote themselves on dating apps will be able to forge new relationships from among the flood of opportunities available to them.
Ultimately, it’s more or less the same trap that threatens many users of dating apps. This is only true in theory, because you certainly become more visible by radiating out into a wider space, but in practice on the one hand it’s harder to choose, because you have to give up on potential ‘better’ men, but it’s also harder to grab a man by the scruff of the neck, because he himself has the illusion of a wider choice and is reluctant to settle down in the belief that he can always find something better, and above all the competition is tougher.
We mustn’t fall into the illusion that polyamory will create more opportunities for ourselves, it will just make it possible (if it becomes more widespread) to exploit existing opportunities relating to our power of seduction.
Being constrained is difficult
One of the recurring remarks made by both men and women in the various polyamorous accounts I’ve read is that monogamy is restrictive. Not being able to enjoy all the possibilities is indeed a constraint and that this constraint is sometimes the cause of separation. But polyamory, while it lifts the ban on sexual exclusivity, replaces it with the other constraints mentioned above, as well as constraints aimed at framing the relationship, as this extract from a testimonial shows:
“Then we have ‘holiday’ rules: you can’t stay with someone for more than 48 hours and you have to call each other before you go to sleep. The rules change all the time; we always have to discuss what we’re comfortable with and what we’re not comfortable with.
Many people say that polyamory is a more honest way of living our relationships, more in line with our behaviour, our desires and our feelings, because many people in exclusive relationships lie to themselves and have adulterous relationships. They are in effect breaking a rule of the couple, but a polyamorous couple is not immune to this problem, even if the rule broken is not that of sleeping with one person or developing strong feelings, any other rule decided by the couple can also be flouted and have painful consequences for the couple.
In the end, exclusive or not, human beings are likely to lose interest in their partner, to have other encounters, whether planned or not, and to experience feelings of varying intensity, ranging from simple desire to passionate love for one or other of these encounters. Polyamory does not secure one or more relationships, any more than a monogamous couple does, but it does allow people to feel good about having different partners and to avoid feeling guilty, having to hide or lie. Many describe their polyamorous approach as allowing them to feel more in line with how they feel.
It allows us to be creative and find other ways of developing our relationship, and it also requires us to work on our discipline, which in my opinion is an essential quality for a fulfilled relationship, whether polyamorous or monogamous. But that’s a subject for another article.
