Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, More Than Nuclear, One Sub's Mission, Post Modern Sleaze, and Rarely Wears Lipstick - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "Explaining polyamory to the monogamous" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.
When explaining polyamory to the disbelieving or curious, it's common to use the analogy of a parent's love for their children: nobody doubts that you can love more than one child , so why is it hard to believe you can love more than one partner?
Ahh, the disbelieving monogamists will say, but parental love is different. You just haven't met the right one yet. When the right person comes along, that love will be so strong that you won't want any others, and you'll want to be monogamous, too. You can't love two people the way you can love two of your children.
And of course it is different, but it's not as different as people think.
In some of the early research into the links between our relationship with our parents and our romantic relationships as adults, Hazan and Shaver noted that both lovers and parent-child pairs "play with one another's facial features and exhibit a mutual fascination and preoccupation with one another". This tender gazing into each other's eyes and stroking their hair or cheek, an act so linked to romantic love it is little more than a cliche, is something very familiar to parents. Sally Read, in her poem Latching On, describes the look on a newborn's face as 'like a lover's eyes'. The last poem I posted on my blog is a love poem, but it's there because I am often reminded of it when I look at my daughter's face. It looks right, as Muir puts it, as if hers is the perfect human face and all others lack for something. I have had that feeling when looking at a lover, but never this strongly.
Sylvia Plath's poem You're is about her unborn child, but was published in The Nation's Favourite Love Poems. Just as the polyamorous will sometimes use a parent's love for their children to explain how you can love more than one romantic partner, it would be difficult to explain how I feel about my daughter without making it sound like a grand passion, and many poets have done exactly that.
Other similarities that Hazan and Shaver noted (summarised here) are that both lovers and parent-child pairs 'feel safe when the other is nearby and responsive', 'engage in close, intimate, bodily contact', 'feel insecure when the other is inaccessible, 'share discoveries with one another' and of course 'engage in "baby talk"'. Of course there are differences (sex being the most obvious) but so many of the key features are the same, that many psychologists now think that our relationship with our parents can work as a sort of test run for our adult love affairs. We learn how to form loving relationships of all kinds from our parents, and children who are securely attached to their parents, find romantically attaching themselves to others easier as adults.
When I am separated from her, I feel her physical absence keenly, and can easily fixate on how much I want to hug her. My husband sometimes holds her hand while she is asleep. The comfort and joy we share when we hold her, kiss her, nuzzle our faces into her neck, blow raspberries on her belly and pretend to eat her toes is not at all unlike a romantic passion, and, as Kate Saunders puts it, it is definitely the stormiest love affair of my life so far.
And quite honestly, I struggle to imagine loving another baby quite this strongly. Wouldn't this powerful love stunt the growth of any love I would feel for a second child? How could I possibly love any other in quite this way?
But of course, I know that I could. I see, all around me, parents in multiple loving relationships with their children, so although I sometimes struggle to conceptualise it as possible, I know that it can be done
Perhaps the difficulty people face in comparing multiple loving relationships between parents and their children and between the polyamorous is simply this lack of good models. Conducting relationships openly this way is not the norm, so when people feel that they couldn't love another, the way that new parents often do, where do they see polyamorous relationships modelled the way I see parents loving more than one child? Our society's prevailing narrative of love comes down as strongly on the side of the "one true love" story of romance as it does on the multiple love story of parenthood.
It would be offensive in the extreme to suggest to a mother or father of multiple children that they just "hadn't had the right child yet", and when "the one" arrived, they would naturally lose interest in the children they had before. It would be unconscionably rude to doubt a parent when they say that they love all of their children, and that they have no desire to have a one child family.
And if you can imagine how it might feel if someone said that about you and your children, you can probably imagine how I feel when I'm told I just "haven't met the right one yet".
