Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month, the PMM bloggers will write about their views on one of them. Links to all posts can be found at polymeansmany.com. This month, our topic is "finding what works for you".
Trust yourself.
You know more than you think you do.... what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.
- Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care, 1946
When it comes to natural human behaviours, like parenting, sex and relationships, we're often told to trust our gut. We are animals, after all, and animal instincts have been honed by evolution over millions of years. Other animals don't worry about how to raise their young, they just do it. They don't worry about what form their relationship should take, or write blogs about it, or read advice columns. They follow their instincts.
Parenting, as one of the most basic and essential behaviours in any species, should be instinctive, as Dr Spock wrote, but what I think he is missing is that we are not an instinctive species. Like other primates (more so than other primates) whilst evolving our capacity to learn, our basic instincts have been eroded and overwritten.
Harriet J. Smith is a clinical psychologist who adopted several tamarind monkeys when they were no longer needed for research. When they started to breed, she realised that the monkeys that she had raised herself had no idea what to do next. The parents didn't understand why they had these tiny, baby monkeys clinging to their backs and would try to bite them, or flick them away. The only adult monkey who showed an interest in caring for the babies was one that had been captured from the wild, and who wasn't even a parent. In other words, it wasn't enough for these monkeys to trust their innate instincts. Successful parenting has to be taught.
This explains why something as natural as breastfeeding feels so unnatural to most mothers when they try it, and also why at 6 months, only 1 in 4 babies are breastfed at all, only 1% are breastfed exclusively. Of all things, lactation should come easily to mammals, but we're not the only species that can struggle. Maki, a chimpanzee born in captivity, was unable to breastfeed her baby, despite the baby being able to latch on and feed when her mother was unconscious. A gorilla in a zoo, who hadn't managed to breastfeed her first child cracked it with her second, after the local La Lache league fed their babies in her sight during her pregnancy. When you consider how rare (and stigmatised) breastfeeding is, and how much rarer it is that we actually see it, it shouldn't be a surprise that human women struggle as well.
If something as natural and necessary to the survival of our species as caring and feeding our young doesn't actually come naturally, how can we expect our relationships to work if we just "follow our gut"?
Like these other primates, we don't know instinctively what is going to work and what isn't. What feels like trusting our instincts is really trusting what we've learnt from our environment and upbringing, and this can lead us into relationship models that just don't suit us. This is why monogamy is our romantic ideal - it isn't because monogamy is natural or best for us as a species, it's just because that's the model we see around us. It's the same reason why we feel that feeding a baby with a bottle is more natural than with a breast, or why transporting our babies in prams and buggies, rather than carrying them (like every other primate), feels like the right thing to do.
Smith turned her research into a book called Primate Parenting, where she attempts to take the parenting techniques of our closest relatives in the wild and use them to guide "civilised" humans. I don't believe that natural is always best, but I do think it's often a good starting place. As Smith explains in her book, there are good reasons why keeping in physical contact with our babies, breastfeeding them on demand, and sleeping with them close by, as other primates do, are both natural and desirable behaviours, and working from that point is a good way to figure out what works best for your individual relationship with your unique child. Unfortunately, what comes most naturally to human relationships is less easy to piece together, and anthropologists are far from a consensus. And while there are many similarities between the ways that primates parent, there are wild differences in how they organise their sex lives, making it far harder to extrapolate from them to us. (Our two closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, are almost polar opposites when it comes to sex and relationships.)
Finding what works for me has been a long process of picking this learning apart. When making predictions about what is going to work well for me, how much of my thinking comes from what I've inadvertently learnt from society, and how much of it comes from my own, rational thinking?
The only way for me to work it out has been to give it a go. I wouldn't have thought that I had the capacity to love more than one person at a time before meeting my boyfriend, and I would have assumed that I'd be tormented with jealousy if my husband had sex with someone else before he actually did it. These beliefs were so ingrained they needed to be demonstrated to be untrue for me to discard them. Similarly, I hated the idea of co-sleeping when I was pregnant, and insisted on having a moses basket by my bed. It became a laundry basket three days after Small was born, and she is still sleeping next to me nearly two years later. I'm not suggesting that polyamory and co-sleeping are going to work for you, but I do think some of these decisions have to be tested in the field before locking down your options. Especially if you're making plans for relationships before you've met the people you'll be having these relationships with (before they even exist if you're talking about parenting.)
I'm pretty sure, based on the available evidence, that monogamy isn't natural, but it's unlikely that the pair-bonding-based polyamory that I've settled myself into is natural either. So if we don't know what is natural or what is a "best-fit" for our species to use as a starting place, we have a lot more work to do in making these decisions. But also, I expect, a lot more freedom.
(N.B. I don't mean to come down quite so hard on Dr Spock. Despite my criticism of his basic argument, he really did challenge the rigid norms of parenting at the time, empowered parents, and was the catalyst for a lot of positive change.)
