On this doorstep I stand,
year after year
and watch you going
and think: May you not
skin your knees; May you
not catch your fingers
in car doors. May
your hearts not break.
May tide and weather
wait for your coming.
and may you grow strong
to break
all webs of my weaving.
From New Life, edited by Sally Emerson
More about National Poetry Day.
Here are how some recent negotiations with my partners have gone:
I suspect this is partly because we're all getting what we want from the respective relationships, so our negotiating is always tweaking, rather than pushing against the foundations. If I wanted more than a weekly date with my boyfriend, for example, and wanted to negotiate for more, then I expect I'd be less willing to lose one of them. If I wanted my husband to spend more time at home, then we'd have bigger issues than me wanting to find some company.
But mostly, what makes these negotiations so painless for me is that they've both been such excellent caretakers of my heart that I don't question their motivations. By now, they've given me years of being kind, flexible and understanding, so if I ask something of them, I know that they want to say "yes", even if they don't.
Which is another way of saying that the hard work was finished a long time ago.
I've written before about how precious my time with my boyfriend is. Things are different with my husband. We don't lack for time together, but having a child really doesn't leave much space for the sort of "couple time" we used to be able to have almost any time we wanted - the sort of quality time my boyfriend and I have scheduled into our calendar every week. It's fairly easy for my husband and I to get alone time with other people (he stays in, I go out for a date with my boyfriend; another night, and I'm the one at home) but together is not so easy.
Once we've all had dinner, and Small is asleep, there isn't much time left before one or both of us is ready for bed ourselves, and sometimes one of us has to use that time to work. Sitting down for a relaxed meal, just the two of us, is rare. Watching a film means staying up late and losing out on precious sleep. Going out alone together to find requires planning, and use of our extra-nuclear family as babysitters.
I notice similar differences in my daughter's relationships. She and I spend so much time together, most of it is pretty mundane: shopping, cooking, her playing beside me as I get housework or work emails done, bath-time. When she gets the chance to spend time with other adults, or her older cousins, she revels in the intensity of these short bursts of dedicated attention, and the novelty of the connection. After spending the whole day with her, I couldn't keep that up.
My boyfriend and I always have huge amounts to catch up on when we see each other. We keep making plans to watch a film, or even just an episode of something, but we usually have too much to talk about. We sit, eat a meal, hold hands over the table. It's quality time, and as we don't share a home or a domestic life, we're able to make that pretty much all we have.
But I sort of resist the idea that this more intense, focused time is somehow of better quality than the drip drip of domesticity. Just as I can't keep up the energy to play at full-intensity with my daughter all the time, as my boyfriend or other family does with her, they don't get to walk to the shops each time with a fun little girl who joins in when I sing a familiar song, who wants to point out the colours of the cars and who thinks that seeing a passing dog is as exciting as a trip to the zoo. They might miss the particular moment when she experiments with new words and sentences, and her language suddenly takes a leap forward. They don't get naptime snuggles, or rushing out to look for snails after the rain. These lovely, mundane moments are paid for by the weight of time we spend together. The quantity creates this particular quality.
My husband and I spend so much time together that there is rarely much build up of things we want to say. Although we talk all the time, our conversation is more relaxed, less urgent, maybe even optional. Sometimes, once Small is asleep, we find ourselves hitting a familiar rhythm without much negotiation: putting away the toys, loading up the washing machine, pyjamas, takeaway, slumping against each other on the sofa, watching another episode of something. It takes a lot of time together to create quality time like that.
I've been subjected to more insults because I am non-monogamous than because I am bisexual. I even found more acceptance and understanding when I was a woman exclusively dating other women. This is clearly not because the UK is somehow more polyphobic than it is homophobic, but I think it might have something to do with the fact that I'm now a parent, and becoming a parent unlocks a whole new level of public scrutiny. The belief that children need one mother and one father was, after all, key to recent debates surrounding marriage equality, and a study of attitudes towards consensually non-monogamous romantic relationships unsurprisingly found that most people associate monogamy with better parenting and a more stable family life.
The assumption is that although it may be one thing to be non-monogamous without children, if you decide to start a family, it's really time to put all that aside and just be normal, for the sake of the children.
With that in mind, my theory about the spectrum of acceptance of alternative lifestyles runs broadly along these lines:
This all means that damaging assumptions about any lifestyle outside of the heteromonoganormative mould becomes much more obvious when parenting is thrown into the mix. People who will have found you simply misguided, or maybe even fascinatingly non-conformist, will flip into judging you as immoral, cruel or negligent.
Elizabeth Sheff has conducted some of the most extensive research into polyamorous parenting so far, and one of her interesting findings is that far from being confused or by their non-traditional families, children aged 5-8 with three or more parents barely seem to even notice. Children are pretty self-centred, and so how the adults in their life relate to each other isn't particularly important to them. "A 6-year-old may not think of someone as mommy's girlfriend, but think of that person as 'the one who brings Legos' or 'the one who takes me out to ice cream," Sheff explains. To think about it another way, if you had close relationships as a child with non-parental members of your biological family, how much thought did you give to the fact that your uncle was your mother's brother, or your grandmother was your father's mother? I'm willing to bet that that was far less important and interesting than the time the two of you spent together, and the bond that was personal to you. It doesn't matter if the significant adults in my daughter's life are my blood relatives, my close friends, or my romantic partners, it's going to be a while before she cares about anything other than what those people have to offer her.
The older children Sheff spoke to who were aware that their families were "different", were grateful for "having multiple adults from which to draw upon for help with math homework or to provide transportation". Again, nothing to do with how those multiple adults related to each other. You can imagine a child with a live-in grandparent, or a close family friend living next door saying the same thing. Whether or not we are monogamous is pretty unimportant to our children - it's just a flashpoint that reveals the depth of prejudice against us.
This matters whether or not you have children and whether or not you ever intend to. If people are only accepting of you and your lifestyle because you're not a parent, that basically means that they think you should be denied access to certain types of family life. They think you're a lost cause, but they want to protect the next generation from making your mistake. They want to cut you off from full participation in society. That should bother you, whether you want to access that part of family life or not, because you're not fully accepted - you're just being shielded from their bigotry. Which is why, if you'll forgive me, we should be thinking about what they think about the children.
Reading articles (mostly from a pretty conservative, Christian perspective) about why polyamory is not an ethical choice, the assumption seems to be that ethical rules about sex and relationships are absolute. Albert Mohler fears that accepting polyamory as normal will lead to 'moral confusion' and Matt Slick believes that ethical nonmonogamy is no more possible than 'ethical bank robbing, or ethical embezzling'.
It is moral and good to be sexually faithful to your partner, and therefore having more than one concurrent sexual relationship is immoral, the logic goes. This is literally begging the question, because the immorality of nonmonogamy comes purely from the assumption that monogamy is moral.
I doubt many of us who are happy without monogamy give much time to this line of thinking. Personally, I believe what is ethical within a relationship depends more on the people within it, than assumptions from the world outside it. Making someone a peanut butter sandwich could be a kind and generous act, or an attempt at murder depending on who you're giving it to. Avoiding other sexual or romantic encounters could mean you are making good, moral decisions based on a sound ethical framework, or it could be pointless denial, depending on your partner.
If you and your partner have agreed to a 'don't ask, don't tell' approach to non-monogamy, then telling them about your other sexual partners could be an unfair and intrusive. Whereas if you have a policy of full disclosure and withhold the information, this could be an unethical breach of their trust. And if you agree to keep what happens in the bedroom with one partner private, but agree to tell another partner every detail of every one of your sexual exploits, then you have made at least one promise that you cannot keep, and so are no longer practicing ethical nonmonogamy at all. Some behaviour that a few of my previous partners would have considered unfaithful and hurtful is now happily within the ethical framework of both of my relationships. And, even more trickily, what is and isn't ethical differs even between my two partners. The assumption that non-monogamy is immoral, and therefore relationships that permit it are necessarily unethical is nice and simple, but may or may not be true for your relationship.
The difficulty with accepting a set of ethical rules for relationships wholesale, as the two articles above are asking us to, is that you might be sticking to a rule that doesn't benefit you or your partner, and so is wasted effort. The difficulty with throwing up society's accepted rules is that you've got to figure out what's ethical for each relationship from the beginning, every time.
(For this post, I will be discussing polygamy, even though it would be more semantically accurate to say 'polygyny'. I know that etymology is against me, but I'm going to stick with cultural usage.)
It would be very easy for me to write about why I think polyamory is a better model for relationships than polygamy. I find the 'one penis policy' to be on shaky moral ground even when the women subjected to it are allowed to be involved with other women. Polygamy generally brings along with it judgemental attitude to sex outside of marriage, and regressive, restrictive gender roles. But there is a lot of criticism fired at polygamists that the polyamorists are attacked with too. And when you come down to it, we have a lot in common.
Yes, I know that polygamy has been used to oppress women, but so has monogamy, and I don't have a problem with people choosing that. In a patriarchal world where the men hold much of the power, just about anything can be used to oppress women (including polyandry, from what little I know of it). When it comes down to it, a polygamous marriage is just a relationship between one man and several women, and there are many polyamorists in that position.
Christine Brown, whose polygamous marriage was the centre of the reality TV show Sister Wives desired a husband with multiple wives so much that she actively sought the role of third wife. She wanted, what polyamorists can probably understand pretty well, to fall in love with a family, not just one person. Vicki Darger, when suffering from debilitating postnatal depression, found that being in a polygamous marriage meant that she had not just her husband, but her 'sister wives' to support her, and help with her other children. Speaking as a woman with two male partners, I'm obviously not going to want a relationship structure like Brown's or Darger's, but I can relate to the reasoning behind their choices.
Have you watched Big Love? I'm surprised at how many polyamorists haven't, and who assume that what polygamists do is very different to us. One scene in the first episode involves the three wives sitting down to organise their calendars, planning which night their shared husband will be spending with which wife and reorganising for birthdays. If you're polyamorous, you might be surprised at how much of their lives you recognise.
I was surprised at how much of it I actually envied. More than two parents for the children, regular family meals around an enormous dining table, shared finances, a communal back garden, and the ability to plan face to face, rather than just through Google Calendar. My husband and I talked about how although we were basically happy as a twosome, maybe someone or some people might come along that changed that. Maybe we'll have the chance to live more communally with secondary partner(s), or maybe one or both of us will find someone who wants to commit to our family as we have committed to each other. And despite being vocal about how my husband and I do practice hierarchical polyamory, it's been watching and reading about polygamy that's given me a less hierarchical model that I think would work for us.
Karaite Jews (for whom polygamy is rare, but permitted), some fundamentalist Mormons and Pakistani law all allow men to take a second wife, but only with the consent of the first wife. This effectively gives the first wife veto power, but not indiscriminately: you can demand that your husband breaks off his courtship of a potential new wife, but you can't demand that he break up with her once they are married. The characters in Big Love vote on whether or not to include a new wife. Although my husband and I have never felt the need to officially grant the other veto power, I would need him to consent if I wanted to bring anyone else into our family as a permanent spouse. A clear difference between our views and polygamous views on relationships is that we don't need marriage or co-primacy with our other relationships to consider them sucecssful, and we're not going to end them just because they aren't heading that way. But if our one of our other relationships did head that way, then that would be the end of hierarchy between the three of us. As Darger says about Val, the third wife in her family, once she was married to their husband, 'she instantly became a full and equal partner.' Equality between the wives is a common requirement in polygamous doctrines.
Perhaps this post doesn't make it sound this way, but I really am blissfully happy with one husband and one boyfriend, and so I'm not looking for either my husband or I to marry again, as much as I am attracted to larger family models. Even if I actively wanted it, it seems unlikely, considering how little space we have left for anyone new. But putting aside my feminist disapproval of polygamy to find out about those who actively chose it has been enlightening for me. I may be happy in my own form of non-monogamy, but other people's choices have a lot to teach me too.
Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.
And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.
So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me
Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.
