Night and I went to a lecture by an evolutionary psychologist recently. It was called “love and betrayal” and we were hoping for lots of stuff on monogamy and anthropology etc, but it all ended up being about gender roles. The difference between men and women. It was interesting! But it was also very heteronormative and a bit biased.
Making The Effort
When Night starts having problems it’s my duty to help her sus them out (which I actually quite like to do, believe it or not), and recently she’s been going through some new relationship issues. In the past her boy troubles have been on issues I’ve not been able to relate to (sub blues, uncommunicative closed shut men, etc)… but this time it’s been helping me see how I’ve acted and felt in the past in my relationships. And it’s been revealing to see that I’m not the only one who does these things.
Absence & Introspections
I’ve not written in here for a while, and I feel like I left it on a low note – so apologies to any readers for that. I considered taking this blog down at one point, I’m worried it isn’t how I feel about things anymore – but I’m yet to go and read over, so I think that might just be what happens when you leave a creative endeavour to simmer for a period of time.
Is it a choice?
This is a question that I have been pondering on today after discussion on facebook. We’ve all heard that argument on non-heterosexuality about it not being a choice and it being something we can’t help. Sometimes people do the same for non-monogamy and talk about it being a choice. There does seem to be this tendency to compare polyamory to sexuality, after all you could technically label it under the parachute term “sexuality” if you really wanted to… but I don’t think it’s quite as simple to compare being poly to being gay. At first glance you can see the similarities – gay people are in the minority against straight people, poly people are similarly outnumbered by the norm. However, if you boil it down to simple desires things seem a little different.
Jealousy as a symptom of monogamy
I’m afraid it’s become a bit of a thing now, bashing monogamy. But I just can’t shake the opinion that it’s doing nothing good for society right now. Maybe it was a good change once upon a time when we lived in an alpha-male-rules kind of structure. Monogamy is clearly a more equal opportunities kind of arrangement when you compare it to the apes (though maybe not the bonobos! They’re a whole other thing). The other males have a chance to mate and eventually the women even have control. But I think it’s about time things changed again, it’s kind of surprising that they haven’t already. You can probably blame religion for playing it’s role in that.
I answered my own question
I’ve been thinking about polyamory a lot recently … and in turn thinking about my opinions about monogamy. And I realised something about my ‘poly evangelist‘ post. Whenever I’ve heard it come up they always seem to say that these poly evangelists think they’re special just because they’re poly, and I realised that this doesn’t really have anything to do with them thinking poly is better than mono… but more like thinking poly people are better than mono people. Whereas I’m very much a “don’t hate the player, hate the game” kind of person. I can genuinely understand why more people don’t decide to go off the tracks like we do and make our own rules. And for some people, I think, being different is much harder.
You can have it all
I was just watching a clip of some daytime TV show where they were arguing monogamy vs non-monogamy, and as usual – our team was vastly outnumbered, and as always – constantly talked over. But the host did bring up an idea that made me think about my approach to relationships – that you can have it all. I like polyamory for many reasons, but for me it’s just always seemed like less of a compromise than any other way of doing things. I’m sure many of us can agree that there are great things about being single and great things about being in a relationship, so why not combine them?
