It's The End of Marriage As We Know It: On Polygamy
…and I feel fine. Or whatever it is REM said.
Marriage as the institution we know in Western society is built on a legal framework of ownership and transactional exchange and exists to reinforce a specific nuclear family model which is useful to capitalist systems. The legal protections of benefits being limited to what the law defines as family starts with how the law defines marriage. The legal recognition of monogamy and criminalization of polygamy (quite literally a crime, beyond just nullifying previous marriages, attempting to marry without first dissolving previous marriages is itself punishable, sometimes severely, by many states) forces a specific isolation. The structure of western housing developments and benefits reinforces that isolation. Humans, being largely social creatures, then strive to populate their network and fight that isolation the only way the state permits: children. Thus the state gets a self-sustaining workforce and the various structures of capitalism often provide the only other reliable outlet for many adults as social interaction to be the workplace. A fact doubly evident when legal restrictions for social interaction in a pandemic are permitted only for the purposes of labor, rather than leisure, and not because the labor is safer, but because it serves the almighty power of wealth. And who are we to stop it, when that same system is built to starve us, to deprive us of shelter, of warmth, of light, of companionship, should our labor cease.
But this is not an essay about the horrors of the capitalist state.
Marriage as a legal framework was created for the solidification of alliances and the legal protections of parent child relationships. Inheritance, allegiance, feudal land disputes, all settled by the exchanging of vows in a combination of church and state. If you ask me, the notion of marriage’s sanctity, such as US conservatives love to espouse, is nothing but a farce. What is to be sanctified in the union of government and faith? It ties the state apparatus to religious belief structures, and ties the institutions of faith to legal sanction, restriction, and modification. Each marriage built on this echoes the marriage of church and state itself, a perverse thing, far from sanctity or efficacy.
But this is not an essay about the horrors of conservative religious hypocrisy.
“Traditional” monogamy is neither older than polyamory, or even polygamy, nor particularly natural or healthy. To hold one relationship above all others, until death, with no room to drift apart or grow closer to others, to moreover assume that all others desire to do the same? This is harmful. To assume that the point of marriage is children, that ‘starting a family’ is when children are born to a couple who have vowed to each other eternal? That is placing unfair and undesired expectations on every person you meet, and also enormously harmful to those who are infertile, to many who are LGBTQ+, to those whose family needs no additions or, in some cases as the expectations hold, subtractions.
But this is not an essay about the horrors of mononormativity.
This is not an essay about the horrors of marriage. I like marriage. In the last 24 hours I have been thinking quite a bit about my future plans for one. It seems nice. My family’s wedding dress, for example, is quite pretty, and it brings me so much euphoria to imagine myself in it, to imagine my family recognizing me as who I am and how I love in a way that ties into our fabric and stretches back to connect me to those who came before. Whether or not I want to involve the state in the sacred union, the symbolic ritual to signify my love, is a question I wish I didn’t have to answer. It’s also a question which makes me extremely anxious, because it is so hard to answer, as I am polyamorous.
This is an essay about the changing nature of relationship structures. It is an essay about polyamory and polygamy, monamory and monogamy, nonamory, ambiamory, the difference between identity and practice, hierarchy, and ethics. It is an essay about the future, and for that, some definitions will be useful; love in this context isn’t exclusively romantic love, but definitely holds an implication of something other than a typical platonic relationship. (And perhaps its best to ignore how homoerotic Plato’s whole work on love can be read as. Though, given he never used the linguistic construction itself, I suppose we cannot blame him for it.)
Polyamory: loving more than one person
Polygamy: marrying more than one person (legal frameworks often refer to this as bigamy, because it starts with 2 and 2’s apparently already two much.)
Monamory: loving one person
Monogamy: marrying a single person
Nonamory: loving no people. This is very common for aromantic people, though not always the case for a variety of reasons.
Ambiamory: the capacity/practice of being ambivalent to the number of lovers
Identity: an innate or socially constructed aspect of self
Practice: a behavior or choice
The question starts with whether polyamory is an identity or a practice. If it is practice, it makes sense to evaluate monamory itself as also a practice, to compare their ethical conditions and possibly come to the conclusion that one is better, more progressive, the future, if we are lucky. In my experience, polyamory was an identity. Again and again I found myself unable to meet the expectations of monogamist society, not, due to cheating, or anything so vulgar as that, but simply for the fact that I felt love at angles, at the intersection of relationships, and I would love more than one without pursuit, none at all, or worse, cut away at pieces of my own heart in the attempt to ignore it. I was successful and it nearly destroyed me.
When I was younger, without my realizing, I repeatedly developed love in the context of groups. I would feel this attraction to people within multiperson dynamics, usually, if not always, on some level more than one of them. Sometimes I would interpret this to mean I did not know what love was. Other times I would see it as a personal failing. More commonly, I just thought this was how everyone worked, that monogamy was pursued in spite of these feelings toward others, and that it was normal to deny them. I practiced that cutting away until the knife I held against myself was sharpened, and I used it with a nearly unconscious deftness.
Once, I broke up with a partner purely because I was falling in love with someone else. Granted, it was my good fortune we broke up because the relationship would not have been good for us anyways, but the reasoning was, on retrospect, absurd. My feelings toward the current partner hadn’t changed. I had written a letter expressing my desires toward the other, but I never delivered it. I sat there in shame and felt that if that would just happen again it would not be fair to my future partners. The person I had feelings for never knew, or at the least, knew only by guessing my intentions, rather than any expression of them. I burned what I had without even being willing to take a chance on something else because I knew, in my heart, it would end the same, it would end in me failing to meet the standards I had internalized from our mononormative society. I was thirteen years old. I did not have positive examples of polyamory to draw on, only those horror stories of polygamy, the reasons, in theory, behind the laws banning it. I was thirteen, and I thought I was broken.
I can hardly remember large parts of my youth; the closet has a muffling effect on memories, and I was in several all the way through finishing university and beyond. I developed that practice of emotional self-harm as I continued to attempt to conform to monogamous expectations. I dated, in various amounts of seriousness. I even was engaged, over a decade of a single monogamous relationship stretching across one of the greatest periods of change of my life. And to maintain it was unspeakable. I recognized years before that I would never pursue monogamy again if anything happened to that relationship, but I did not know whether that was a choice I had. If it was a choice, if I could be happy as I was, I would not change it. I would not lose someone I loved just because I was foolish about the grass on the other side. It took me years from the crystallization of that understanding to determine that I was, in fact, polymorous, rather than ambiamorous. It is likely that I knew earlier, but the parts of me who still believed it to be a failing, to be lesser, the parts that hated myself, they shouted too loudly.
And they drowned out so much good. Not good just in the sense of the what ifs, of the people I felt for who I didn’t pursue, their names still in my memory fondly. Friends, close friends, those I had romantic or alterous (neither romantic nor platonic) attractions toward which I did my best to sublimate. It was too painful to cut them out entirely, but I had to reconfigure myself to interact within the confines of my understandings of right, and wrong. Or at least try. But the human heart is not designed to be molded in such ways. And thus the other parts of my loss.
I broke myself, I closed off, dissociating, derealizing, depersonalizing, putting every feeling in a neat little box and slamming closed the lids. I could not just not feel toward a single person, or several, I had to form disjunction after disjunction in my capacity to feel such ways at all. It is no surprise to me now that in my worst depressive states I admitted to my partner that I did not love them. How could I? I loved no one, by necessity. To play the role of monogamist I had to abandon the pretense of monogamy as growth of purest love. When I said I had times incapable of love, but that I knew it would return, and in the meantime I had no desire to leave the relationship, because I still cared deeply, it was not a lie. But it was only a part of the story, because I was lying to myself on the reasoning why.
Years later I sit in therapy, unwrapping boxes and grieving over the mutilation I enacted on my heart. I am still broken. I am loved. I do love. I am healing. I experience intense, pure, unadulterated joy in the lives and hopes and dreams of myself and my partners. But still I am broken. On most days I love myself, not in spite of this, nor because of it, but because I know better who I am, and that soul is beautiful, when I can see it. I spent years hiding from myself, ashamed, and the person that was is gone, transformed into the one writing this. That transformation was an act of love, of love for self, as much as love for, and from, others.
No moreso could I change my polyamorous identity than I could change my homosexuality, than I could change my trans identity. And similar to those other forms of my queerness, I suffered in that closet. Unfortunately also similar, I face many difficulties, legal, social, and more, now that I continue to pursue who I am. My polyamory is not simply a practice, it's a part of who I am, and unfortunately, one with very few protections, even such as they exist for other portions of me.
Expanding on the distinctions of practice and identity, ambiamory in particular is necessary to discuss when talking about the polyamory/ambiamory/monamory/nonamory divide. A great many people can be happy either monamorous or polyamorous in practice. These folks, being ambiamorous, may not experience that same internal torment I did, but still we share a kinship. But for them, polyamory well may be a choice. And in that sense, I think they must be fairly common, due to the pervasiveness of that belief. Similarly, nonamory as identity for those who do not pursue any amorous practice. Strangely, this gets little pushback as an identity, so far as I have seen, beyond that directed at aromanticism more generally. Both of these I think are wrapped up in understandings of LGBTQ+ experience and gatekeeping. I say that my polyamory is queer, and would be queer with or without my other forms of queerness.
But I do not know whether an ambiamorous person’s practice of polyamory is to be LGBTQ+ or not, I cannot determine that for them, only they could. There is a set of LGBTQ+ people who vehemently deny the queerness of polyamory, but if they see it as a choice, it stands to reason why. We are told that all sorts of LGBTQ+ identities are choices, and, by extension, cannot be identities, and do not need protection or support. “This is a choice” becomes synonymous with “this isn’t LGBTQ+” and also “this is a suitable target for ethical judgment.” If their rejection of polyamory as LGBTQ+ is rooted in the confluence of their differing understanding of polyamory to my experience and also the deep trauma which places the notion of LGBTQ+ as choice as delegitimizing, then the reaction, often disturbing, sometimes violent, is nonetheless unsurprising.
I reject that twofold, one in that polyamory is not always a choice, but also in that not being choices are the determining factor of validity in LGBTQ+ identity. We should not define LGBTQ+ identity by suffering, nor by decision, but by existence, even as we use that suffering to galvanize and guide our solidarity and efforts toward liberation. The oppression and suffering based model of validity will always be one encouraging fractured community, infighting, and gatekeeping. It also is one of deeply soul-crushing implications, because I dream of a world where LGBTQ+ people do not by necessity suffer. At the end of the day, demanding that LGBTQ+ identities cannot be chosen, ever, indicates a belief that they are negative, a last resort. If you could but choose a different path then you would. I cannot accept that. It also is linguistically disingenuous, as the history of the world has always been one of evolution of understandings of identity, and these things are not and never have been fully fixed concepts. Choice and identity live in tension, held in opposition by the way oppression is constructed and modeled, but while we must recognize the current material realities, we are lost when we believe them immutable.
Meanwhile, monogamy and polygamy, of course, are practices. Marriage didn’t exist for the entirety of human development, unlike it seems reasonable to assume love did. These different structures of marriage, for good or ill, are not identities. And trying to internalize as an identity marriage, ultimately involving more than one person at the very least, can thus be quite harmful.
I said earlier that I like marriage. I do. This makes me a rarity of sorts within some of the communities I travel in. As a relationship anarchist, it is often suggested that I should be anti-marriage, that it is an inescapable and unjust hierarchy, a tool of the state to oppress and control. And it certainly can be that. But I am also queer, my polyamory is queer, my transness, my sexuality, queer, queer, queer. And we know marriage by a different metric. The struggle to be seen, to have our queerness manifest within this sacred concept, rather than the legal one.
The history of queer marriage is the history of illegal marriage, unrecognized marriage, desperate marriage, spiteful, liberatory, beautiful transgression of all that the more conservative hold sacred. Because they do not hold marriage sacred, but rather the institutions which control it. Our queer elders did not fight so hard and so long for me to spit upon their actions, upon the opportunities they built for me in a world that is imperfect and so often unkind. Marriage to me is the most defiant expression of love. It is a declaration to the world that in spite of what the kyriarchy has done to destroy me, I will. Claim. Joy.
My imaginings of marriage are not jealous, are not exclusive, are not possessive. They are freedom. Freedom to choose the same person, day after day. It is beautiful not because it is binding, the legalities mean nothing to me save the necessary practicalities of a world, the compromises I make for survival. It is beautiful because I choose it, in every moment, and in every day. The continuity is oh so fragile, an edifice of living glass, but grown as the longest cultivation of desire, a plant years, decades, or a lifetime in care. Marriage to me is a celebration, not a single moment, but ongoing jubilee in the sparkling glitter of the eyes of a partner as they see in me uncontainable beauty, and I in them.
We as queer people are no stranger to defining our selves, our relationships, our families, as separate from and in contempt of the legal system around us. My understanding of marriage is no different from that. And it is not necessarily romantic, though it can be. And it is not necessarily exclusive, though it can be. I might marry once or many times, depending on the flights of my heart and my fortunes. My marriage to one partner will not change the structure of my feelings toward another. That is anathema to many a so called sacred definition of marriage, but it is the one I use, which I have carved out for myself as just one more step in the queer tradition of which I am but one more step. The toxicity of modern notions of traditional monogamy will not hold a monopoly on the concept of marriage, because we stand against them.
There have also been those who posit polyamory is some greater moral structure, more defensible, less hierarchical, than monogamy. I disagree in so much as I know my polyamory to be an identity, I cannot imagine a world where monamory also does not exist as identity. Placing an ethical judgment on identities is a road that’s been traveled before, and it leads plainly into hell.
On the other hand, while I am not the first to point out the flaws of mononormativity, I did point them out first here. At least, a spattering of them. Monogamy as it is commonly practiced today is so often toxic, harmful to those participating in the same way toxic masculinity damages a privileged group as part of the cost of maintaining that privilege. Monogamy as that? It has to go. Many monogamous people could due to learn a more ethical, healthier approach to relationships from polyamorous individuals who practice ethical non-monogamy, in all it’s many, many forms. That will not make those monogamous people less monogamous. I suspect it will “make” some of them less monamorous though, for the same reason that visibility and acceptance increase the prevalence of openly and practicing gay, trans, etc. individuals. Not necessarily a changing, but a realization.
On my part, I am a relationship anarchist. I do not impose hierarchies upon my relationships, regardless of their type. They each develop individually to the best of my ability, and I do not fundamentally prioritize romantic relationships over sexual ones, or either over platonic, etc. Because of how I experience attraction and my own beliefs regarding ethics, this is what works for me. For others, different models arise, in truth, as varied as there are people. There are many models that are ethical, and many that are not. The current institution of monogamy is steeped in unethical practice, and part of uprooting the assumptions leading to its primacy will open the door for other practices to grow in prevalence. In that sense, polyamory will push monogamy to the side, but not as a replacement, merely as taking its place as one among many. Too, also, in that sense will monogamy die. Monogamy of the state apparatus, of the enabling of abuse, of the exclusive access to legitimacy, of the reinforcement of nuclear family, it will die. Instead, relationships will grow out of the intention and honest desire only of those involved in them, a continuation of the way embracing LGBTQ+ liberation has begun to change the structure of even cisheterosexual relationships for the better. Marriage will occur, monogamy will occur, but on the terms of consent, and of enthusiasm, and of greatly heightened variability. So too will non-monogamy. And all relationships will, I hope, grow stronger and brighter for being rooted in informed intentionality. It starts with the shaking of the foundations until the spires fall, but we will not leave a ruin, and instead build anew. It starts with an earthquake, but in the end of that world, we will be fine.
Written anonymously
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