Editorial Note: This post was written by Wes Fenza, long before the falling out of our previous quint household and the subsequent illumination of his abusive behavior, sexual assault of several women, and removal from the Polyamory Leadership Network and banning from at least one conference. I have left Wes’ posts  here because I don’t believe it’s meaningful to simply remove them. You cannot remove the truth by hiding it; Wes and I used to collaborate, and his thoughts will remain here, with this notice attached.

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I think that polyamory is better than monogamy.* This assertion is qualified only by the fact that by “better” I mean “more closely aligned with my value system.” However, I don’t think my value system, when it comes to relationships, is all that different from the norm. My line of thinking can be summed up in a syllogism:

Premise #1: All other things being equal, the greater the mutual love in a relationship, the better the relationship;
Premise #2: Polyamory is inherently more compatible with mutual love than monogamy
Conclusion: Polyamory is better than monogamy.

Premise #1 is relatively uncontroversial, so I won’t spend a lot of time on it, except to say that if you disagree, polyamory is probably not for you. I don’t intend this as a moral judgment. I think that transactional relationships can be very happy and fulfilling for some people. They are just not what I prefer.

Likewise, it seems clear to me that the conclusion necessarily follows from the two premises. This leads me to believe that most popular disagreement is with Premise #2.

Polyamory is Inherently More Loving than Monogamy

Like any good lawyer, I’ll start by defining my terms:

Polyamory: a style of relationship involving two or more people which has no rule or agreement (implicit or explicit) against pursuing other loving and/or sexual relationships.

Monogamy: a style of relationship involving only two people which has a rule or agreement against outside sexual and/or romantic relationships.*

Love: a very strong concern for another conscious creature’s well-being such that one’s own well-being is dependent upon the well-being of the other.

Respect: an attitude of deference, admiration, or esteem.

Polyamory, as defined above, is more compatible with love and respect for one’s partner than monogamy. To say it another way, the relationship that is maximally loving and respectful will necessarily be polyamorous.

I’ve dealt with this before somewhat. The only point of a rule or agreement against outside sexual relationships (i.e. a monogamous relationship) is that you anticipate having outside sexual interests. It’s a contingency plan. The only time such an agreement would have any effect whatsoever is a situation in which one or both parties has the opportunity and desire to pursue an outside sexual relationship. Therefore, when crafting such an agreement, both parties consider this at least likely enough to necessitate an agreement.

The effect of the monogamy agreement is to put the brakes on such a thing. It’s saying “if I want to fuck someone else, I won’t.” Making that sort of sacrifice for a partner (assuming that’s what your partner wants) is definitely consistent with loving and respecting your partner. The disrespect comes in the next step: saying “in return, if you want to fuck someone else, please don’t.”

Imagine saying that about any other topic. “Honey, let’s agree that even though both of us really like cheddar cheese, neither of us will eat it ever again.” “Honey, in the event you’d ever like to go snorkeling, please don’t.” Etc. It sounds ridiculous, because it is.

This is not to say that monogamy serves no purpose. Firstly, monogamy is the best way to ensure sexual safety and lack of unwanted pregnancy. However, monogamy done for that reason would still allow a lot of safe sexual play, so couples that have rules against all sexual contact (i.e. the majority of monogamous couples) can’t be doing it for this reason.

Other justifications are emotional. Monogamy arguably** enhances the stability of relationships by preventing parties from exploring other options. However, demanding monogamy from you partner for this reason is basically saying “if you meet someone who makes you happier than me, stay with me anyway.” It’s a selfish justification, and in opposition to love and respect as defined above.

Another popular justification for monogamy is jealousy.*** One party feels that if hir partner hooked up outside of the relationship, it would be upsetting. But that begs the question: why would it be upsetting? Sex is fun! A loving partner should be happy that hir partner is having fun. Instead, jealousy encourages a person to feel bad when good things happen to other people. To be jealous of someone is to wish ill fortune on that person. Jealousy is, in effect, the opposite of love. If love is a symbiotic relationship, where one party’s happiness creates happiness for everyone, jealousy is a parasitic relationship, where one party’s happiness drains happiness from all other parties. In that sense, the more love in a relationship, the less jealousy. Therefore, if you buy into Premise #1 above, the less jealousy in a relationship, the better the relationship.

This is not to say that polyamorous people are any less jealous, more loving, or otherwise better than monogamous people. As in any group, there is great diversity within the polyamorous community, and not all people becomes polyamorous because they love their partners. Many people become polyamorous for reasons just as selfish (or more selfish) as the reasons that people choose monogamy. Many polyamorous relationships are unmitigated disasters.

However, the most loving and least jealous (i.e. “best”) relationships will necessarily be polyamorous. Loving partners want each other to have the things that make the other happy. A loving partner will encourage hir partner to pursue a relationship if ze wants one. People who love one another want each other to have the things that they want.

What do you think? Agree/disagree? Let’s hear it in the comments!

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*yes, I know that technically, “monogamy” refers to marriage. I’m using it in the way that most people do.

** this is not necessarily true. Nonmonogamy may do more to enhance stability by allowing parties more freedom within the relationship, and taking away a main reason for leaving a relationship.

*** the discussion of jealousy applies equally to possessiveness. Wanting to own a person is incompatible with loving and respecting that person.

Editorial Note: This post was written by Wes Fenza, long before the falling out of our previous quint household and the subsequent illumination of his abusive behavior, sexual assault of several women, and removal from the Polyamory Leadership Network and banning from at least one conference. I have left Wes’ posts  here because I don’t believe it’s meaningful to simply remove them. You cannot remove the truth by hiding it; Wes and I used to collaborate, and his thoughts will remain here, with this notice attached.

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Polyamorous people tend to think about relationships a lot. I’m no exception. What I want to talk about today is the transactional model of relationships.

A transactional relationship is a relationship where both (or all) parties are in it for themselves, and where partners do things for each other with the expectation of reciprocation. Almost all relationships start here. People tend to date a person because of what they get out of it. Doing otherwise would actually be kind of weird. Genuine concern for a partner’s well-being (some might call it “love”) is something that generally grows as the relationship progresses. But some relationships never get past the transactional stage. I suspect that many, if not the majority, of relationships never do. I’ve fallen victim to this myself. There are times when I’ve bought something for Gina, or done the dishes, or done her some other sort of favor, and expected something in return. But there’s a deeper foundation that some relationships reach, where people do things for each other just to make the other person happy for altruistic* reasons. I truly believe that some relationships transcend selfishness, and reach a place where both partners are happy in large part because the other partner is happy.

Some poly relationships work on the transactional model. You see this is relationships which involve a lot of rules (or ridiculous relationship agreements). The idea is that “I let my partner see other people, and in return, I’m allowed to see other people as well.” Side note: this is why I dislike the term “negotiation” in a relationship context. It’s adopting the language of business transactions.

This doesn’t work with the kind of polyamory I practice. As I’ve said before, polyamory isn’t all about you. My preferred style of polyamory is something people do for their partners, not for themselves. It’s based on a mutual desire not to deny each other the things that we each want. The transactional model doesn’t work there. If you try to do poly for yourself, you start worrying about things like who has more partners, counting date nights, money spent on partners, and keeping a running tally of who is benefiting more from the arrangement. You start worrying if things are “fair.” You start getting resentful if you feel like your partner is getting more goodies than you.

Granted, it’s a spectrum, and not a binary. Some relationships are entirely transactional, and some are entirely altruistic, but most fall somewhere in between. I think that the best relationships, or at least the ones that appeal to me, are much closer to the altruistic side of the spectrum than the transactional one.

What do you think? Can a transactional relationship be fulfilling? Are all relationships really transactional, and we just fool ourselves into thinking otherwise? Discuss in the comments.
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* I don’t actually believe in pure altruism, but that’s a discussion for another time. What I’m talking about if functional altruism

I began writing a response in the comments section of Wes’ recent post, and it fairly quickly spiraled out of control and into something that probably should be a post in its own right, so I’ve decided just to post it. But I have a couple of caveats:

1) I’m a bit concerned that we’re overloading the blog with one discussion. While I think it’s an important discussion to have, and one that is not being had much in the polyamory community, I know we also like to write (and you, dear reader, like to read) about other topics.

2) I don’t want to create (or perpetuate) the kind of rhetorical cycle of assertion, counter-assertion, attack, and defense that can sometimes sidetrack discussions, especially on the interwebs. On the other hand, Wes’ post (for me at least) further problematized this issue, and I’d like to explore how/why I think it did so.

3) I disagree with a lot of what Wes said, and I’d like to be clear on where, and more importantly why, I think his argument could be stronger. The problem with arguments about semantics is that they tend to devolve into arguments over definitions. This can be interesting as a purely rhetorical exercise, but I’m not sure it always leads to greater understanding. I have challenged some of Wes’ definitions, just as he challenged some of mine, Shaun’s, Loving More’s, etc. And if Wes wanted to respond to this post, he could certainly parse the definitions of my definitions. This can go on reductio ad absurdum. I really don’t want that to happen.

At the core of Wes’ criticism is his three part statement:

Polyamory is not sexual….polyamory is not an orientation….being poly is nothing like being GLB.

I think he is wrong on all three counts here.

1a) It’s a mistake to disqualify “sexual” because the definitions of polyamory do not mention sex. Isn’t sex implicit in the terms “romantic” and “intimate”? I’m not saying that all intimate/romantic relationships must be sexual, but sex is one of the things that tends to differentiate what we call romantic/intimate relationships from other relationships. If this weren’t the case, we wouldn’t need the word “polyamory” to describe a different class of relationships than, say, intimate but platonic friendships.

Under Wes’ definition of polyamory (“relationships, honesty, and intimacy”), all but the most closed relationships would essentially be polyamorous, thus rendering the word nearly meaningless. Or, to put it slightly differently, monogamous people also have multiple loves. They love their siblings, for example. or their children. We all acknowledge that “loving” is the proper word to use for these relationships. The type of love that is not permitted in monogamous relationships is “romantic” love, which is usually erotic/sexual in nature. If we’re going to have a separate category to describe polyamory, it has to describe something other than relationships that already exist.

1b) The other problem with focusing on the word “sexual” in “sexual orientation”–and now I’m taking the opposite position to the position I took in 1a (which is a problem with semantic arguments, as I said in my introduction)–is that many people object to the idea that one’s orientation/preference be described primarily in terms of sex. Wes said that sexual orientation “until recently was used almost exclusively to mean the sex and/or gender to whom a person is attracted.” The “until recently” part is important. One of the reasons the term “sexual orientation” has ceased being primarily a description of sexual (i.e. libidinal) desire is that focusing exclusively on the sex (i.e. what we do) neglects other important elements of the state of being the term “sexual orientation” sought to define (i.e. who we are). The APA’s definition clearly considers both “sense of identity” and “membership in a community of others” as important elements of sexual identity.

This cuts both ways. If we can’t qualify people for a certain sexual orientation for not having certain libidinal desires, we can’t disqualify people for having them. In other words, we can’t say polyamory is not an orientation because it’s not about the sex.

2) Wes’ analysis used one definition of “orientation” to the exclusion of others. As I pointed out, one definition of the word is “choice or adjustment of associations, connections, or dispositions.” That has nothing to do with “physical desire.” But I’d also argue that for some people, polyamory is a physical desire. How would we categorize someone who was only attracted to couples, or groups of people, for example? They wouldn’t fit our usual definitions of hetero, homo, or bisexual, and even pansexual wouldn’t exactly fit. We would have a different way to describe their sexual desire, and polyamorous might fit well there. I realize, of course, that this is an extreme example, and such attraction is probably exceedingly rare, but wouldn’t we have to say that such a person had a poly orientation?

Or what about someone who wants a d/s relationship? They may not have a gender preference for their partner, and they may not want a sexual relationship (or not a primarily sexual one anyway), but they absolutely need their partner to be dominant and they want to be submissive. I think it would be correct to call this an orientation, even a sexual orientation, even though one’s “object” of desire does not fit into our traditional models (hetero, homo, bi, pan, etc.). I realize that I may be stretching the definition of “orientation” nearly to its breaking point, as I did with “sexual” above, but that’s essentially my point. These definitions are slippery precisely because their constituent parts are not easy to define clearly, and because romance, intimacy, and sexuality are extremely complicated ideas that resist easy categorization.

3a) I don’t think it’s a good idea to say that “Being GLB is about the type of person to whom you are sexually attracted.” LGBT people have worked very hard over the few decades to dispel the perception that it’s all about “teh gay sex.” Surely for many people it’s partially (or even mostly) about the gay sex, but I think we all pretty universally agree now that when we say someone is heterosexual, homosexual, etc. we’re not just talking about the people with whom they have sex (or want to have sex). So while it may be true that polyamory is not the same as sexual orientation when we consider the number of partners polys seek, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that polyamory is similar in kind to what we’ve traditionally called sexual orientation when it comes to disposition toward those partners. Wes said that using the language of the LGBT community implied a false equivalence. I disagree. I don’t think poly and other orientations are exactly equivalent, but I think it’s fruitful to examine the ways in which they may be similar.

3b) If socio-political gain is polyamorists’ primary goal, I really don’t think aligning ourselves with the LBGT community could fairly be described as an attempt to “coopt the sympathy that the GLBT community has built up.” How much sympathy is that? Is it really politically useful? Discrimination against LGBT people is still rampant in the U.S. And to the extent that we practice non-normative lovestyles, I think that we ought to align ourselves with the LGBT movement, not because it’s politically expedient but because we have affinity with them. Polyamory queers relationships norms in much the same way that being gay, pansexual, transsexual, etc. queers gender/sex norms. I don’t think that’s a false equivalence at all.

I’m not sure anyone would say that polyamory is absolutely a sexual orientation in exactly the same way being LGBT is an orientation. Similarly, I don’t think it’s a good idea to dismiss poly as categorically not an orientation. I tend to describe poly as an orientation for me because I find that the concept of sexual orientation most closely describes the way I feel about my own sense of polyamory’s role in my life. I suppose we could try to invent a new word to describe how polyamory operates as a description of “who we are” rather than an explanation of “what we do,” but that would take more time, and chutzpah, than I have right now (or may ever have).

I also disagree that broadening our definition of the term “polyamory” weakens it. Having too narrow a definition can be just as problematic. For example, polyamorists often exclude swingers from the proverbial club (pun intended) because swingers don’t have multiple “loving” relationships. But that categorization privileges certain kinds of “love” relationships (actually, it privileges one kind whose definition is nebulous but which nonetheless one is supposed to know when one sees it) over others. Most swingers I’ve known develop intimate relationships with play partners that I would consider “loving,” even if the putative definition of “swinging” requires that the relationships be strictly sexual. The truth is that a lot of swingers (and some self-identified polys) exist in a liminal space between the strict definitions of “swinging” and “polyamory.” Perhaps the umbrella term “open relationships” is useful here, but that can open an entirely new Pandora’s box.

As with so many things, our lives and loves cause us to color outside the lines. I say we should embrace the ambiguity.