Guest Post by the Spouse: Hey Jealousy! or Savaging Poly-Love

As anyone who really knows me knows, I'm a big fan of Dan Savage. His advice has improved the quality of our marriage more than once. (And maybe even made me a better spouse and friend...) I've been reading Savage Love since the old days when the letters started with “Dear Faggot…” I’m ever grateful for Dan's ability to put things in perspective, and help me understand and cope with my own culturally-unusual inclinations.

So of course I have an opinion on “Polygate”.

As you’re probably aware, Mr. Savage got himself into a little bit of hot water with the poly people a couple weeks ago in the process of answering a question about whether someone who is polyamorous be happy with someone who is not. This is not an unreasonable question for Savage Love, and I think Dan could have handled it easily, except that he took the extra step of defining the group. "Poly is not a sexual identity...", Dan noted, continuing, "It's not something you are, it's something you do." (emphasis his) Dan reiterated this point the following week, saying "But is poly something anyone can do, or something people are? I come down on the do side." 

What I understand Dan to be saying, essentially, is that certain things are innate properties or attributes, while others are preferences and activities. I hope I'm not taking this too far - and I think some of the folks who wrote into SL on the subject and were republished last week did stretch things a bit far - but I get the sense that this comes down to the political implications of innate attributes vs adopted attributes, rather than "identification" vs "orientation". And while the latter doesn't provide a lot of information, the former provides a tremendous amount, and is crucial to the question at hand. Because if you ask me to act against my preferences, the question is how much of my totality is being violated.

  

The question, then, is if being non-monogamously-inclined shares the same status as an innate property as sexual orientation. Is it a trait over which the individual has no choice? The comment boards are alight with people addressing this point.

Clearly, I have an inclination toward non-monogamy, and I was certainly uncomfortable in ways that felt unnatural when I felt I was expected to spend the rest of my life in a monogamous relationship, but I have trouble saying that indicates a biological grounding. I suspect, like many have noted, that there’s a continuum. Perhaps the spectrum runs from comfortable only with one partner to only comfortable with multiple partners, or perhaps between asexual and highly promiscuous individuals. (I use the term “promiscuous” as a non-judging descriptor; as readers are probably aware, my wife and I enjoy being sluts.) I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter much to this particular argument.

Because this whole argument has gone off the rails.

What makes us a good poly relationship is not that we like to have relationships with multiple people. It’s that we don’t mind our partners having relationships with multiple people.

Look, I don’t have to be poly-inclined to want to have sex with lots of women. That was me approximately from the age of 11. (Probably earlier, but I can’t remember back that far…) And I suspect that many of my friends felt about the same. But I’m pretty sure I had no idea how to have any kind of relationship at that time, let alone coordinate my emotions to accept, or even enjoy, my partner having relationships with other men and women.

Rather than tell stories about how “I’ve known since I was a teenager that I didn’t want to be monogamous” – the argument put forth by many on the poly-is-innate side – or rebut “Sure I want to have sex with multiple partners, but that doesn’t mean I go out and do it!” – the argument put forth by many on the poly-as-lifestyle side – I think the more relevant story is how long you’ve known that you didn’t mind having a non-monogamous partner.

I’ve certainly known since college. I had quite the crush on a girl I knew in college. And we did in fact hook up, for a few glorious, wonderful weeks. The thing is, she was seeing several other guys at the time. And I knew about this. Now, that could have made me jealous – some would say it should have made me jealous – but it didn’t. I was just glad to spend the time with her that I got with her, grateful for the intimacy that we shared for the short time we could do so. What she did when she was away from me wasn’t as important. Granted, I would have gotten an ego boost out of hearing that I was better than her other partners, or that she liked me more, or that she was leaving them to spend more time with me. And it certainly was ego-crushing when she dumped me and not them, although several years later I came to understand why and what I had done, as a naïve boy, to help bring that about.

But I wasn’t jealous.

And I think that’s where the discussion should be. Not what you want sexually; or, at least, not just that. There is a spectrum, but the truth is that we vacillate wildly throughout our lives in terms of what we want, whether we want to put all our attention on one person or we’re casting around for something new. Maybe you spend more time on one or the other, and that’s fine, but I suspect that it’s a mistake to put too much of an emphasis on that half of the equation.

Because, ultimately, being polyamerous isn’t just about you. It’s very, very much about your partners.

So, what does this imply about Dan’s advice?

Here's where things went off the rails. If we go back to the original article, we see that the polyamorous questioner, PP, was asking if he could be happy with someone who was, essentially, jealous. (Not his words, but basically the question at hand.) But then he asked a different question as the last sentence: "Can someone who is poly be happy with someone who isn’t?"

These are PP's separate questions:

Question 1: Can a polyamorous person be happy with a jealous person?
Question 2: Can a polyamorous person be happy with a non-polyamorous person?

Hey look! Two different properties, not of our poly person, but of our poly person's partner! Which means that it's not really about the poly person's identity. It's about what they need to make their relationship work.

If I were gay, I would prefer sex with men. I don’t think it would say a great deal about what my partners’ preferences are, other than by the fact that they’re unlikely to want me as a partner unless they, too, are not totally straight. My sexual orientation, I imagine, is to a large degree about what my preferences are.

In contrast, being non-monogamous, I could have a partner who is monogamous or non-monogamous. It doesn’t really matter. If she wants multiple partners and I’m one of them, terrific! If she’s only interested in one partner and I can be that partner for her, that’s fine. (This is not exactly true, but it’s subtle and for another entry.)

However, it’s rather important that my partner is compersive. Why? Because if not – if she’s jealous by nature (not judging, just characterizing) – she will be unhappy with my non-monogamy, leaving me with the choice to either cheat (unacceptable for an ethical slut), remain monogamous (unacceptable for a self-aware slut), or make my partner unhappy with my non-monogamy (unacceptable for any decent human being).

So my partner choices are defined by my partner… hey, wait, that’s actually similar to what a self-aware adult should do! If you love travel, a partner who loves to travel may make you unhappy. If you don’t want children, a partner who’s angling for ankle-biters will cause you heartache. If you love getting blow jobs and your partner can’t stand giving them… well, there may be some work to do either way.

So it comes down to two attributes and whether they’re biological: Where are you on the asexual/non-monogamous scale, and where are you on the jealous/compersive scale? Are they biologically ingrained? Are they learned or innate? Are they malleable? Do they naturally alter over time?

At the risk of taking a stand, I think desire for multiple partners is probably somewhat fluid, although I imagine that spending life confined on the "wrong" side of the spectrum - the one that goes against your identity - is a recipe for unhappiness. However,  I suspect that the jealous/compersion side is, to an extent, an innate property, if not somewhat malleable through experience and knowledge. If this is so, the implication is that we are more fixed in how we treat our partners’ behavior and less so about the requirements for our own. If you want to have sex with multiple partners, that’s fine, but you should be aware and have a certain due respect for your partners’ requirements of you. After all, this hypothesis suggests, your desires for multiple partners are just that: desires. Whereas, the hypothesis concludes, your partners’ jealousy or compersion is far a more a part of them than your interest in multiple partners.

So what was the answer for PP, and was Dan right?

First, based on our hypothesis above, let's evaluate PP's questions:

Question 1: Can a polyamorous person be happy with a jealous person? Answer: Probably Not.
Question 2: Can a polyamorous person be happy with a non-polyamorous person? Answer: Possibly.

Sadly for PP, Question 1 was the correct question to ask, but conflated the jealousy and polyamory axes. It doesn't matter whether his girlfriend wants multiple partners. The question is, can she accept his desire for multiple partners.

Dan's response? In addressing the question: She's made her call, you either have to be monogamous, or dump her. It's your choice. Pretty straightforward. And correct.

And on polyamory? "These are relationship models, PP, not sexual identities." I'm not so sure, Dan. It is true that they constitute relationship models, but if placing someone into an alternate model constrains their behavior in a way that makes them unhappy or doesn't suit them, hasn't that violated their identity? I'm not going to say that pairing someone who identifies as non-monogamous with someone of a jealous nature is akin to pairing a gay man with a woman in the hopes that the pairing will make a "normal" or "functional" or whatever excuses people used to concoct. However, I think it'd be a bit disingenuous to say that the two are totally dissimilar, too. 

Incidentally, in response to one (perhaps overblown) Twitter-er, Dan closes his second response with "No one is legislating against polyamory here." I'm not so sure. I'm no lawyer so I don't know how any existing state laws on adultery could be applied against consenting, non-monogamous adults. However, I have it on certain authority that the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 134, makes it illegal for anyone in the military to have sexual intercourse with anyone they are not married to if they or the other party are married. Got that? It is illegal for any person in the military to conduct a polyamorous relationship if either party in the couple is married. (Explanations online point out that it's not as simple as all that as there is a criterion that  "...the conduct of the Soldier was to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces or was of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces..." Any chance this might be used against folks in a non-monogamous relationship?) Something to chew on.

Ultimately, I suspect it all comes down to how innate the monogamy and compersive axes are, relative to each other and other properties. Perhaps Dan's assessment is not totally unfair, to the extent that one might not be as fixed in one’s interest in multiple partners as in the gender of those partners. However, I think there will one day be an accounting of how much a degree biology actually plays in sexual orientation, and how much may be a result of development and experiences, both also very important but not biological or genetic. It is my fervent hope that, at that point, it won’t matter, as all people will recognize that when consenting adults engage in play, the activities, genders, and number of participants will be irrelevant to the morality or legality of the actions. (And, furthermore, if self-identity of body morphology is as biologically entwined with cerebral structure as our current knowledge would suggest (particularly the mapping-of-self in the parietal lobe), we as a society really need to be a hell of a lot more understanding of transgender identification and modification than we currently are.)

A footnote: It has not escaped our notice that the two attributes discussed here – the polyamory axis and partners’ compersive axes – suggest a very nice Punnett Square that might be interesting to digest at a later date...