Polyamory I: Idealism

Trigger Warning: Divorce

My first (poly) relationship

The three of us clenched onto the person to our side, our four hands made a perfect combination. His left hand, with his proud wedding ring, and my right fit smoothly. And his right tangled into her left, with her proud wedding ring, was so perfect inside each other as well. For me it was my first relationship- and I haven’t had monogamous since. I do not know how I would fit into monogamy. But I was able to find out that I did fit into polyamory.

There weren’t that many complications. Well, except that time that we cause a bit of mayhem prancing around 5th Avenue while clinging onto each other’s hands. We made a giant love chain which the hundreds of people smothering the concrete didn’t find romantic, just a nuisance.

The whole thing was a secret, which killed me. And the relationship itself. Eventually.

It would have caused an uproar if I talked about it and perhaps I’m too much of a coward to deal with the attention one gets when they flip off society.

Why do people get married?

I guess, there is this sigh of relief when marriage is on because one feels like all the awkward is over. All the first dates filled with the blubbering conversation or the desperate lays with your co-worker, class mate, hipster on the F train, that you only went with to not feel so lonely–

But, I think I can find other ways to not be lonely.

I hate how shocked people get when I say I don’t want to get married. Like, marriage is essential to the human soul. Marriage isn’t a natural instict, it is  an artificial binding. However, feeling loved and loving someone else might very well be a need for the human soul. But that doesn’t necessarily connect to a ceremony that has a) been accomplished so many times before and b) failed so many times before. The repetition of marriage creates an inanity in the institution. Having universal experiences is a way to just copy and paste our lives into this one conglomerate perspective, which may be incorrect, or maybe it doesn’t even matter if it is incorrect. Maybe we only have 80 years, 29, 200 days, to stomp on that concrete, breathe this smoggy air, fuck on our beds and maybe it would be more fulfilling if we stop trying to make our intimate lives so universal and try to do something that we actually want. Before we get penetrated by The Scythe.

Even though the couple I was with had a positive relationship with marriage and a very loving successful one themselves, it wasn’t enough to give me hope in the institution; I was and am still aware of the 50% divorce rate.

In a similar fashion, my parent’s marriage hasn’t persuaded me. They haven’t gotten divorced and have never cheated on each other and are living out a very ‘50s household/traditional way of life. It works for them, I think, and they are generally happy. They hit rough bumps like every other relationship every here and there but I do not see them getting divorced in the future. But I don’t understand why the relationship that created you has to be one’s foundation for all romance. Their situation isn’t going to nullify every other divorce story I encounter. I’m not in a bubble. I see what is going around me. And I don’t like it.

Tradition

I hate traditional. I loathe it. It isn’t working yet so many people are living it out anyway just in the name of tradition. For traditional romance. Instead of looking at the problem and trying to reasonably find solutions.

Love is about a new experience. Love is about redefining your self with the addition of someone else. Love is about exploration. Love is not about conservativism. It is about bringing others into your life to reinvent it into something new and fresh and beautiful. Love is about finding out what beauty is to you. Love is about finding out who you are.

Tradition isn’t about you. Tradition is about everyone before you. Tradition is about something that has been done in the past that continues to be done for no other reason except that it has been done before. Tradition is about keeping a line of similarity in all those who follow. Tradition is about living under old definitions and perspectives and tradition is about declining an existential search of what love, relationship, life is to you.

Breaking away from tradition

So, try something new, if it fails you can always go back to the status quo; some people have to fit into the majority anyway.

But I encourage experimentation to figure out if your self aligns or not.  Try loving two beings at once. Try to expand the love you have out of your rib cages, outside of your bed, outside of your home, outside of the comfort of your picket fence, and try something that you have always been told to be repulsed by.

Fuck a married man. Fuck a married woman. Fuck the two at the same time. It is an interesting feeling to look up and see someone grin through their chest towards you and then after towards his wife. It is interesting to break out of constraints and allow one to love unconditionally.

With everyone’s consent, naturally. I’m not advocating ruining someone else’s marriage.

I was dating someone whose love wasn’t affected by being shared. When I inquired about the nature of his love, he compared it to a parent loving more than one child or a friend having more than one best friend.  That romantic love is a lot like other variants of love in the way that it doesn’t run out. He proved this to me by being able to smirk with his heart at me, and listen to me when I have my insecure breakdowns, a bi-daily event, and be there for me, and do all the right things. And make me feel so confident that I can be loved.

At the same time he loved his wife. He longed for her so desperately when she went out of state, and spoke in code to her, and honored her beauty and her flaws.

Though that relationship didn’t work out, I am still an advocate of polyamory and am still in nonmongamous relations. Nowadays my poly shape is a lot more complicated then the simple ‘V’ shape of my previous relationship but I enjoy it. I enjoy allowing myself to be open and vulnerable to people who are important to me. I enjoy not having to keep my emotion pent up for one person and being able to express myself, honestly. I enjoy all different kinds of people and I like that I never have to choose one person. That one incompatibility doesn’t mean a relationship is useless to me. That I can be constantly exploring and constantly expanding the quantity of love that I receive and give.

Why is this important?

In other words, for the most of us, love is essential. It is what is keeping our cells duplicating, mucus flowing, heart pumping, mouth salivating, and lungs rising. For most of us, love is health.

We have too small of expectations on the human ability to love. There is a lot of passion buried inside of every one of us and we can love more people than we think we can. Or I think so. I think more of us are polyamorous then we think.  Whoever reads this might be but just never thought about it. If you aren’t, then that’s okay, but just think about it. Just try to understand relationships, understand if you fit into the mold, and if you don’t then break free and experiment. Somehow. Polyamory is just my perspective but the real point of it all is to not follow tradition blindly, especially on something as important and personal as love.