Is Poly Right for You? Examining Cultural Hangups About Nonmonogamy

I have a long history with exploring poly and open relationships.

Much of my history has been monogamous relationships where we decided to open up the relationship at a later point in time.

This usually ended in some kind of heartbreak.

But why am I still poly? Why expose myself to that kind of possible emotional risk?

Well, first of all, most mono relationships also end in heartbreak. And the break ups in my open relationships were usually amicable albeit emotional. Truly loving someone frees you from them as they move forward in making themselves happy. Although my partners ended up with other people, things have always worked out for the best in the long run.

Generally, if a relationships ends there is a good reason for it. It always strikes me as especially tragic when people stay in bad relationships for years. Poly is not incompatible with long-term commitment but for me it allows one to take a more reasonable position about the waxing and waning of love and desire.

But secondly, I keep returning to poly principles because they're what I believe at a deep level:

• I don't believe that loving more than one person diminishes my capacity for love
• I don't believe that there is a "soul mate" out there waiting for me
• I don't believe that one person is likely going to satisfy all my social, emotional, intellectual, sexual, and domestic needs for the rest of my life.
• I don't believe that I could be happy having sex with only more person for the rest of my life
• I don't believe that jealousy is an insurmountable emotion that should dictate how relationships unfold
• I don't believe there is one cultural template for relationships that works for everyone
• I don't believe that human desires and needs are static

Is poly always easy? No. But when are human relationships ever "easy"? Mono relationships can also be messy, dramatic, emotional, and full of pain.

There are a lot of myths out there about poly relationships, with many people thinking they're "inferior" or somehow psychologically unhealthy.

There are also many people who swear up and down they could never "do" poly but also haven't spend any serious time working through their own socialization and learning history having grown up in a culture that makes monogamy the cultural default.

Although I do believe that poly isn't for everyone, and that many people go into poly thinking they can handle it when in fact they cannot, I also think that there is a LOT of room in our culture for people to do some deep introspective work sorting through why exactly they cannot do poly. Is it really an effect of their innate personality or a more complex product of the culture they were raised in? It's hard to truly separate our seemingly innate desires from the cultural matrix in which monogamy reigns supreme.

I think there's a lot of stigma surrounding poly for mainly the some reason there's stigma surrounding so many other things: ignorance. People just often don't have a clue what ethical nonmonogamy looks like in real life. They might have all sorts of warped assumptions and misunderstandings about what poly has to look like. And in truth, poly means different things to different people. And frankly, some people practice poly in ways that are likely unhealthy. But that's also true of monogamous relationships.

If you are out there reading this wondering if poly is right for you, but you're scared that poly relationships are too foreign, too complicated, too messy, know this: poly relationships are no different from other relationships. At their core they still revolve about openness, honesty, communication, trust, and love.

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