P.S. I Love You (and You and You)

The images that come to mind when most people think of poly-anything, are of polygamy: Mormon extremists, child brides, oppressed women. Or of swinging: bored, middle-aged, cocktail-swigging couples who throw their keys in a bowl. Most wouldn’t imagine Linda Austin, a 30-year-old, mortgage-paying, corporate ladder climber who visits her parents all the time.*

A white-collar, university-educated, Calgary suburbanite, Austin says, cheerfully, “You can’t tell me apart from the soccer moms in my neighbourhood.” Her life is anything but the prairie family stereotype, however; instead of loving several people in sequence, she openly loves and has sex with several men and women at the same interval.

She realized four years ago that she was polyamorous, after having a few long-term, monogamous relationships with men. Polyamorous means “many loves”: simultaneous, intimate and sexual relationships, and is different from swinging, which is when a couple picks up a single or couple to sleep with them. There’s another difference: many people believe polyamory is an orientation, like being gay; whereas, swinging is a lifestyle.

Austin isn’t a typical polyamorist, but then, there isn’t really such a thing. Some polyamorists are married, and sleep with one-night stands out of town, never kissing on the lips, and telling their primary partner everything. Others have truly open relationships, closed triads or marriages with more than one person. The only requirements are that everyone disclose everything (which means it’s not cheating), and only act in ways their partner or partners fully consent to.

“The irony to me is that the only thing any of us do that’s controversial is be honest,” says Jenny Block, author of Open: Love, Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage. Block is described on the back cover of her book as “the average girl next door,” a “normal” southern U.S. suburbanite mother and wife. And she has a girlfriend. She says most people aren’t shocked by the statistics that 40 to 60 per cent of people cheat on their spouses, but are shocked by the idea that there might be a different way. “Sleeping with other people isn’t new; being honest about it is,” says Block.

But while being honest is new, loving or having sex with more than one person isn’t. Block is surprised by society’s amnesia about the real history of monogamy. “Romantic marriage as we know it is approximately a hundred years old,” she says. Before that, marriage was primarily a business proposition; no one expected you to be in love for life, or to have one person “complete” you or make you “whole,” never mind that they do so for 60 years. “It’s so entrenched, we think it’s normal. But the idea of having more than one partner is much older,” says Block.

“I would never expect to love just one relative. I love my mother and father and aunts and uncles, and there’s no limitation on that sort of love.” As Block points out, she also has many friends, each of whom she loves and does different things with, from seeing movies to discussing politics. She finds it surprising that we consider sexual, romantic love to be a limited commodity. “Friends have told me they can’t get pregnant again because they love their first child so much. But then when they do, they say, ‘I can feel my heart expand.’” She adds, “It sounds goofy, but that’s just how I feel.”

A few years ago, Block realized she was attracted to other people, even though she still loved and was attracted to her husband more than ever. “I didn’t want to leave my husband; that’s why I did this,” she says emphatically, underlining the common misperception. She says she wanted to find an ethical way to pursue her attractions that didn’t involve cheating, and that meant her husband, Christopher, was happy and secure. Block says it was a tremendous relief to her to find out other people felt the same way and had found ways to make it work.

“We used to say we sleepwalked through our marriage,” Block says. Now, she says, they appreciate each other much more. “It’s very easy to think the grass is greener: ‘If I was with someone else, he would have remembered my birthday, he would do the laundry.’ But now I have a much better grip on how every relationship turns into that relationship. It makes me recognize my partner as a human being who’s trying to meet his own needs and also meet my needs.” She says she and Christopher have never been happier. And, with the exception of a few book reviews that personally attacked her, everyone, including her family, has been very accepting.

It hasn’t been the same experience at all for Austin. In Calgary, polyamorists operate in hiding. Neither Austin’s family nor her colleagues know or suspect anything about her orientation, and she doesn’t plan to tell them anytime soon. Austin says she’s travelled all over the world and finds in Calgary, “you’re expected to conform more than in any other city,” because it’s so deeply conservative. She knows gay Calgarians who have been verbally attacked on the street, and who hide their orientation here, even though they’re open about it when they travel. But despite the city’s rejection of her orientation, she stays because she is so close to her family, who lives here, and because she loves it.

But, she says, the environment makes it hard to meet people. In many cities there are online and off-line groups, bars and meeting places that are polyamory-friendly, but Calgary has none of those.

“Everyone has to keep to themselves. If you meet anyone else, it’s sort of in passing,” says Austin. To find someone, Austin posts a note on a dating site or Craigslist, then wades through the hundreds of responses she gets, most of which are from married men wanting to cheat on their wives, and which she rejects because she’s “totally against non-consensual relationships.”  She says the underground meeting process is also time-consuming because you can’t send photos or talk openly — both of which help determine if you’re actually attracted to someone. She often spends hours talking online with someone, only to realize there’s no attraction there.

Being found out carries both emotional and even financial risks. A couple of years ago, when swing houses were legalized across Canada, many reporters called Dr. Trina Read, a Calgary sexologist, whose book Till Sex Do Us Part: Make Your Married Sex Irresistible was released last month. Read connected one reporter with a swinger she knew. His name didn’t run in the paper, but the swinger’s best client, who recognized him from something he said in the story, notified him that he’d be taking his business elsewhere. Read was unwilling to list any polyamorists she knows, because there would be similar, or more, hostility to them.

It’s not the same everywhere. In many other North American cities, there is both more interest in and acceptance of polyamory. In the year 2000, a Google search for the word “polyamory” produced about 6,000 hits; today, it finds more than 2,540,000. There are 642 Yahoo polyamory groups worldwide. Loving More magazine, a 17-year-old publication, has recently had to recruit more volunteers to handle all the inquiries. New York’s Poly-Pride Weekend in October 2008 had at least twice as many attendees as ever before. And The Ethical Slut, a 1997 book by Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt that some call the bible of polyamory, has sold more than 50,000 copies.

That’s not how Austin heard about it. Someone explained polyamory to her when she was 12, but back then, Austin was sure she was monogamous. She had boyfriends through high school and university, then, at age 22, she had a relationship in which she and her boyfriend would occasionally go out and pick up someone else to have sex with. The rule was to have fun, but never develop any “feelings.”

She found the experience deeply exciting. But although her boyfriend could separate love and sex, she always found “touching and kissing is really intimate, really emotional.” After about three years, she told her boyfriend she could no longer stay emotionally detached from their “flings.” He said it sounded like she wanted to join Bountiful, the B.C. town known for its polygamous sect. “Then he waited for me to get over it or something. Then he acted like it was a joke. Then I left,” Austin says.

After that, she spent some time being “totally non-committal … a female player,” but eventually found the experience “lonely and empty and shallow.” One night, Austin says she realized she wanted real relationships with more than one person. “It was kind of a shock. It was really scary. I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m a freak. How will I explain this one?’” Then she started researching it more. “I met people, I tried to figure out all the dynamics. I’m very logical.”
And it “started to all set in.”  For her, it just felt right.

Read says despite the social acceptance for monogamy, the idea that it’s natural is false. She says in terms of human evolution and survival, women are wired to constantly seek the best genetic donors to procreate with, and men want to impregnate as many women as possible: ideally ejaculating every 24 to 48 hours. Society doesn’t run that way because communities built on static families and homes are much more stable and easier to run.

According to Read, many people are naturally monogamous, and, for them, there are no downsides to the current societal norms and “constructs.” But she points to the divorce and infidelity rates as an indication of the percentage of people who find “monogamy goes against who you are.”

And though cheating rates are typically higher among men than women, that’s not an indication that more men are naturally polyamorous, says Dr. Brian Parker, a Calgary- and Edmonton-based clinical sexologist. Those rates reflect different societal messages about cheating when it comes to women. For men, cheating can be about bravado, for example; whereas, though things are changing, there are still ideas that women should be more sexually chaste. Parker says, in fact, “women and men are wired very similarly.”

Parker says polyamory and monogamy are orientations, like being straight, gay or bisexual, and says the reasons men seek more than one sexual partner are no longer linked to wanting to father as many children as possible. Some people simply aren’t fulfilled by one person, so they pursue multiple relationships to fill emotional and sexual voids. “For me, as long as it’s consensual, there are no issues” with polyamory, says Parker. “Every single person has found other people attractive when they’re already in a relationship. It’s about whether you’re wired to pursue that.”

But some people don’t think the answer to fulfillment comes from pursuing attractions to other people. “The answer to cheating isn’t to open everything up,” says Brian Rushfeldt, co-founder and executive director of the Calgary-based Canada Family Action Coalition, which advocates for Judeo-Christian moral principles. He says non-monogamy has serious consequences for both individuals and society, including increased risk of STDs and problems for children.

He thinks cheating and polyamory epitomize the new selfish ideas about relationships. “Love and sex have become interchangeable terms. We’ve confused these ideas to the point that it’s all about filling our own emotional, sexual or even financial needs,” he says. “But love is really about putting the other person’s needs and interests first, and helping that person reach their potential.”

When couples are having trouble, Rushfeldt counsels them to find ways to address their individual feelings of emptiness, and become satisfied with themselves, rather than seeking happiness through their partner or through someone else. If we “make a deliberate choice” to remain faithful and in a monogamous relationship, we’re happier, because once we start down the road of thinking a new person can fulfill us, it’s never enough, he says.

“Men and women are biologically destined to form a union,” Rushfeldt argues, and monogamy makes security and trust much easier both for the adults and for the children. Monogamy creates “a stability for children that simply cannot come from any other type of relationship . . . The more we move away from the model of having a committed mom and dad, the more children will grow up with that deep wound,” he says, adding they then go on to be lonely, unhappy people unable to form relationships themselves as a result, which he says is something we’re already seeing in younger generations.

Read says many people are hesitant to accept polyamory because they don’t believe it can actually work. But when it is “done properly,” it means a lot of communication, which usually leads to a couple becoming closer, developing a better relationship and even a better sex life with each other. “But people who haven’t experienced that don’t generally believe it.”

Read says most Calgarians have conservative values when it comes to monogamy. “There’s lots of anxiety when someone strays outside of what’s acceptable. It threatens what we’ve built up, as a society, to think is correct and right. And that makes people nervous.”

Susan Naylen Sorrell, a Wall Street banker turned co-owner of the Calgary sex shop, A Little More Interesting, says she hears from many polyamorists that it really works for them, but she worries that some people turn to it as an escape from, or a supposedly easy way to save, a struggling monogamous relationship. “Monogamy is hard. The Hollywood vision is that relationships are easy and exciting, and when they’re not, then just divorce and move on.” But, she says, if they “open up and become vulnerable,” couples can save a monogamous relationship, and that it will be much more meaningful and rewarding as a result.

Sorrell also says some sex addicts turn to polyamory to avoid intimacy with a single partner and can coerce their partners into joining a polyamorous relationship. It is one way sex addicts act out, but really, they would be better off confronting their addiction.

Birgitte Philippides, former president of Polyamarous NYC, is a practicing polyamorist who believes traditional relationship models simply don’t work for everyone. “Some people think we’re trying to bust up the sanctity of marriage,” says Philippides. “But we support marriage and monogamy, as long as they’re a choice and not something we have to do out of fear. If monogamy works, by all means, keep with it.”

She argues people’s emotionally charged aversion to polyamory is largely based on the fact that it goes against what we’ve come to think of the best way to handle the emotion of jealousy. “Do you really escape from jealousy through monogamy?” she asks rhetorically. Philippides points out that in a supposedly monogamous relationship, one partner can have feelings for someone else, but you just don’t know about it. “It’s a false sense of security,” she says.

Philippides says she hopes to show people they have options, and she thinks that’s an important message. The most common thing she hears from people coming to a Polyamorous NYC event for the first time is, “I found home.”

Block hopes that in 10 years in more progressive cities, polyamory will be where the issues of gay rights and gay marriage are today. And she’s hopeful that eventually, polyamory will be fully accepted.

Austin is more cautious. “I’m sort of a trend-setter here . . . but I do think it will come.” She says she sticks with it because it’s really freeing. “I don’t feel limited by someone else’s idea of how I should love. I never could understand how I could love one person and not someone else.” She pauses, then continues, “My mom has always said that she loves all the children the same but different. I just don’t see how that can’t apply to an intimate relationship, to being happy.

“If I was to follow my heart, polyamory is where I’d go,” says Austin. “If I was to follow what’s rational, I’d be monogamous.”