Polyamory for the Practical

The Polyamorous Misanthrope

Welcome to the The Polyamorous Misanthrope, in which myself, the Goddess of Java, or some guest columnist will rant, rave and otherwise edify on some poly subject.   If you have an idea for a column or a rant on spike, contact me and we'll talk it over.   For past articles, check out the Archive .

I am desperately worried for the poly community. We're supposed to be this group of people dedicated to love.

And yet --

I see more pain, heartache, broken dreams, cruelty and what have you going on in the poly community. It's drama, miscommunication, expectations...

I've mentioned this, with a certain level of despair and a sense of "losing the faith", to some poly people before and had always gotten the response, "Yes, but aren't monogamous people the same in their relationships?"

Honesty forces me to agree. I don't know that I can blame it entirely on poly. It's just that we increase the issues exponentially by having more relationships.

I do blame it on a lack of love. I blame it on a lack of maturity (I don't spare myself). I blame it on rushing into relationships before you're secure in yourself. I blame it on the biological clock! After all, the urge to procreate will take over a lot of stuff. Our culture is such that we've no maturity at all until well into our thirties or forties (though I'm betting when I'm in my fifties I'm gonna laugh at who I was in my thirties and forties, too!). But our ideal childbearing years are a good fifteen to twenty years younger than that. To me, it seems like biology is driving us to choose mates long before we're settled in ourselves and what have you to be able to be independent, loving people. By the way, this goes for the childfree, too. While you might not want kids, your body is still programmed to mate.

I guess I'm increasingly of the opinion that a lot of we people who charge into poly (and I've never actually HAD a monogamous relationship) or relationships at all are guilty of the most astounding arrogance and self-deception about our genuine limits.

In fact, in discussing this with the Goddess of Giggle, she commented that what she sees is a newness to polyamory. In a lot of ways, we haven't found our feet yet. People who go poly often overload on the relationships like a kid in a candy store, who've never been able to have as much candy as they wanted. They'll stuff themselves sick until they calm down and realize that too much candy will actually result in sugar highs and painful stomach aches.

The thing is, in relationships, the stakes are higher. We ain't talkin' tummy aches here! We're talking hearts -- hearts that are human and can hurt. We only have so much time in the day, and many of us overextend ourselves way the hell too much. We're adults here. We have our commitments, our children, our jobs, our educations, you name it. Those things take time. So do relationships, after all, and while it's a hell of an ego boo to have someone interested in you, a person's heart is more important than your damned ego (or mine. I've done it, okay. If I'm bitching about something, I'm prolly guilty of the same thing, 'kay, unless I specifically state I've never done such a thing).

I wish I could offer a better solution than, "Get your shit together, you nitwit!" (This is not from a high horse, here. I'm in the same boat and have to do the same things).

But I really do think we as polyamorous people have much higher stakes in our relationships and it behooves us to work a lot harder on getting ourselves together to a place where we can be truly loving human beings. Leaving behind a trail of broken hearts, broken dreams, broken relationships and pain is not the way someone whose goal is to be a loving person has any business behaving. If you can't do that yet? Well, you might want to consider if poly is really the way for you to be the best human being you can be.

Yet.

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