This topic is probably making SwingBot sweat and BG run for the hills. So, my dears, let me preface this by saying that it is not about our current activities, and not about changing our arrangement. Please relax.
I like the concept of polyamory. I have had mixed thoughts about the idea of multiple loves for as long as I can remember. On the one hand, I am a product of our heterosexual-monogamy-centric society: I grew up figuring a romance was between one woman and one man. However, I also often questioned concepts like \”one true love,\” \”the one,\” and \”one and only.\”
Adults married, divorced, and remarried. Teenagers fell madly, deeply, passionately in love, only to break up and fall madly, deeply, passionately in love with someone else… often within a few months. There are a lot of people out there and the world is a big place; what happens if your \”one true love\” and you never connect? And what about couples in which one partner dies? Is the survivor doomed to never love again, or does the survivor get another chance?
I particularly pondered that last question when I believed in — or at least assumed — the Christian views on afterlife. Does Heaven permit one man to have two wives, or one woman to have two husbands? Would the two spouses be jealous of each other? Envy is a sin, so one assumes that all three would coexist peacefully in Heaven, but how would they share? When the surviving partner is still alive after his/her first partner died, and finds the new partner, would the dead partner watch with love and affection over the new union, because her/his lover is happy again?
My thinking became secular only, but I still had lingering questions about each person being geared to romantically love only one other. We can have multiple friends — including some friends that we love dearly — simultaneously. We love our different family members. Parents theoretically love their children equally, no matter how many they have and how different those children might be. So, why is one particular type of relationship, romance, restricted to only a one-at-a-time situation?
I mentioned in previous posts that I have a history of cheating. I do not defend that history, of course, but my actions may have been, in part, due to a very bad handling of a desire for an open relationship. I did not know how to ask for an open relationship, or even know of the concept of open relationships, so I went ahead and took what I wanted without asking.
Before I ever heard the term \”polyamory,\” I sometimes fantasized about a multiple family home life. I dreamed about a big, lovely home on a spacious property with shady trees, a good yard for dogs, and plenty of parking for the multiple cars. The home was in a nice, upscale-suburbia neighborhood, where the neighbors are friendly with each other, but still have space between each other\’s homes. And in this \”American Dream\” house lived more than two adults.
Precisely who resided there and what the relationship arrangements were generally depended upon my mood. Sometimes there would be three adults, maybe two men and me, maybe one man, one other woman, plus me. Sometimes there were two MF couples, or one couple and one other man and one other woman living singly. Usually, I was part of a couple, but occasionally I was a single. Rarely, one or more of the other people would have children, and all the adults would have some involvement in raising the children.
My fantasies generally focused more on the day-to-day details, rather than on sexual relationship dynamics. Even in my unconventional-home fantasies, I often shied away from the unconventional topics of bisexuality and open relationships. Some sort of relationship fluidity was going on, but I could not bring myself to actually address it.