Polyamory Week 2022 - We are all polyamorous
You can find all posts for Polyamory Week 2022 collected here.
Thank you for joining me for Polyamory Week 2022 and my exploration of the unexpected benefits I've discovered on my journey into ethical non-monogamy. I hope you've been able to learn something about your own lives and relationships from what I've written.
And today, for our last post, I wanted to talk about one of the most universal lessons I've taken on board: the fact we are all polyamorous.
As you might imagine, deciding to open up my life to multiple loves has led me to really think about what love means.
You see, I spent almost thirty years believing that I could only possibly love one person at once. But now, I had proof this wasn't the case. So, logically, there had to be something fundamentally wrong with what I thought about love.
And so I took some time, and I really thought about it. What was love to me? Or, more importantly, what really was love full stop.
And do you know what I realised?
We're all polyamorous.
Yes. All of us.
Even you at the back. And you, the person trying to shift down in their chair so I won't see them. And especially you, the person sitting bolt upright, your gaze all but challenging my impertinence at the suggestion you would lower themselves to such a thing!
Think about it. I loved my wife. My one and only, right? But I also loved my family. Of course, that’s only natural. We had a bond of blood and shared upbringing. But hang on, I also loved my best friends. There are two or three people I’ve only known since becoming an adult, and I consider them as close as family. I guess I can count them? But I have other friends I love as well. Yes, they may come in and out of my life more than the others, but I can’t really say I only like them. It doesn’t sound strong enough. So I guess I love them too.
So many people, all of them receiving my love in a different form. But all of them receiving my love.
And wait, if amor means “love”, and poly means “many”, then I surely the fact I loved all these people means I was poly-amor…ous.
Love has many different states
It was these thought processes that led me to really reconsider our relationship, as well as my concept of love in general.
I won't go into all the many reasons, but we, as a society, have created this synthetic construct of "true love". Something we can only feel for one person in our entire lives. And because sex was for so long only "acceptable" with marriage, sex and "true love" became intrinsically linked.
And while we've slowly grown past the idea that we can have sex without love, we're still stuck on the idea that you can't have love without sex.
Therefore, anyone we didn't want to have sex with, we couldn't possibly love. And if love can only come with sexual desire, what we feel for family and friends cannot possibly be "real" love.
And, on the other side of the coin, if we have sexual feelings towards someone else, we can't possibly be in love with our partner.
And I call bullshit on all of that.
I say all that love is the same thing. Yes, it's stronger - maybe you could say purer - for some people over others. But that doesn't make it a different substance. That's like saying water and ice are entirely different things because one is harder than the other.
If you only want to have sex and collect all the trappings of "settling down" with one person, that's great. But you're still polyamorous. Because you love many, many people. It's just all in different ways.
I never expected polyamory to lead me to realise how deep love truly is in our lives.
Love is pretty awesome, and it's also an infinite resource. You're never going to run out of it. So rather than breaking it down and insisting there are "types" of love for different people, or that you can only love a finite number of people, we should embrace the fact that love is a part of every personal relationship we have however big or small.
If none of my other posts have resonated with you this week, I hope this one will. Because if you can expand your relationship with love, it will allow you to truly see exactly how important the people in your life are to you.
And that's something all of us should see, no matter our relationship model.
