Poly Politics

My first (and so far only) monogamous relationship was not well executed. We never took the time to lay down the law. The two of us met through a mutual friend, and then spent a flirtatious long weekend in Autumn crammed into a dirty car driving to Bennington, Vermont. He lived far away in Colorado, stuck in a suffocatingly Christian part of the country, while I was busy living it up at a liberal arts college. I didn’t realize that what I was doing, (sending nudes, rubbing my hips up against other 20 somethings at parties) constituted as “cheating”, until a year later when I asked my college housemate whether she would be upset if her live-in-boyfriend danced with someone else on a night out.

“No.” She paused, “Okay no, but only if it’s, like, platonic.”

“Have you guys talked about that?”

“Yes. We were at Spring Formal and this girl who he hooked up with, like, half of last year was like super close to him, so I thought I should bring it up.”

I set up a Tinder account almost as soon as I arrived in Ireland. I have cousins, family here, but a couple months ago had few acquaintances beyond that. Everyone I spoke to suggested I join societies in order to meet people. However, casually dating, and then later befriending a variety of weird kids had proved successful in the past. Tinder in Dublin seemed like a quick way to figure things out, see which one-liners people were pasting to the bottom of their profiles, get a handle on what folks were looking for. I found out rapidly that there was a pocket-dictionary’s worth of slang I had never heard of (acting the maggot?), and that here, like at home, few people were interested in anything with strings.

I have found that it’s not uncommon to swipe past a selfie of someone I’ve met during my time here, someone who I know to be in a fully committed, exclusive relationship. My tally is bordering on half a dozen and I have the screen-caps to prove it. I am not the right person to talk to about what constitutes or does not constitute as a monogamous relationship, but looking from the outside in, keeping your Tinder account active, while in the throes of passionate and monogamous young love, does seem somewhat nontraditional.

Non-monogamous relationships are far less sexy than folks imagine them to be. With the exception of maybe 50-something year old swingers, there are far fewer threesomes than there are DMC’s, far more talking about the possibility of casual sex, than actually having it. Non-monogamy, particularly polyamoury requires negotiation; boundaries have to be established, some ground rules need to be laid out. It requires that you ask yourself and your partners questions about what you’re respectively comfortable with: “It’s important to me to hear from you regularly”, “I ask that we spend major holidays together whenever possible”, “I don’t want to hear about the specifics of your sex life outside of our relationship”, “Tell me about new, exciting people you’re dating”, etc. It demands candor of you and your partner. Being forthcoming is what prevents polyamoury from sliding towards duplicitousness.

I put “Queer & Poly” at the bottom of my new Dublin Tinder profile below some select candid shots, the requisite outdoorsy photo, and a prime selfie taken on a top notch eyebrow day. Not unsurprisingly, most of the initial messages I received were vocabulary questions easily summed up as “Wait, wah?” Between being queer and being polyamorous, I found myself not only in the minority, but in a small subset within that minority.

“So, like Sister Wives?” was how one Tinder fella responded after I gave him my 10 second poly synopsis: “I have a partner of a year and a half back in the Bay Area. We’ve agreed together that openly seeing multiple people is okay with us”.

No, not like Sister Wives. Unlike the notorious TLC reality television show centering on one man, his four wives, and their 17 kids, no one is getting married. Polygamy is structured in a way that would make ethically non-monogamous people squirm; it’s often patriarchal, hierarchical, and non-consensual. Well executed polyamoury looks far more like an open, honest, and monogamous relationship.

The central tenet of ethical non-monogamy, what stops it from being infidelity, is a high level of consent. Partners, be they sex partners, romantic partners, or otherwise, are all informed, and have agreed to the possibility that people they’re involved with engage in multiple intimate relationships. Actions that have not been mutually agreed upon as acceptable, or actions that seem like they should be okay but have the potential to upset your partner could constitute poly-infidelity, or at the very least, a breach of trust. Commonsense logic says that poly people are commitment-phobes. The truth of the matter is, that healthy polyamorous relationships, like all healthy relationships, demand real commitment, and real honesty.

Illustration by Daniel Tatlow.

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