Really well said, SW. I’m in an exclusive, monogamous marriage, so I probably have no clue what I’m talking about :), but it seems to me that being able to maintain a marriage (and family) while still having other romantic partners, without succumbing to jealousy (as it sounds like Maurie and her spouse have been able to do) is pretty darned emotionally mature.
Are you saying all relationships are the same with respect to their nature and terms?
Nobody here has done that, AFAIK.
There are some people who seem to think that so much as going to the bathroom without the other indicates a lack of commitment. Or being in the same room as a woman not their wife without their wife present.
I have a lot less problems understanding someone like my great-aunt who was fine with her husband’s “straying” (1) than someone who can’t go for two hours without speaking to their beloved (former boss of mine). But then I’ve never done jealousy, it’s one of those character traits which just seem really tiresome to me.
1: they never officially talked about it, he never knew who was telling on him… she’d already known he liked whores when they got married and he talked in his sleep so when he’d had a business trip she’d wait for him to fall asleep and question him; she also, when she told this, pointed out that if he’d been faithful she would never have learned about certain interesting uses of feathers and scarves. When the bunch of nasty magpies she was putting down asked about those uses, she smirked and refused to provide any details.
Not at all. I was only saying that I don’t understand how “enjoying activity x with person other than primary partner” is in any way “an acknowledgement that on some fundamental level your primary relationship isn’t providing you with what you want/need emotionally and that gap is not something you are capable of filling for yourself”, which is what you seemed to be saying.
If you are saying that sex with someone other than one’s primary partner is the line at which one is acknowledging a fundamental lacking in one’s primary relationship (but golfing, coffee, or chatting with someone else is not), then you are doing exactly that.
Non-monogamy is not necessarily a fear of emotional commitment. My relationship is very committed. There just happens to be a third party involved, who we care for and consider when we make decisions.
And I fail to see why acknowledging that a single individual cannot meet all of your needs is wrong. A significant problem in our society is that it’s hammered into many of us that we should be looking for someone to be our one-and-only, and we should be able to meet that person’s every need. Sometimes people do find that, but there are reasons why there are stereotypes of unhappy sexless marriages, not to mention how common cheating (physical or emotional) is. Why is being honest about your needs, communicating with your partner, and finding a solution together a bad thing, or immature, or stunted, or escaping anything?
I think you’ve just described life. No one person can provide us with everything we need and want emotionally. We’re always looking to fill that gap in other ways. I don’t think sex is so special or unusual that it must be an exception to how we get those other needs filled.
Assuming all parties feel that way, I don’t see the big deal. Think about this. What is it that destroys relationships? Is it actually sex outside of the relationship that destroys the relationship?
No. It’s failed expectations. Betrayal. Differences in values. It’s what that sex means symbolically that matters.
The sex can be an expression of betrayal or something else bad, but the sex itself is not the problem. The only thing it matters is the meaning that the people in the relationship have imbued it with.
So if two people have imbued sex with some meaning like, "I demonstrate my love and trust in you by ceding your decisions about who you sleep with to you and you alone,‘’ well then it’s a whole different ballgame, isn’t it? If the act of sex outside the relationship is not a threat, but is itself an act of love, on what grounds can we say this is undesirable? It may not be typical, but it’s still a viable way to maintain a relationship.
Speaking as someone with a successful monogamous marriage…
My spouse and I were exclusive in regards to sex. However, it would be inaccurate to say we had all our emotional and social needs fulfilled by our partner. We both had long-term friendships with opposite-gender people outside our marriage. We were both clear about who we spent time with, what we were doing with those people, and jealousy did not arise. This is actually pretty damn normal. It was also a godsend when my spouse died because those relationships, both same and opposite gender, were a valuable source of support to me emotionally.
The notion that monogamous couples ONLY have their needs filled by each other and never outside the marriage is, IMO, a pernicious standard that almost no one could possibly achieve - unless there was some serious odd mental/emotional things going on.
But can you see how that’s a really big assumption? Almost all relationships have some sort of inherent power imbalance–even if it’s just one person is more emotionally invested. There is real potential for a person to take advantage of that imbalance, and I think people have an ethical duty in their relationship to guard against that, to act with an abundance of caution to avoid taking advantage of a spouse. Again, to not be the boy in The Giving Tree.
I don’t think you can characterize the emotional/symbolic weight of sex in human relationships as arbitrary, like assigning the meaning of the phonemes C-A-T to a feline. There’s reasons: sex and sexuality do a lot of shit to our brain chemistry, for one thing–they make you have lots of feelings in your parts, distract you. For another thing, their are all sorts of practical issues: pregnancy and disease, to start with. I’m willing to believe that people can imbue these things with a variety of meanings, but that doesn’t mean it’s just an arbitrary semantic game.
I agree, but this is a condition that may exist in any kind of relationship, not just a non-monogamous one. Considering your partner’s true needs and desires is always critical no matter how you identify that relationship. That’s why communication is so important. And it’s why I wouldn’t pressure my husband for an open relationship knowing how much he values monogamy.
When I said “arbitrary constraints” I wasn’t really talking about sex, but the nature of outside relationships in general. Society saying to my husband, “It’s not right for you to spend time alone with your female friends even though your wife is fine with it” seems pretty arbitrary to me.
I’ve never been in an open relationship so I can’t comment on the various meanings of sex in that context. But I do recognize that those acts mean something different to different people. And it’s not my business to decide whether that is right or wrong for them. It’s something they’ve gotta figure out themselves.
If you are saying that sex with someone other than one’s primary partner is the line at which one is acknowledging a fundamental lacking in one’s primary relationship (but golfing, coffee, or chatting with someone else is not), then you are doing exactly that.
[/QUOTE]
Different things are not the same. Platonic relationships are of substantively different nature than romantic ones.
I’m not trying to suggest that non-monogamous relationships can’t work. Clearly they can and do. Consenting adults ought to be free to behave according to whatever relationship framework they mutually agree on. I have no problem with it.
I’m simply addressing the questions raised by the OP about why non-monogamous relationships are often thought of as immature or stunted (her words, not mine).
Polyamory isn’t for me, but if it works for other people, hey… you do you.
I agree. Any and all relationships in life are a series of compromises and adjusted expectations. No single person can (or should) be your entire world. That includes your spouse/s.o. That’s why most healthy relationships rely on friends and family and acquaintances related to various roles we play in life, i.e. spouse, parent, friend, sibling, colleague, etc… Each of these relationships comes with a set of parameters and boundaries that are somewhat fluid but familiar to everyone (excluding extreme examples or exceptions due to dysfunctional relationships).
That said, I am perfectly willing to accept that non-monogamous relationships do work for some. I’m not judging those relationships as being immoral. Not in the least. All I’m doing is addressing what the OP asked with respect to why non-monogamy can be viewed as “immature” or “stunted”. I provided some examples of why that may be. OP can reject them if she wants because they don’t apply to her. I don’t know her and I don’t know anything about her specific situation. However, that doesn’t make me wrong about the subject in general.
To use gross generalizations:
Younger people want to act out and experiment. They have less of an inclination toward monogamy.
Older people have experimented plenty, with often disastrous results. The predictability of monogamy has a certain charm.
So monogamy is associated with greater age and experience, and therefore maturity, including emotional maturity.
But there is more to it … Maturity also means acknowledging that you cannot ‘have it all’, that every choice and commitment involves some kind of sacrifice.
That being said, I don’t care how any adults construct their relationships, as long as all there is informed consent by all participants.
ETA: I also don’t want to know, because it is none of my business. When plural marriages are legal, then you can tell me.
Something one also does when considering a dependant relative or a housemate. The difference which freaks people out is that your situation happens to involve sex between more than two parties; for some people that difference is huge, for others it’s “ok, so?”
Are you saying there is real potential for an unethical person who wants monogamy in a relationship to press the person who doesn’t into accepting it by taking advantage of the gross imbalance caused by the huge societal pressure to at least appear monogamous to the outside world? That people have an ethical duty to guard against pressuring anyone into monogamy unless they are absolutely certain it’s what there partner wants and that there’s no coercion, especially by the plethora of outside sources that push for monogamy?
Or are you actually just arbitrarily declaring that monogamy is great and no one is ever coerced into it, but non-monogamy is a bad thing that people get coerced into all the time?
Romance and sex are two completely different things. It’s possible to have a relationship that is nonsexual but romantic, sexual but not romantic, non-sexual and non-romantic but with too much emotional or physical intimacy for most monogamous people, and lots of others that don’t fit neatly into ‘Platonic versus romantic’. And again, this is something done today in the first-world country of the United States by actual people, including some people who aren’t indigenous people (why you think the last one is relevant, I’m not sure).
Americans tend to use the two as synonyms, though. It’s one of the cultural shocks that foreigners tend to encounter: for most of the world, romance is the non-sexy parts, for a lot of Americans it means sex. It’s also a culture that tends to have more problems than most of the Western world (in the widest definition of “western”) with the idea that two people who are in each other’s “pool of interest” can be friends without wanting to have sex; the concept of the chevalier gallant (straight, friend to lots of women, not sexually interested in his friends) is even more incomprehensible.
That’s true - the problem is that you stated things that are factually incorrect, such as your bold assertion that the kind of nonmonogamy that I (and other people that I know) practice in the United States is not practiced in any first world country today by non-indigenous people. Nonmonogamy that doesn’t involve a primary couple simply is not some obscure thing only practiced by indigenous people in the distant past, and speaking as though it doesn’t exist indicates a severe lack of knowledge on the topic in general. Here’s a few articles on the topic from the first page of a google search to show that this isn’t some concept I came up with on my own, or that it’s some obscure thing from the distant past with no relevance today.