alt.sex.column

by andrea nemerson

PSA

Dear Andrea: I have to take exception to part of your recent (otherwise spot-on) characterization of polyamory: "Ideal for the rare natural-born polyamorist and immediately or eventually disastrous for everyone else."

This statement contains a fundamental fallacy – the assumption that some are "natural-born" polyamorists. While nature plays the largest part in our sexual preferences, how we conduct our relationships is more shaped by nurture.

It's cultural. Ultimately it's a complex series of choices. Transitioning from one way of doing things to another is very difficult. You do a disservice to those who are trying very hard and very honestly to change their early cultural programming. You'd be doing a public service if you rephrased it.

How would I say it? Poly works for those committed to the hard personal work needed make it work and is immediately or eventually disastrous for everyone else. Of course, the same could be said of all other forms of relationships.

Love, Happypoly

Dear Happy: Good letter. I disagree with you, of course, but that's where the fun is.

I actually believe I am doing a service, and a rather important one, by pointing out that not everyone (indeed, hardly anyone) is cut out for polyamory – and that if it is not your thing you will fail so dismally that it really would be far better for everyone involved were you simply not to try. This is the sort of behavior that can be observed and recorded but not so easily studied with scientific rigor, so my opinion here is based solely upon anecdote, but good lord, what a lot of anecdote I've got. I've been living in San Francisco, polyamory central, since the '80s, and I can't say it has been fun to see so many promising relationships crash and burn, causing untold amounts of collateral damage along the way, but it certainly has been instructive.

The truth is that none of us actually has the faintest idea which human behaviors are innate and which are learned. There has been a good deal of study of "human universals" (by anthropologists, not hard scientists), and I should point out that sexual jealousy is considered as universal as the fear of death and the tendency to gossip. As for whether polyamory is innate or acquired, we can make some very educated guesses based on a preponderance of data points, but we don't really know. My feeling that certain traits are "hard-wired" has, frankly, as little scientific support as has your bias toward cultural bases for the same behaviors. I will grant you there are cultural differences out there – the occasional partner-swapping tribe or whatnot – but let's face it: The most common alternative model you're going to find when you step outside the cozy confines of western industrial society is not happy-shiny-everybody-gets-some egalitarian polyamory, but brute, patriarchal polygyny. That's what humanity has tended toward when not striving for two-by-two heterosexual monogamy, and it is not the sort of model highly evolved, postmonogamous utopians like yourself tend to find comfortable. There are, of course, other models – the terribly French setup where everyone is married but people make certain arrangements and nobody says anything comes to mind – but we have no models for a society where people are not pressured to chose one love and settle down but are encouraged to love many, in whatever peculiar arrangements suit the participants, without jealousy or fear of outside censure. San Francisco doesn't come close, and not for lack of trying.

I would love to believe that hard work and plucky determination were all it took to establish a new paradigm for human interactions where nobody feels driven to possess another and where love multiplies instead of dividing when a new person comes on the scene, but I have seen no evidence that it works this way. What I have seen, as I have repeated here ad infinitum, ad bored-out-my-skull-saying-this-already, is a few couples who seem spectacularly, one is tempted to say naturally, well suited to sharing and a bunch of others who work at it, who communicate in "I statements," who process endlessly, who try and fail and try again and grimly hang on to try yet again, just to fail again, hurting everyone involved in the process because they are not, in the end, any good at this and cannot fake it. What is the point in castigating these people for not trying harder? They already remind me of nothing so much as one Stimpson J. Cat in the episode where he keeps feeding coins into a slot in the wall, whereupon a door opens and a donkey kicks him in the head. Except in this case, of course, the donkey kicks everybody else in the head too. Somebody has to stop feeding these folks another quarter.

If not me, who?

Love, Andrea

E-mail Andrea Nemerson at andrea@altsexcolumn.com.