Polyamory TREE

At the Edmonton-based Tipi Confessions[1] show I co-produce with three other Indigenous women, the MCs recently read an anonymous audience confession on stage that elicited much laughter: “Polyamory is too much talking. Yawn.”
 
True! But so worth it when the tree of polyamory matures. After four-plus years of transition from compulsory monogamy and state-sanctioned marriage-mind, my solo polyamory tree feels rooted and fruiting like never before.[2]
 
What is “Solo polyamory”? A Facebook page on the topic lays it out as follows:
 
People who practice solo polyamory have lots of kinds of honest, mutually consensual nonexclusive relationships (from casual and brief to long-lasting and deeply committed). But generally, what makes us solo is the way we value and prioritize our autonomy. We do not have (and many of us don't want or aren't actively seeking) a conventional primary/nesting-style relationship: sharing a household & finances, identifying strongly as a couple/triad, etc.[3]
 
That’s me.
 
This blog post is inspired by the emergence, after years of tender and consistent cultivation, of the full-bodied fruits of polyamory. I have also honed my tending skills via study of polyamory’s social practices and the ways in which our bodies and institutions shape and are (not) shaped by ethical nonmonogamy. Combining action with theory is key to undoing this compulsory monogamy world. [4]
 
Fruits
 
Monday 11am: A text from a newish lover from across town: “Your messages make my day brighter.” Plus a kiss emoji. We schedule a coffee date. We also shift the hours of a dinner date. I realized that I’ll be back later from Calgary than I thought. I am not the best with my Google calendar. He is full of sweetness. He draws it from me too. I feel my heart grow with him. He too is a gardener. He often wakes me and puts me to sleep with affectionate messages. It is joy to have days begin and end with his texts, though I see him about once a week. Our work and home-lives are at the center of our lives. He is not solo poly. I am, but what does that mean? My daughter is the anchor of my house.
 
Monday 5pm: “So it looks like this weekend is a no go. I miscalculated my weeks….” My dear friend and lover in another province asks to re-schedule our visit. He is a novice at nonmonogamy Google-calendaring. I understand. “The extra few weeks will only increase the joy we have in seeing each other,” I say. And yes, it’s okay if he visits even now that my teenage daughter has moved to live with me after several years living with her dad. Of course, I am open with her about polyamory. I am bad at hiding things. And ethical nonmonogamy is not shameful. I want my daughter to know there are options besides compulsory monogamy, and marriage. And I am only attracted to kind people. I would not bring anyone around her who is not kind. “Oh she knows about us,” I tell him. “She likes you. She thinks you’re cute.” (I didn’t tell him the rest: “….like a puppy.” My girl loves dogs more than humans.) He laughs.
 
Monday 11pm: I just went to bed, after tucking in my daughter who is still sick with a cold, and cuddly when she is sick. Otherwise, her autonomy is quickly increasing. A little ding on my phone. Is it my sweetie across town? He’s an early-to-bed person. Probably not. Is the one I adore in another province? Surprise! It’s a man I was newly seeing when I left Austin last year. He and I started slowly: Busy schedules, work, our respective children, my two main partners, our friends. And his wife, who I now email and message with more than him. She keeps me apprised of their lives. I’ve gotten to know them better since I moved away. We share in common the experience of having artistic children, and a belief that love should proliferate, not be contained by monogamy. She is so lovely. But this time, it is him catching me up on their lives by text. I tell him I’ll be in Austin in July. We make plans. He sends me a picture of him in his Texas boots kicking back in a field of bluebonnets. Be still, my beating heart. I love that land, those skies. He too is one to be seriously doted on. He is a good partner to his wife, a good dad, a good person. He is a good friend and potential lover to me. Plus, BOOTS. He says he has a sexy photo for me too….if I want it? Sexier than boots in bluebonnets? Oh yes, I want.
 
Tuesday 7:00am:  Sexy pic arrives.  I get on my rower with energy. A great start to the day.
 
Sunday 3pm: I make plans in late April in Vancouver with a steady partner I left in Austin. It was not easy to leave there. It was a good life. But I am drawn to places where Indigenous presence is more visible. I am giving a keynote at a polyamory conference in Vancouver.[5] He will fly up to meet me and also attend the conference. He would rather go there than visit Edmonton. Go figure! (Edmonton is the main city of my heart now. I have brief dalliances with Vancouver a few times a year.) He and I shall walk all over Vancouver. I will go vegan with him for a few days. His vegan philosophy runs counter to my view on things, but it is fundamental to who he is. And he makes me laugh even when I eat vegan food. With his well-coiffed hair and his pastel-colored, always immaculate shirts, one might take him for a political party staffer on a night out. He looks normative, but good. Yet he is quirky and unusual on the inside. He is from one of the most cosmopolitan cities on earth. He relocated to Texas and stayed. I am enamored of his contradictions, and our contradictions together. He is fun. And despite our considerable differences, we are fun together.
 
Three Sundays ago: “Standing on the street…my instrument wrapped around me…Here I am, thinking of you. I miss your beautiful smile. How I miss the challenge of your towering intellect.”
 
This text. Made my month. Would it not yours?
 
That former lover and always mind-mate is one of the most talented and interesting human beings I will ever know. He texted me from his southern city. I will be there for another talk, also in April. We made plans. I will be able to hear him play music again, hear his distinct voice and laugh. Connections take many forms. Sometimes they involve human bodies touching, or human bodies wrapped in voluptuous arms of brass. Bodies connect with cityscapes, with thousands of bluebonnets, and the sultry air of a southern city. We will eat decadent southern food together. There will be much meat. Our two bodies will be wrapped in each other’s voices and laughter. Who knows what else? One is open.
 
This is how polyamory works for me.  Both my mother and a mentor told me when I was in my twenties, “Never burn bridges.” I’ve almost always followed that advice. Think of how one is with platonic friends. Those one connects with deeply. One can go years. Pick up where we leave off amidst each other’s meandering lives. This is how I am with friends and lovers. My lovers are almost always also my friends, where we are able to move into, out of, and sometimes back into romantic engagement. This is different than the common “friend with benefits” (FWB) idea. FWB often implies a public face of the relationship where the sexual engagement is a hidden fact. While I am not one to publicly display much physical affection, neither am I interested in hiding romantic feelings. FWB, counter-intuitively, seems conditioned by the dominant societal ideal that sex is only legitimately attached to the real, authentic (assumed monogamous) romantic relationship. So sex between "just friends" is somewhat illicit, gets hidden. FWB seems to both denigrate the power of sex in and of itself ("it's just sex") and denigrate friendship as a "real" relationship ("we’re just friends"). FWB thus seems ironically to privilege the ideal of the mononormative and compulsory sexual couple. But all of my intimate relationships are real relationships. Sex with appropriate persons and with robust consent can be a beautiful experience. Yet sex isn’t some special signifier of authentic love. True love can exist absent sexual connection. I have a couple of friends with whom there is no sexual contact, and I consider them as among the great loves and supports of my life. There are those also those people who identify as asexual but who love romantically in both monogamous and polyamorous ways.
 
A current lover once broke up with me. He said he wasn't ready for a relationship. It was both a funny and sad moment. I said to him, “We are in a relationship even if you break up with me. Will we not always be friends, like we have been for years? That’s a relationship.” He agreed on the friends part. But he didn’t think he could do ethical nonmonogamy. And after his long marriage, as much as he liked me, he might want to pursue others. He had my blessing. But he wasn’t ready to process polyamory and the idea that we could have other-than-platonic love and touch between us, yet also pursue that with other people at the same time. Friends with benefits or serial monogamy made sense to him, and they don’t work for me. And most importantly for both of us, he didn’t seem to understand that it is possible to cultivate deep intimacy while living life off the relationship escalator[6]--outside of normative couple structures, e.g. cohabitation and marriage. From his point of view, there was freedom or getting trapped. So “falling for” someone made him nervous. I laugh, but not at him. I laugh at how absurd and oppressive settler society has made the project of love and fidelity. Faithful and loving nonmonogamy is counter-intuitive to social norms that draw hard lines between friend and lover, sex and other kinds of intimacy and touch. These lines prompt us to be stingy and possessive with love and affection, and to view it as inappropriate except in the narrowest of circumstances, to attach it to a one-way relationship escalator. In my form of ethical nonmonogamy, I do not draw such lines, nor am I interested in tackling someone onto an escalator. I love him, whether we have sex or not and no matter who else he has sex and love with. As a solo polyamorous person, falling for him never scared me, whatever happens. I cherish each of my eggs. Occasionally one breaks. But not putting them all in one basket means I have others to sustain me. After a hiatus in our romantic relationship (no hiatus in friendship), he’s pondering my polyamory again. This makes me happy. 
 
Five Wednesday’s ago. My avowed monogamist daughter spoke up at the end of a group conversation in Trondheim, Norway, where I traveled for work. She was the only young person in a group of adults, all Indigenous people, testifying to one another about the trials of living under colonialism. One topic of conversation was settler-imposed sexuality and family structures. My daughter shared: “At first my Mom’s polyamory freaked me out. But I was younger. I didn’t get it. Now I understand, and it has taught me that I don’t have to choose one group of friends over another. I don’t have to be in a clique at school. I can have lunch with one group of kids this day, and a totally different group of kids the next. Sometimes they don’t understand, and they get offended, but I like to have different kinds of people in my life.”
 
That is the kind of nonmonogamy I too practiced as a teenager, back in my Midwestern and not-at-all-cosmopolitan childhood, long before I understood that polyamory was a possibility. I liked and was often liked in return by nerds, rockers, cheerleaders, athletes, band kids, theatre kids, and kids that crossed race and class lines. I willed myself at about the age my daughter is now to not limit myself to one crowd, to promiscuously consider many possibilities that came my way, not to covet or be jealous. Maybe I was naturally a nonmonogamist. Or maybe I was just so interested in people and the world that I developed strategies for having as much of it as I could. If I never left my childhood homes in rural South Dakota or the Twin Cities of Minnesota, I have no doubt I would be in part who I am now: In whatever configuration I could manage, spinning webs of diverse care and relations. Polyamory is one more way to enact that.
 
As ever,
The Critical Polyamorist
 
[1] See our Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/tipiconfessions/. Also see the webpage and podcast of our parent show, Bedpost Confessions, produced by Sadie Smythe, Julie Gillis, and Mia Martina, out of Austin, Texas, https://bedpostconfessions.com.
[2] Stay tuned for my eventual unpacking of “solo polyamory” within a context of critical Indigenous relationality. Polyamory is, I am aware, a form of settler sexuality but one in which I find partial decolonization. It is a weigh station as I learn to disaggregate settler sexuality and kinship into good relations.
[3] For more on solo polyamory, check out these two-oft read articles. Aggiesez. “What is Solo Polyamory? My Take.” SOLOPOLY: Life, Relationships, and Dating as a Free Agent. December 5, 2014. Available at: https://solopoly.net/2014/12/05/what-is-solo-polyamory-my-take/. And Elisabeth A. Sheff. “Solo Polyamory, Singleish, Single & Poly.” Pyschology Today. October 14, 2013. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-polyamorists-next-door/201310/solo-polyamory-singleish-single-poly
[4] I am very much in conversation with Angela Willey, and her book Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016.
[5] See the SoloPolyCon 2017 conference Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1261631220560643/.
[6] Aggiesez. “Riding the Relationship Escalator (Or Not). ” SOLOPOLY: Life, Relationships, and Dating as a Free Agent. November 29, 2012. Available at: https://solopoly.net/2012/11/29/riding-the-relationship-escalator-or-not/.