from monogamy to polygamy and back again
I’m sweating through my eyeliner as I pull my forearms away from the sticky bar, slick with a layer of Vodka and Red Bull. Birdcage is just starting to pick up, and I’m shoulder to shoulder with coupled lesbians crooning into necks and femme bisexuals flanked by twinks who talk loudly into each other’s ears whilst their eyes periodically dart to their phones. I feel someone sidle up to me and I slide to the right reflexively.
“Cara!?”
I recognise the person but the dim lighting, alcohol and copious amounts of amyl I’ve partaken in earlier mean that there’s a rude blockage in my brain that prevents the recall. In response, I settle on a drawn-out “Heyyyyyyy!” as if the elongated greeting will fill the space their name should have occupied. They have a blond pixie cut, impeccable eye makeup, and dangly blue earrings made from perspex, the kind you would find at an overpriced Glebe Markets stall that sell for $45 a pop. They talk excitedly, and I half pay attention, trying to remember why and how I know them.
“How’s Adam?” they ask with a smirk.
Ahhh. Now I remember. My boyfriend has a plethora of internet friends who follow me periodically whenever he tags me in his stories. I reply with the usual spiel — fine, working, still living at home. They order a gin and tonic and continue immediately after I respond, barely registering my small talk.
“I was just wondering because like, he’s been sending me nudes and stuff? So random!”
I suddenly realise how drunk I am, and how loud our conversation has been against the thumping background of Ariana Grande.
“Oh, really?” The ‘really’ comes out as a sharp exhalation of breath, a half laugh.
“Yeah! Like horny videos and stuff. Did you know about that?” Their demeanour is so non-chalant and amiable that I almost believe the response I pull out of my ass.
“Oh yeah, he does that! That’s just Adam.” I grin but I can’t be sure my smile meets my eyes.
“Ok cool! Just wanted to make sure that you knew so that’s good. Anyways, how’s your night been?”
I move away from the encounter with a strange disassociation. Did someone just tell me in the middle of a lesbian club night that my boyfriend was sexting them while I remained blissfully unaware? Surely not. Surely sending nudes to other people on Instagram without your partner’s knowledge is just what happens eventually in long-term relationships, akin to bickering about the toilet seat and attending christenings together. I rejoin my friends and gaslight myself into forgetting the encounter for the night, a reprieve that proves to be short-lived.
For the next two weeks the knowledge that my boyfriend of two years has been and probably still is technically cheating on me churns in my gut like I’ve swallowed thick smoke. I don’t tell anyone, not even my close friends, because interestingly enough I don’t feel anger, pain, or sadness. I don’t even know how to react to the information, particularly because I was no saint in this relationship either — a year prior I had my first ever sexual experience with someone of the same sex when I cheated on Adam with a woman I had funnily enough also met at Birdcage (a notably feral situation which included large amounts of MDMA and a carrot standing in for a dildo). I confessed this to him on the journey home from her house, sobbing and coated in a layer of molly sweat. We worked through it without much fanfare and eventually, it became essentially an in-joke between us. Still, the guilt ate at me; what right did I have to feel betrayal when my indiscretion was arguably worse? I felt like I was at the centre of some strangely stale karmic event.
Later, I’m drunk in a Maccas in Wollongong with my friend Rachael and the truth I learnt spills out over my hash browns and Coke No Sugar. She is appalled, insistent that what Adam did was fucked up and that I should confront him about it on the ASAP. I remain sceptical. I don’t feel that angry. I’m more curious than anything, and my friend’s reaction stokes doubt within me. I feel as if my relative composure might be indicative of an inherent lack of love in our relationship, which I know isn’t right because I care about him so deeply that I’m left essentially only buggered by the fact that he was keeping secrets from me (that, and I have an attachment style which includes issues with being a people pleaser and not being able to understand and articulate my needs… but let’s move on)
I figure it’s finally time to give up the ghost. The following Monday evening, I gently confronted Adam about the sexting, completely derailing our ritual of silent mutual screen time. I watch his face turn sour and he goes quiet, apologizing softly like a scolded puppy. I explained that I wasn’t even angry about the sexting itself, more that he did it behind my back, and I felt that I deserved better than the way I found out. Once I feel somewhat satisfied with his apology, I make my pitch: I’m obviously, demonstrably more than a little gay, and you seem to be finding joy in exploring digital gratification from others that I cannot provide. If we are both so desperate to push the boundaries of this relationship, why not open it up?
I see Adam soften a little, more surprised at my suggestion than my finding out about the Instagram messages. He emerges from his shame cloud as I continue to state my case. “I think we could date other people, but obviously keep our relationship priority one, and let each other know if and when we are going on dates so we can plan around it, but like, we won’t share any details with each other. I don’t wanna know specifics. But like, I want to know if you had a good time and how your dates went, you know? I don’t know. What do you think?” My face is red after trying to ask for something I want that I don’t yet know how to describe.
Adam agrees to my proposal, and to the initial parameters involved without much to add. Perhaps he had whiplash from the speed at which he was accused, tried and effectively exonerated in the space of ten minutes, fearing that anything he added would overturn the result. We go back to our mutual screen time, side by side, wondering what length of time is appropriate to wait before we download Hinge.
I was warned that polygamy involves copious amounts of both emotional and logistical admin, but only after I had already enmeshed myself in its luxurious depths. To make it even harder, there are no official guidelines or rules for polyamory in a real-world sense (apart from the occasional advice gleaned from an Instagram infographic) and the likelihood that anything found on Google actually fits into the complex emotional triage happening not only in your brain, but your partner’s, is slim. You can only hope that you have an opportunity to interrogate someone you know who has gone through it before, and even then you will find yourself at a loss when trying to marry their unique experience to yours.
For the duration of my open relationship, I consistently fielded questions from people both inside and outside my immediate circle about how it all worked. I don’t get it, how can you juggle all those people? Do you tell each other about your dates? Does he fuck other people in your bed?! I found myself explaining our processes even though I still didn’t yet have the vocabulary or experience to really understand why it worked, or what we did to make it work, or why at times it felt so positive and freeing. In some cases, I defended our agreement to people who responded to the knowledge that I had multiple partners as if they were being mildly threatened. They always made it known, politely, that they could NEVER do that because they were just too normal, too jealous, too protective. Regardless of how open minded that person appeared to be, it always coaxed out my long-buried shameful regard for my sexual appetite, my desperate, stinking need for more. The fact that even their passing judgement had this effect on me still pisses me off. This anger became a reflection of my fear of the vast unknown within; that the internal bog of desire I kept at bay would flood and soil the clean hems of everyone that surrounded me. At the beginning, I knew what we were doing was okay because it simply felt right. My ex and I traipsed our way into a new type of existence that worked for us and ended up being an integral period of growth and love in our relationship and individual futures.
Nowadays, instead of stumbling through a conversation about my sex life while trying to avoid judgement or pointedly invasive questions, I often welcome conversations with friends who are new to polygamy about what they are going through and why it can be so tough. I validate their experiences and offer my own in solidarity, and they turn their little faces toward me like the Pixar lamp; inquisitive, eager to find a solution, eager, sometimes, to be absolved of guilt.
I find it funny that something certainly not new can be so elusive to the general population. You kind of stumble into polygamy like a baby deer, and come out with a certain type of skillset only gained by fucking many different kinds of people in a lot of different contexts, and making a lot of mistakes while doing so. Luckily, many people are more vocal than ever now about their sex lives (including me, sorry). The silver lining to entering this new albeit occasionally cringe-worthy reality is that we have better access to ways of being and loving and connecting than ever before.
My motivation for opening my relationship with my ex included two main reasons; Firstly, I was starting to realize that I was deeply, intrinsically, irrevocably bisexual and wanted to explore this hugely important part of my life without shame and without losing the healthy and loving relationship that I had. Secondly, if he could lean into his basest instincts and fuck around on the clock, why couldn’t I? It was as if something had clicked for me that night that Rachael and I had our inebriated debate over how much shit I was supposed to be giving him after his betrayal — what happens if I open this door wider, rather than close it? How hard could it really be? Surely not any harder than finding out that your boyfriend is sexting other people while you’re at a gay bar.
This reasoning, while important at the time, seems shallow now. It merely scratches the surface of what polyamory gave me in the end. The reality is that I learnt so much more about myself and the people that I love and have loved than I ever could have without it. For the record, I am in no way suggesting that I am a professional at this stuff, or the most experienced, or have the best insight. Nor am I suggesting that you have to have the intention to further humanity when becoming open or poly — most people don’t, even if they act like they do once they have a few notches on their belt and the discourse-y terminology to prove it. If your motivation is impure at best, I have no problem with that, either. All I’m saying is that polygamy can be an incredibly innovative tool for personal development in modern dating and relationships, queer and straight, and I’m here to tell you why.
Now that I am in a monogamous relationship and the ways in which I express, discover and embrace my sexuality are different, I question how much my identity comes into how beneficial polyamory was for me. If I examine the zeniths and nadirs of my polygamous period, I note clear traits that led to both events — most of my successes and failures were because of work that I did and mistakes that I made, rather than the influence of other people. This can be both a blessing and a curse, depending on how far along you are in your journey of self-acceptance — when you are dating men and women, and non-binary people, and multiple people at once, and dating couples, and also in a throuple, it’s kind of hard to ignore your shitty qualities or the areas you are lacking relationship-wise and odds are one of your partners is going to bring them up. The nature of your engineering is revealed to you in unavoidable sticky gobs; it is therefore imperative that you embrace the stains.
Allow me to elaborate with a personal example; unfortunately, I love spending money. As much as I loathe the silk straightjacket of capitalism and consumerism, and the desire to own things, buying stuff makes me feel good. It soothes the sting of boredom, depression, self-doubt, sadness, and long days at work. It puts duct tape over the mouth of existential dread. I don’t want to be a material person, nor do I believe money or possessions will lead to a fulfilling happiness, but I’m thankfully enlightened enough now to understand the function it has in my life and why it helps at times and hinders at others. The same can be said for the way I view sex. There is a part of me that craves a dangerous liaison, a dramatic tryst engorged with lust and sweat and late-night fluttering of the heart. More than this, as I’ve mentioned before, is an untampered hedonism when it comes to the pleasures of the flesh. I want to try everything, and I want everyone to try me, all at once. In my core, I covet without end. I know from experience that if you mix this kind of biblical promiscuity with other various less-than-desirable personality traits, i.e. my impulsivity, my tendency to people please, my stubborn nature — you will usually push the pleasure button in blinding self-servitude without checking the terms and conditions of the experiment you signed up for. The issue is that this is not a victimless crime, and once my reverie had broken if it was not me that had suffered it was one or more of my partners.
It was partly because of this that at the end of my first queer relationship I experienced the worst heartbreak I have ever felt. I truly wanted to die. I felt I had lost something so integral to my being that when it left I became a shell of a person. The fact that I was mainly responsible for the split was even worse — it ate at the hatred I had for myself and I fell into a spiral of shame and guilt so intense that I only felt a semblance of happiness when they offered a window into their emotion, a glimpse into any joy they experienced in their day during our messy drawn out breakup. Unfortunately, I took for granted their openness as hegemonic to mine, that my nonchalance in my sexual liberation meant that all of my partners had the same views or experiences about casual hookups and flirtations. I didn’t account soon enough for the wounds their past relationships gave them, how sore they still were, how intensely we felt for each other and how delicate I should have treated the intensity of that love. That, and I made mistakes that furthered this distrust. As such, our insecurities rubbed up against each other — them in desperate need of stability and trust, me consistently searching for approval and validation from not only them, but people outside of our relationship whose brief brush with my sticky needs, my sweating desire for stimulation and acceptance barely soothed my wounds, a selfish salve that had disastrous side effects.
I did a number of other shitty things while I was open. I (thought) I was in love with a man who was, at the time of our lengthy situation-ship, emotionally distant and sparked distrust in my closest partners. Despite this, I continued to see him, the reprieve he gave me from facing the shitty aspects of my closest relationships a handy outlet to swerve confronting the reality of my needs. I kissed someone who I shouldn’t have kissed, at the entirely wrong time, lied about it, and blamed it on booze. I secretly fantasized about people that I shouldn’t have and stayed quiet in the pursuit of validation when I should have been asking for love. I highlight these specific indiscretions to emphasize that contrary to popular belief, non-monogamous relationships are not a free-for-all. You may encounter the need for boundaries you didn’t even know you had. Polyamory is not necessarily having your cake and eating it too. Sometimes you really shouldn’t have that much cake.
That all said, if it were not for this messy search for dopamine, excitement and orgasm, I would not have realized things about myself that have made me understand why I want the things that I want, that I am not alone in my exploration, and that pushing beyond the fear of my untamed urges can lead to experiences and community that I would have otherwise never have known. Polyamory taught me that I am a people pleaser, that a proper apology means you take responsibility for your actions with action itself, and that doing things the easy way because you fear losing someone can be a very selfish way of existence. It proved to me that having sex with men as a means of self-actualization has an endpoint, and entering into sexual relationships with men where I did not know or ask for what I want was providing diminishing returns. In having relationships with people who were not men, I began to relish in my queerness and deepen my respect for physical connection that involved communication, trust and empathy. It taught me that my sexuality was vibrant and vast, that I am at once a masochist and exhibitionist, that I could get railed by three different people in front of an eager crowd at an orgy and spanked with a studded paddle, all while fairly sober, and feel higher than I ever have afterwards. I have grown to love my feral nature, to respect its part in making me whole.
As I have touched on before, I often have to remind myself that my perspective is not the only one that exists. I know this sounds worrying, but the fact of the matter is that I have been shaped in a world that values me in a sexual context above all others. If I can do no other things well, as long as I can fuck, or be a slut, or take a dick, I have a place in the world and my path to that place is fairly well-worn. Being polyamorous, I found I surrounded myself with people who mostly shared the same beliefs and experiences about sex that I did. If you are not careful this can create a kind of vacuum. Fortunately, my feminism has since evolved, but I still take for granted that others (namely men) will embrace my sexuality even at its most brazen.
Enter the love of my life: Luke. When we started dating at the end of one breakup and the beginning of a second, he very sweetly explained that polyamory was not for him and that if he were to get serious it would need to be monogamous between us. Initially I was somewhat apprehensive; I wasn’t sure if I could put all of my eggs in one basket after having them spread around the coop for so long. I felt that my brain had been re-wired. As I am wont to do, I ignored my internal logic and threw myself headfirst into my crush. A month later, the decision to become fully monogamous was made for us — my ex and I broke up after five years together, three-ish years of being open and one session of couple’s therapy.
A self-described “serial monogamist” from a Sydney Anglican upbringing in the Northern Beaches, Luke and I have time and again worked through emotional barriers from my work or personal relationships that have made us both feel jealous, threatened or confused. In these moments I would often become frustrated, my shame regurgitating as a blubbering tantrum. I sometimes felt like the black sheep of the relationship; a deviant hell-bent on unwittingly destroying our relationship from the inside out. Now I know that this is a story that my anxiety tells me and that the values, freedoms and beliefs about myself that I was holding on to don’t actually serve me in my current reality. Luke never tries to oppress my persona but simply works to understand it, and remains inquisitive, calm and patient in these moments. He never completely rejects any notion but ensures his boundaries are made known in the present.
In addition, Luke has done so much work to unlearn his prejudices about sex and love in light of our relationship. Just as I never imagined loving more than one person before I first tried polygamy, Luke had always viewed sex as intrinsically linked to love, making most of his sexual experiences pretty romantic and intense. At the outset of our relationship, he was as intimidated by my body count as I was by the intensity of his adoration, worried that he wouldn’t be able to show me a love that was equal to that of multiple people. Recently I asked him how my history has influenced these views. He described a steadily growing liberation from the toxic masculinity inherent in the jealousy he for so long felt was commonplace and “normal”, simply a part of having a girlfriend; learning through situations that were both painful and joyful that sex can be an expression of a range of different things — friendship, boredom, love, curiosity, self-care etc., and that understanding this has deepened his trust in our love and how special it is. He admitted that he was previously wary of his girlfriend’s having close male friends for fear of there being sexual attraction between them. Now aware of the inherent insecurity that this reflects (and, to be honest, homophobia) and the reality that finding people outside of your relationship attractive is quite normal if not human, we continue to foster each other’s individual desires with a kind curiosity, resolute in our knowledge that this does not undermine our love for one another. It has led us to an open exchange of thoughts about sex, gender and sexuality and to respect that we can each have our own desires. Understanding and expressing these desires opens doors for us to create a new experience that is better than we had in the past, and to recognise how wrong we both were to be scared that two people who loved so hard could ever fail in loving each other as we needed to be loved.
I do believe that Luke and I met at a time in both of our lives that meant we were willing to be the most honest we had ever been in a relationship, and with this honesty trust harder than we had before. When I was polygamous, I always touted that the trust I had for my partners was fairly simple because I lived without the fear of infidelity. While this is true in some sense, if you don’t know what you need or aren’t willing to be honest about it, things can fall apart quickly. There is always room for a lie, and betrayal is something we never want to dabble in again.
It hasn’t always been easy, and the gratitude I feel for Luke, with his giant reservoir of patience, understanding and humility is something I continue to aspire to as our relationship moves forward into the forever. I am also incredibly grateful to the people I have loved, dated, fingered, hooked up with, sexted, and spoken to who have left their mark on me in all of their delightful and delirious ways; without them I would not know that my love will never be finite, and that I have so much more left to learn.
As someone who has enmeshed herself on both sides of the spectrum, I can safely say that polygamy has a lot more to offer than what initially meets the eye. Apart from the drastically positive change in the way I communicate with my partners, I have deepened my respect for different modes of love and gained a better understanding of myself. I, and in turn the person I plan to spend the rest of my life with, have unlearnt heteronormative ideas about love and relationships learnt in our upbringing that were toxic to us and the people in our lives without us even knowing it. This has brought forth a respect for the imperative nature of honesty with yourself and with others, a reminder to explore jealousy in what it can teach you about your needs, to take responsibility for yourself, for the good and the bad, and embrace shame, the ickiest and gooiest of all emotions.
These are skills that you can apply to all other areas of your life, in being a good ally to sex workers, to queer people, to people from different cultures who love in ways that are ancient and sacred. What do you stand to gain from learning new things? What do you stand to lose from holding on to the past? How does it serve you?
If you have made it to the end of this lengthy rant and you still can’t see the positives, or if your argument is that polygamy is indulgent or hedonistic, consider this; Monogamy can be just as luxurious. In the right circumstances, you are completely connected and enthralled with one person. You spend all of your time with them, in your thoughts and outside them. You pay for them, cook for them, eat with them, kiss them, and touch them, you give and receive from another when it can sometimes be so hard to do that even just for yourself.
If you ask me, that is sluttier than any polycule I can imagine.