“Keep your married hands off me!”
Hugo writes, in a post that touches on marriage, monogamy, and spiritual growth:
Monogamy (of which I am a fan) is the single best vehicle for personal growth that I know. I’ll accept that there are some who are capable of radical transformation without a life partner to push them. But I am convinced that one of the reasons why so many of the rest of us are hungry for romantic relationship is because we want a partner with whom we can build a better life for ourselves and for the world at large. Once the initial chemistry starts to fade, what keeps the commitment going is often hard work. That hard work has a tremendous potential payoff: extraordinary intimacy between two people, sure, but it also produces a couple whose ability to be of service to the world is often much greater than it would have been had they both stayed single.
I know I’ll leave the promiscuous and the polyamorous spluttering, but I am convinced that there are only two paths to spiritual growth: celibacy and monogamy. Those genuinely called to the former are, well, few. Most of us, I think, will be at our best either in a monogamous relationship or preparing ourselves for one.
(And then the part about “spluttering” gets withdrawn after discussion in the comments, but I won’t get into that.)
And now, just to be provocative, here’s a renegade Mormon polygamist on why his marital system is the greatest vehicle for personal growth (quote from Dorothy Allred Solomon’s Predators, Prey, and Other Kinfolk):
… if the prime factor leading men to practice plural marriage as taught by Latter-day Saints was gratification of lustful desire … who would take such an expensive way, ever beset with trial, hardship and sacrifice? There is too ready at hand the common means and practice of approved society by which men can satisfy their sexual desires simply by paying a few measly dollars and the forgetting of further care and responsibility….
Only the purest religious motives, strengthened by deep love for wife and children will enable a man to pay the price modern civilization will exact. If one is strong enough to pay this high price, what is the reward? First, a multiplicity of offspring … the chief measure of our glory in the future kingdom over which righteous living will permit us to reign as kings and queens. Another reward of eternal magnitude … is the development of the true spirit of charity and self-sacrifice. No other school through which the mortal can pass has the ability to develop these Godlike attributes that righteous living of the law of plural marriage.
Now, as I said in a different comment thread at Hugo’s blog, I’m not a real relativist when it comes to relationships. I’m a semi-relativist. The way I see it, if I were an extreme non-relativist, I’d be inclined to believe, not only that what felt right or wrong to me in a relationship was absolute, but that everyone else knows I’m right, and is just pretending otherwise out of selfishness or whatever. And I’ve run into that sort of person: not only is abortion wrong, but every woman who has one is aware of this and wracked by guilt, not only is homosexuality wrong, but deep down gay people know how dubious and unloving their relationships are, not only is casual sex wrong, but nobody really enjoys it. I think that, in general, people are aware they’re doing wrong (and have to stifle that knowledge) when they can visibly see that they’re hurting another person who’s right there with them, otherwise our feelings are all over the map. Being a semi-relativist lets me realize that some of the choices that look bad to me may genuinely look good to someone else.
But being a “real relativist†seems to me to involve commiting myself in advance to the idea that whatever people say they like is equally good and healthy, that there are no ways of doing relationships that are more healthy or workable than others, and that people are best off making decisions as little units of two without looking outside themselves at all. And that’s not where I am.
So, when it comes to monogamy, I’m on Hugo’s side; I’m for it. But for slightly different reasons than the ones he’s giving here. For me, it’s not a matter of personal growth, really. It’s not a matter of self-discipline (OK, obviously self-discipline is involved in staying faithful, but I don’t favor monogamy because of the self-discipline involved). Rather, I think that as a system, the world where it’s considered normal to expect married couples to be faithful to each other works better, for more people, than the world where the norm and expectation is otherwise. The world where it’s normal to say, “Keep your married hands off me!” (to borrow a line from Dreamgirls) is better than either the world where marital fidelity is assumed to be merely a private arrangement or the world where people actually normally form multiple marriages.
In making this judgment, I make, of course, a set of assumptions about human nature, and how we generally work. I assume that sexual jealousy comes naturally to most people, and is hard to control. I assume that we’re largely a pair bonding species. I assume that, though one may not be your absolute favorite as the number of sexual partners you would want to have, it’s generally your most favorite number in the world as the number of sexual partners you want your spouse to have. And I assume that, difficult though fidelity sometimes is, overcoming sexual jealousy to the point where you’d maintain a stable long-term relationship through multiple affairs with other people is even harder, for most people.
I also make assumptions about how polygamous relationships generally work. I assume that it’s no accident that polygamy is generally one-sided, and associated with social inequality. Since one is the number of sexual partners you want your spouse to have, you’re much more likely to accept sister-wives in a culture or subculture where your husband is boss than in a world where you’re both equal, and free to walk away easily. I assume that polyamory (free and equal poly relationships for both sexes) will only work on a small scale, and for people who particularly short on sexual jealousy, and that on a larger scale it will be unstable. And I assume that what’s most likely and stable in polygamy will be the system that favors powerful men – men can take plural wives and women can’t take plural husbands – and that it will be bad for women (and tied to wifely submission) and bad for low status men. Etc.
Finally, I assume that, though we can enforce our norms harshly or mildly, we’re never really going to live in the world of no sexual norms at all. So, you can ask “does this pick my pocket or break my leg” and wonder whether we should really be using police power to raid polygamous households (if no abuse of minors is going on). And maybe the answer is no, we won’t do police raids, but we’ll support groups helping women leave polygamous marriages. Or whatever. But we’ll never live in the world where we each make our decisions as individuals and have no expectations at all as to what is normal.
But all of these assumptions that I make are assumptions about people in general, about what I think works on a large scale. They say nothing about whether anyone’s most ethical individual choice involves polygamy. Sure, the world where men can take many wives, and I should discipline myself to accept it, is not a world I’d prefer to live in. But maybe if you already live in that culture, your most ethical choice, in some particular case, might be to take the multiple wives and deal as fairly with them as you can. I don’t know otherwise. And certainly, once you already have the multiple wives, suddenly divorcing all but one of them is unlikely to be your most ethical move.
It also says nothing about whether every individual person will experience the most personal growth out of monogamy. Maybe some people are happily experiencing more personal growth from their consensually open, polyamorous relationships than they would from monogamy. I don’t have any way of knowing otherwise.
What I know is that being able to display rings and things to the world that say, we made a public promise, and now we’re both off the market, is, in general, one of the perks of marriage.
May 10th, 2007 at 5:35 am
You know what they say about assumptions…. and you’re certainly making a LOT of them (especially when it comes to polygamous and polyamorous relationships). *insert rolling eyes here*
May 10th, 2007 at 6:52 am
Oh, totally, Tammy. And they’re assumptions that are true of some polygamous and polyamorous relationships (I’m in the middle of reading a book that shows polygamy’s darker side, and in which even the most honorable polygamists are living it out in a very patriarchal form). Empirically, it’s true that patriarchal polygamy outnumbers egalitarian polyamory, that people choosing non-monogamous partners when they can freely choose monogamous ones are a minority, and that for most people, having multiple relationships at once is something they try in college (or maybe for brief periods between relationships), and don’t get to work that well.
But I did mark these assumptions out as assumptions about how *people in general* are likely to act, if they live in circumstances where being open to polygamy is an *expected* thing. Where the weight of social approval, if spouses/lovers disagree, is in favor of setting aside jealousy and welcoming those extra relationships whether you like it or not. I know people who’ve gone the open relationship route for approximately as long as my husband and I have been married (and we’ve been married nineteen years), and it isn’t patriarchal or one-sided, and is much more satisfying, for them, than what I’ve described. But it also was chosen at the outset, by people who were quite free to have chosen monogamous relationships, who could have marked out their relationship to the world as monogamous if they’d wanted to (and had that respected without discussion, not constantly up for negotiation the way people’s sexual boundaries are when they’re dating), and who weren’t under the influence of any kind of spiritual pressure to accept extra partners.
Believing that most people are happier with monogamy than the alternative isn’t the same thing as believing that nobody is happy with the alternative. Because, no matter what the downsides of polygamy/polyamory, it does also seem to me to be just as empirically true that some people, sometimes, are happy with it, as that the patriarchal and unequal forms outnumber the equal forms, and most people don’t choose it in the world where they’re equal and free to leave once the poly relationships start.
May 10th, 2007 at 7:05 am
Also, bear in mind that there’s a *huge* gradation of just how monogamy-friendly your norms could be. Even something as mild as “are you *sure* your spouse is OK with this” (and letting yourself be persuaded by both people that they really are OK with the open relationship) is still a monogamy-favoring norm, not a neutral one. If the world at large has an opinion on who’s right if the partners disagree, there’s a norm present. And generally, when it comes to monogamy, the world at large does have an opinion, one way or the other, on who’s right if the partners disagree.
May 11th, 2007 at 6:24 am
What you tend to describe however is a weighted/jaded relationship. If people aren’t open, honest and BLUNT about their preferences and in their communication within the relationship, then it’s no one’s fault but themselves if they end up in a relationship that they merely “tolerate.” Yes, people still choose monogamy. It is the society norm based on religious culture and generations of societal normative behavior. doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong, but it doesn’t have to be the only option for the individual because we ARE individuals. Not sure what I’m trying to argue here except to say that generalizations and assumptions shouldn’t carry the weight of our opinions when discussing human emotions and relationships.
And FWIW, I’m the “single” part of a polyamorous triad (my partners have been married for almost 14 years). We’ve been together as a family for almost 18 months…. and with honest, open and blunt communication it’s getting better and better.
May 11th, 2007 at 11:17 am
Yes, I’m describing the weighted relationships. I tend to think that pressured polygamy sucks, on average, to a worse degree than pressured monogamy does (which isn’t to say that pressured monogamy is without its own flaws).
I agree with you about the value of being open, honest, and BLUNT. I wouldn’t go so far as to say “it’s nobody’s fault but themselves”; social pressures can be pretty hard for any of us to resist (and lots of us have trouble resisting milder degrees of patriarchy than what some of these relationships face). But I’d agree on the value of owning your own preferences enough that you can get a relationship beyond one you’d merely “tolerate.”
The other thing is, in some cases (particularly the college overlapping relationships – the open kind, not the kind where it’s outright cheating), people are honest enough about what they’re doing, but not *thorough* enough in what they wind up telling each other.
On the whole individual vs. norm thing, the way I see it is that it’s neither enough to say just that individuals differ, nor to just look at what may be most comfortable for the majority. It’s also a question of what sort of a thing you think minority preference X is. Is it the sort of thing where people can pretty much sort out for themselves if it suits them, the way people can figure out for themselves if they like tripe? Then leave the tripe-lovers alone, to do their own thing; it doesn’t matter how much most people may not want to eat tripe. Is it the sort of thing where people often make bad choices about whether they’re suited to it, but you still think both choices are worth preserving? Then it may not be so much a matter of leaving each person alone to make their own choices, as of talking about what makes X work or not, and what questions you need to ask to discern whether you’re really meant for X. Or do you see X as basically of no value, and dangerous for most people to choose? And the few people for whom it works just got lucky and escaped its general badness? Then you go for the moralistic sermons. And I think there are probably ways of doing relationships that fit just about everywhere on this range (though we can argue a whole lot about which things go where).
May 13th, 2007 at 3:11 am
Tammy,
Thank you so much for weighing in and sharing your experience. My mind and heart have been much opened on this recently by coming to dearly love a woman friend/spiritual sister who is working on building a stable and healthy triad with two guys who have been together for a while. She’s also begun discerning a vocation to priesthood, which is quite a trick given her relationship status even in the radically open parts of the independent Catholic world like my own jurisdiction (my bishop is out and proud and I am in the minority as a conventionally partnered straight person, which is a fruitful situation for both me and the only straight guy at present as well).
In fact, I got into it with Hugo recently because he was proclaiming the automatic and utter superiority of monogamy and equating polamory and promiscuity. It made me think that polyamorous can be misleading in this context–though she uses it, as you do–because it is usually used for open relationships of one stripe or another. At least in her case (not sure how you and your partners verbalize your permanence/exclusivity plans, or if it’s developing as you go) I think a more accurate word would be polyandry or polygamy–a faithful covenant relationship with three people instead of two. The scriptural model of marriage, in fact,
, except of course for the gender issue, so I don’t know why it freaks people out so much–though certainly I can imagine it would be exponentially more difficult managing a greater number of personality issues and communication challenges. (Which Kate freely admits).
And which brings me to your point, Sappho. I really appreciate both your nuance and open-mindedness, and awareness of the gender dynamics. You are right that there is lots of problematic polygyny, and it’s inherently more dangerous to try in a patriarchal society and especially in a patriarchal religious subgroup. (Though it’s not automatically impossible, and even in patriarchal contexts I understand there are sometimes benefits in the sister-wife arrangement. You might know better than I some of the African realities in that regard). But I think polyandry may be less liable to be hierarchical/unhealthy/unfreely chosen, especially where it’s not the social or religious norm.
Anyway if either of you (or anyone else) wants to visit Kate’s place it’s When I Was A Boy, http://voicetrembles.blogspot.com/.
May 14th, 2007 at 6:55 am
Yeah, I think it’s fair to say that there are sometimes benefits to the sister-wife arrangement, even with all the disadvantages of patriarchy.