[UUPoly-L] Response to editorial/article on polyamory

[Joani Blank <joani@swansway.com>]

This response comes from a out of state UU friend to whom I sent the 
article link.  I have her permission to forward it to you.

Joani Blank
Oakland, CA
> Interesting. I'm glad she [the editorial's author] finally got 
> around to admitting there were people for whom monogamy works. I 
> believe that I'm one of them, and I mostly have the reaction she 
> described for such people to polyamory: not my thing, but if it 
> works for you, hey, who am I to criticize?
> I have seen a few examples of times when people called what they 
> were doing polyamory but didn't seem to do the emotional work to 
> make it succeed. Of course monogamy can be done badly too, probably 
> in more ways than I have imagined. But I think that in our society, 
> where monogamy is the ideal held up most of the time, it's a little 
> bit harder for people to have much of a shared context of ideas or 
> models for making polyamory work. That doesn't mean it's impossible 
> or inadvisable, just that it takes more work to develop the shared 
> understandings to do it reasonably well, so it doesn't rearrange 
> people's lives in ways they didn't bargain for or want. I've also 
> seen some examples where polyamory seemed to be working for the 
> people involved.
> I totally acknowledge that I say all this from the outside looking 
> in -- I tried having an "open" relationship once, but as soon as 
> theory became reality (I developed another liaison outside that 
> primary relationship), everyone involved was pretty uncomfortable 
> with it, and we decided to close that sucker back up. That's when I 
> developed the "not wrong, but not for me" model of open/polyamorous 
> relationships that I still have.
> I'm interested in what the author said about "mentally cheating." 
> This is one of those places where I don't think the mainstream, 
> monogamy-idealizing culture has much useful consensus on where the 
> line should be drawn. Is it mentally cheating if I  1) admire 
> someone's body who isn't my partner;  2) entertain conscious 
> fantasies of a romantic/sexual relationship with them, but never act 
> on them;  3) actually fall in love with them, but keep the 
> relationship strictly platonic; etc.?
> I think reasonable people could differ on where the line belongs. I 
> believe that the boundaries need to be well defined between the 
> partners in a relationship. If one partner believes fantasies are 
> fine and another considers them "sinning in one's heart," then 
> there's a problem. To my view, it's the effects on the 
> monogamous/existing relationship(s) and on the trust between 
> partners that are most important. Anyway, getting back to the 
> article, "mentally cheating" sounds as judgmental as some of the 
> things people say about polyamory -- like an unexamined prejudice, 
> or at least an attitude that's not very well explained within the 
> article itself. (I realize poly folk have often done a lot more 
> examining of their attitudes about love and sex than people who 
> haven't considered polyamory for themselves.)