A few years ago one of my best friends entered a polyamorous relationship. Earlier last year I found out my parents had a relationship that was open (to what degree, I don’t know – and I don’t want to know). So when my partner broached the topic with me recently, I was intrigued. Naturally, I invited my friend to the park and asked them over a joint about their experience being in an open relationship. I was blown away by how much I resonated with what he said.
Why are we allowed to hold an infinite amount of love, for an infinite amount of friends, yet the amount of people we can love in a romantic or sexual way is automatically finite? What makes our capacity to love hundreds of people automatically void when it comes to our partners? Having multiple friends doesn’t mean I love my other friends any less, so why shouldn’t it be the same for romantic and sexual partners? Furthermore, where does this line between friend and partner lie? I have had sexual partners with whom I was friends first, and I have had sexual partners with whom I’m still very good friends now. I have never felt that there was a strict difference between the two, a line that must be crossed or not crossed, but rather a free flowing spectrum of different forms of love and intimacy.
I have long believed that rules around sexuality and gender are forces designed to make us conform to the heteronormative nuclear family model. In fact, as a Gender and Cultural studies student, I read and write about these theories every day. The first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality has been highly influential in this area, especially his daring thesis that sexuality, commonly thought to be an inherent aspect of human existence, is in fact constructed by culture according to the political aims of the society’s dominant class. He defines the “technology of sex” as a set of techniques that have been developed and implemented by those in power, to uphold our hegemonic society, as a way to protect their status.
Wendy Holloway wrote in “Gender Difference and the Production of Subjectivity” that heterosexual relations are “the primary site where gender difference is re-produced.” Holloway goes on to say that “gender difference is… reproduced in day-to-day interactions in heterosexual couples, through the denial of the non-unitary, non-rational, relational character of subjectivity.” These theories can be applied to sexuality not only in terms of sexual orientation but also the way we view intimate relationships as a whole. Monogamy furthers the heteronormative nuclear family model. People are convinced to settle down and start a family, for which they then have to provide. Thus, the capitalist cycle is further perpetuated by the relentless rules that tell us this is the only way to live and have a family.
Monogamy is a relatively rare phenomenon in mammals (3–5%, from a total of 4,000 mammalian species). Humans, as we well know, are not strictly monogamous. A tendency to social monogamy has evolved, however, and is subject to strong reinforcement by cultural factors, particularly religion and the institution of marriage.
A recent shift from polygyny to monogamy, which is supported by ethnological data and possibly accompanied the shift from mobile to sedentary communities. The results we obtained suggest that male population sizes increased substantially later than female population sizes. This observation raises the possibility that a polygamous mating system might have been widespread in prehistoric human populations. In the ethnological literature, there is ample consensus that humans evolved in multimale polygynous bands. Sociobiological studies do suggest that the development of extensive farming resulted in a decrease in the levels of polygyny. Especially with the shift to farming in the Neolithic period, sedentary and more structured communities developed. Nuclear families replaced the polygamous, extended-family compounds typical of hunting-gathering populations, and the household, rather than the band, became the main socioeconomic unit.
In the traditional Christian wedding ceremony, a man and a woman promise each other before God a lifetime of fidelity (‘Therefore what God has joined together, let no man separate’; Matt. 19:4-6). Consequently, the Roman Catholic Church forbids divorce. But why? Why forbid divorce if man was monogamous by nature and there are no alternatives anyway? But the ‘problem’, of course, is that there are alternatives: Homo sapiens are not a strictly monogamous species. And even religion cannot enforce monogamy and the cultural institution of matrimony as both nature and culture have their own prerogatives.
Legal, religious, and economical restraints are weaker today, and the economic self-reliance of women has increased. Divorce rates have increased in many Western countries. The present-day situation, therefore, increasingly reflects all the diversities of intimacy of Homo sapiens: monogamous when necessary, polygamic when possible. The fear of conservative groups that the traditional values of matrimony and the family are at stake is very realistic: these values are at stake indeed. The reason, however, is not that humans are immoral; it is that in modern Western societies men and women now have more freedom to pursue a plurality of relationships (or lack thereof).
This is by no means meant to be a prescription that everyone should revert back to polygamy. We are, after all, products of our social environment. Not only this, our society isn’t designed for the communal living from which we came. However, if we are to bring down these systems of control and domination, we must at least be open to other ways of being and loving.
