Sex, love, and (non)monogamy
Last night, I went on about nonmonogamy, but I didn't really talk about the last part of my reader's question: "How have the social constructs of sex and love impacted you, or your partners, if at all?"
To some degree, this entire blog is a response to this question. Social constructs of sex and love are so massively overlapping that it took me a very long time to separate them in my emotional landscape, and I was lucky enough to grow up in a liberated setting where it was never implied that you can only have sex with someone you love. Still, as we all know, there are a lot of social equations that influence how we think and act without realizing it, and our culture certainly has managed to conflate sex and love.
For a long time, it was easier for me to believe that one could feel love for multiple people than that one could lust after more than one person at a time. Now, is that the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard? Come on, there's so much evidence for people desiring multiple others simultaneously, both looking around my immediate environment and looking at media examples, both fictional and non. Where did that idea come from? I blame the ether.
The ideas about sex and love that I find most appealingly countered in nonomongamy center around possession and agency. In a traditional monogamous pairing, partners more or less belong to each other. The degree to which a partnership plays this out varies significantly, of course. For example, my cousin has been dating an incredibly possessive fellow for several years. He gets twitchy when she goes out with male friends, and he insists that if she dresses up and looks hot that she's trying to make him jealous (and, it appears, succeeding.) What she gets out of this clingy form of love, I have no fucking clue, but, then, I obviously prefer a freer version of commitment.
Even when I think I might like to be able to have more say over who my partner spends time with, I'm glad I've chosen a relational style that doesn't allow me to do so, because I don't actually want to be possessive, and this makes me look closely at those urges when I have them. And it also means that I have largely dismantled the idea that love and exclusivity prove each other. I'm sure there are ways to break out of the ownership frame while conducting a healthy monogamous relationship, but since I haven't done that, I don't know what those ways are. Any of y'all who have? Pipe up!
