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There was a radical aromantic post going around a little while ago. I thought, hey, I'm radical and also aromantic, this is right up my alley!
It... was not only not my alley, it wasn't even in the same state. There was some stuff about romance and the nuclear family that I quibbled with, but the thing that really bugged me was the "it's inherently bad to ask your partner to be sexually monogamous with you, it's limiting their freedom too much" (I'm paraphrasing - they might have been less direct than that).
The more I think about it, the more annoyed I get. I mean, by that logic, isn't "please be nondisruptive when you're awake and I'm not" (lark/owl relationships have some interesting challenges) *also* limiting your partner's freedom? TBH my partner wants to sleep in way more than they want to sleep around, so "don't blast Hotel California after midnight" is more of an imposition than "don't have sex with your blond toned engineer friend with the manic pixie personality".
And there are a lot of ways that my partner and I have had to change our behaviors for the relationship to work. Don't make big purchases without my approval. Please give me a half hour warning before you bring people over so that I can get myself emotionally ready. Turn down the music when I'm in the car with you. No, we're not moving *there*, my family lives too close. Please only buy this brand of soup, it's guaranteed vegetarian. Help me clean the house twice a month even though you'd rather do it once a season. Yes, you can go to that questionably legal rally but please leave if it looks like you might get arrested. I can't help you with your trauma right now, please take it to your blog.
Are all of these things - things we do because otherwise the relationship just wouldn't work - too much of an imposition too? Because ultimately, when you share space/finances/wonderful-but-also-terrible sprogs with someone, unless you're the most chill and needless person on the planet, you're going to be limiting their freedom at least a little in order to be comfortable. That's not for everyone, obviously, but saying that *no one* is allowed to do that... it's not a good look.
Alternatively, those impositions are fine, but the "no sex with others" thing is not, which... what makes sex so special? Why is "don't keep knives out in the open, it makes my brain go bad places" more okay than "don't do the horizontal tango with anyone else, it makes my brain go bad places"? I mean, the bad places of my brain don't discriminate based on whether something involved genitals or not.
And if I said "sure, you can go out and have sex with others, but for the love of everything don't pork my awful siblings" (and a number of open relationships have stipulations like that), where does that fall? Or "use barrier birth control" or "no pregnancies with anyone else"?
In all the time I've spent in polyamory-adjacent spaces, I've only seen this sort of thing a couple of times, so I assume it's not common. Which makes me think that the people who say it are at the intersection of "I personally cannot imagine being happy in a relationship with someone who tells me what to do with my genitals and I'm assuming everyone else is the same way" and "society tells you to obsess over your partner's/partners' sex life and that's bad, so let's do the exact opposite" and... it feels the same as the "gay people shaming people for their 'straight' relationships" (which I've seen too much of) or "neurodivergent people claiming superiority over NT people/other ND people who have a different symptom profile" (which I've seen a few times, though thankfully rarely). Just because it's (ostensibly, anyway) punching at someone with privilege you don't have doesn't make it okay.
IDK. I strongly suspect that if I tried to discuss any of this with the authors it wouldn't go well. (And I mean, as a monogamously married person with a relationship that *looks* like it fits into amatonormativity, I *do* have a lot of both social and legal advantages.)
It... was not only not my alley, it wasn't even in the same state. There was some stuff about romance and the nuclear family that I quibbled with, but the thing that really bugged me was the "it's inherently bad to ask your partner to be sexually monogamous with you, it's limiting their freedom too much" (I'm paraphrasing - they might have been less direct than that).
The more I think about it, the more annoyed I get. I mean, by that logic, isn't "please be nondisruptive when you're awake and I'm not" (lark/owl relationships have some interesting challenges) *also* limiting your partner's freedom? TBH my partner wants to sleep in way more than they want to sleep around, so "don't blast Hotel California after midnight" is more of an imposition than "don't have sex with your blond toned engineer friend with the manic pixie personality".
And there are a lot of ways that my partner and I have had to change our behaviors for the relationship to work. Don't make big purchases without my approval. Please give me a half hour warning before you bring people over so that I can get myself emotionally ready. Turn down the music when I'm in the car with you. No, we're not moving *there*, my family lives too close. Please only buy this brand of soup, it's guaranteed vegetarian. Help me clean the house twice a month even though you'd rather do it once a season. Yes, you can go to that questionably legal rally but please leave if it looks like you might get arrested. I can't help you with your trauma right now, please take it to your blog.
Are all of these things - things we do because otherwise the relationship just wouldn't work - too much of an imposition too? Because ultimately, when you share space/finances/wonderful-but-also-terrible sprogs with someone, unless you're the most chill and needless person on the planet, you're going to be limiting their freedom at least a little in order to be comfortable. That's not for everyone, obviously, but saying that *no one* is allowed to do that... it's not a good look.
Alternatively, those impositions are fine, but the "no sex with others" thing is not, which... what makes sex so special? Why is "don't keep knives out in the open, it makes my brain go bad places" more okay than "don't do the horizontal tango with anyone else, it makes my brain go bad places"? I mean, the bad places of my brain don't discriminate based on whether something involved genitals or not.
And if I said "sure, you can go out and have sex with others, but for the love of everything don't pork my awful siblings" (and a number of open relationships have stipulations like that), where does that fall? Or "use barrier birth control" or "no pregnancies with anyone else"?
In all the time I've spent in polyamory-adjacent spaces, I've only seen this sort of thing a couple of times, so I assume it's not common. Which makes me think that the people who say it are at the intersection of "I personally cannot imagine being happy in a relationship with someone who tells me what to do with my genitals and I'm assuming everyone else is the same way" and "society tells you to obsess over your partner's/partners' sex life and that's bad, so let's do the exact opposite" and... it feels the same as the "gay people shaming people for their 'straight' relationships" (which I've seen too much of) or "neurodivergent people claiming superiority over NT people/other ND people who have a different symptom profile" (which I've seen a few times, though thankfully rarely). Just because it's (ostensibly, anyway) punching at someone with privilege you don't have doesn't make it okay.
IDK. I strongly suspect that if I tried to discuss any of this with the authors it wouldn't go well. (And I mean, as a monogamously married person with a relationship that *looks* like it fits into amatonormativity, I *do* have a lot of both social and legal advantages.)
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It's something to do with the novelty, and it usually wears off in a year or two, but sometimes people are just absolute assholes. And unfortunately, because non-monogamy is such a niche practice with very few communities built around it (at least in the west, I should say), there's usually not much incentive for these people to actually learn if they don't want to.
Now, a lot of them do want to! They want their partners to be happy, too. Humans are pretty social animals, after all!
But there's enough resolute assholes in these spaces to make them really unwelcoming for a lot of other people. I actually stopped calling myself a relationship anarchist for a couple of years because of what a nasty reputation the term has gotten. But, I figure, better to reclaim and rehabilitate it, than lett assholes take away another thing from me, you know?
With a bit of reflection, a lot of these people will find that restrictions on sex are very similar to other restrictions on other activities: if you can't live within the restrictions, and the restritions can't be changed without hurting the other people involved, it's time to end (or dramatically overhaul) the relationship.
At any rate, you're right that this is a very rare opinion for people to hold. As I said, most of the peopel holding this belief are really new to non-monogamy, and are extremely self-centered about it as a result of that novelty. The minority of long-term people holding these beliefs either recognize that they only work as personal rules and not as models for other people to imitate, or are consummate assholes that really shouldn't be getting their voices boosted as much as they do.
The problem, of course, is that if you're brand new to the practice, and you find someone who has been non-monogamous for decades, and they agree with you and tell you that you're right and a genius for seeing past the blinders of modern society ro whatever, you're more likely to like them, and pick up their other bad habits.
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Or the "I'm a dom so I'm going to dominate you even if you didn't consent" (urghhhh, seen it, makes me ragey every time, YOU'RE NOT MY FUCKING MOM), or "I'm a sub, dominate me" (never met one myself, but others have and HOLY CREEPTASTICAL BOUNDARY ISSUES, BATMAN!)
In the end, I don't really have much investment in the whole thing beyond my usual "I want everyone to be happy" life philosophy, but it's awfully uncomfortable to think about what sort of message monogamous and poly-but-not-yet-aware people are getting from this, because there aren't many of them but they sure are awfully loud. And seeing it wrapped up in the same package as "romance is evil and how dare you want your partner to buy you flowers sometimes" and "the nuclear family is inherently terrible and how dare you not live in a great big commune", which is like. A trifecta of "the way you relationship is bad and you should feel bad" from a community supposedly friendly to me after a lifetime of being told by normative society that being bi, being aroace, being really weird around touch, being genderweird, being kinky, being clinically fucking insane, and so many other things made me an inherently bad partner.