"We Are What We Love: How Polyamory Can Change the World for the Better"

Elephant Journal

A Buddhist online magazine "dedicated to the mindful life" runs Krystal Baugher's latest poly piece, following her “How More Sex with More People was Good, Then Bad, Then Ugly.”

We Are What We Love: How Polyamory Can Change the World for the Better

By Krystal Baugher

I’ve had lovers tell me I’m too rational about love.

...For the longest time I’ve been attempting to figure out what love is, why people think they feel it, do they really feel it, what is it supposed to feel like, what people are supposed to do with it, etc.

I’ve read Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, William Wordsworth, Junot Diaz....

As Diane Ackerman says in A Natural History of Love:

“Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one can agree on what it is.”...

For the longest time I’ve been grappling between the theory and the reality of polyamory, which is the idea of being in multiple intimate relationships. I remember the moment when I felt I could dive into the polyamorous lifestyle and I would come out okay in the end. I was watching the movie Adaptation:....

Donald: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn’t have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.

Charlie: But she thought you were pathetic.

Donald: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That’s what I decided a long time ago.

Something opened up for me in that concept of “you are what you love.”... It gave a sort of permission to love fearlessly. To understand that even if a relationship ended, if there was love, that love never went away, it existed somewhere in the universe forever.

Enter bell hooks, social critic, intellectual, author, feminist....

-----------------------------

...Let me do an analogy here. Our current basic living situations for a majority of the population consists of compartmentalized space, so either a one-family home or apartment separated from neighbors by thick walls, where life becomes individualized.

People literally shut each other out.

Now it has been a psychologically proven fact that people who are well connected to communities are happier[, healthier, and live longer].

So it would come as a logical solution to start tearing down the walls....

Read on (Sept. 24, 2013).

Also at Elephant Journal not long ago was Freya Watson's Polyamorous Monogamy:

...We were shooting the breeze as usual, a group of university friends nursing coffees and arguing the toss about open relationships. I was trying — and failing once again — to find a way of reconciling my head and my heart. My head agreed with the logic of open relationships, but my heart was none too sure and I couldn’t quite figure out why.

...Like many readers and writers here, my spiritual journey has been about keeping the heart open. It has been about finding ways of allowing a greater love to flow through me, and about dealing with all the ways in which my very human self will kick and scream at times in resistance to that. So when I first heard the term polyamory, my initial reaction was: Isn’t that what we’re all trying to do — to love everyone? Do we really need a label for it?

...The term polyamory, however, seems to describe an attitude rather than a set of behaviors, and for that reason I have found that I’m comfortable with it. It emphasizes the way an individual thinks and feels rather than a prescribed way of behaving, allowing the freedom for each to find their own way of expressing the love that they feel. It allows for individual freedom which, strangely, the term ‘open relationship’ with its unspoken expectation that everyone had to have multiple partners, didn’t seem to....

Elephant Journal has had many other poly-related articles and mentions.

More Buddhism-and-poly stuff:

• YouTube of a talk on the topic by Soto Zen priest Ingen Breen.

• A Leunig cartoon in Elephant Journal.

• My past posts tagged "Buddhist" (including this one; scroll down).

If someone says that "compersion" is the only word available for the opposite of jealousy, you can refer them to mudita.

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