Elle: "​Polyamory Made My Marriage Better — and It Might Make My Divorce Better, Too"

The women's magazine Elle posts a story today with a title that sounds snarky, but totally isn't:

​Polyamory Made My Marriage Better — and It Might Make My Divorce Better, Too

What non-monogamy has taught me about "moving apart without blame."​

By Arielle Greenberg

A few years ago, my husband, Rob, and I converted our traditional marriage to a polyamorous one. It's been remarkably smooth. We're very happy with our choice. And yet eventually we'll probably divorce. Does this mean that polyamory failed us? Not at all.

The author and her husband
on their wedding day.

Like many of our generation, Rob and I are children of divorce, and so when we got married a dozen years ago, we designed a quasi-Buddhist ceremony that made room for the concept of anicca, or impermanence. We wrote our own vows and left out the "until death do we part" and "forsaking all others" stuff: Instead, we spoke about the inevitability of change and pledged to support one another as we continued to evolve.

We meant it, but we had no idea what that might look like. We didn't anticipate that our evolution could involve the desire for sex and relationships with other people.

...After we finished having babies, we looked around and realized that although many things about our marriage were stellar — close friendship, mutual support and admiration, compatible co-parenting — we weren't ideal for one another sexually. We never really had been. Our libidos don't match; I'm more "sex motivated" of the two of us. Our relationship had thrived despite a lack of romantic chemistry.

This is not an unusual revelation, of course, and in most marriages, it results in screaming matches, or swallowed resentment, or affairs conducted amidst lies and betrayals. But Rob and I didn't see our "problem" that way — we didn't even really see it as a problem. We saw it as a reality, and an opportunity for positive change. We became poly....

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For the last few years, most days at my house look like this: my partner Mike, who lives with us, helps me with dinner while Rob tends to the kids. We all eat together, and then Mike and I put the kids to bed while Rob texts a woman he's met on OKCupid. Once the kids are down, the three of us sit on the couch for a movie and a cup of tea. Sometimes Rob stays home with the kids while Mike and I go out dancing. Sometimes Mike and I stay home while Rob travels for work or goes on a date. Sometimes Mike and I take the kids camping and Rob spends the weekend combing bookstores. Sometimes Mike and Rob watch football together while I volunteer. Sometimes we all take a family vacation together.

It helps that both these men are tidy Cancers who share a love for progressive politics and sports blogs; they are also guys who have always enjoyed living with male friends.

Our arrangement wouldn't work for everyone....

Read on (March 25, 2016). "Arielle Greenberg is a poet and writer who lives in Maine; her book of personal micro-essays about style, shopping, and feminism, Locally Made Panties, comes out this spring."

Update: The mainstream women's magazine Marie Claire has posted the article on its site (March 28).

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"6 Common Misconceptions About Polyamory"

The Buddhist Elephant Journal posts another nice article looking at poly. People there are paying attention.

6 Common Misconceptions About Polyamory

By Renee Picard

I used to be one of those people who couldn’t comprehend how it would be possible to be in a non-monogamous relationship. I’ve always held pretty liberal views on relationships, but I remember making certain assumptions (internally) about what an open relationship might be like.

In the past year or so I have learned a lot about it by spending time in the community....

Despite the fact that it is becoming more mainstream and acceptable, mainstream media likes to dramatize certain elements and downplay others, potentially giving the rest of the world false impressions of what polyamory is.

So, to clear some things up, polyamory (non-monogamy) is not:

About orgies....

The same as polygamy....

A way to ‘prevent’ divorce or breakups....

About eliminating jealousy.... The difference is in the way it’s dealt with.... There is a focus on knowing the difference between attachment and love.

About avoiding commitment....

About having less intimacy or less love.... Put simply: when one spends time within a community where there is extra incentive to be open, loving, accepting and compassionate—well, this can be contagious!

Polyamory is more about:

Freedom of choice....

Flexibility....

Learning to love (yourself)....

Presence and authenticity....

Here's the article (Jan. 28, 2014).

A search of Elephant turns up these these others.

Here are all my posts tagged "Buddhist" (including this one; scroll down).

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"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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"Monogamy, Polyamory, and Beyond"

Tikkun

In the January/February 2007 issue of Tikkun, now on newsstands, Prof. Jorge N. Ferrer expands on his previous article describing the possibilities of compersion — "sympathetic joy" in multipartnering — for spiritual practice.

Tikkun is a Jewish/interfaith magazine of progressive politics and spirituality ("Tikkun: to heal, repair, and transform the world"). The article is long (9 pages); we have Ferrer's permission to quote from it extensively:

According to Buddhist teachings, the cultivation of sympathetic joy can break through the ultimately false duality between self and others, being therefore a potent aid on the path toward overcoming self-centeredness and achieving liberation.... The awakening of sympathetic joy in observing the happiness of one’s mate in relationship with perceived “rivals” is an extremely rare pearl to find.

The evolutionary origins and function of jealousy have been clearly mapped by contemporary evolutionary psychologists, anthropologists, and zoologists. Despite its tragic impact in the modern world — the overwhelming majority of mate battering and spousal murders worldwide is caused by jealous violence — jealousy very likely emerged around 3.5 million years ago in our hominid ancestors as an adaptive response of vital evolutionary value for both genders. Whereas the reproductive payoff of jealousy for males was to secure certainty of paternity and to avoid spending resources in support of another male’s genetic offspring, for females it evolved as a mechanism for guaranteeing protection and resources for biological children by having a steady partner. In short, jealousy emerged in our ancestral past to protect males from being cuckolded and to protect women from being abandoned. This is why even today men tend to experience more intense feelings of jealousy than women do when they suspect sexual infidelity, while women are more likely than men to feel threatened when their mates become emotionally attached to another female and spend time and money with her. Modern research shows that this “evolutionary logic” in relation to gender-specific jealousy patterns operates widely across disparate cultures and countries, from Sweden to China and from North America and the Netherlands to Japan and Korea.

The problem, of course, is that many instinctive reactions that had evolutionary significance in ancestral times do not make much sense in our modern world....

The discussion of the twin evolutionary origins of jealousy and monogamy raises further questions: Can jealousy be truly transformed? What emotional response can take the place of jealousy in human experience? And how can the transformation of jealousy affect our relationship choices?

To my knowledge, in contrast to most other emotional states, jealousy has no antonym in any human language. This is probably why the Kerista community — a polygamous group located in San Francisco that was disbanded in the early 1990s — coined the term “compersion” to refer to the emotional response opposite to jealousy. The Keristans defined compersion as “the feeling of taking joy in the joy that others you love share among themselves.”

...Experientially, compersion can be felt as a tangible presence in the heart whose awakening may be accompanied by waves of warmth, pleasure, and appreciation at the idea of our partner loving others and being loved by them in nonharmful and mutually beneficial ways. In this light, I suggest that compersion can be seen as a novel extension of Buddhist sympathetic joy to the realm of intimate relationships and, in particular, to interpersonal situations that conventionally evoke feelings of jealousy.

...I suggest that the transformation of jealousy through the cultivation of sympathetic joy bolsters the awakening of the enlightened heart. As jealousy dissolves, universal compassion and unconditional love become more easily available to the individual. Human compassion is universal in its embrace of all sentient beings without qualifications. Human love is also all-inclusive and unconditional — a love that is both free from the tendency to possess and that does not expect anything in return. Although to love without conditions is generally easier in the case of brotherly and spiritual love, I suggest that as we heal the historical split between spiritual love [of all] (agape) and sensuous love [of the particular] (eros), the extension of sympathetic joy to more embodied forms of love becomes a natural development. And when embodied love is emancipated from possessiveness, a richer range of spiritually legitimate relationship options organically emerges.

As people become more whole and are freed from certain basic fears (e.g., of abandonment, of unworthiness, of engulfment), new possibilities for the expression of embodied love open up which may feel natural, safe, and wholesome rather than undesirable, threatening, or even morally questionable. For example, once jealousy turns into sympathetic joy and sensuous and spiritual love are integrated, a couple may feel drawn to extend their love to other individuals beyond the structure of the pair bond. In short, once jealousy loosens its grip on the contemporary self, human love can attain a wider dimension of embodiment in our lives that may naturally lead to the mindful cultivation of more inclusive intimate connections.

...Serial monogamy plus clandestine adultery is in many respects not too different from polyamory, except perhaps in that the latter is more honest, ethical, and arguably less harmful. In this context, the mindful exploration of polyamory may help alleviating the suffering caused by the staggering number of clandestine affairs in our modern culture.

...To disregard a potentially emancipatory cultural development because its early manifestations did not succeed may be unwise. Looking back at the history of emancipatory movements in the West — from feminism to the abolition of slavery to the gaining of civil rights by African-Americans — we can see that the first waves of the Promethean impulse were frequently burdened with problems and distortions which only later could be recognized and resolved. This is not the place to review this historical evidence, but to dismiss polyamory because of its previous failures may be equivalent to having written off feminism on the grounds that its first waves failed to reclaim genuine feminine values or free women from patriarchy.

...Mindful polyamory may also offer an alternative to the usually unfulfilling nature of currently prevalent serial monogamy in which people change partners every few years, never benefiting from the emotional and spiritual depth that only an enduring connection with another human being provides. In a context of psychospiritual growth, such exploration can create unique opportunities for the development of emotional maturity, the transmutation of jealousy into sympathetic joy, the emancipation of embodied love from exclusivity and possessiveness, and the integration of sensuous and spiritual love. As Christian mystic Richard of St. Victor maintained, mature love between lover and beloved naturally reaches beyond itself toward a third reality, and this opening, I suggest, might in some cases be crucial both to overcome codependent tendencies and to foster the health, creative vitality, and perhaps even longevity of intimate relationships.

...Ultimately, I believe that the greatest expression of spiritual freedom in intimate relationships does not lie in strictly sticking to any particular relationship style — whether monogamous or polyamorous — but rather in a radical openness to the dynamic unfolding of life that eludes any fixed or predetermined structure of relationships. It should be obvious, for example, that one can follow a specific relationship style for the “right” (e.g., life-enhancing) or “wrong” (e.g., fear-based) reasons; that all relationship styles can become equally limiting spiritual ideologies; and that different internal and external conditions may rightfully call us to engage in different relationship styles at various junctures of our lives. It is in this open space catalyzed by the movement beyond monogamy and polyamory, I believe, that an existential stance deeply attuned to the standpoint of Spirit can truly emerge. Nevertheless, gaining awareness about the ancestral — and mostly obsolete — nature of the evolutionary impulses that direct our sexual/emotional responses and relationship choices may empower us to consciously co-create a future in which expanded forms of spiritual freedom may have a greater chance to bloom. Who knows, perhaps as we extend spiritual practice to intimate relationships, new petals of liberation will blossom that may not only emancipate our minds, hearts, and consciousness, but also our bodies and instinctive world.

The whole article is available online only by paid subscription.

Incidentally, Tikkun's editor, the leading progressive Rabbi Michael Lerner, is at pains to say, "We don't pick our articles on the basis of our agreement with their content.... For example, I don't agree with Jorge Ferrer's article about polyamory in this issue...."

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"What's the Opposite of Jealousy?"

Tricycle

In the last generation, almost below the cultural radar, many Americans have taken up Buddhism. A top-quality read for anyone is Tricycle, "America's leading Buddhist magazine," which claims "an upscale audience of approximately 200,000 readers." Its Summer 2006 issue presents an essay by Jorge N. Ferrer (a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco) challenging modern Buddhists' allegiance-by-default to monogamy.

Jealousy, it seems, likely emerged as an adaptive response in our hominid ancestory some 3.5 million years ago.... As evolutionary psychologist David Buss writes in his acclaimed book, The Evolution of Desire, most human mating mechanisms and responses are actually "living fossils" shaped by the genetic pressures of our evolutionary history. The problem, of course, is that is that patterns that were adaptive millions of years ago might be anything but that today.

What does this mean for us spiritually? ...While Buddhism has addressed in great detail the transformation of other deeply conditioned emotions — greed and hatred, for instance — it has, so far as I know, not much to say about jealousy, specifically about sexual jealousy. But it seems to me that Buddhist principles can be, and should be, extended to the realm of intimate relationships.

In the article, Ferrer dwells on what polyamorists call compersion (or frubble):

Buddhist tradition speaks of four "divine abodes," or qualities of an awakened mind to be cultivated and put into practice... — lovingkindness (maitri), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita) and equanimity (upeksha).... Of these, mudita is for many Westerners the least familiar, at least as a term. It refers to the capacity to participate in the joy of others, to take happiness in the happiness of others.

And he urges today's Buddhist teachers to examine their mono assumptions:

Historically, Buddhism never strictly defined the rules of marriage for lay people and accepted the relationship styles customary in the countries through which it spread.... The culturally prevalent belief — supported by many Buddhist leaders — that the only spiritually correct sexual options are either celibacy or monogamy is a myth.... It may be perfectly plausible to hold simultaneously more than one loving or sexual bond in a context of mindfulness, ethical integrity, and spiritual growth. Indeed, while working toward the transformation of jealousy into sympathetic joy and the integration of sensuous and spiritual love, for some it might even be expeditious.

The full article is available only in the paper magazine or to Tricycle's electronic subscribers.

Update August 31, 2006: "I've heard from the author of the article (Prof. Jorge N. Ferrer) and one of the editors of Tricycle that they've received numerous letters critical of the article," writes Mori Morrigan. "Apparently my little missive to them was one of the few [positive] comments they've received. If you read the article and appreciated it, you might consider sending something along to the editors (e-mail editorial@tricycle.com ).

"The author of the letter that appeared in the most recent issue assumed polyamory was the same as promiscuity and compared the proper Buddhist attitude to that as the same as toward a 'brutal murderer.' (That you should 'dwell in lovingkindness toward him' but not accept the conduct.) She then quotes extensively from the Buddhist canon on desire and monogamy (none of it friendly toward poly, as you can imagine). There is also a very incisive reply by Prof. Ferrer."

A lesson here: When we speak or write about multiple partnering, people will think in their own paradigm and assume we are excusing cheating and sneaking — unless we explicitly state what polyamory is about, use the word, and define it as the radical concept of "responsible non-monogamy with the full knowledge and consent of all concerned" (or words to that effect). The Tricycle article didn't quite do this.

As an editor in my day job, I've stressed for years that if the reader misunderstands something, it's the writer's fault.

P. S.: Here is a 20-page booklet titled "The Great Activity: Love and Enlightenment — a zine on the intersection of Buddhism and Polyamory" (2006).

P. P. S.: Here's a thread on NewBuddhist.com titled "Polyamory, Buddhist-style."

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