I Have Read a Book About Open Relationships

I am reading a book called Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships. Not that I felt I needed any advice; my relationship with Raider was created almost 20 years ago and is sustaining itself pretty well (Year 20: The best so far, in every way). But I was curious to see what the book said, and curious to see what's up in the world. For many years, busy with child-rearing and whatnot, I not only cleaved only unto Raider, but I paid no attention to what was going on in the, I dunno what you'd call it, non-monogamy community. I was familiar with the word "polyamory," and aware that some folks seemed to prefer it to "non-monogamy," but I didn't know why, or what that word necessarily meant to the people who were using it. If I used it to describe myself, what would I be saying about myself? If I said I was non-monogamous, what connotations would that carry these days? It's not that I'm especially concerned about labels, only that I recently found myself curious about the thinking that folks were doing about these things.

Hence, the book.

It's a great big book, and it has some strengths. I'm not sure, though, that it's one I would recommend to someone just starting to think about whether they might not be purely monogamous, or considering a relationship with someone who is polyamorous or non-monogamous. There are several reasons for that.

For one, the book has a real bias toward non-monogamy. Monogamous people, you will learn from this book, buy into a number of myths, such as the idea that you should get all your needs met by one single person. Not only the author, but a number of her interviewees, mention this. But I have never met a person who believed this. If they did, we'd see a lot more people who formed up into couples and then moved into little hermitages together; weddings would be going-away parties, people weeping into their handkerchiefs because they were never going to see the happy couple again. This is a straw man that people who are non-monogamous like to knock down--and have for as long as I can remember, which is getting to be a long time now--because it makes them feel smarter and more enlightened than exclusive couples.

You will also learn from this book that non-monogamous people are more courageous than monogamous people. There's some truth in this, in that being non-monogamous, especially openly, does take the same kind of moral courage that any kind of unconventional choice does. But monogamy takes courage, too. I think that successful relationships of all kinds require the same kinds of qualities: bravery, honesty, respect for boundaries, acceptance of the beloved.

This book isn't written for monogamous people, and so it's a bit unfair to criticize it by saying that it would be off-putting for a monogamous reader for these reasons. But it bothered me because it's sloppy thinking, and because I believe it is possible to affirm one's own choices without denigrating the authentic choices of others.

Speaking of words: the author likes to say that terminology doesn't really matter, but the book is devoted to parsing words into their narrowest possible divisions. "Non-monogamy," by her definition, means that you have a primary relationship, and other relationships just for sex. "Polyamory" means that you seek out other relationships to meet emotional needs as well. From there, you get "hierarchical" and "non-hierarchical" polyamory, "polyfidelity," "solo polyamory," and so on. You get every possible combination of partners and lovers discussed as its own special case. Labels, labels, labels. I found it tiresome. I began to feel like the hardest part of being poly-non-mono-whatever was going to be figuring out which box I might fit in. But I don't want to be in a box. So, no thank you.

Two other small things: I appreciate the diversity of the people who were interviewed for the book, though, oddly, they are often presented as couples even if there are other people involved. For instance: "Diane and Mike live with their triad partner, Derek." I do think that a lot of people experience their relationships this way--Raider and I, for instance, are probably always going to be a couple, no matter what else happens. I think. But often it seemed like a strange default option on the part of the author as she wrote about people's stories. And I would have liked to hear a bit more from people in long-term relationships. People who've been together for 2 years, or 4, certainly have much to say that is worth listening to. But where are my peers? I'd have liked to hear more from people whose relationships were a little longer in the tooth.

All in all, I'd say The Ethical Slut is a better book. It's more concise, and doesn't spend so much time parsing words to within an inch of their lives. Neither book had much to say that was new to me; of course, I learned what I know in my twenties, and I learned it all the hard way. Maybe reading a book would have been a better idea.

Both of these books make me want to write my own little pamphlet. I would call it, "Loving Your Slutty Friend: A Field Guide to Kink, Casual Sex, and Multiple Relationships For the Vanilla and Monogamous." I would start by talking about what I think we, and our relationships, have in common. It's all just variations on a theme, I would say. It's nothing to be afraid of.

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