Whats love got to do with it?

It was a mad love affair that spanned three countries, dozens of hotel rooms, hospitals, family dinners and festivals; a mixed bag of intimacy and revelation so heady that even after we finally called it off, the whole experience continues to challenge my understandings of love, companionship and those weird bundles of connectivity we call relationships.

For many years I viewed long term relationships as the holy grail of intimacy. The spinning whirlpool of my childhood and adolescence left me questioning if I was worthy of love, and I set out seeking the answer in the reassuring arms of Forevermores. It was a logical place to look; the boy meets girl and finds redemption through commitment narrative is engraved deeply into our culture; like archaic graffitti on school desks, we recarve it year in, year out, through films, books, dinner table discussions and self help books, the supremacy of the long term monogamous relationship as the end game underwrites so many of our assumptions about love and romance.

But something didn’t fit.

As my lover and I went through the throes of trying to work out why we didn’t make eachother happy, we stumbled upon a sobering realisation; neither of us knew of any long term relationships that we aspired to.

That scared the shit out of me.

Everything I’d swallowed about the “you and me babe” package deal got stuck in my throat, and like a polite guest at a family dinner, I didn’t know where to spit.

At this point I started talking to some of my friends about their relationships; particularly about the different configurations people were experimenting with under the banner of polyamoury. The compelling thing for me about these relationships wasn’t so much the multiplicity of partners, but the commitment to honest communication about what was needed and desired from different relationships at different times; the willingness to create a framework around the connection, rather than the other way round.

I’ve got a hunch about the link between prioritizing a cultural norm about how to relate over the dynamic process of relating, and my inherent confusion within relationships; like I’m trying to squeeze the myriad of connections and experiential delights into a tiny box called “partner”, and wondering why it feels so damn claustrophobic in here.

For me,  polyamoury provides a much needed philosophical framework (because some of us have a deep need for structure) for teasing out some of these issues about how we create relationships that work for the kind of connections we are having. I don’t think it’s some silver bullet for the whole complex web of emotion and desire that arises when bodies and souls entwine, but there are some great voices from the frontiers of sexual and gender politics that are raising some poignent questions about the historical and cultural assumptions that underlie why and how we relate to each other.

These cultural assumptions at times seem overwhelming and impossible to overcome; I don’t know if I’ll ever want to have multiple partners, at the moment having room for many different kinds of love (for people or experiences) feels central to my understanding about relationships. Regardless, it feels a worthwhile undertaking to lift the veil on partnerships and delve deeper into my understanding of self in relation to other.