February 6, 2007
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Polygamous Love, Is It Possible?
" Are humans capable of developing a close, loving, sexual relationship with more than one partner at a time? What forms should these relationships take and should they be recognized as a form of marriage? "
This is one of the questions asked at Socrates_Cafe this week"A simple answer might be "Yes, but...."
These kinds of relationships have a few problems:
"Loving" relationships are, if not taught by societies, at least culturally defined - let's take a simple definition of sexual or erotic love, as that's what I'm talking about.
Love: "A selfless passionate affection for another person combining devotion and affection with sexual desire"In a loving relationship, this erotic love is mutual, deep, abiding, and all-encompassing between the partners.
If there are only two, this mutual affection is easy to understand and reciprocate, but if another person or two become involved, the relationship becomes much more complicated. Now each partner must feel the all-encompassing affection with each of the other partners.This sometimes breaks down because of some sort of competition between the partners. Historically, here in America, this has been solved by strict supervision of the relationship by religious or social authority as in the case of the early Mormon Church or the Oneida Community, to cite two famous examples. Other cultures which encourage or support polygamy, such as Islam, have fairly specific and rigid rules of acceptable marital behavior. The question of a "Loving" relationship is seldom addressed; the focus seems to be on following all the rules, and in the case of Oneida, at least, loving relationships were discouraged.
About thirty or forty years ago one branch of the "Hippy" movement began to organize groups and communes where everyone was encouraged to do their own thing and rebel against accepted behavior norms. This post-pill, pre-AIDS era was a time of a lot of experimentation in multiple partner relationships.
I personally know both participants in, and children of, these relationships, most of which were fairly short-lived and broke apart partly because of sexual tension and jealousy and partly because they were economically unstable.
While the partners "fell out of love", their children often remember those times fondly and did not seem to have been harmed by their parents'multiple relationships.There are communes which have remained - like the Twin Oaks Community, which is still a going concern after 39 years. This Commune's start and early development is well described in Kathleen Kinkade's book "A Walden Two Experiment" (Wm Morrow, 1973) and his been the subject of a Master's dissertation as late as 2000. They have an active website Twin Oaks Community.
There are currently several groups of polygamist advocates active in America today, some religiously oriented Christian Polygamy , and some non-religious and somewhat more open:Seattle Group. The Seattle group even publishes an on-line magazine called "Loving More".In 2002, The Los Angeles Times reported that there were more than 30,000 polygamist unions among Mormon Spin-off groups in Southern Utah and Arizona. At least some of these seem to be religiously-ordered unions of fairly young girls and older men and there are several groups organized against this type of relationship. In most of the interviews and news reports about these situations, there is little or no talk of love and affection between the partners. Most girls in these relationships have a positive attitude about them however.
To sum up, it isn't hard to find reports, interviews, and discussions of multiple partner love relationships where the partners firmly express their belief that they are in a loving relationship and are content despite the considerable social and legal pressure they face. These people think it's possible to have a loving polygamous relationship, do you?
Comments (11)
Good post. I think you have properly identified that competition between the partners is a problem that would prevent a loving relationship in a polygamous relationship.
I'm sure that's a problem - it was in those I personally knew about - but how about all those who claim "Not in our relationship - we all really love each other" are they lying or deluded?
Personally I don't know what to think. I almost believe that love is a roos that we play on ourselves, but perhaps fooling ourselves is all that is really necessary to be happy, which is likely another emotion we don't fully understand. I firmly beleive that human kind is nothing more than animals who form some primitive thought patterns which have arbitrary meaning, or can be assigned meaning based on what we need at the moment. I don't think love is as deep as we want it to be, or as necessary to us as we would like it to be. Love is simply a tool we use to get what we need, like education but not as structured. Love has been assigned so many meanings that it's hard to really know if what you feel is love or a conglomeration of lies we tell ourselves. Some folks are just naturally stable, (or lazy) and seem to be content to channel all love feelings into one person, but others find it difficult to commit themselves to that concept.
I guess it is possible to have any kind of relationship you want, but the love part of the equation is way too deep of a subject for most to fully comprehend which makes it prone to fear and a host of other negative emotions. I think this is a likely reason folks get so upset about things like gay marriage, or polygamy, because it threatens their possition and makes them afraid that their lives arent what they thought it was.
Da_Vinci, I'll disagree with you about love being some kind of ruse or delusion and I think a good many of us understand it very well indeed. If you want a really good definition read Shakespeare's 116th Sonnet here
Different cultures define what sexual relationships are acceptable and many have accepted both homosexual and polygamous relationships - it just happens that ours doesn't. What bothers people is probably because in our culture, these kinds of relationships are labeled illegal or immoral - but these are cultural definitions.
The question of how true love fits into these relationships is what we are talking about. In a polygynous relationship for example, can a man love all his wives with the same deep emotional intensity/ If he has a favorite, does this mean he doesn't love the others?
To take the other side of the coin, can a wife share her love for her husband with other wives or will she be jealous - is this true love?
The same questions could be asked about any multiple-partner type relationship.
Do you know anyone who has first-hand knowledge or who has been in such a relationship?
All this pointing out of cultural perspectives, definitions, and biases towards one kind of relationship or another makes me wonder if the experience of love is the same in all cultures. Do you think the kind of love we tend to value, the all-encompassing "eyes only for you" kind, is valued higher everywhere? Is "that feeling" we rdognize as love the only way to identify love in a romantic context, and if so would you have to have that feeling for all the partners you had in a polygamous relationship?
Strange questions, maybe. oh well.
Good question. There is a lot of cross-cultural evidence that erotic love is pretty much a universal concept. Almost all cultures have lots of stories where romantic and erotic love drive the plots. The oldest known novel, the "Tale of Genji" written over a thousand years ago in Japan is full of such stuff.
To be sure, erotic love is regarded and expressed differently in other cultures, but the idea is still recognizable.
The major question here is, I think, can it be shared between more than two people at once?
Tychecat, are you sure "Tale of Genji" is the oldest known novel? What would you call Homer's Iliad and Odyssey? Personally, I have trouble labeling any work of that size as a poem.
Oh goody! a historical question.
Nope, The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Bible, the Anead, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Epic of Gilgamesh; all those religious books are not considered novels even though all of them have themes and stories remeniscent of novels. Lady Muresaki's Tale of Genji is considered by most to be the earliest that fits the modern definition.
She was ahead of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Kalidasa, and Cervantes by several hundred years.
Not having much to do, I've read all these I've mentioned and I see where you're coming from. There is a lot of Roman literature (alas, not enough) that carries storytelling pretty, far but google "novel" and you get the modern concept and definition.
Almost all novels, ancient and modern revolve around Romantic Love and lovers' troubles. Has this tradition of storytelling actually defined romantic love for us, or are these stories just describing one of the human conditions?
Please ignore the misplaced comma
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