Polygamy and polyamory aren’t the same thing and swinging is not the same as polyamory either. You’ve conflated a whole bunch of things that are different under one umbrella. And what kind of feminist thinks that only men want sex and that they are the only ones to benefit from less restrictive social mores around sex? Oral sex primarily benefits men? Really? That’s news to me.
Women get bored with monogamy before men do, and overwhelmingly most open relationships are initiated by women.
I know of several people, including myself who have found a lot of healing from the wounds inflicted on our sexuality by a patriarchal society through polyamory. My husband and I have both experienced a lot of personal growth as individuals and as a couple after we opened up our relationship. The quality of our communication, honesty, and partnership is noticeably better and it was already good to start with.
“For me, sexual liberation has been an opportunity for me to seek myself and find a place of comfort with who I really am and how I want to connect to others, not simply to accept outdated standards that have been arbitrarily applied to my life by other people.”
“Having multiple love interests in your life at one time gives you the opportunity to experience non-attachment based love. You can’t own all of these people in the way that some married couples feel they own each other. It’s a lot harder to be co-dependent when love and relationship extends to more than just one other person. Not every non-monogomous person goes about it in a self-reflective and self-aware manner, but it’s sure a lot easier to see the pitfalls of any relationship when you remove the constraints of “just us.”
Polyamory is a very different kind of relationship style than monogamy and you can’t evaluate it through the lens of monogamous thinking and get a true picture. Polyamory is a mindset. It isn’t just sanctioned sexual infidelity. It’s a way of thinking about relationships that is expansive, rather than restrictive and it doesn’t work well with either co-dependence or controlling behaviors. Most of the time when I hear about trouble within a polyamorous relationship, it’s because monogamy-oriented ways of thinking are in play.
