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Title: Monogamy and Vulnerability Author: Lee Shevek Language: en Topics: monogamy, relationships, love Source: https://butchanarchy.medium.com/monogamy-and-vulnerability-dd3566a9709b
Relationships are deeply personal. They are the smallest and most
fundamental blocks that form our histories, our cultures, our societies.
We are dependent, and thus deeply vulnerable, to other human
relationships from the time we are born to the moment we die. Nothing
human-made was made outside of relationships. Everything we make is a
product of relationships. We are intrinsically tied to other people;
such is the reality of human existence. To discuss relationships, then,
will always be something that hits everyone in a way that is close,
personal, and sometimes uncomfortable. We have insecurities we have yet
been unable to quell and often reach for different forms of
relationships as a salve to those insecurities. All of us, ultimately,
wish to feel loved, cherished, and appreciated by other human beings,
and almost all of our activities beyond basic survival activities (and
very often even those basic survival activities) seem to bend towards
that end. What will give me the adoration of others? What will earn me
the love of others? What will make others impressed, drawn to me,
trusting of me? When driven by such intense social need, it can be
difficult to truthfully and genuinely assess the underlying values we
hold when we seek out connection. What makes a relationship valuable?
What makes a person valuable? What makes me valuable?
In discussions such as these, I find it important to recognize the
inherent vulnerability required in calling the standards for our
relationships into question. On the same coin, we cannot have the
mutually fulfilling relationships we want to have in our lives without
doing that questioning. As long as we keep taking the same things for
granted about relationships we will continuously make the same mistakes
that make us miss each other, or hurt each other. As long as
relationship advice articles ask questions like “What top 3 romantic
gestures will help strengthen your relationship?” and not “Why do you
think your romantic relationships more important than your friendships?”
or “Why do we all keep doing monogamy?” jealousy will return the same
monster it’s always been, those flowers will wilt, those individual
dates will fade from memory, and we will keep asking ourselves why love
always seems to hurt us so badly.
It is time to have a frank conversation about monogamy.
In this essay, I will be discussing the underlying values of compulsory
monogamy that our culture takes for granted—that jealousy is an
expression of love, that possessing one’s partner is a sign of
commitment, and that imposing boundaries on the autonomy of another is
not only acceptable, but expected—and I will argue that these values
work towards the end of foreclosing on our personal vulnerability, even
as they fail to ultimately do so. In order to do so, a working
definition of compulsory monogamy is in order. Compulsory monogamy is
the social mandate (taught and enforced by family, schools, churches,
law, custom, etc.) that for relationships to be considered valid and
meaningful they must be romantic, sexual, and exclusive. It is
compulsory because it is expected and because other options are either
maligned, invisible, inaccessible, or any combination of the three. What
I will generally leave out of the discussion is what I call self-imposed
monogamy: the kind of monogamy that says “I won’t have more than one
romantic/sexual partners,” without saying “You can’t have more than one
romantic/sexual partners.” For the duration of this exploration, my
focus will remain on the you-can’t monogamy.
What is it that makes you-can’t monogamy so generally acceptable to us?
This is a question Harry Chalmers explores in his essay “Is Monogamy
Morally Permissible?” He begins with a thought experiment:
Imagine that two partners are in a romantic relationship, and that they
are also (or perhaps a fortiori) friends. Yet theirs is not a typical
relationship, for the partners have agreed on a most unusual
restriction: Neither is allowed to have additional friends. Should
either partner become friends with someone besides the other, the other
partner will refuse to support it—indeed, will go so far as to withdraw
her love, affection, and willingness to continue the relationship.
(Chalmers 1)
Many of us, as Chalmers asserts, would find this arrangement, at
minimum, morally troubling. Even if both of the people in the
relationship in question were enthusiastically consenting to this
agreement, it wouldn’t shake our discomfort at the agreement itself.
Friendships are an important human social need and good. They fulfill
us, fill our days with joy, provide us important emotional support and
perspective. To deny other friendships to our partners as the basis of
our romantic relationship seems perverse, a wild overreach into someone
else’s autonomy. So why, then, is it so acceptable for us to place such
limitations on the romantic and sexual partners our partners can have in
their life? Chalmers, in his essay, directs a thorough exploration and
break-down of the different defenses of monogamy generally offered up to
such a question (The Specialness Defense, The Sexual Health Defense, The
Children Defense, The Practicality Defense, and the Jealousy Defense),
and it is not my intention to walk that same ground. Nor is it my
intention to delve into the political structural reasons why we practice
monogamy in the first place, of which there are many already
investigated by feminist scholars. Instead, I want to open up inquiry
into the values lurking beneath those defenses and hold them up to
long-overdue scrutiny.
The fundamental moral assumption made in you-can’t monogamy is that,
once we have made a romantic/sexual connection with someone (one that we
desire to make on a regular basis), it is reasonable and acceptable for
us to impose limits on romantic/sexual relationships they can have with
others for as long as they hope to maintain their connection to us. All
other defenses of monogamy spring from this moral belief. What makes
this belief unique is that the romantic/sexual component is the feature
that makes such a belief acceptable. As Chalmers shows above, we would
find such logic applied to nonromantic/nonsexual relationships like
friendships morally unacceptable, so this tells us that monogamy can
only make sense if we make a division between romantic/sexual love and
nonromantic/nonsexual love, and then valorize the former over the
latter. Not only valorize, but create a whole new set of standards and
practices to go along with the distinction. While jealousy over one’s
friend having other friends is treated as something one must learn to
cope with, jealousy over one’s romantic/sexual partner having other
romantic/sexual partners is seen as something one may justifiably act
upon and grounds upon which one may justifiably impose sanctions in
response.
To answer why such values and distinctions between romantic/sexual love
and nonromantic/nonsexual love are so entrenched within our society one
must delve into their roots, which are undoubtably in the establishment
of patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism; however, as
I have said, delving into those roots is not my aim here. Instead, I
explore the emotional reasons individuals might have to keep trying at
making monogamy work, and why considering anything different (even if
monogamy has historically not worked out for them) creates such an
anxious, and sometimes reactionary, response. I believe there are two
dominant emotional reasons for feeling secure in the story of you-can’t
monogamy: the inherent vulnerability of embodiment and insecure
attachment.
I began this essay with a reflection on the inherent vulnerability of
being human, and to there we will return, beginning with Judith Butler’s
words on that vulnerability: “Our very sense of personhood is linked to
the desire for recognition, and that desire places us outside ourselves,
in a realm of social norms that we do not fully choose, but that
provides the horizon and the resource for any sense of choice that we
have.” (Butler 33). We are vulnerable to one another, always and without
pause. While the rugged individualist ideology of neoliberal capitalism
seems to offer us a potential reprieve from this vulnerability, its
practice of atomizing human social life actually exacerbates the rawness
of such vulnerability. Most of us do not have one cohesive social life,
but separate social relationships unconnected with one another, and
fragile. For those of us who have been in committed romantic/sexual
relationships, even tumultuous or toxic ones, those relationships
sometimes represent the only people in our lives that we can come home
to and reveal our deepest vulnerabilities we feel we cannot show in
other social realms. It is such a freedom to be completely one’s self in
the presence of another, to be seen, affirmed, and held in our
complexities. Additionally, when we are monogamous, our partner is the
only person with which this is true for us, and we are also the only
person with whom that is true for them. This is the representation of
the “Specialness” argument that Chalmers argues against in his essay,
which he defines thus: “One common defense of monogamy is that monogamy
helps one’s romantic relationships to be special. Many think that there
is or can be a distinctive value in choosing, and being chosen by, just
one person.” (Chalmers 228). This, as Chalmers also points out, is
actually a conflation with specialness and exclusivity. Non-monogamous
people have been quite clear that their nonmonogamy has not diminished
the special place individual people have in their hearts. Each person is
unique and special to us in their own right, regardless of how many
relationships—friendships, sexual relationships, or romantic
relationships—does not diminish that specialness. Yet, I think that even
pointing this out cannot shake the fundamental belief many people have
that one’s vulnerabilities will be protected and held in special regard
only in monogamy. It is my argument that this is due to the prevalence
of insecure attachment.
Insecure attachment, a term most often used in human psychology, is
characterized by fear and uncertainty in one’s relationships. Even when
all the faulty reasoning mobilized in you-can’t monogamy’s defense has
been soundly defeated, a staunch monogamy defender will still invariably
be standing before you and saying, “I don’t care, I could never do
non-monogamy, I’d be too insecure!” We need, I believe, to speak
compassionately, but directly, to that response before we can ever hope
to deconstruct compulsory monogamy on a larger scale, because it comes,
ultimately, from a place of fear and insecurity. People believe that if
they cannot erect structures that help them capture and then solely
possess someone else’s love and affection, they will not ever have
meaningful or safe love, a basic human need, at all. We believe love is
a finite resource. We have been taught that it must be romantic and
sexual to be of true and lasting value. We have internalized the message
that we can only be really special to someone if we are more special to
them than anyone else. And, most importantly, most of us, at some
fundamental point in our lives, have been subjected to this scarcity and
hierarchical mindset by people we were exceptionally vulnerable to:
family, early romantic/sexual partners, teachers, friends, and even by
mainstream media and State law. It is no wonder, then, that so many of
us believe that it is acceptable for our insecurities to dictate what
kind of relationships the people close to us have. In the current state
of things, when all of us have scars of past attachment traumas on our
hearts, it makes sense why we scramble to tie any meaningful and loving
relationships to us by any means necessary, especially when compulsory
monogamy leaves such means so easily at hand. However, this being
understandable does not make it right, or healthy, or even actually
effective to those ends.
In his book The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm writes that having faith is
one of the most important conditions of loving someone well. Having
faith, according to Fromm, requires us to believe that the attitudes
person(s) we love will remain reliably unchanged—not that they will
always stay the same, but that the personal qualities we came to love
them for will remain a part of them—and, also, faith that they will
continue to love us in return. He writes further:
To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the
readiness to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety
and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever
shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession
are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. (Fromm 116)
You-can’t monogamy leaves little room for such courage or faith. We use
possession as a foundational means to shore up our sense of safety and
security, and not only does this keep us from having faith in our
partners’ desire to love us regardless of what other relationships they
may have in their life, but doing so even often heightens our feelings
of insecure attachment. As Chalmers writes in response to the Jealousy
Defense: “Rather than confronting the underlying needs or problems that
jealousy indicates, monogamy is instead simply a way of avoiding
behaviors that trigger jealous feelings, even at the cost of restricting
the partner’s freedom and well-being.” (Chalmers 236). This is what he
terms, aptly, a capitulation to jealousy and insecure attachment. Rather
than finding and building relationships that hold us in our insecurity
and help us work through it in healthy ways, we find relationships that
end up feeding that insecurity. Counterintuitive at first glance, it is
actually monogamy that most often enhances and exacerbates our insecure
attachment. Rather than learning to cope with our insecurity and fears
of abandonment when a beloved partner goes out on a date with someone
else, and then building up a new feeling of security and trust every
time they come back to us with love and affection, we sit in constant
fear that our partner in monogamy might run into someone who they have
undeniable attraction for and leave us entirely in order to explore it.
Rather than being able to be honest about what we can and cannot give to
our partners and allowing them to freely fulfill their needs and desires
we cannot sustainably give them with others, we manically seek to
fulfill their every need, even at the expense of our life-goals and
personal projects, just to make sure they never feel unfulfilled and
seek out someone else. Rather than finding joy and happiness in seeing
someone we love fill their life with all kinds of unique and special
loves, we dread the potential for any new friendship they make to become
romantic or sexual. Instead of seeing each person we begin relationships
with as uniquely valuable because of the person in-themselves, we are
driven to find whatever single relationship we believe will solve our
insecurities the best.
We have, according to Indigenous scholar and Critical Polyamorist Kim
Tallbear’s interpretation, made a relational norm out of “hoarding
another person’s body and desire.” (Tallbear 157), and it has, all
things considered, done few of us much sustainable good. We use monogamy
as a means of foreclosing on vulnerability in our relationships, even as
our inherent interconnection with one another renders such an attempt
impossible from the start. We try to put limits on ours and our loved
one’s interdependence with others. We assert sovereignty over one
another’s agency and autonomy. We have made acceptable putting
boundaries on domains that are not ours to erect fences upon. We devalue
our friendships, hold romantic/sexual love as supreme, and still quake
with insecurity when our romantic partner goes out with friends for fear
that they will discover their friendships to be something more. When
relationships do end, we feel at a loss and isolated because the terms
of compulsory monogamy demand that we pour our love and energy into one
romantic/sexual relationship at the cost of all other connections,
romantic/sexual or not. At least 25% of us (statistics have only been
collected for marriage relationships) will be in a relationship where
infidelity occurs (Blow & Harnett 219). Something is fundamentally
broken with how we build relationships in the United States, and no
amount of material romantic gestures can fix that. Perhaps it is time to
have more frank conversations about monogamy.
“Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy.” Undoing Gender, by
Judith Butler, Routledge, 2009.
Blow, Adrian J., and Kelley Hartnett. “INFIDELITY IN COMMITTED
RELATI0NSHIPS II: A SUBSTANTIVE REVIEW.” Journal of Marital and Family
Therapy, vol. 31, no. 2, 2005, pp. 217–233.,
doi:10.1111/j.1752-0606.2005.tb01556.x.
Chalmers, Harry. “Is Monogamy Morally Permissible?” The Journal of Value
Inquiry, vol. 53, no. 2, 2018, pp. 225–241.,
doi:10.1007/s10790-018-9663-8.
“The Practice of Love.” The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm, Allen &
Unwin, 1958.
Tallbear, Kim. “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and
Family.” Making Kin Not Population, by Adele E. Clarke and Donna Jeanne
Haraway, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018.