Why It’s Vital For Everyone to Learn About Polyamory
It’s time to deconstruct modern relationships and create something healthier and more ethical (even when it’s monogamous)
A lot of people are scared of polyamory. They see anything that even suggests the way they think might not be right as an attack on them and their life choices. They fear that even being curious about the idea will see them tarred with the brush of being unhappy in their relationship. They rely on the assumption that it's all about sex, and so they are somehow a better person for not entertaining the concept.
But the sad thing is, these knee-jerk reactions are preventing them from having healthier, ethical monogamous relationships.
The truth about polyamory is that learning more about it will help you build healthier, more rewarding relationships, even if you never plan to be anything more than 100% monogamous. Because, at its core, what polyamory is actually about is deconstructing modern relationships and stripping out the old, restrictive social ideas that we no longer need (or never needed in the first place). Once we do that, we are left with the tools and the freedom to build healthier, more fulfilling relationships. Yes, even if those relationships are monogamous.
So, let’s discuss why it's vital for everyone to learn about polyamory.
How can Polyamory Create Better Monogamous Relationships?
What kind of city has the best road systems? One that’s been around since Roman times, where all the streets were designed for people pulling carts? Or one built recently where the streets were laid out with modern cars and public transport in mind?
I think we both know the answer.
Now, take that metaphor and use it to think about the roadways and paths we use to navigate relationships. For as much as society has changed and grown in the last few decades, modern relationships are built on foundations set in place centuries ago when people saw marriage and relationships in very different ways. And yet, we still use the same ideas and constructs as the basis for things today. We might have upgraded the roads - resurfaced them, widened a couple of lanes, put up better signage - but we still follow the same pathways because we see the route everyone else is taking and follow them without thinking. These routes have worked for so many years, so why would we suspect they aren't the best ones to follow?
But sometimes, the fact that people have always done something a certain way isn’t a good enough reason to keep doing it.
Sometimes, we need to demolish and rebuild in order to make the journeys we take not only easier for us as individuals, but better for all of us as a whole.
That is the fundamental truth of what polyamory does.
Polyamory, at its core, is about re-learning relationships.
Society has a preset idea of what a "relationship looks like. Yes, we're permitted to make alterations and changes to better fit our personal circumstances, but only as long as we adhere to the same core structure. Same-sex marriage is still marriage. Child-free marriage is still marriage. Yes, there are still some people who will be adamantly against any change, and I don't wish to diminish all the troubles people have gone through to win the right to equal marriage. But, as a whole, society is accepting of these changes.
We're not creating anything new. We're merely making small adjustments that still fit into society's idea of what a relationship looks like.
There is nothing wrong with this. Don't get me wrong, if you want a traditional style of relationship, then that's absolutely fine. The reason people tend not to question traditional marriage styles is they work for a vast number of people.
But just because a relationship works doesn't mean it wouldn't work even better if you built it around you, rather than your being forced to contort yourself to fit inside it as it comes.
The invisible baggage of modern relationships
No matter how modern or evolved we believe our current relationships might be, they are all filled with centuries of baggage. So much, in fact, that we don't even see it.
There are many, many examples I could discuss here. But for the sake of brevity, I'll pick one: A father giving his daughter away at her wedding.
Think about a traditional Western marriage ceremony. Who is given away? The bride. By their father, to her husband. Sure, in many modern ceremonies, this tradition is given a new spin, with different family members doing the giving away or with the groom's parents also walking him down the aisle. But these altered versions are still rooted in the time when a woman literally belonged to her father, and her marriage was the moment that ownership was legally transferred to her new husband.
But why is this important? It's just a fun tradition, right? No one actually thinks about relationships through the lens of the woman belonging to the man anymore.
The problem is, they do. We all do, even if we don't realise it. Because actions and words affect our way of thinking far more than any of us realise.
According to a 2023 study by Pew Research Center, only 29% of heterosexual marriages are classified as egalitarian, where both the husband and wife earn the same amount. The number of marriages where the man is still the primary or sole breadwinner is still 55% (compared to 16% where it is the woman). But whatever the reasons for this uneven split, the depressing fact is that even in egalitarian marriages, the study showed that men spent 3.5 hours more a week on leisure activities, while their wives spent 2 hours more a week on caregiving.
So even when a husband and wife are contributing exactly the same financially to their household, the woman has to contribute more emotionally and physically, while the man enjoys more leisure time.
There are many sociological reasons behind this (I recommend reading the full report; it's eye-opening), but one of them is, I believe, because while our social concept of what a "relationship" is has evolved, we haven't actively deconstructed it.
This is where learning about polyamory comes in.
The importance of looking at things from a new perspective
Have you ever rearranged a room in your house and found it suddenly feels completely different? It's the same space with the same furniture, but now it just feels more comfortable? Or even just sat in a different chair to your usual spot and found yourself noticing things in the room you haven't paid attention to for years, simply because you're looking at them from a new angle?
This is what learning about polyamory does to your relationships.
When I talk about the different skills and practices needed for healthy polyamorous relationships, in almost every single case, they are exactly the same as the ones you need to maintain a healthy monogamous relationship. When I research and write about most of them, I realise I've been doing many of them for years without even realising it. Others are completely new to me, but now that I've seen them, I can see how their importance to a healthy relationship is blindingly obvious, and the fact I hadn't thought about it before is just embarrassing for me.
By looking at relationship skills from a polyamorous perspective, I'm suddenly seeing all the things I needed in my monogamous relationship but simply didn't realise.
Polyamory isn’t about replacing Monogamy
An important point to remember is that polyamory is not about replacing monogamy. We can't improve the situation we are in by simply replacing one off-the-peg relationship model with another. It's about learning to recognise how to build relationships around our own needs, wants, and desires.
Let's go back to my earlier analogy for a moment. If you've ever lived in any major city, I'm sure you know of at least one major road improvement scheme that has actually made the roads worse than they were before. One that caused months of disruption, only for the final result to disappoint absolutely everyone. Either it didn't fix the problem, or it simply replaced one problem with a new one. This happens because the planners only looked at what they needed to immediately fix and didn't take the time to properly consider what they actually needed to make things better in the long term.
In the same way, we can't say, "Monogamy isn't working. Therefore, polyamory must replace it". Instead, we need to say, "We can't assume monogamy is working, so looking at polyamory will allow us to see our different options in a new light".
Healthy relationships only work when they are built around us. If we try to create something that doesn't fit what we and our partner are looking for, we're going to end up in just as bad a place, if not worse, than before.
If you want to work on your relationship - be it polyamorous or monogamous - you need to have done the work to understand what it is you want and what elements will help you build a relationship that will lead to you moving towards these goals rather than holding you back. And if that involves remaining monogamous, then that's great. Hopefully, it will be a better version of monogamy that works for you without all the insidious "traditions" that you never needed or wanted that have been causing problems you hadn't even realised were problems.
The reason that it is vital for everyone to learn about polyamory is that if we don't learn to actively deconstruct the traditions and practices that have been built up around relationships, we will never be able to truly create fair and healthy relationships.
Polyamory is not just about sex and dating. Nor is it about destroying the concept of monogamy outright and making everyone non-monogamous. Nor is it about burning all the old traditions to the ground and creating a new relationship utopia without the baggage of our ancestors.
It's about looking at relationships in a new way and learning how to see how the traditions we hold on to impact our way of thinking. That way, we can choose which ones we want and which ones need to be finally put aside and forgotten.
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