Choosing Insecurity (2017)
knowingless.com
knowingless.com
But how does the author differentiate between "insecurity" and "protecting myself from an outcome I do not want." Just because a potential outcome makes me anxious does not inherently mean it's just an "insecurity" that I should "grow out of."
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This is clearly a failure of imagination on the author's part. I'm pretty introverted, and when I was younger I sort of implicitly suspected that no one "really" liked going to concerts. Somehow going to concerts had become a popular thing, and everyone must have been pretending to enjoy them just to fit in.
Clearly, this idea was as incorrect as it was naive. I had suffered a failure of imagination, and had incorrectly assumed that my native perspective was far more common than it is.
I think we've all suffered these sorts of failures at one point or another.
Hell, if "halfgamous" were a thing, that's what I'd be.
Also, go easy on yourself. Emotional needs are a sign of humanity, not weakness.
I like applying Chesterton's fence as a rebuke to most calls to shed some traditional more of society. In considering this I'm not sure most proponents of polygamy understand why monogamy exists as a societal tenet in the first place.
This is about the equivalent of saying that people who decide to eat 3 meals a day are insecure about dealing with the negative emotions of being on a continual starvation diet.
Maybe the author should just try owning their position like "yea I want to sleep around and feel good about myself" instead of having to tear others down.
If you're a healthy weight, then eating all the calories needed to give you good energy levels seems pretty optimal.
There are plenty of mono people who choose mono and who deal with jealousy. The entire premise is starting off on the wrong foot. (There's also a good chunk of mono people who observe and/or try poly and say "dear God, I never want that scheduling nightmare")
It is certainly consistent with a large subgroup within poly that likes to send the message that polyamory will make you somehow a more evolved human being. But there, too, is plenty of evidence to the contrary. (Major sanctimonious preachers of the poly choir have turned out to be major shitheels in recent years)
So maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't conflate choice of partners with character, ethical behavior, or other traits.
Just a thought.
So if you and your partner have both freely decided that you don't want to date other people because the scheduling is too annoying, you're not really her target.
I've heard some of my friends say things like "if I ever found out my partner slept with someone else, I'd be furious and might never forgive them." Maybe that's who she has in mind.
Two: You can certainly mutually agree to expectations without being insecure. Hey, lots of couples are monogamous because STDs are a thing, and they FULLY expect their partner to stick to that definition. Not insecurity, collective risk management.
Three: Not forgiving somebody who betrayed your trust isn't jealousy. Wanting to control their behavior in the first place is.
Four: If she wanted to say "jealousy is rooted in insecurity", she could've just said that and saved the world a lot of screen space. It's not about "target", it's about the mindset that somehow poly is magically better. (And boy, there are extremely jealous poly people out there. Wanting to control is a desire that's independent of relationship status)
«Jealousy is a negative trait, territoriality is a positive trait. Jealousy stems from fear and insecurity. The focus of jealousy is actually yourself. Territoriality is an instinctive act to provide and protect the one(s) you love. Jealousy focuses on you, territoriality focuses on your partner. You are being territorial because you care for their well being. Jealousy breeds resentment, anxiety and distrust, territoriality breeds a sense of safety, security and trust.»
[1] https://www.relationshiptalk.net/are-you-a-jealous-or-territ...
It's still being an ass, just in different ways.
Choosing polyamory is not "fixing oneself." There is no benefit to it, unless the only thing you get out of sex is physical pleasure.
There are a thousand reasons that someone may be drawn to either lifestyle, a thousand more reasons why someone might find themselves shifting between them, and still a thousand more reasons why someone might be situationalist and not identify with any prevailing lifestyle for themselves at all.
Depthful discussions about different ways of living can be interesting and enlightening, but making reductionist claims about the “other” doesn’t deliver on that.
I wonder if people are just wired differently, and it's like trying to convince a straight man that he should actually be attracted to other men. Would explain why this topic has generated basically zero interesting discussion, which is unusual for this website.
I think you might be on to something. Maybe I'm an odd duck, but I can't possibly divide my romantic attention between multiple individuals without negatively affecting the quality of the relationship/s. I suspect anyone who claims to be able to doesn't experience love the same way.
You're right though, different people probably do have a very different experience of love. Some people say they do not experience romantic love at all, some people can't imagine romantically loving more than one person, others are sure that they're fully in love with multiple people at once.
It's impossible for me to say conclusively that someone is wrong when they're talking about their own experience of feelings.
For example, one might have all the confidence in the world, but prefer to pursue a monogamous relationship for practical reasons.
I might be fairly content with or without a monogamous relationship, but I know that certain experiences would be exceedingly unlikely without one, and they're things I want to experience. For example, raising kids in a healthy environment. In a monogamous relationship I can provide a stable and functional environment for my kids to grow up in. I don't care all that much about who my partner has sex with, but I do care that our relationship meets their needs such that they don't feel compelled to have sex with other people, so we can raise our kids under conditions that keep everyone happy. It's not really about who they have sex with so much as creating a life where that isn't really a concern in the first place.
If I was concerned or insecure about sex, well, I wouldn't have had kids I think. They aren't conducive to having more sex at all, nor necessarily all that great for ensuring someone is monogamous. Divorce rates are evidence enough to illustrate that.
So am I insecure about something here? Not passing on my genes? Not having stability? I suppose you could frame it that way, but at some point you need to choose one thing over another, and it wouldn't be useful or informative to call that insecurity. I feel secure in my choice, for what it's worth.
Couldn't you make the same argument the other way if you assume that monogamy is "right": "poly people are insecure in thinking that no one would commit to them and only them and they choose to act accordingly to that principle instead of working on themselves"? Of course there are poly people that are like that just like there are monogamous people that want to control/are jealous of their partner but I don't think either are as good of arguments as the author thinks
I think she explains herself more thoroughly and isn't nearly as provocative about it, though still makes the same basic error in equating possessiveness with insecurity. Someone may be quite confident but still not like sharing. I think that's a basic impetus behind a whole lot of type A personalities and elite competitors that I don't believe you can rightfully call insecure.
Her definition is unorthodox to say the least, by the way:
> (edit: i should clarify that my definition of monogamy is “when you place a restriction or expectation on your partner’s engagement in sexual activity.” In a situation where two people are totally okay with their partner fucking/loving other people, but just happen not to due to lack of desire or interest in other people, I consider this just passive polyamory.)
I guess I fall into this category of having a "formally open" marriage because I don't believe it is realistic to expect that in 60 years together neither my wife nor I should ever encounter some opportunity to have safe, harmless sex with some other person, but at the same time, we're both homebodies who are not socially motivated and absolutely do not want to date or go looking for someone.
Calling us "polyamorous" on that basis stretches common usage. Every poly-identifying person I have ever known that talked about it seemed quite opposite, intensely social people who needed to constantly be around others and more or less craved nonstop affection and physical validation. If I was being less charitable, that could be framed as another form of insecurity.
There are quite obvious and real distinctions in what we're trying to get out of life. I just want one person so I can have a family and not be totally alone as I gradually get closer to death, but I have no absolute ideal of lifetime sexual exclusivity I intend to hold myself or my life partner to. Aella is a prostitute who has had a continually open application process where anyone on the Internet can apply to date her. Those are very different life goals and I don't think it is useful for her to categorize us together. If the beef is with people who force their non-willing partners into monogamy out of jealously, fine, say that, but don't say that is the single defining trait of all monogamy and thus your beef is with monogamy itself. Come on.
At the end of the day the only fundamental truth is that nobody wants to be present when 2 people are getting romantic/sexual. Also nobody wants to picture somebody they are having sex with somebody else before.
The above is something which is true for basically everybody except for rare fetishes.
Once you recognize the fundamental truth above it becomes perfectly clear that what people call polyamory is essentially 2 people having a pseudo-romantic relationship in which they don't live together and don't see each other every day.
And when they are not seeing each other they are having pseudo-romantic relationship with other people and everybody in this chain of pseudo-romantic relationships thinks of themselves as being the only one who is enjoying exclusivity but doesn't bother investigating if that's really the case. Of course they don't confess sleeping around either.
Such things have existed forever. It used to be called the "talking stage" when everything is still fair game but somehow you assume the other person is not taking advantage of the fair game clause which exists during the "talking stage".
Some social norms exist in other countries where it goes beyond the talking stage. Eg. France. But if you ask around they don't define themselves as poly.
I suppose everyone forgot about the individualist nature of protestantism.
The initial comparison she makes to 'monogamous people' is not really explored. She ascribes some of her own judgements to monogamy at the end, but it's not really based on anything that monogamous people do or say. It's mostly her own reasoning about herself, generalities and an anecdote about her friend in real life.
It's a tiny bit of a shame, glad she's doing well but it is clear stepping into a more traditional church that has survived the test of time (and isn't fundamentalist) like catholic, orthodox or episcopal might provide her with the seed of a faith that can last.
She knows what she's doing though, the subtitle of her blog is "In pursuit of an internally consistent annihilation", so be her wants. A long way from Mary.
Also, while mainstream Christians are monogamous, a lot of devout followers of Abrahamic religions over the centuries were decidedly not: e.g. certain Mormons and Muslims.
I'm not sure I follow. If I come to you saying "I'm not sure if monogamy is the right thing to do", your answer is "it's the right way because the Bible says so"? That's a pretty unhelpful answer unless I already happen to believe that the Bible is true.
Specifically in relation to the blog poster's article, I detected someone who knew what Christianity was on some level and was writing about the topic of monogamous relationships and authority from the counter-perspective to Christianity. So I wanted to re-open that topic for the author of the blog post and remind him/her (her in this case) that the answer can be found in Christian thought and specifically not in fundamentalist evangelism and young earth creationism and all that she was involved in.
Providing grounding for monogamy as a whole depends on the christian faith you attend. There are common threads of value in monogamy across all christian faiths, like the marriage of a man and woman under God. The connection to God and the whole of the christian faith is a tremendous benefit of monogamy and marriage in a religious faith as it provides a solid and external whole to tie one's relationship together and to be one with a tradition of marriage that has lasted a long time and gives you a community of people who support the idea of marriage. It frequently gives you a lot of ancillary community benefits or connections and knowledge about marriage and the resulting difficulties, but those side benefits are not structured as an explicit argument for christian marriage in common conversations about it.
The separate denominations or branches of Christianity have more detailed supports of marriage which vary based on the thinking and logic of their faith. Some examples include:
- Catholics have many many arguments for making a marriage from natural law, perfect form and lengthy spiritual reasoning around relationships and the different catholic monastic orders (Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, ect) have fleshed out the idea in accordance with the pursuit of their monastic way of life. Summarizing it is difficult as the Magisterium, the authoritative Catholic version of the Word of God, can take decades to scratch the surface and the Dominican monks spend most of their time reading and exploring the tradition. One Franciscan monk (the more relatable monks) describes the convenant of marriage in catholicism here[0].
- Orthodox have a phenomenological worldview which features a view of the world from the 'first person perspective' and builds a rich and fulfilling set of symbolic interpretations and cycles of the subjective experience of living in the world. This worldview uses simple language to fill in one's mysterious relations and soul satisfying connection to a wife with rich symbolic and active participation in a long standing tradition. This view is hard to communicate a summarized view of marriage because it makes more sense, the more you ingest their symbols and symbolic worldview. Without the pre-requisite knowledge it's like a lego piece without the picture on the box and the instructions and the rest of the lego set.
- Episcopalians (Anglicans) have a long running hierarchical tradition that emphasis a nurturing community which accepts people from many different beliefs into one 'lake' of members who worship the same god. The faith emphasizes a personal connection to god and those around them where communion with the laity is a central feature. A go-with-the-flow attitude to conflict and reasoning the church offers a secure and long-running emotional direction for a marriage to follow. The arguments for marriage are usually because of common reasoning about being better for children and society and all that, largely the focus and benefit of Anglican faith is on the emotional support, long running traditions and guided behaviour. One is quite often encouraged to seek theological answers themselves and bring a new and fresh interpretation, a new angle on things. It is almost he opposite style of thinking to the catholic focusing on teachings, even though the faiths share quite a lot in common.
The arguments you get out of these versions of Christianity will differ in style drastically as they think about the world differently, though ultimately agree on quite a lot of basic elements of marriage and faith. The Bible is the source material for a much much larger "programming language" of discussion around faith. Like higher-level programming languages are built on machine code, so are some of these faiths built on the Bible. The level of added detail from the biblical interpretation varies wildly and some faiths prefer sola scriptura (only scripture, only the bible).
Those two abrahamic religions in particular, Mormonism and Islam vouch for the authenticity of the Bible yet seek to extend off it with fallacious arguments that the bible itself contradicts. Which is a bucket of worms in itself.
Discussions about authority suffer from the same level of difference between the faith branches and the same necessity to build it up from little knowledge to some knowledge to a lot of knowledge. People who can tolerate, or whom believe in a faith structure that has an authoritative structure, will find somewhere between much less and no rebellion in the rest of their lives against authority as a concept. They will likely see the relationships around people with authority much more clearly, as any faith makes it clear how you relate to people around you.
The faith the blog poster grew up in, is in much more radical opposition to the "old standby" faiths and may have opened the door for some basic tenets of christian to slip by her grasp. If she wanted to grasp them, of course it's up to her and anyone else to have a look in.
Summarizing the "christian view" on marriage is a bit difficult as the value in Christianity doesn't always fit inside words and the words used are usually built on other words of which few people get the context, as we live in a largely secular society that is not educated in religious symbolism whatever the outcome. There is a lot of rich and seductive ideas about monogamy, the "shortest version" of the christian ideas are probably best found as a writers' philosophical quotes from the last two thousand years.
C.S. Lewis (famous Anglican/Episcopalian from the 1900s)
The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ's words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism - for that the words "one flesh" would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment, but stating a fact - just as one is stating a fact when one says a lock and it's key are one mechanism, or that a violin and bow are one instrument.
G.K.Chesterton (famous Roman Catholic from the early 1900s)
Variability is one of the virtues of woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.
also
I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and woman, as such, are incompatible.