This week, New York Magazine unveiled a new package on polyamory (which, as far as I can tell, is pegged to a memoir about a woman in an open marriage that just dropped this week). And, you know, fine. Good! The piece has some good info in it. If it inspires someone to make choices that improve their life and relationships, then I’m all for it.
However.
Maybe I’m just old and jaded, but it was hard not to feel like, well, I’d read all this before. I mean, sure, yes, as the package itself acknowledges, The Ethical Slut debuted in 1997 (I think I read it in 2000? Def when I was 17) and Dan Savage talked about being “monogamish” over a decade ago and even those trends were preceded by all manner of swinging and communes and free love in the decades before (to say nothing of the many world cultures where monogamous partnership is not the default). So as a person who has done the reading, I had literally read much of the package’s contents before.
But the raw info itself — the terms like NRE and compersion and metamour — are not really what I’m talking about when I say that I felt like I’d read it all before. What I mean, truly, is that it feels like there’s this media cycle in which polyamory (or non-monogamy or swinging or whatever you want to call it) falls in and out of fashion, an ebb and flow in which it suddenly resurfaces as some hot new thing that everyone is into only to fall back into the shadows once the novelty wears off.
Meanwhile, the people for whom this is just everyday life — the people who, as a friend mentioned, are just trying to figure out how to get their kid’s school to recognize that there are three parents with three different last names but they’re all the kid’s guardians — carry on in the background, trying to navigate a world that is not built for them, a world that doesn’t really get easier just because Susie and Tommy learned the word compersion and are trying to figure out if they can fuck other people without breaking one another’s hearts.
It’s a similar cycle with bisexuality, I think. Even when it’s not as blatant as trend pieces declaring multigender attraction to be some hot new trend, there’s still a feeling that interest in bisexuality — interest in what it means to be bi, in our lives, our lives, our struggles — ebbs and flows with no real acknowledgment of the fact that, uh, we’re just here living our lives the whole fucking time.
It feels like we have to latch on to these tiny windows of opportunity as the rare chances to say “Did you know we’re not just sexy but suffering? Did you know biphobia is real?” before the tide rolls out and once again, no one fucking cares.
It is not a way to live a life.
I’m not interested in being a novelty, a curiosity, a special identity that comes into focus every few years, like an identity-based Leap Day. I’m interested in bisexuality, in polyamory, in asexuality, in every way of being a person, being permanently on the table when we talk about sex and love and relationships. I’m interested in people realizing that, while some details may shift, the fundamental lessons of how to be a good partner remain unchanged regardless of gender or sexuality or number of partners:
Be honest about what you want. Respect other people’s boundaries. Recognize that the people you date are people, not objects*. It is really, truly that simple. But I guess recognizing that would mean magazine writers would need to find other sexy topics to fall in and out of love with every few years.
* Hat tip to my beloved and brilliant friend Irene for some of this
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