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Polyamory: a lifestyle choice, or an orientation?
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In a previous article about intersecting subcultures, I made a remark about "choosing to be polyamorous." I received a comment from a reader wondering what I meant by that: did I believe that polyamory was only a choice that people made, or that, like being gay or lesbian, it was something you were born to?
My short answer to that question was "yes." But I felt I should expand upon it here.
The jury is still out on whether homosexuality is genetic or behavioral, learned or inborn, though anecdotally many gays and lesbians speak of always having known they were different, and the search for "the gay gene" occasionally pops up in the news. Whatever the answer is, I find the question a bit maddening: nobody asks people whether they were born heterosexual or were taught to be so. And while a definitive "yes" answer to the gay gene question might be useful for those who want to stop the "ex-gay" conversion fanatics, it could also pave the way for genetic manipulation, eugenics, or worse.
What seems clear, however, is this: being gay is not a choice, but an orientation. Whether you are attracted to men, women, both, or those in blurrier gender categories is something that naturally arises in people, and may shift over one's lifetime but cannot be forcibly changed.
So what about attraction to, and love for, more than one person at a time? It's obvious that people can be attracted to others when they are already ostensibly "taken." But is there an orientation that defines people who feel they *cannot* live monogamously?
Monogamy is one of our society's deepest assumptions, and one that we break more often than we stick to. But most discussion around polyamory assumes that it's a lifestyle choice that people make, a way of loving more broadly and with more freedom that is a deliberate turn away from the status quo. Some people, however, feel that it is actually an orientation: that they could no more make the choice to live monogamously and be fulfilled than a gay man could live happily married to a woman.
Personally, I will admit that in my monogamous days, I often had the feeling of being open to love with someone else without feeling my love for the person I was with lessen. Unfortunately, this sometimes manifested as cheating behavior - which I would immediately cop to after the first incident. Some people carry on affairs for years without feeling a reduction of affection for their spouses. There is a classic image of the bachelor who just can't settle down, and I've certainly known some openly polyamorous people who have always felt multiple, deep loves at a time and found anything else alien. Perhaps these are all examples of people who are poly by orientation, and are expressing it to varying levels of healthiness.
On the other hand, some people live in polyamory simply because their partner requires it, and they themselves do not see other people. Some choose polyamory after half a lifetime of failed monogamous relationships. Some people are poly for a while, then decide they wish to be monogamous. And some choose polyamory as a political statement, or a move toward greater freedom, or because of one person in particular.
When a teenager thinks he or she might be gay, sometimes others will suggest that he or she is "just going through a phase." This dismissal of earnest sexual exploration is nearly never true, though there are people who behave more bisexually in their youth, then default to the heteronormative status quo later in adulthood. This choice doesn't mean that those sexual attractions and explorations were any less real. And for the most part, what people begin by being attracted to, they stay attracted to on some level throughout their lives.
In polyamory, I believe it is more fluid. I don't see a lot of solid evidence for poly being an orientation, but I can believe that for some people it is. "Orientation" applies a state of being rather than actions: a man is gay because he is attracted to other men, not because he has sex with other men. Some poly people may be naturally inclined to love multiple people at a time, even if, at the moment, they aren't seeing anyone. For other people, it's a lifestyle: a conscious choice that they make throughout their lives such that it becomes natural. For still others, they really are just going through a phase that will end when they find the person they want to marry - in which case, it's really more like old-fashioned dating.
Regardless of whether poly is a choice or an orientation, however, it is a valid way of being and living, even though sometimes people choose it for the wrong reasons. Hopefully, the question of whether it is an orientation or simply a choice will not take on the same force as that question takes with regard to homosexuality - because in the end, it really doesn't matter. What matters is: what works for you?
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