SEXIS WRONG

Love Without Limits
Excerpts from Polyamory
Deborah Taj Anapol
What Is Polyamory?
“Most of you are jealous and possessive in your
love. When your love turns to possessiveness it
makes demands. The demands then alienate the
loved one and you incorporate anger and fear into
the relationship. With these come bitterness and
aggression, and whether we speak of individual
love relationships or global interactions, what you
call love, but is in fact ownership and manipulation,
takes over and the problems then flow.”
—Wayne Dyer, Gifts from Eykis
Our culture puts so much emphasis on monogamy that few
people realize they have a choice about how many sexualoving
partners they can have at one time. Even harder to grasp
is the idea that multi-partner relationships can be stable, responsible,
consensual, nurturing, and long-term. Polyamory
is not a synonym for promiscuity!
I myself didn’t realize that polyamory was really a possibility
until I’d failed several times at the usual possessive and
dependent arrangement that commonly passes for love. As
time went on, I began to realize that, for me,
monogamous marriage was profoundly isolating
and intolerably lonely, partly because of the
strict limits on whom I could love. My husband
at the time was only willing to love and accept
me if he could be sure that I loved and desired
no one else.
was. If I acknowledged being attracted to other men, my husband
quickly let me know that I was out of line. Worse yet, as
a trained observer of human behavior, he could easily detect
any signs of attraction unless I was careful to cover them up.
Our relationship didn’t feel very intimate because it wasn’t!
Another pattern I began to notice was that, after about four
years of exclusive commitment to one partner, I would grow
increasingly restless and dissatisfied. At first I thought the
solution was to find a new and better partner. After several of
these four-year cycles, I realized I was just repeating the first
stages of relationship over and over. Most of the long-term
marriages I’d observed in my parents’ generation seemed to
go on automatic pilot after a few years, an alternative that
didn’t appeal at all. Nevertheless, I suspected that genuine
intimacy could continue to unfold over many decades. In order
to find out what was possible later on in a partnership, I
realized I would have to find a way to sustain intimate relationships
over time.
I knew that my real self wanted to give and receive unconditional
love. I’d experienced this kind of total acceptance only
As time went on, I began to realize
that, for me, monogamous marriage
was profoundly isolating and
intolerably lonely, partly because of
the strict limits on whom I could love.
In truth, however, I still cared deeply for all my past lovers and
sometimes encountered others to whom I felt strongly attracted.
Sure, I could suppress these feelings, but the bottom
line was that in order to maintain my monogamous commitment
I had to pretend to be someone other than who I really
outside the arena of marriage, in a few special friendships
and in the contexts of psychotherapy and spiritual teaching.
Next to this kind of genuine intimacy, most romantic liaisons
seemed like protection rackets. I knew I was capable of loving
more than one person at a time, so I assumed others
LOVE WITHOUT LIMITS 29