This is so perfect:

I’m not straight and live in New Orleans, and you can only go on so many dates with people who say things like, “I separated from my nesting partner to go solo poly, although lately I’ve been thinking I’m actually more of a relationship anarchist1,” before you build up sufficient resentment to want to get a few jokes in.

This isn’t the fault of the polyamory community as a whole. It’s easy to have your scene ruined by annoying rich people (for example, San Francisco) or to make something cool sound uncool by talking about it too much (for example, weed) or to be right and yet still be embarrassing about it (for example, atheism). The lighthearted mockery of terms like “compersion” is mostly a harmless good time, until it inevitably provides cover for reactionary sexual politics. Suddenly someone is writing an essay in The Atlantic about how polyamory is bourgeois, and before I can even think, “That doesn’t seem right,” a bunch of revanchist weirdos eager to roll back the Sexual Revolution are chiming in on X to call polyamory both bourgeois and morally degenerate, and all the fun has been sucked out of my eye-rolling. And so I end up back in bed with the polyamorists

Absolutely top notch writing throughout, and an unbeatable review of More2 that generalizes losslessly to nearly all pro-polyamory lit published to date: contorted memoirs (sometimes disguised as guides) attempting to make coercion and precarity sound enlightened3. The entire thing is worth a read (here’s another link to it).

Then it ends with… optimism? I guess?

Perhaps the standard by which we evaluate polyamory or open marriage should not be its ability to remake the world but the possibility of remaking each other. After all, who hasn’t left the bed of a lover feeling undone? Feeling new, in some promising and terrible way that demands your attention? Alive to the possibility that you are not the person you thought you were, and that this will have consequences for how you live your life?

This insight alone may not be enough ground on which to build a transformative political program, but it’s something. And if the people who are willing to cultivate rather than disavow it are annoying nerds, then so be it. Better that than a cynic or a scold. Perhaps it will always remain too earnest, too unbearably uncool, to admit you might believe that pleasure and care and devotion can exist in abundance.

Like Jensen, I’m not here to be a cynic. I agree that non-traditional relationship structures are not inevitably doomed, even if writing about them seems to be4. But why does polyamory need evaluation? Is identifying some higher purpose supposed to shore up its reputation against problematic memoirs? Why can’t polyamory be… boring?

I’ve learned a lot from my own past relationships, but self-improvement was not their purpose. Even for such a hedonic practice, “I’m dating you for my own self-improvement” feels like an incredibly selfish thing to say because it implicitly accepts another person’s suffering as an acceptable cost. I guess that’s fine if everyone expects to benefit from the experience, but we had no reason better than really liking each other. For a five year span I had two simultaneous long-term squeezes and it was very intentionally a (fairly5) low-key affair. Nearly twenty years later I’m still close with one of them, though what that looks like has evolved in the time since our footloose 20s6. But even in our more promiscuous days we were skeptical of the scene and its buzzwords. In an effort to be both descriptive and uninteresting we labelled our situation “multiple relationships”.

People will do all kinds of things instead of seeing a licensed therapist, but there’s also people out there for whom being in multiple relationships is an absolutely ordinary part of their lives and I don’t think they should have to justify that. Polyamory doesn’t need evaluation, what it needs is a break from people who wield it as an excuse for bad behaviour.

  1. Ed: I know people like this, and every single one of them has serious commitment issues. Terrible relationship material, but good fun if you’re looking for empty calories. ↩

  2. Winter, M. R. (2024). More: A memoir of open marriage. Doubleday. ↩

  3. While Jensen claims “writing about open marriage isn’t an inevitably doomed undertaking”, the example she gives does not actually convince me (or anyone else) otherwise—floating an open marriage with a 6 month old baby because your partner’s libido is shot betrays an apalling lack of self-awareness of how you’re falling short as both a parent and partner. But I don’t have any better examples! They’re all crammed full of red flags! (The meta here is not lost on me.) If you know of any, please send them my way. ↩

  4. My theory for this is selection bias. Like “suburban gays”, anybody enjoying boring nonmonogamy (and they do exist!) is way, way less likely to write about it than people motivated by a guilty conscience or the conviction that polyamory needs evangelism. ↩

  5. Nearly every unit of drama came from our relationships with short-term squeezes, and—much like a solo motorcycle crash—was obviously avoidable in hindsight. Oops. Self-improvement! ↩

  6. The most recent change being that we both had two kids each during the pandemic. I only maintain one romance these days, but my life has never been more full. ↩