I first fucked a married woman whilst I was still in school. If her husband didn’t know that, when the mood took her, she was enthusiastic and keen to experiment, he was possibly the only man in the village. If I had to guess, he probably did know. Some people nowadays would call him a cuckold. So far as I know, they didn’t give it a name or have a great debate about it – they just got on with it, as she did, and for that I was, at the time, generally grateful.
I also suspected that many of the married men who were part of the local gay scene had wives who knew, or suspected, what their husbands were up to. The fact that those men were, in practice, bisexual, was at very least unspoken. Or to put it another way, a cock in the mouth tastes the same no matter what you call it, and no-one felt the need to go looking for a label.
The other day, in the comments on the excellent Alisande interview with Jem and yours truly on XOJane someone asked Jem if she had a polyamorous relationship with her significant other.
I don’t know the answer to that. If their relationship is polyamorous, I’m not privy to it. I may be a little pedantic, but polyamory seems to me to be about having many loves. One of our boundaries involves love.
Jemima and I don’t do romantic love. We do sex. great, wonderful, shaking at the knees forgetting to breathe sex. That we both view the world with love, affection and optimism is not about our relationship, but is a spiritual and political outlook that makes us more congruent as people. That congruence makes the friendship that goes with our relationship easier to sustain, but, to paraphrase Tina Turner, what’s love got to do with it?
If you go to church fetes or jumble sales round here, you’ll see that amongst the tombolas and the slightly sad eyed ladies with books of raffle tickets there’ll be be a huge teddy bear; for a £1 a go you get to guess his name you can claim him. (He’s always male…)
I sometimes feel as if sexuality and sexual politics is a great big game where, if you can name something you can claim it as yours to define. And all I can say is ‘It’s just a hobby guys…’
Tell me more about the great shaking at the knees forgetting to breathe (or how to breathe sex )
Seriously tho, part of the reason I dont think I am poly is it seems to demand an equivalence, to me there are different forms of love as you know, I dont want to feel about another as I feel about the resident buddhist.
Precisely. Our relationship flourishes because it doesn’t require that equivalence, and because it doesn’t give house room to the idea that different equals less.
Huh. I’ve never thought of poly being about equivalence. In fact, the way our family works, with us all being on roughly the same level, is by far the exception, not the rule. From what I can tell, by far the majority of poly people work on a hierarchical basis, rather than seeking to treat each partner the same way.
For me, the thing that I cherish most about being poly is that I can define each relationship on it’s own merits, without any assumptions because of the name that we use for what we are to each other.
Thank you for the comment, which reminds me of the joy of blogging – I get to think out loud.
I think I resist the poly label because I resist the idea that this is hierarchical, and, I’ve read a lot about poly hierarchies, not all of it good.
Let me give you an example of how I got to where I am.
I bake, and I brew, because I was brought up by good, talented women who thought men should be able to do such things. If I make meat pies to take to work, and an apple pie for weekend treats, I don’t need labels or wrappers. I know what the meat pie is, and I know what the apple pie is. If I brew a batch of bitter, and a batch of stout, I don’t need labels on the bottles.
If soemone asked if the lack of labels on the pies meant they’d taste the same, I’d be confused. Same with the beer – winter bitter is ruby red, summer bitter is golden, stout is caramel black. Better or worse would be a daft question…
For me, the thing that I cherish most about being poly is that I can define each relationship on it’s own merits, without any assumptions because of the name that we use for what we are to each other.
Perhaps if that was the sort of thing I had read, I would feel easier about self identifying. I have to admit my knowledge of ply comes from fet boards, where ppl like to exclude by having strict definitions that people must fit.
I’m sort of wary of that sort of poly, not because I don’t believe it can work, but because if you have a set of words people use for who they are to one another, and they’re used by many people, it can lead to a situation where one side puts a label on a relationship meaning one thing, and the other party accepts that, but thinks it means something different.