Is Polyamory Just Cheating?
I need to get something straight about polyamory, y’all — for realz.
“Cheating is cheating,” he said.
He was super sure if himself. Like a lot of people, he was convinced that his worldview was how everybody else saw the world: Can you imagine? That’s some privilege for you. Taking it completely for granted that the world believes what you believe or, at least you figure, would benefit from a little indoctrination! This is really true around relationships.
A relationship is “boy meets girl” then they get married, then they get a house, then kids, then grow old then one dies while the other grieves until their own death. Okay, probably way more people accept that boy meets girl is an old-fashioned assumption. I hope so, at least. Some may go as far as to say the marriage part is just a formality. Still the model is widely accepted as the normal, average way people connect. The test of a “real” and successful relationship is one that concludes in the death of one of the devoted and faithful pair.
The fact that half of all marriages end in divorce—not even counting the people who start a relationship and break up without ever getting married—proves that model as faulty AF. Even in relationships where the couple managed to stay together (one of the “lucky” 50%) another 20% cheat, according to a study titled America's Generation Gap in Extramarital Affairs. In spite of all that reality, people respond with suspicion—or outright derision—when I discuss my polyamory.
Non-monogamy is practice in a large percentage of couples. Much of non-monogamy is practiced without the consent of one of the partners. That nonconsensual extra-relationship activity is often referred to as cheating. That cheating is done across gender. My contradictory friend (who was more than happy to have sex with me, the whole while knowing I was in a polyamorous relationship) losing their shit on me later (leaving me sitting at the restaurant table, wishing he’d waited until dessert), was a demonstration of how ingrained that thinking is. Even when engaging in polyamorous behavior, his cognitive dissonance set him off on a self-righteous tangent.
There are and have always been relationship models, and lots of them, outside of the lifetime monogamous model, also called the escalator model as it is assumed that every relationship is aiming to follow a certain path to completion. Research it and find out. Read books like The Ethical Slut, Pleasure Activism, Opening Up, and More Than Two. In the meantime, stop beating yourself (and/or) other people for living ethically, according to their own cultural standards and/or inclinations.
