Fidelity as Aesthetics

I've identified as a relationship anarchist for about two years. I've practiced polyamory for three years and a half. I've had non-exclusive relationships for six years and a half. Before all of that, I was generally unfaithful.

In less than a year, I'm gonna get married.

 

---

 

I'm not the type to go anywhere halfway. I don't only want to get married; I want to be a married man. I want an identifiable wedding band. I want people to think (know?) that I am 'taken'. I want to show off my alienation.

This is not an edifying story about settling down when you hit 25. I do profoundly believe in relationship anarchy, and I believe that relationships in which romantic and/or sexual agency is condemned on moral bases are intrinsically repressive.

But here's the thing: monogamy is not so much the practice of exclusivity as it is the ethical prescription of it, whereas polyamory is but the refusal to have exclusive relationships. I wanna argue, in fact, that choosing to practice exclusivity for reasons that are not ethical ones is a full-fledged relationship anarchist experience.

Also, what can I say — I'm fucking in love.

 

---

 

Here's something about polyamorous culture that I kinda like, and was very useful to me when I started questioning monogamy: love doesn't have to feel so heavy to bear. Casual love, slight love, sparse love, even — they matter too. You don't have to be wildly, desperately, passionately in love for your feelings to be real and worth consideration.

But what if you are?

I don't find, at the moment, that non-monogamous culture provides any satisfying echo for the kind of dark, crazy, devouring thing that took over my life. I needed something that would acknowledge that darkness and channel it. Something to help me go through the suffering, the jealousy, the sadness, the uncertainties of a relationship that was increasingly intense and important, and yet would never be settled in a monogamous structure.

For now, polyamory seems not to tolerate much more than success stories and happy endings, which is very understandable, given that it's competing on the marketplace of ideas with the most ubiquitous relationship model. We have an ethical and ideological battle to fight, and we need good arguments.

But I do think that ethics are merely an auxiliary question when it comes to shaping relationships.

 

---

 

What really matters when it comes to connection between human beings is mythology. The way we love each other, the way we make kin with each other is immensely determined by which stories we've been told and we tell ourselves. Bonds between people are not so much made of ideas and opinions as they are of identifications, symbols and aesthetics.

Every relationship model (like any model) is based upon core ethical values. However, it being good as a hegemonic model depends upon its aesthetic diversity, which is not only a multiplicity of possible practices within it (even if that matters a lot) but most of all a multiplicity of possible stories to be told. Otherwise, it's either repressive or confined to the margins — either it's smothering any impulse outside the dogma, or it merely stands as an 'alternative' side norm, soon to be digested by mainstream culture.

My being monogamous (albeit in a fairly unconventional way) is less a virtue than it is a calling. I wanna be faithful in the way one swears allegiance. Not because it's the right thing to do — because it fucking slaps.

I'm an anarchist out of conviction, but I'm a knight out of taste.