WTF is a Polyamorous Orientation?

Like many nerds who grew up in the 80s, I adored Star Wars.  Space battles, lasers, light sword-wielding mystics, villians with crazy lightning hands.  Whole blocks of dialog and reams of esoterica filled my brain.

So imagine my horror when I sat in a theater in Guam in the summer of 1999, watching George Lucas gutting my childhood.  He had already scarred me with the revised version of the trilogy a few years earlier.

I could deal with Greedo shooting first.  I didn't even mind all the background junk that only served to clutter the screen.  I could even barely stomach the creepy racist caricatures.  But midi-fucking-clorians?  He had reduced an energy that bound the universe together and locked light and dark into an eternal struggle down to being a blood-born parasite.  

The lesson here is that searching for a biological component can result in losing the magic and annoying people with needless technobabble.  This silly lesson might apply, though, to the ongoing quest in polyamory for legitimacy through inescapable biology.

But what's the harm in thinking it's biological?  If we make this argument, then can't we finally move toward getting some legal recognition, if not full protections?

Maybe.  But then, if the argument isn't sound, then the whole community looks like a pack of immature nerd swingers using wishful thinking to unsuccessfully justify their actions, like a bunch of furries getting naked in a convention hotel room.

Let's engage in a little thought exercise.  We're poly, as I'm sure you'd know if you read the previous posts or somehow knew how much time we spend on Reddit's /r/polyamory forum.  What I'll bet you didn't know is that we were born this way.  At least, that's the starting assumption of this exercise.

My wife and I were born poly.  Likely from poly parents who themselves had poly parents.  Maybe it's a recessive gene.  Really really recessive.

So that orientation that we both experience takes the form of us both seeking out or at least being open to multiple loves.  But that's where we start to differ as well.

Girl is interested in good looking guys who want to talk about history and pop culture.  And being good lovers doesn't hurt.  There's no limit.  That whole poly infinity symbol with a heart.

Boy is different.  He wants guy third for a polyfidelitous triad.  Sure he's poly, but poly is just more than one right?  That's in the word itself.  He conjectures that mankind evolved in small socioromantic groups for the purpose of resource collection and collectively raising offspring.  He's just building that small close-knit group.

Girl isn't really onboard with Boy's plan.  Her view of her polyamory orientation is about being open to love, not closing yourself off from it.  She points out that boy's social model has no historical support.  She, on the other hand, knows that monogamy in the animal kingdom is rare.  Human monogamy is something people try to force, but that most people will be tempted throughout their lives and putting a yoke and that and saying we can only consort within this little household group is just as contrived as monogamy.

But if polyamory is an orientation, it necessarily must be oriented to something and go beyond simply being the relationship model you want to build.

So what is polyamory as an orientation?  Most would say it's ethical non-monogamy wherein people build serious, loving relationships with multiple people.  That's why it's not swinging or a garden variety open relationship or old fashioned cheating.  It's different exactly because it's ethical and about really loving the partners.  Strip those things away and it just falls back to being swinging or cheating.  So if it's an orientation, it's one defined by ethics and love.  Both of those have to be in the mix for it to be polyamory.

One of the more problematic analogies for poly is that people can love multiple people, just like loving all of one's children or both their parents.  Ignoring the fact that familial love is not the same as romantic love, it also strips loving multiple people away as the defining trait of poly because everyone is now poly.  A distinct orientation can't be something that everyone does.  Therefore, loving multiple people can't be a defining characteristic of being oriented poly.

That leaves us with the ethics angle as the only unique element to poly.  We can put aside the fact that orientations based solely on ethics are not really a thing, but we have to examine the number of people who come to polyamory through infidelity and people in the community who talk about never being able to be faithful in relationships prior to finding poly.  That means that they can't be ethically oriented.  They were driven by being with other people, not by being honest about it.

Once you start to define it, the orientation model goes out the window.  So we're left with the "But I've always felt poly," argument.

"Most of my relationships had something missing." That's true for most.  In our lives, the vast majority of people will have more relationships that don't work out than relationships that last the rest of their lives.

I just feel it.  How is that not religious thinking?  It reduces polyamory as orientation to faith with less supporting evidence.  The Catholics at least have their saints and their relics.  I believe in something that is not in any way proven because of a conviction I hold.  I cannot see God but I know he loves me.  I know I'm poly because I want to be with multiple people.  My friend does it, but he's a player.  We're different because of something I cannot quantify or qualify.  It simply is so in my heart.

None of this is to say that polyamorous people don't exist.  It's just that, like The Force, it's best not to make up a biological component to give it depth it doesn't need.  Poly as an orientation is a tautological sinkhole.  Also, fuck you, George Lucas.  Han definitely shot first!