|
Recently I was going through my bookshelf marveling at how many books a
person could own and yet still not have read, when I came across this
little gem: The Lesbian Polyamory Reader – Open Relationships,
Non-Monogamy, and Casual Sex.
It’s basically a how–to guide on sleeping around. I attempted to read
this book on numerous occasions, but the overwhelming ‘70s sentiment,
and poetry with lines like, “waking the lotus bud of want,” meant that
finishing it was generally impossible.
Open relationships were a favourite topic of mine when I first started
writing this column. I loved espousing the joys of sleeping around,
telling myself it was a carefree existence that embraced one great,
guilt-free time after another, but was that really true?
I gallivanted along on my high horse of sex-positive diatribe and had
so much third wave feminist rhetoric spewing from my mouth I was
reminiscent of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, only I’d been possessed by
the Riot Grrl movement instead of the devil.I still believe in
polyamory in theory, but the key word here is believe.
Belief is fine and good but it’s never as reassuring as other concepts,
like fact for example. Fact is the true enemy of belief, and whilst I
can confuse fact and belief just as easily as I can confuse love and
lust, after numerous attempts of testing my faith in open relationships
I have to admit I never had one that worked.
The closest they
came to success was when the other person and I were really not that
into each other; and as much as I’d like to, I don’t think I can
consider a relationship based on mutual disdain as successful.
If the open relationship can work, I’m certainly no shining example of
it. Maybe if I’d armed myself with more than an industrial-sized box of
latex gloves and dental dams and actually read The Lesbian Polyamory
Reader from cover to cover instead of just laughing at the cover (a
picture of three women who I couldn’t believe could get one woman let
alone several), then maybe I could have avoided the mess that ensued
for great chunks of my relationship career.
The book does instill doubt with chapter titles such as ‘Too Many Women
Too Little Time’, and ‘Living the Dream’, but there is some sound
advice for tackling jealousy, in the form of a questionnaire.
The authors’ recommend that each time one of you sleeps with someone
else, you fill out a questionnaire and then hand it into your partner
for analysis. One of the questions is, ‘How would you rate the
experience?’, with multiple choice answers that range from ‘It sucked’
to ‘It blew my mind’; and, ‘How would you rate this person?’, with
possible answers including ‘Serial killer’, and ‘Can imagine falling in
love with them’.
The idea is that if you have all the information, your jealousy will
not be fuelled by obsessing over the unknown. Sometimes, however, the
unknown is a place of deep joy. If I was looking over a completed
questionnaire that presented me with the answer, ‘It blew my mind and I
can imagine falling in love with them’, while I may attempt to take it
all in my stride, my suspicion is that I’d really just want to kick
some heads in.
Is that wrong?
 |
Opinion 
Subscribe to this comment's feed