Frequently described as trendy fad among youth, polyamory is generally misunderstood both in form and motivation. I hear people express most of their surprise at the desire to stray from the monogamous norm. When I was younger, I was primarily concerned with addressing the stigma and explaining my philosophical points as to why I was anti-monogamy. I could rattle off a whole spiel about the ways in which monogamy serves the interests of capital at the expense of women’s labor, but my personal attitude and beliefs do not explain why polyamory has trended positively in the last few years. A quick Google Trends search will reveal that it was around 2012 people started searching online for information about polyamory, and this took a huge upward turn around 2019 and is generally trending upwards.
Interest in a term does not necessarily mean the practice itself is growing in popularity, but there does seem to be greater online discourse and media representation of all kinds of sexual and romantic practices, polyamory notwithstanding.
Hence, the question I am often asked by folks who see me as being more “in touch” with sexual deviancy (I probably am…), is “Why are people into this?!”
Let’s play with several theoretical, albeit incomplete, explanations.
The psychoanalytic response
I love blaming the internet for collective changes in neurological behavior, like our rapidly plummeting attention span (when I was growing up, the average human attention span was close to 12-15 seconds; currently, it stands at under 8 seconds, which is less than that of a goldfish). One cultural change is this orientation towards binge behaviors. Streaming has set off conversations about “binge watching” television, we are in an era of dangerous levels of youth binge drinking; this pervasive practice of consuming in large quantities because nothing is ever enough sets the stage for a new culture in which youth are socialized.
We, as a collective, have regressed to our cultural id. We’re reduced to focusing so greatly on the pleasure principle and feeding our basest urges. Without a strong cultural identity, religious identification, or authoritarian government, we have lost our superego daddies as we are increasingly permitted to indulge.
Thus, one partner is never enough. We binge-date, binge-love. We struggle to identify with the concept of a soul-mate and see it as controlling and possessive to expect a partner to restrict themselves from pleasure. We see love as being a respect for a partner’s own pleasure principle as we simultaneously indulge our own. Jealousy need not cause pain. We overindulge our id and see any manifestation of a cultural superego as repressive, a characteristic of a regressive, childlike society.
It feels too easy to suggest the internet itself, particularly in the post-Section 230 Web 2.0 era of social media, has disrupted our ego boundaries, causing a mass psychological regression. But you wanted the easy answers, right? Aren’t you, too, a product of clickbait society?
The capitalist realist response
The cultural epidemic is one of depressive hedonia. Rather than saying the psychoanalytic nonsense about id, we can also see our binge-oriented culture as being excess in material to try to combat our collective depression. My generation has seen endless war, two recessions, a global pandemic, and we can see the effects of climate change just throughout our lifetimes. It’s bleak. In order to grasp at the straw of the normal existence we were promised, we consume at an even greater rate than our parents, meanwhile we self-identify as anti-capitalists. Chasing the dragon of consumerism.
In this instance, we can perceive polyamory as just one more element of depressive hedonia and the constant need for more. That to experience a quietness would be to experience and live our depression, so instead we fill our time with more social relationships, constantly craving more of the endorphins we get from being surrounded by loved ones.
When all is hopeless, why not love as much as you can?
The postmodern response
Fuck the rules. There are no grand narratives, therefore no elevated value of monogamy or strict rules on how to behave. We are condemned to be free. With such a dearth of freedom, but a high cultural emphasis on partnership, we simply seek more. Certainly there is still plenty of stigma around deviant lifestyles, but the general dismissal of Christian values among youth is at least growing, even if those values are still deeply woven into our cultural fabric.
We are simply postmodernists rejecting convention for the sake of it; rejecting the premise of truth altogether.
We’re hip and postmodern by questioning the logic of deviance - why is it that one partner is the norm? Once we realize the norms are socially constructed, it becomes easier to engage in more personally fulfilling practices. Or, to begin participating to deviant practices believing they will be more fulfilling than the regimented monogamous prescription of yesteryear.
The Deleuzian response
Polycules are rhizomatic, with various connections between different nodes. They echo the condition of capital. We are not hierarchical, but simply orchids and wasps. An assemblage. Lifelong, monogamous relationships would instead be seen as aborhescent, with a hierarchy and a clear beginning, middle, end. There are binary connections rather than multiplicities.
“Lines of flight or of deterritorialization, becoming-wolf, becoming-inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: that is what multiplicity is. To become wolf or to become hole is to deterritorialize oneself following distinct but entangled lines. A hole is no more negative than a wolf. Castration, lack, substitution: a tale told by an overconscious idiot who has no understanding of multiplicities as formations of the unconscious. A wolf is a hole, they are both particles of the unconscious, nothing but particles, productions of particles, particulate paths, as elements of molecular multiplicities”
There is no hole and there is no absence. Under the guidance of monogamy, to lose a partner is just that: loss. Under polyamory, lines of flight guide the construction of relationships into different instances. A seamless transformation of intimacy with degrees of intensity, rather than the binary logic of romantic/platonic. As capital is striated, the relationship structure underpinning our society has followed suit.
The feminist response
Perhaps more accurately captured by an “identity politics” response, we can see a position that roots polyamory in the feminist expansion of women’s choice. A greater presence in the workplace (driven both by cultural feminism but also the 70s stagflation and a subsequent growth in service labor) means women do not need to rely on a monogamous heterosexual relationship in order to be “provided for.” If heterosexuality is scrutinized as a consequence of changing gender roles, why would monogamy not be criticized as well? A function of monogamy is to organize the nuclear family structure, which the feminist movement has relentlessly critiqued. With an increase in divorce and a declining stigma towards blended families, single parent households, and other non-normative family structures (only about a fifth of American families are nuclear), we seem to be increasingly willing to accept that monogamy itself is not necessarily for life. We see children of blended families are often willing to see more than two adults in a “parent” role (since so much of our cultural Christian values are manifest in “What about the children?!”). If this is the case, do we need monogamy at all?
We are the daughters of Free Lovers with self-important identities.
Do these attempts at sociocultural explanations even sound different from one another? I hardly think so. The essence of any theoretical position on polyamory is that it is a cultural byproduct of changes in capital. There have been manifestations of non-monogamies throughout history, but generally not with such a prominent label (identity, even!) and presence in cultural discourse. The above seem to be, at least loosely, responsible for some of these changing cultural trends.