Many of us are familiar with Donald Rumsfeld's famous (and surprisingly useful) taxonomy of knowledge:
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.
But this taxonomy (as originally described) omits an important fourth category: unknown knowns, the things we don't know that we know. This category encompasses the knowledge of many of our own personal beliefs, what I call unquestioned defaults. For example, most modern Americans possess the unquestioned default belief that they have some moral responsibility for their own freely-chosen actions. In the twelfth century, most Europeans possessed the unquestioned default belief that the Christian god existed. And so on. These unknown knowns are largely the products of a particular culture; they require homogeneity of belief to remain unknown.
By definition, we are each completely ignorant of our own unknown knowns. So even when our culture gives us a fairly accurate map of the territory, we'll never notice the Mercator projection's effect. Unless it's pointed out to us or we find contradictory evidence, that is. A single observation can be all it takes, if you're paying attention and asking questions. The answers might not change your mind, but you'll still come out of the process with more knowledge than you went in with.
When I was eighteen I went on a date with a girl I'll call Emma, who conscientiously informed me that she already had two boyfriends: she was, she said, polyamorous. I had previously had some vague awareness that there had been a free love movement in the sixties that encouraged "alternative lifestyles", but that awareness was not a sufficient motivation for me to challenge my default belief that romantic relationships could only be conducted one at a time. Acknowledging default settings is not easy.
The chance to date a pretty girl, though, can be sufficient motivation for a great many things (as is also the case with pretty boys). It was certainly a good enough reason to ask myself, "Self, what's so great about this monogamy thing?"
I couldn't come up with any particularly compelling answers, so I called Emma up and we planned a second date.
Since that fateful day, I've been involved in both polyamorous and monogamous relationships, and I've become quite confident that I am happier, more fulfilled, and a better romantic partner when I am polyamorous. This holds even when I'm dating only one person; polyamorous relationships have a kind of freedom to them that is impossible to obtain any other way, as well as a set of similarly unique responsibilities.
In this discussion I am targeting monogamy because its discovery has had an effect on my life that is orders of magnitude greater than that of any other previously-unknown known. Others I've spoken with have had similar experiences. If you haven't had it before, you now have the same opportunity that I lucked into several years ago, if you choose to exploit it.
This, then, is your exercise: spend five minutes thinking about why your choice of monogamy is preferable to all of the other inhabitants of relationship-style-space, for you. Other options that have been explored and documented include:
- Non-consensual non-monogamy, the most popular alternative.
- Swinging, in which couples engage in social, recreational sex, mostly with other couples.
- Polyamory, the practice, desire, or acceptance of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved. This category is extremely broad, but the most common variations include:
- Polyfidelity, in which >2 people form a single committed relationship that does not allow outside partners.
- Hierarchical polyamory, in which each individual has (usually) one primary partner and some number of secondary partners. These labels typically reflect the level of commitment involved, and are not a ranking of preference.
- "Intimate networks", in which each person maintains some number of independent relationships without explicit rankings or descriptions, such that a graph (the data structure) is the best way to describe all the individuals and relationships involved.
These types of polyamory cover many of the available options, but there are others; some are as yet unknown. Some relationship styles are better than others, subject to your ethics, history, and personality. I suspect that monogamy is genuinely the best option for many people, perhaps even most. But it's impossible for you to know that until you know that you have a choice.
If you have a particularly compelling argument for or against a particular relationship style, please share it. But if romantic jealousy is your deciding factor in favor of monogamy, you may want to hold off on forming a belief that will be hard to change; my next post will be about techniques for managing and reducing romantic jealousy.
I feel that I am naturally monogamous - or possibly just patterned after my parents, who as far as I know are monogamous with one another. But I think that it would only be moderately difficult to perform the mindhacks to be comfortable with some types of polyamory, if the practical obstacles (e.g. how to deal with eventual children, prevent disease, present to the outside world, etc.) were all taken care of to my satisfaction.
I've been in a heterosexual relationship wherein I (but not the other party) had standing permission to have sex with other women, but I didn't find myself in a position to exercise this option in practice. (I did hit on a girl during that relationship, but she was located out of state.) This did not seem that difficult to adjust to psychologically. Possibly, this is because I attached no particular romantic emotion to hypothetical girls I could sleep with; they would serve as the functional equivalent of boyfriend-approved sex toys (whose needs and preferences would be more salient, because of course they'd be people, but nevertheless, they wouldn't occupy the same central role in my mind as an actual girlfriend would.) It's also possible that I would have freaked out completely if I'd actually had the opportunity to have sex with a woman, but this seems unlikely.
My suspicion is that I could also potentially be happy in a polyfaithful stable triad if all of the sub-relationships were virtually or completely free of drama, but more people than that, or appreciable amounts of romance/sex between triad persons and non-triad persons, or more conflict than "almost none", or any other complications, and I'd want to abandon the entire mess and find myself a nice singular partner.
I suspect that part of this inclination in myself is that I want my relationships to be permanent, reliable fixtures in my life. (I haven't managed this yet, but it is a very stable want.) Polyamories of any kind are necessarily more complicated. There are more practical obstacles, more negotiations, more neologistic rules, more outside perplexity, more spawning points for drama, more ways in which the relationship changes over time, and - if the parties involved are all inclined towards polyamory in the first place - more affordances for dissatisfaction within the established limits of the relationship. All of these things make the relationships less likely to still be around for the long haul in a more or less recognizable form, and that's not a desideratum I could give up nearly as easily as "all of my partner's nookie is for my exclusive use".
The complexity of a polyamorous relationship actually makes it more stable if you look at it in terms of the group relationship and not in terms of the individual relations within it. In a triad. a person who is currently dissatisfied with one partner still has a healthy relationship with the other. One has to be dissatisfied with with the relationship as a whole to decide to leave both partners.
I see the somewhat chaotic flux present in the insides of a polyamorous relationship as no different than the trials that monogamous relationships undergo. It is simply the way that it continues to be a relationship beyond encountering those stresses that causes them to stand out.