Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners

by Deborah M. Anapol

  Paula has had the freedom to explore other relationships in part because she chose not to have any children, and she’s always worked on her own creative projects. Her next boyfriend moved in with them, and for the next four years, Max enjoyed a series of short-term relationships with many different women while Paula focused on the two main guys in her life. After she broke up with her boyfriend, both Paula and Max were “single” for a year and used to joke that even though it was just the two of them, they still felt they were poly. Before long, Paula and Max were living in a foursome with her lover Henry and Max’s lover Margaret. Although Henry and Margaret didn’t get along well and Max was still troubled by jealousy, Paula still felt it was a positive experience overall. Margaret left after a year, and the others stayed together as a threesome for several more years, but eventually Max decided it was time for Henry to find a woman of his own. Henry chose a woman who thought she wanted polyamory but who later decided she couldn’t handle it, so Henry and his new wife moved into their own home. Not long after this, Paula met David, and they’ve been together for the past ten years. David also has another girlfriend who is married. Meanwhile, Max has had relationships with several other women and rarely experiences jealousy anymore. Paula says that she and Max have stayed together all these years because they enjoy each other’s company, they’re sexually compatible and considerate, respectful, and appreciative of each other. “He takes really good care of me,” Paula reports, “and we believe in investing in our relationship. No one person can fulfill all your needs. There are things he wants that I can’t give him, but I can set him free to find those things elsewhere.”

  Paula acknowledges that she had a very traumatic childhood and feels it’s been profoundly healing for her to have had so many good experiences with men. “I’m a complex person,” she says, “and it’s hard to find everything I want in just one man.” Part of what Paula is looking for with other men is someone who enjoys sharing her bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, and sadomasochism fantasy play, which doesn’t appeal to Max at all. She also values the opportunity to have interacted so closely with Max’s lovers but admits that a lot of the women have had problems with her. “They’d fall in love with Max, and they’d get mad at me for no apparent reason. They’d get irrational. Maybe there’s something I’m not seeing, but I don’t think it has anything to do with me. I’ve had to learn not to take it personally and to respect them where they’re at and give them space if that’s what they want.”

  Paula suspects that she’s underestimated how hard it is for people to accept polyamory. “I just want everyone to be one big happy family, but it seems someone is always throwing daggers at me. Why can’t we all be friends?” But the hardest part of polyamory for Paula is the need to constantly be juggling a complicated schedule of who is spending time with whom. “It’s one never-ending decision making process. Sometimes I just don’t know who I want to be with, or I want it all, I want to be with my husband and my boyfriend. It’s hard to make plans with others because I don’t know where I’ll be, with who, or when. If Max was not out of town so often for his job, I don’t know how I would manage at all.”

  Rainah defied her conservative father by leaving her native Austria and going to live in the community that gathered around Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in Pune, India, while she was still a teenager. She later followed Bhagwan (now known as Osho) to the new ashram in Oregon. After the new ashram dissolved, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area along with many other sanyasins and enrolled in a nursing program at the local community college. Now in her mid-forties, she’s an attractive, vivacious woman who has never married or had children, though she’s had several long-term relationships. She runs her own successful practice as a nurse practitioner and appears organized, competent, and down to earth.

  Rainah is grateful to have been in the presence of this unconventional guru in the early days before the publicity about sexual experimentation at the ashram and his collection of Rolls Royce limos made headlines worldwide. “He was a genius with words and with energy,” she reminisces. “He touched something in all of us with the love that he exuded and the razor-sharp way he could see right through you. I remember my first darshan (private audience) with him. I was a teenager and quite self-centered and full of myself. Just the way he looked at me I got that there was no one there to be impressed. It was a huge puncture to my personality. He blew me away instantly.” In those days, in the late 1970s, it was still under 100 people, about three-quarters wealthy professional westerners in their thirties and forties, about one-quarter young Indians, Rainah reports. “It didn’t matter what people did or what the community did later on, it never affected my view of Osho. It was just a giant lesson to never give our power away. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as the old saying goes.”

  Osho was working largely with breaking down the egos of the westerners; and there were many naked encounter groups with permission to break all taboos. Osho supported “taking the lid off sexually” and encouraged sexual experimentation because he wanted his followers to move through the cultural obsession with sexuality so that they could go on to love and meditation. “In his presence, everything would come up—any self hatred, anything you were holding on to, anything you didn’t accept about yourself. . . . Sex was such a small part of what was going on. So much was being broken down. Sure there was jealousy, but it was a small thing relative to everything else.” After some time, people started to become more “natural.” Rainah recalls that by sixteen she had had many sexual experiences but eventually settled down for a time with an Indian boyfriend. “It wasn’t a decision,” she says, “it just happened that way.”

  For Rainah, the sexual experiences, even for a hormone-driven teenager, were much less significant than the energy darshans with Osho. The women would meet on the marble terrace in the garden outside his house in the evening, and he would “touch certain places where something needed to move. It was not a physical touch, the only physical contact would be sometimes a finger on the third eye (between the eyebrows). Osho would be surrounded by a few women who were able to amplify his energy, and he would energetically work with several other women in one evening. Some women would swoon or gyrate or make sounds, and it was all very sensual. To an observer, it would have looked like a strange kind of orgy.”

  “I could die any time now and not feel like I missed anything” is how Rainah describes her experience of darshan with Osho. “Osho said that some people are on a path of relationship and others on a path of meditation, but I feel that for me it’s both. In some of his talks, Osho said you could only go very deeply if you stayed with one person, but you have to remember that he was always talking to a specific person who may have asked him a question. And he could say something one day and say just the opposite the next day.”

  Until recently, Rainah was in a ten-year relationship with Devesh, who was an Osho sanyasin. Devesh divided his time between Rainah and another woman who he’d been living with for twenty years, and he also had a number of other partners during this time, while Rainah chose to have no other sexual partners. She says she went deeper into the practice of sex as meditation and healing with Devesh than she ever had before and at this point does not go into a sexual relationship without first taking the time to see how it may impact her and whether it will be in the best interest for both her and her potential lover—unless, of course, it’s one of those “really clear and clean” situations with no potential for drama that is just pure fun, she adds.

  Over the years, Rainah has come to realize that she’ll never be able to say ahead of time whether she will be monogamous with a given person and even then that it could change over time depending on what’s happening in her life. “I’m neither for monogamy nor against it,” she says. “I still have a romantic streak, and I used to always be asking myself, am I polyamorous, or am I monogamous? Now I’m comfortable with knowing that I’m neither; it’s just very moment to moment. It’s no lon
ger a mental decision. It will change depending on who I’m with. I can see the good in both monogamy and polyamory. I just have to keep being real with myself, owning my conditioning and not mistaking that for who I really am.”

  All these women are very different from each other and represent very different ways of expressing femininity as well as practicing polyamory. Nevertheless, they’re all strong, creative, independent women who are determined to make their own choices in life whether or not they’ve married. Some find in polyamory an effective way to address personal issues that might make monogamy difficult or impossible; others are simply attracted to a more expanded and authentic means of self-expression.

  QUINTESSENTIAL POLYAMOROUS MEN

  Polyamorous men are just as diverse a group as polyamorous women, but one thing they seem to have in common is that however traditionally masculine they may or may not be and whatever their age, if they are hetero- or bisexual, they place a strong value on women’s sexual autonomy and have a deep respect for the feminine. Usually, they were raised by mothers who were strongly independent, even in cultures or life circumstances where this was not common. These are men who embody a sensual appreciation for life, and while they may be critical of patriarchy, they are strikingly proactive in effectively creating satisfying lives for themselves in a strongly masculine way.

  Ned is now sixty-nine years old and retired two years ago from a successful business career. Prior to this, he served as a military pilot in Vietnam, which he looks back on as a grand adventure and the best time in his life even though he was philosophically opposed to the war. As he saw it, he was stuck in a bad situation but figured he might as well make the most of it. Ned is a self-described intensity junkie who enjoyed the fast-paced excitement of evading enemy aircraft and exploring the bars and women of Bangkok as much as he later enjoyed juggling several multi-million-dollar deals at a time. He was concerned that he’d be bored and restless after retirement despite many activities, including a season pass for his favorite football team, biking, hatha yoga, meditation, surfing, and adventure travel. He needn’t have worried. Relationships have become his new avocation.

  At the time of his retirement, Ned was no stranger to nonmonogamy. He’d explored swinging in the 1970s with his second wife. He enjoyed the socializing and the sex, but after their divorce, he looked around at the people he knew and noticed that none of the ones who’d had open marriages were still together. He decided to give monogamy a try and was happily married to Marjorie for thirteen years. “I’m pretty sure Marjorie would never have considered anything nonmonogamous, but it never came up. I was happy with her, there was no need to discuss it.” Ned says they’d still be together today had she not died after a sudden heart attack. He was devastated by his wife’s death but after a year of mourning decided it was time to start dating again.

  After several short-lived relationships Ned bumped into Faith at a party, and they’ve been inseparable ever since. Ned and Faith first met at a swing party back in the 1970s and became friends and lovers. Their children were best friends, and Ned had been buddies with Faith’s ex-husband, but they lost touch when Faith remarried and moved to another state. For the first several years, Ned and Faith were busy with their work and their new romance. They shared an occasional sexual adventure with another old lover, but Ned remembered the soap operas of open relationships twenty years earlier and felt cautious about going there again. Gradually, he discovered that in his absence polyamory had come into its own and that swinging had dramatically changed. “People seem more mature and more realistic and just generally better prepared for a nonmonogamous lifestyle than they used to be,” he observed. Before his retirement, Ned and Faith limited their involvement with others mostly to a few old friends, but now, with more leisure time, they have regular dates with two couples in their late fifties who they met at swing parties. Ned says that with one couple it’s purely sex; with the other there’s the possibility of a deeper relationship. “They’re both very intelligent and interesting, but they’re newbies, so we’re taking it very slow.”

  Ned also has intimate friendships with three other women. Jacqueline is in her early fifties and coping with a sexless marriage and has a “don’t ask, don’t tell” agreement with her husband. She has a regular bimonthly date with Ned and Faith (who is bisexual and thoroughly enjoys the threesomes Ned arranges). Ama, who is a refuge from the war-torn Middle East, and Satya, an Indian woman who was raised in London, are both single mothers in their thirties who enjoy the sense of expanded family as well as the erotic connection with Ned and Faith. Ned’s grandchildren live thousands of miles away, and he likes including children into his life. While he’s clear that he’s just doing what he enjoys and is good at, Ned also gets satisfaction from knowing that he’s providing sexual gratification and emotional support for women who might otherwise have to do without.

  How does a man pushing seventy manage five part-time women and one primary partner? Ned says it just happens by itself. “I didn’t think getting older was going to be like this,” he confesses. “It’s just incredible. I feel like a sultan. If I’d known it would be like this, I would have retired sooner. And life just keeps getting better.” Ned is a high-energy, athletic man with a can-do attitude and a rare appreciation for both the safe, practical, predictable material side of life and the edgy, dangerous aliveness of new people, new places, and new experiences.

  Ned’s parents divorced in the 1950s when he was in elementary school. He spent most weekends with his father, but his mother, who was a feisty schoolteacher, openly had a series of lovers in the era before women’s liberation. Ned is emotionally intelligent and a good communicator, and while he’s comfortable in the world of men, he says that most of his friends are women because it’s been hard to establish close friendships with other men. His strong alpha persona may present a challenge to relating intimately with other men while making him a magnet for women, and that’s just fine with his fiery bisexual partner.

  Graham is half Ned’s age and has a more androgenous appearance but also enjoys the affection of several women. He was born in a working-class neighborhood in London thirty-five years ago but now divides his time between several European cities where he is developing both his art career and his intimate relationships. He says that he began having spontaneous spiritual experiences as a young boy and as he grew older began seeking ways to understand the other dimensions that had been revealed to him. His quest led him to India, where he studied yoga and meditation, and he began to be interested in ways he could build a life based on spirituality. Graham remembers first exploring the idea of non-monogamy as a teenager. “I was seeing a girl in a casual way when I met another girl who I also liked. As the original relationship was casual, I felt that it wouldn’t be an issue to also explore the possibility of being with the new girl. However, I always had a belief in being open and honest, so I explained to the new girl the situation with the first. She was okay with it at first but then felt it wasn’t for her. I continued to see the first girl, and we moved on to explore the possibilities of nonmonogamy together, including a triad situation a little while after. In fact, we continued to see each other for nearly a decade, and I am still friends with both of them some eighteen years later.”

  While still in his early twenties, Graham began to see a young woman who would turn out to be a primary partner for ten years. At first, they decided they would have an open relationship, but before long, the lack of trust and communication led them to shift to monogamy. Graham commented that “the fact that we had to do this, in a sense to hold on to the relationship, was a sign of the future problems that led to our split. When we did finally split and she met a new guy, I felt a sense of compersion for the first time. I was genuinely happy for her and felt that I too could get back to a sense of who I really was away from the limitations I had built around myself and her.” Shortly afterward, he met his first openly polyamorous partner.

  Graham continues, “We started off as a c
ouple, but later I began to see her ex-partner. About eight months after that, we developed into a triad-type relationship. However, I don’t put any limits on how I or my partners should love—other than being safe, honest and open. Also around the same time, I became involved with a young woman with a small child. She was still involved with the father, and we explored the idea of her maintaining her relationship with him as the father and me as her lover, but unfortunately he was not able to accept the situation despite us spending time together and enjoying each other’s company.”

  Graham has recently begun two new relationships but says it’s too early to tell how they will develop. One is with a fellow artist who identifies as polyamorous, and the other is new to all this and isn’t sure what she wants. Graham feels that “my intimate relationships and connections with people form in a very organic way. I tend to focus on long-term bonds, and most of my lovers remain my close friends, although the exact configuration of my intimate partners may change.”