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

by Deborah M. Anapol

  One of the most difficult things for me about traveling in tropical India was that it is still frowned on for a woman to show bare shoulders or legs. Midriffs peeking through colorful saris, strangely enough, are perfectly acceptable as long as they are topped by short-sleeved breast coverings. Women must cover up throughout most of Turkey and the rest of the Muslim world, where head scarves are also required in mosques, and the burka is common in most areas. In predominantly Buddhist Thailand and Cambodia, modesty is also the rule in temples or in the vicinity of the many celibate monks, but in India, this prohibition on bare skin coexists with temples filled with Shiva Lingams and sculptures depicting love making in every conceivable configuration.

  Khajuraho is a popular tourist destination, and in the small town that has grown up around the temples, there are many small hotels and restaurants catering to travelers. Shiva is a strikingly handsome young Indian man who looks as though he just stepped out of one of the ancient carvings. When he learned that I was an expert on polyamory from the United States, he asked me to have dinner at his restaurant and give him some coaching. “It’s easy to meet foreign women here,” he told me. “Even the ten-yearold boys know that all you have to do is ask a woman if she wants to learn Tantra and you have a date.” Shiva has had many love affairs with tourists who end up staying anywhere from a few weeks to a few months before moving on. “But this time it’s different. It’s not just a fling. Genvieve and I Skype almost every day since she went back to France. It would be easy to have other women and not tell her; lots of Indian men do that. And she could do the same, but we’ve talked about it, and we want to be honest with each other, to share everything. She’s going to come back next year when she finishes college, but now we are apart, and we want to enjoy life but still be close to each other. The trouble is, she gets jealous when I tell her I’ve been with another woman. I get jealous of her too. I’m afraid she won’t come next year as she’s promised. It’s a lot of drama! What can we do?” I gave Shiva the links to the material on my website about managing jealousy, applauded his good intentions, and gave him the cardinal rule about dealing with jealousy: never try to reason with a jealous person. Instead, breathe through the emotional upset, find support from sympathetic friends or a therapist, and talk about it when the jealousy has subsided.

  Khajuraho was the spiritual capital of the Chandella dynasty, known for the flourishing of arts that took place under their long and stable reign. These exquisite temples were built over a 200-year period, beginning in the tenth century. Twenty-five of the original eighty remain, spread over a twenty-one-square-kilometer area. Because they are located in such a remote area, invaders never completely destroyed them, and like the similarly amazing ruins in faraway Ankgor Watt in Cambodia, they were covered by jungle for centuries before being discovered by westerners in the nineteenth century. It’s obvious from the sculptures covering the walls of the existing temples that group sex was part of the repertoire of this accomplished culture. Scenes with every conceivable combination of sexual union abound, but they are side by side with scenes of all aspects of life, various gods and goddesses, animals, and plant life. Judging from the sculptures, despite the freedom to explore many configurations, the male/female dyad was the predominant social unit.

  Perhaps this society is distantly related to the Gonds people, an indigenous tribal people still living in the forests of central India who are known for their Ghotuls. The Ghotul is thought to be a very ancient institution where young people are taught everything from crafts to ethics to farming to the arts of love. In some villages, all the young people, both girls and boys, sleep together at the Ghotul beginning in early puberty, though they still visit with their parents daily. They are given total sexual freedom and are expected to explore intimacy with everyone in the group so that they can learn who they are from the many different reflections. Pairing up is forbidden until adulthood, at which time monogamy is the rule.

  The Gonds people live in modern-day Maharashtra, the same state where cosmopolitan Mumbai and Pune, site of the infamous Osho ashram, is located. Pune has become a high-tech center and is home to many Indian professionals as well as those attracted by the Ashram founded by the man first known in the West as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and later as Osho. Osho was well known for developing spiritual practices that encouraged people to say “yes” to the shadow—and to sexuality. He encouraged couples to break out of the confines of traditional marriage and encouraged singles to passionately follow their attractions. Jivana was one of many young Americans and Europeans who spent time at the ashram in its heyday, drawn to the chance to be in the presence of Bhagwan.

  Jivana says that she felt caught in the “evolutionary wobble” while living at the ashram. All the old forms for relationship were breaking down, and there were daily therapy groups to provide a place for people to look at what was coming up for them. What Jivana discovered when she fell in love, she says, is how wounded she was. Having never experienced such love, such safety, such sublime sex, she wanted to establish a solid dyad before opening up to others, but she also wanted to honor her new partner’s autonomy. Nevertheless, her partner felt this as limitation and control and they frequently argued.

  Many Osho sanyasins I’ve known over the years have been conflicted about nonmonogamy. Osho taught that monogamy required a high level of awakeness, that it was a very high spiritual practice. He also taught that true love is not possessive, that if your beloved wishes to be with someone else, it doesn’t work to try to prevent it. But without the ongoing support of the guru or at least the community, it’s been difficult for many sanyasins to reconcile the two. Today, the Osho resort, as it’s called, is perhaps the most Western place in all of India. Its rooms have purified air, its food is organic, the bathrooms are sparkling clean, the swimming pool is hygienic, and the large meditation hall is equipped with soundlessly closing airtight doors and frigid air-conditioning. In the required orientation meeting I attended, there were visitors from all over the world, but perhaps a third were Indian. Things have changed a lot in India in the past thirty years.

  Raj Mali is a thirty-five-year-old Osho sanyasin (devotee and follower of Osho’s teachings) who grew up in Pune. He is a successful corporate trainer and relationship and intimacy coach whose practice includes young polyamorous couples. Two years ago, after reading my book Polyamory: The New Love without Limits, Raj decided to take the leap and come out to his family. While westerners are often apprehensive about family reactions to polyamory, family is far more important to Indians. Fortunately for Raj, his family was concerned but lovingly accepting and even curious. “Initially the journey looked dangerous, but when I embraced it, it set me free. The path was laced with deep confrontation and sometimes fear, but now when I look back, it was all worth it,” he says.

  Raj fantasized about having an open marriage while still in high school, long before he’d ever heard of polyamory. When he shared his ideas with his friends, they ridiculed him, and his girlfriend was furious at the very idea. Realizing that for the people he knew marriage meant monogamy, or cheating, he decided not to marry. Now he’s happy to be able to suggest polyamory as an option when working with couples where a secret affair is on the horizon. When I told him I was writing about polyamory in India, Raj agreed to tell me a little about one of the couples he was coaching.

  Reemah and Avinash are in their late twenties and were about six months into a passionate romance when Reemah found herself struggling with jealousy for the first time in her life. When Reemah slapped Avinash on learning he was late for a meeting with her because he’d been talking with Sheela, a woman they were both friendly with, Avinish decided he’d better not have any more friendships with women but felt resentful and began to feel he needed more space from Reemah. Although he was still very much in love with Reemah, he secretly started feeling more attracted to other women. The more he withdrew, the angrier and more suspicious Reema became. As this downward spiral, which I call the “dominant wom
an and submissive man two-step,” built, Reemah decided to seek help from Raj.

  When Raj guided Reema to take her attention off of Avinash and direct it toward discovering what was underneath her jealousy, she quickly discovered that she was trying to avoid her own strong desire to experience sex with other men. Reema was caught between the judgments she’d internalized that women who slept around and didn’t marry were sluts and the awareness that she wanted very much to be one of these sluts. Meanwhile, Avinash was feeling more and more torn between his attraction to his woman friend and his loyalty to Reema. He eventually allowed himself to be seduced by Sheela, and when Reema intuited this, he confessed. A major fight ensued, and they decided they should have some sessions together with Raj. He was able to help them recognize that both of them wanted to stay together and that both wanted to have sex with others but were afraid to be truthful with the other about their desires. Avinash didn’t like the idea of Reema having other partners but realized that if he was going to claim this freedom for himself, it was only fair that Reema have it for herself. Faced with the prospect of breaking up or opening up, they decided together to try opening up. They are still working on managing their respective jealousies and sometimes fight about the other intimate friends in their lives, but for now they are still choosing to put each other first.

  I arrived in Bombay a few weeks after the 2008 terrorist attack that left residents and tourists alike in a state of shock. Sandeep, an Indian man in his early forties who runs a small consulting firm in Bombay, was still reeling and grateful that his immediate family was unharmed. Sandeep has been married to Leela for fifteen years, and they have a six-year-old daughter. Theirs was an arranged marriage, as is still common in India; nevertheless, they came to love each other deeply. Sandeep told me that Leela is his best friend, that they tell each other everything, and that they started their business together as well. Two years ago, Leela told Sandeep that she wanted to become sexually intimate with their good friend Karna. Sandeep was very uncomfortable about this, partly because Karna was not telling his wife but also because his own jealousy was painful and intense. He’d already downloaded my Compersion e-book by the time we met and had found it helpful, but he was still struggling.

  Sandeep had been introduced to me online through a mutual friend, and when he heard I was coming to India, was eager to meet with me. I had coached many couples in the United States dealing with similar situations and was not surprised to find that poly hell, as some people call it, knows no national borders. I’m told it’s unusual for an Indian wife to openly assert her sexual freedom and for her husband to be accepting of this, but I suspect that Sandeep and Leela are on the leading edge of a growing poly-amorous movement in India. Sandeep is a thoughtful, insightful man and a professional communicator with a Western education. He is a student of Bombay advaita master Ramesh Balsekar, who teaches that it is only our thoughts about what should or shouldn’t be happening that disturb the natural state of peace and happiness. Leela and Karna also have an affinity for advaita, and the threesome have attended many satsangs (literally translated, this means “meetings in truth”) together, so I figured that they had at least some chance of working this out.

  I began by acknowledging Sandeep’s courage and willingness to let jealousy be his teacher and then inquired about his family of origin. As I’d guessed, Sandeep’s relationship with his wife mirrored that with his mother, who was a fiery and dominating figure. His father was amiable but distant, much like Karna. Clearly, this triangle offered Sandeep an opportunity to do the inner work of healing the past, and he had the necessary skills and motivation to move through these old issues quickly, but still his marriage was at risk because Sandeep and Leela had never established a satisfying sexual relationship. I suggested that he ask Leela if she were willing to invest some time and energy in creating a sexual connection with him as well as with Karna. In India, as in the United States, it’s sometimes easier for people to access their eroticism with a new partner than with the spouse they know so well.

  It always seems ironic to me that, Khajuraho, Kama Sutra, and Ghotuls notwithstanding, many modern Indians have yet to undo the heavy burden of sexual repression. Yet there is evidence that this is changing. Facebook now has a “Polyamory India” group, and upper-class Indians have discovered swinging. I met Chitvan and Suresh in southern California, where they had gone to visit Sandra and Jack after meeting at a lifestyles convention in Las Vegas. Both Chitvan and Suresh are medical doctors in Delhi and have been married for fifteen years. They are an affluent, upwardly mobile, high-energy couple in their early forties who are anything but sexually repressed. Jack described his first meeting with Chitvan at one of the many lifestyles parties: “I was resting on a couch next to Sandra, and Chitvan sits down and starts fondling me. After a brief conversation with Suresh and Sandra, she grabbed me by the cock and dragged me off to the group room where she had her way with me. She was an extraordinarily skilled lover. After I came twice, I told her, ‘I think I’m done.’ But Suresh, who was engaged with Sandra a few feet away, heard me and said, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll get you hard again,’ and he was right, she did! I’m looking forward to visiting them in India. Chitvan has promised to throw a swing party for us there.”

  EUROPE

  Dossie Easton, therapist and coauthor of The Ethical Slut, gave the keynote address at the First International Conference on Polyamory and Mononormativity held at the University of Hamburg, Germany, in 2005. Scholars from all over the world gathered to discuss the variety of ways that people in many communities structure their relationships. Organizers Robin Bauer and Marianne Pieper, who originated the term mononormativity, say that they wanted the conference to combine activism and academia. Dossie reports that “the German academics were concerned that I did not present a unified economic theory that addressed socialism, capitalism, class issues, and the potential for polyamory to create economic and political equality for all. They wanted to know how polyamory will help solve social problems beyond individual relationships, and I suspect they thought I was remiss in not developing such theories.”4

  Many organizers and researchers outside the United States have echoed this observation, confirming my own impression that in Europe and the United Kingdom, the polyamory movement is less focused on personal growth and more focused on the political and ecological implications of relationship choices. It also appears that the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and queer community in Europe, the United Kingdom, and Australia are more likely to have embraced polyamory in their activism and research than their counterparts in the United States, resulting in a stronger presence abroad for polyamory within academia.

  According to Robin Bauer, a gay, transsexual poly researcher, Germans use the term polyamory mostly to refer to committed multiple partner relationships rather than nonmonogamy, which is primarily sexually motivated. Robin finds that gay men and other sexual minorities who have been predominantly nonmonogamous in the past perceive the term polyamory to apply mainly to heterosexuals and bisexuals who have not been part of the alternative sexual community up until now and see no reason to identify with this foreign term.

  The ZEGG community hasn’t embraced the word polyamory either, but they are a good example of the way in which many Europeans seem more inclined than Americans to place polyamory in the context of a wider movement for social change. They acquired a former Stasi camp in Belzig, formerly in East Germany, outside Berlin just after the Berlin Wall came down, that they have built into a successful community, now numbering about sixty adults (60 percent female) and fifteen children. ZEGG is well known for advocating nonmonogamy, although their members are free to choose whatever lovestyle they prefer.

  ZEGG founder Dieter Duhm was active in the German leftist student movement in the 1960s, but as a young radical sociology professor in the 1970s, the mainstream left rejected him because he criticized Marxism for its use of violent revolution. In the mid-1970s, he left academia to explore altern
ative communities, including what is now the Osho ashram in India, and set about creating his own vision of a “humanistic” community of people “with whom we can explore the interfaces of love, fear and truth.”5 While the group began by focusing on organic agriculture, art, ecology, and renewable energy technologies, it soon became apparent that they would have to resolve conflicts around sexuality, jealousy, and possessiveness. Duhm was strongly influenced by Wilheim Reich, another German socialist ostracized for his views on sex, health, and social change. ZEGG soon became notorious for its practices of free love, and while they received much negative coverage in the German press, they also attracted thousands of visitors from all over the world who came to participate in their seminars and summer camps. At ZEGG, free love is considered an essential step toward a new culture of peace, partnership, and sustainability. Their belief is that the only way to a free society is to create a world where love is freed.

  ZEGG first came to my attention in the early 1990s when they sent a team of organizers to the United States. They sought the support of the growing polyamory movement that we had established in the United States but had a disdainful attitude toward both the spiritual and the individualistic, apolitical brands of polyamory, which they felt predominated in the United States. Despite their socialist roots, they lost no time in competitively striving for their share of the newly booming polyamory seminar market in good capitalist fashion. In an interesting cycle of cross fertilization, their group process (called ZEGG forum) for resolving interpersonal conflicts, which incorporates elements of psychodrama, gestalt therapy, and body-centered therapies developed in the United States, caught on among a new generation of Americans who were too young to remember the encounter groups and consciousness-raising groups, not to mention the “oil parties” popular during the sexual revolution of the 1970s in the United States. ZEGG also inspired an annual two-week “Summer Camp” in the United States where the forum is taught and practiced and polyamorous people can have a brief taste of living in community with each other.