How to fuck
Fun fact: You can give me money now. More detail at the bottom.
This week’s question comes to us from Goran Butorac:
What are your thoughts on monogamy/nuclear family vs polyamory/relationship anarchy?
TL;DR: Let people fuck. Fucking is great.
Since the Catholic Church has been in the news this week, let’s start there. I grew up in an old-school Catholic family. And when I say Catholic, I mean Portuguese Catholic. With the blood, the witchcraft, the violence, and the smutty stuff. Not United States Catholic, which is basically just Presbyterianism, and a little closer to vanilla office culture. To be clear, they do have some things in common, like rapist priests, and a Pope that writes sternly-worded emails to maybe dial it back a smidge with the raping.
Anyhow, the Catholic Church is very much into the idea of what a relationship is, and what it isn’t. Despite the majority of Catholics being miserable in those relationships. Which the Catholic Church solved by letting you know that you had to stay in those relationships, which is actually good because being miserable counts as sacrifice, and sacrifice is the pathway to heaven. Catholics are absolutely insane. (I’m sure other religions are insane as well, but this is the one I can speak of with insider knowledge, so here we are. You tell your truth, I tell mine.)
I got to be raised by two of these miserable people. My parents were thrown together by circumstance and tradition, not love. They got married, despite not wanting to get married, because in the small town they grew up, tradition (i.e. the Catholic Church) demanded it. They stayed married because the same Church demanded that as well.
My parents absolutely did not like each other. They got married because a physical act triggered a set of dominoes set in place by a society (in this case, a society very interwoven with the Catholic church) that punished people for fucking who they wanted to fuck. It was a life sentence.
Let’s take a moment here to clarify that when I talk about people fucking who they want to fuck I am very much talking about actions between consenting adults. Anything else is violence.
During their life sentence, my parents introduced three children into their unhappy existence. If you have trapped yourself in a world without love, it is impossible to teach children what love is. There is nothing you can point to. There are no examples. Children learn by mimicry. We look to the adults around us, who seem to have their shit worked out, and try to imitate the acts we see before us. This is how we learn to walk. To pick up a spoon. To pet the dog. To talk to one another, not just in words, but in volume and tone.
“Love is at the root of everything, all learning, all parenting, all relationships. Love or the lack of it.” —Fred Rogers
My parents, who did not know love, could not teach love, which means I could not learn love from them.
I write all this out not because it answers your question, although by the time I’m done it might, but because it helps to establish my history of family, which was one of the words in your question.
Your question also asks me to look at “monogamy” and “polyamory” in opposition to one another, as if we’ve got front row seats to the fight of the century. Ali vs Foreman. Hogan vs Andre. Balboa vs Creed. (There is erotic fan fiction about all three of these fights, by the way.) But I believe that what makes either of those types of relationships work is the same thing. You have to love the person or persons that you’re in that relationship with. Moreso, you have to like the person or persons that you’re in that relationship with.
Let me be straight-up about this, I have never been in a polyamorous relationship. But I have several friends who are. Some of them seem very happy. And I believe that their happiness comes from liking the people they’re in that relationship with, not the number of people they’re in a relationship with. I’m in a relationship with someone I really like. Sometimes you like more than one person. Cool.
I can’t really speak about polyamory with any sort of expertise beyond “Hey, they seem happy” and honestly, that’s the real lesson to take away from here.
Let people fuck.
Let people be happy.
And let them choose what that looks like for them.
Going back to my childhood for a bit, there’s another thing I remember about my parents: they absolutely loved shit-talking about all of their friends, and neighbors, and discussing their private lives. It was our most popular dinner conversation topic. Discussing who was unhappy. Who was having an affair. (A conversation my father managed to have with a straight face.) Whose kid was smoking weed. (A conversation I managed to have with a straight face.) And of course, because we learn how to behave by mimicking the adults around us, my brothers and I would jump in by shit-talking about neighborhood kids, kids in school, and each other. In our misery, in our lack of love, we propped ourselves up by shit-talking anyone who might be living differently.
As I got older, friends started inviting me to hang out at their house and while, to be fair, I saw a lot of people who were as miserable as my own parents, I also got to meet people who actually seemed to like one another.
“Why are your parents always hugging each other?”
“Do yours not?!”
Reader, they fucking did not.
And here I must inform you that Tolstoy was wrong. All happy families are not alike. All happy families are weirdly, wildly, amazingly different. Sometimes there’s a happy couple, which can come in many weird flavors all on its own. Sometimes there’s a happy couple and a third. Sometimes there’s intermingling of couples. Sometimes dad kisses mom goodnight and she goes off to get hammered by a primal dom.
Looking out at the current everything environment in the United States, I see my family shit-talking everything they don’t understand. Everything that makes them afraid. Everything that might seem a little strange. But I figured out my parents a long time ago. They’re shit-talking everything that makes them uncomfortable because seeing people living life differently than you, when you are trapped in a life of misery, makes it impossible to ignore your own misery.
Let people fuck.
Let people be happy.
And let them choose what that looks like for them.
Like I said earlier, I can’t speak much about polyamory. It’s not my experience. And that’s ok. I love that we’re all having different experiences. I love that we’re all trying our own thing. I love that people are getting what they need. Try as I might, I will never understand what makes other people tick, but I love that they are ticking. I love that their hearts are working. I love that they’re getting what they need. I love it when people genuinely like one another.
So maybe Tolstoy was right. Maybe all happy families are alike. Maybe they all just like who they’re with.
❤️
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