Polyscepticism: the collective failure of the romantic imagination

Musings on a decade of non-monogamy and the reemergence of monogamist realism

I’ve been in and out of various non-monogamous and polyamorous relationships since 2015, when I was a naive 19-year-old, drunk on caustic mixed drinks and convoluted queer theory on Tumblr.

Of course, I’ve done monogamy — who hasn’t? — but grappling with non-monogamy has been the major education of my past decade.

Polyamory and non-monogamy have taught me about the limits of love, the transience of desire and what happens when a large part of your life, the way you love, is not intelligible to the average person.

ENM facilitates a thousand different rejections and miscommunications. It enables you to not let go when you really, really should. But all these new ways of fucking up come alongside the space to truly explore your desires and values, and to make choices driven largely by these two factors.

Rather than accepting that relationships have to be a certain way, you’re granted the terrifying and exhausting power of being able to choose the life you want and make it happen.

Polyamory is like communism: nice in theory, harder in practice (or should we say praxis?). Much like disentangling oneself from the dominant economic order, organising your sexual and romantic relationships in ways that go against the status quo requires a level of re-education and problem-solving.

Similarly, coming into polyamory is a lot like coming out as queer. You shed your old frames of reference, you mourn the life trajectories you once dreamt about, you abandon any expectation that your parents or siblings will be able to fully relate to the company you keep or the ways you define yourself.

It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that polyamory is being more openly disdained as the collective political — and romantic — imagination shrinks and shrivels.

Polyscepticism: non-monogamy as the collective punching bag

Yes, in a world that is socially and materially becoming unlivable, we have more urgent preoccupations than throuples getting side-eyed at queer events or tweets about poly people being ugly.

Still, it’s hard not to notice the ways that non-monogamy and alternative relationship styles are regarded with increased hostility. On the right, the trad wife-worshipping lifestyle platform Evie enthusiastically covers anti-poly internet discourse and has long held the belief that “Monogamy is the opposite of what we need to be happy”. Last year, the more left-leaning The Atlantic argued that non-monogamy was “the ruling class’s latest fad”. Whether as a self-indulgent delusion, or a gratuitous waste of daters’ time, polyamory has become the collective punching bag of people on both the left and the right.

Often, it feels like these judgements are based on an aesthetic distaste for polyamory and all the drawn-out processing, neologisms and novel situations it requires. In other cases, they seem rooted in unfortunate incidents with polyamorous people – much like the grudges held by gay and straight people who were once dumped by a bi partner and decide to hold it against the wider bi population forever more.

Surely, if you’re secure in your non-monogamy you can know that polyamory isn’t for you without wanting to devalue or denigrate other ways of loving and intimately relating to people? If people were really so confident and happy in their monogamy, I doubt they would concern themselves with ridiculing the phrase ‘platonic life partners’.

The instinct to undermine poly folks feels like an indirect response to monogamy and, by extension, dominant dating and relationship norms. Much like capitalism, monogamy is the hegemonic standard and – if we’re to believe the cottage industry of think pieces about the failings of modern dating – much like capitalism, it’s making everyone unhappy.

Part of capitalism’s rule, Mark Fisher would agree, is the fact that it is supported by an ideological framework that makes it seem like there is no alternative. I can’t help but think that, in an era where the dreadful weight of capitalism is weighing down on us, constraining our imagination and capacity to think of other ways of organising, that monogamist realism is also rearing its head.

Borrowing from Fisher, monogamist realism is the belief that there is no alternative to monogamy – no other viable options than to settle down with one partner and step onto a relationship escalator which ascends into cohabitation, marriage and, if not children, at the very least a mortgage and shared pet.

Polyamory encourages us to engage the imaginative muscle, to find solutions and to envisage other worlds. As society sharply shifts to the right, we need more – not less – of those skills to help us navigate the challenges that lie ahead.

Don’t let monogamist realism – or capitalist realism, for that matter – win.