Love in a World of Scarcity

Salon.com has been running a series of articles by Tracy Clark-Flory on monogamy, prompted in part by a New York Times Review article that quizzed sexpert Dan Savage about the Weiner affair, and in part on the seemingly endless list of celebrity infidelity scandals. The first Salon article interviewed marriage historian Stephanie Coontz on how monogamy has evolved (basically, from an arranged economic compact to a personal commitment based on romantic love). The second article interviews cultural anthropologist Judith Stacey, author of the book Unhitched, on the world’s non-monogamous cultures.

I wrote a review a few years ago of  Laura Kipnis’ wonderful book Against Love, in which she argues that monogamy is unnatural and unhealthy, and possibly complicit in our emotional detachment from political life and our ecosystem as well. Kipnis sees monogamy as part of the cultural indoctrination that leads to wage slavery and mindless consumerism — it’s all about creating scarcity (in this case, scarcity of love and sex) to drive up the ‘value’ of both, and hence needlessly drive up the hunger, desperation and jealousy (and, alas, resultant domestic violence) of so many in their anguished search for them. And ultimately, it’s all about creating a ‘consumer’ populace that is (financially and emotionally) endlessly needy, unsatisfied, and wanting more, that can be exploited and oppressed.

The problem with the pontifications of Savage, Coontz and Stacey is that they all seem to equate monogamy with sexual fidelity to a single partner. Mark Oppenheimer, who interviewed Savage, notes:

What if a woman, or a man for that matter, looks outside marriage for the other emotional satisfactions that come along with sex? Savage has less to offer that person. He does not tell people to take long-term boyfriends or girlfriends. He is skeptical that group marriages, of three or more partners, can last very long. Nor could he have much to offer the person who feels a partner ought to constrain his urges. There is a reason that sex advice is easier to give than relationship advice. Satisfying a sexual yearning is easier than satisfying a hole in your life.

It’s pretty clear that a lot of ‘infidelity’ in monogamous relationships is in search of something other than sexual excitement or variety. The whole argument behind polyamory is that it is unreasonable to expect any one person to fulfill all your life’s desires (social, intellectual, emotional, financial, physical, and sexual). The “marriage is hard work” mantra that we are inculcated with in our culture calls on us to stifle our desires, suppress our impulses and disappointments, and accept our one partner for who s/he is and what s/he can offer us — in other words, to settle for less. Anthropologists have concluded that such settling is unnatural, and that is why the chemistry of love binds us to a single partner only for a brief period sufficient to produce offspring and ensure they are sufficiently provided for until they are weaned.

In my review of Against Love I speculated idealistically about the emergence of a new polyamory society within our culture, one that in retrospect sounds very much like the Mosuo culture in northwest China described in glowing terms in Unhitched. This is what I imagined:

A lot of people, some of their own free will, and many more who have been pushed, have recently broken free of wage slavery and are now working, mostly for much less income, for themselves. That’s probably a good thing in many ways — it reduces the supply of the remaining wage slaves, which might actually, in time, allow them to bargain from a position of at least a bit of power. It increases self-sufficiency. It reduces excessive consumption. What if there were a similar revolution against marriage slavery? What if a whole generation just refused to define themselves (in more ways than one) as married, or to live with the constraints of monogamy, and instead opted for a polyamory life-style?

Paternity ‘rights’ and responsibilities would both probably suffer, as the new family unit would be a woman (or possibly, and more logically, a group of women, in self-selected community) and their children. They would have the power, and could strike whatever contract they chose with males who wanted the responsibilities and privileges of fatherhood. The nuclear family and the ‘single-family dwelling’ would disappear. Conjugal relations would not attach to parental responsibility, and could be negotiated between any two people as individuals on a one-shot basis, with no responsibility other than the responsibility to prevent unwanted pregnancy and disease. This would probably be bad for the oldest profession, as the supply/demand ratio for quick couplings would soar. Jealousy and the consequent domestic violence that is the scourge of our nuclear spouse-as-property society would, slowly (old habits die hard), disappear. I think the vast majority of men, driven by million-year-old biological imperatives, once they reached a certain age, would choose to attach themselves to one of the matriarchal communities (if so invited), and would do their share to provide for its well-being, in return for the company and sense of purpose that would bring.

Since my marriage ended three years ago I have opted for polyamory, not for any ideological reasons as much as because I enjoyed “playing the field” in my youth and see no reason why I should not do so again, having lived monogamously, faithfully and responsibly, for the better part of three decades. Poly just works for me, and makes sense to me. I am much better at it now than I was thirty years ago, I think: I am more knowledgeable about who I am and hence can be far more honest about what I seek and what I offer in loving relationships. I am much fussier about who I love, and can’t envision trying to juggle more than two or three relationships.

I’ve actually found I’m quite willing to make a (non-monogamous) commitment to those I love, and I think I’m a lot more generous than I used to be in what I’m willing to offer. What is critical to me is that my relationships be mutually healthy and happy (and it’s my intention that, if and as long as they are, they be lifelong), and that they leave enough room (time and space) for me to be alone, since I’ve discovered I really like, and perhaps even need, time alone in warm, natural, beautiful places.

This got me thinking about, if we were to shift our society from a scarce-love monogamous one to an abundant-love polyamorous one (not that everyone would have to be poly in such a society, just that it would be equally acceptable as, and probably more popular than, monogamy), what would people look for in an ideal poly partner?

I think the list would be very different from the list of qualities for an ideal monogamy partner, mostly because love in a world of abundance is very different from love in a world of scarcity. Our modern love-scarce world, I think, is due partly to social and cultural conditioning (what we ‘learn’ from experience about love, from infancy to adulthood), and partly to the enforced busyness of our lives, which leaves a scarcity of time for everything, including love.

Based on my own experience with both, and on a superficial review of some sites that suggest what these qualities might be, here is my list, in approximate order, of the (somewhat overlapping) qualities that would seem to make an ideal partner:

Not much doubt which I’m better suited for. It just took me most of my life to figure that out.

It was the writing of Glenn Parton that first got me thinking about love as (in modern monogamist society) a commercialized, scarce-ified resource. When I discovered polyamory, it was liberating — I had not thought that there was an alternative to monogamism. And then it occurred to me that our way of thinking about love is analogous to the way we think about everything in our society: from a worldview of scarcity, competition, jealousy/envy, and insecurity.

Perhaps if we can start to liberate our thinking about what is possible by discovering that love is abundant, if we want it to be, we might then be able to realize that everything in our society and economy is abundant, if we want it to be. If we choose to stop competing, to stop working for, voting for, paying taxes to, listening to, buying from, and otherwise supporting corporatists, then we might liberate ourselves from corporatism the same way we liberate ourselves from monogamism — by just rejecting it, and choosing another way to live. I’ve called this the Generosity Economy, but it’s commonly called the Gift Economy. It’s an economy — and in fact a whole set of systems: social, political, economic, technological, health, educational, etc. — based on abundance and self-sufficiency. And the only thing holding us back from realizing them is our false belief, instilled through centuries of propaganda, that the only way to live is a life of scarcity and struggle.

Such a realization, if acted upon, would not only make us much happier, and less driven by stress, it would dramatically reduce our impact on the environment and greatly increase our resilience in the face of the crises we will have to face in the coming century — crises not of scarcity, but of the consequences of believing for far too long that a society driven by anxiety about scarcity and the endless need for more is the only way to live.

Cartoon: By Peter Steiner from The New Yorker, in the Cartoon Bank