...that love ain't love. They can't tell me what love is, who I shall love, and how many people I should love at once, and make laws about it.

Like everything, we need to question our ideas about certain values and where they've come from. Everything is a social construct, including relationships based on 'love'. Whilst biology dictates that a man and a woman come together to procreate to ensure survival of the species, society builds layers on top of that that firmly entrench rules - for example, one can't have sex until 16, or one shall not sleep with your cousin, or even one shall not bed down with someone of the same sex, even though we've been doing just that since Eve fell in love with Eve and Adam bunked down with Adam.

You have a right to believe in God and the rules your church upholds, however, if God is love, I don't think he's dictating who we 'should' love as long as we're not hurting each other. It's as simple as that.

“It's a false premise to say that most monogamous people have chosen monogamy. Most people belong to the religion they were raised in...because that's what's familiar. That's the milieu they grew up in, and, for better or worse, they're just continuing the pattern. Until this traditionalist mindset is shaken loose, you would likely try from reflex to impose notions onto nonmonogamy that are not only untenable in the new context but spel sudden and messy doom even in situations that otherwise could be worked out.” ― Anthony D. Ravenscroft

Loving more than one person can be scary and confronting if you're raised to believe your heart should solely belong to one person and one person only. If that's what you've been raised on, it's hard to imagine others loving in different ways. But I remind you again that love is love. Love is by it's very nature an incredibly beautiful, pure thing, and who are we to dictate the many forms that love might take in a lifetime?

And if you truly love your partner, and you want them to be happy, you also have no right to dicate who else they might love, and you absolutely should be happy for them. In return, if you're not, then perhaps they shouldn't be with you. Personally, if Jamie or I fell in love with someone else and still professed deep love for each other, then that seems a beautiful thing to me.

Polygamy, the real sentence I was meant to start with for Hive account@galenkp's Weekend Experiences topic, feel different to me - like a bound contract whereby you must obey your spouse, and if that means he has many wives, you just need to deal with that. Cults have absolutely given polygamy a bad rap, using the good book as an excuse - because if people like Jacab, Abraham and Solomon can do it, and people like David with 700 wives and 300 concubines, why not a cult leader? I feel uncomfortable about the double standard, because no where is it validated that woman can have a many husbands as they like for, well, sex on tap and housework.

Polyamory to me means 'many loves' or 'multiple loves', and whilst I've settled for my main squeeze, I've experienced many loves in my lifetime and am grateful for each one of them, the good, the bad, and the meh. Without going into detail, we are both thankful and grateful for both male and female lovers that have both enriched our lives and made our skin tingle - both before and since we've been together. If it wasn't for these experiences I wonder about how deep our love really was - for us, we've been made far stronger for it, and more deeply in love.

“I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.”
― Anaïs Nin

Luckily for both of us, these experiences didn't make us change our mind about each other. If it had, I guess we would have done that anyway, and be on our merry way. We never believed that love was about ownership or exclusivity, sexual or otherwise. Of course we'd experience tinges of jealousy or the desire to ask for absolute and conditional love, but we spent a lot of time questioning where that came from, and what we believed our love meant. We grew to understand completely that our love was about respect, care and committment to each other, to be kind and supportive, to grow together, create together, make a life together. It wasn't about forcing exclusivity on each other. If that's what naturally evolved because we didn't want to hurt each other by taking other lovers for the rest of our lives, then that's what evolved. Other relationships are different, and they sure as hell have the right to love how, and who, they want, just as we do.

I love polyamory, ultimately. To love many. I think it says alot about our capacity to love, as human beings. What a beautiful thing that is, to open and share our hearts with others, not just one, because we're told that's the contractual condition.

But I am truly happy to be with my one love, right now, in this moment in time, and long for no other. That makes me feel blessed, just in the way it might utterly bore others, and that's okay too.

What do you think?

Images created in Midjourney: Polyamory in the style of Gustav Klimt's 'The Kiss'.