Day 2-Are you born with it?
Maybe its polyamory (It could also be Maybelline but this is not a hair segment)
A little while ago I started thinking about what we are born with and what we learn from external influences. And, my sparkly pineapples, I started to wonder about the different ways in which people experience polyamory and whether the nature vs nurture argument could be applied. Do some people choose to be poly and others just feel it…well…naturally? Now if you will reach under the seat and safely secure your information over load hat to your head….we are about to get mildly educational…..you can stop eye rolling, I am not about to recite a whole Psychodynamic therapy book at you, but I am going to apply some theory here.
Once upon a time…yea that’s right, you read it…my blog my rules….there was a renowned Psychoanalyst by the name of John Bowlby who was a leading researcher in the subjects of attachment and separation. He believes that our attachments start from the moment we leave the womb and that we do this as humans and not even as the gender, as he stated that babies are gender less until either assigned or influenced. This made me think that we are hard wired to attach to something even from the minute we slide out of there like a water ride at Thorpe Park…got to love a visual…and Bowlby talks a lot about attaching to one constant after another, often as a way of continually replacing your primal care along the road of life.
So guess what, I started applying this theory to Polyamory and wondering whether the way in which we individually attach is hard wired in the DNA or it is something that we pick up a long the way. Ok ok I will pull it back slightly before this gets to be a complex psycho analogy paper. Take this example,I come shooting out of the womb like a bat out of hell screaming like previously aforementioned bat, covered in what can only be described as de constructed jelly and ice cream …can you say Michelin star….and I take one look at my mum and go YOU…YOU ARE MY EVERYTHING AND WE ARE NOW TOGETHER FOREVER!!! Fast forward a few years and I start to make friendships and meet teachers…my reaction is YOU ARE NOW MY EVERYTHING…..these reactions, are what I would call hardwired. So in this example I am born with a mono brain. I cannot be attached to more than one person at a time and forever latching on to one care giver.
NOW for someone born with poly brain…they come shooting out…see above for visuals….and they look around the room and go YOU AND YOU AND YOU AND YOU…and I want the same from all of you, bare in mind I am not talking poly and mono in relationship sense here but in attachment sense. So in this way they are looking at individuals as people that will add varying degrees of themselves to their lives.
Alright alright I can see some of you falling asleep at the back there. I started to wonder why some people struggle with the idea of non monogamy more than others. Putting aside the obvious societal influences and what we have been told is the norm for decades, what if some of us….are just born with it. This came about as a reaction to something that Tom said to me a while ago where he told me he always felt like he wanted more exploration and varying people in his life. I watch him dance and sway gracefully and securely (funnily enough Secure is a type of attachment in the psychology world, also funny because Tom cant dance) through non monogamy, this is not to say there are never issues and that he ever stops learning, but in a baseline way he feels certain in his feelings on polyamory and the way in which he feels about sharing himself with more than one person.
Me? Not so much. You know the story of my meander into poly so I wont re tell it, but it really was a very conscious choice. And that there is the key word, choice. I chose to look at my attachment situation and start to let go of the one and only hand I was holding and start to look at holding multiple hands, reaching out for different reason. There is a very clear difference between the natural ease that Tom feels and the ease I create for myself through the choices I am deciding to make. Often you find that a couple opens up a relationship and one person decides to be non mono and the other stays mono, so their partner is the one and only.
The first time I came across this, it was the story of a couple that had done just that and were making it work. The husband was the one not dating outside of the relationship and he was asked, but how does that work? because you are comfortable with your partner seeing other people? And he responded, yes, she is my one and only but it doesn’t mean I have to be for her. Of course he could date other people if he chose to…but then I thought, perhaps not…perhaps he was wired differently to her in the womb.
Which got me thinking, yea my brain hurts as much as yours,,……what if the feeling of being naturally poly and deciding to choose it to be your lifestyle is actually all about the little babies inside us owns attachment style. I for one am still sawing through that monogamous umbilical chord, but it seems to be coming away quicker and quicker each day.