‘I didn’t choose to be this way, this is how I am and it makes no sense to me to be otherwise,’ says Jaunita.
You would be forgiven for thinking Jaunita was gay but she isn’t. While she may be attracted to men and women, she is actually polyamorous or ‘poly’.
Polyamory is the term for a relationship of more than two people; the hybrid term derives its meaning literally from Greek and Latin words and translates to ‘many loves’. Not to be mistaken with polygamy which entails one partner having multiple partners of the opposite sex, polyamorous relationships are ‘intimate, emotional connections and relationships’ between more than two people.
Currently Jaunita lives in a relationship with two other men, one of which is her fiance and partner of 14 years, not to mention the network of lovers and spouse-like partners in her life. Sitting in a cafe over coffee, the 30-year-old illustrates her relationships in a ‘polygraph’ with pen and paper. The network is as intricate as a spider’s web and splinters out into clusters of people as each group holds a different role in her life. Not all of her relationships are about sex; in fact it seems almost half of the people drawn on her graph are non-sexual partners.
‘I find many monogamous people tend to be less ethical than poly people,’ Jaunita explained.
‘Poly people are invariably very specific about the open and honest involvement of all people.’
Jaunita points out that her relationships are transparent; her partners well-aware of each other and she is surprisingly ethical when it comes to meeting new people. For example, she said she would refuse to be with anyone who was not as transparent as her with their own partner. Case closed. Compare this to the estimated rates of cheating among monogamous couples.
Last month a study of 900 people from the US found that women cheated nearly as much as men, 19 per cent and 23 per cent respectively. According to the Sexual Health Australia website, statistics suggests that 70 per cent of all marriages experience an affair.
She drives her point home when she recalls a discussion she had with some poly friends about cheating. A friend of a friend had been sharing a story of an affair with a married man; as her friends consoled her, they cautioned her against getting hurt but did not appear to be too concerned about cheating.
‘Then you’ve got people who make a point of being open and honest and clarifying the boundaries and seeking to find people where it works for the group of you,’ she said.
‘And suddenly they’re less ethical.’
Jaunita found that being poly was more than a lifestyle; it was who she was, something she couldn’t change.
Polyamory VS Marriage Equality
In Australia, there are numerous online groups around the country for poly people to connect. One such group is PolyVic, a website for Melbourne’s polyamorous community which hosts social meets and holds discussion groups on polyamorous relationships.
PolyVic co-founder Anne Hunter believes people who are unfamiliar or scared of things like gay marriage had a tendency of merging it together with other things they did not understand.
‘In my experience, people conflate differences they are afraid of,’ Hunter said.
‘I think the gay and lesbian communities have come from a point of embracing relationship diversity, however in the pursuit of same-sex marriage, in order to gain some of the recognition that is accorded to heterosexual marriage in our culture, there has been an attempt … basically to say to straight society, we’re the same as you; the only difference is that we are two people of the same-sex but we have all the same values and we want a picket fence and a dog’.
Hunter suggested the stance made for good lobbying but was concerned for people in ‘diverse relationships’ of what may happen in the future.
‘When you are lobbying, you need one item that you are lobbying about that is clear and straight-forward,’ she said.
‘We really need marriage equality, we really need that, everybody deserves to have their relationship recognised and validated.
‘Once gay marriage is recognised which will happen, are we then going to have to then turn-around and fight the people we have been supporting in order to get our own relationships recognised.’
In the gay marriage debate, there is an incumbent fear from critics that same-sex marriage will open up the floodgates to a variety of other relationships models like polyamory.
As Bill Muehlenberg, the author of conservative blog CultureWatch, put so eloquently: ‘Homosexuals say gender has nothing to do with real love and marriage. Polyamorists say number has nothing to do with real love and marriage.’ While the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen wrote in his church’s paper in June that same-sex marriage would lead to polygamy and incest.
In her Marriage Needs Defining article on the Drum Unleashed, freelance writer Katrina Fox wrote that marriage could go even further than just same-sex relationships.
‘Surely it makes more sense to expand the definition of marriage to include a range of relationship models including polyamory, instead of holding up monogamy as the gold, indeed only, standard,’ she wrote in March.
Marriage equality advocates refute these claims as a ‘desperate scare-tactic’ by opposition forces like the Australian Christian Lobby who have used this line before. Yet it’s a compelling conundrum (at least to us) that the LGBT community will have to come to terms with: how equal is marriage equality?
Benn Dorrington
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