The Monogamous Onion

I was listening to yet another old Erotic Awakening podcast, one where Dan and Dawn's Question of the Day was whether anyone can be poly, and how you could tell…

During the discussion, Dawn made the comment that she thinks people tend to be hardwired one way or the other, that some are wired to be monogamous and some are wired poly, but that we all have an insulating layer of societal expectations that can make it difficult to see what we really are…

I was kind of drowsing as I listened but my eyelids snapped wide open on that one - and my brain immediately added, "plus, the lifestyle tends to impose yet another layer on top of that…"

Because when you enter this heady world, it's easy to feel that there are community pressures to throw off the constraints of vanilla life. Monogamy is just one more societal conceit created to produce cookie cutter members, so why should we accept it? 

Who ever heard of a monogamous slut? 

It can land a person in an maddening quagmire, all those multiple layers of tropes.

But truthfully, altho' I have long considered a kinky nature to be just the result of wiring, I'd never thought about monogamy or polyamory as a wiring issue. That had always struck me as more of a morality-based decision. Does it sound too ridiculous for me to admit that even the suggestion that it's not something we can alter was an incredible relief?

Not because it means I don't have to change but more because it means my struggles aren't against a flaw - they're against a valid, real thing. And that difference in perspective actually changes a great deal. Because now the argument shifts from, "Why can't I make myself accept this? Why can I not change?" to "OK, it's just not gonna move. How do I punt around it?" (Not to mention, "Do I want to punt around it?")

I've spoken ad nauseam in the past about my great internal conflict over not being able to cheerfully assure BG that a ménage would be just splendid. I want to do and be what he wants, after all. But any form of sharing or being shared is something that I have NOT been able to get a handle on, and I have found that frustrating.  

It seemed I was battling a combination of societal construct and my own insecurities and getting nowhere. And since I know societal constructs aren't that important to me, then that must mean my insecurities go a lot deeper than I want to accept. (Which, btw, may still be true. However…) 

My lack of progress makes a lot more sense if I consider that maybe what I was actually doing was trying to peel away one construct so I could lay on another construct, when in fact, the truth lies in a layer even deeper, within something that is actually an integral part of me -- something that just IS, so it's OK to accept it and go from there.

And that makes me feel like SO much less of a hypocrite, it's positively emancipating.

Because I know I don't judge people who can multi-task their sexual fidelity -- so my inability to budge my own feelings on the matter was starting to make me feel like someone who could talk the talk but not walk the walk. 

Or a big fat chicken...

And neither hypocrite nor chicken is an adjective to make a person proud.