Being Alone: The Other Counter-Monogamy

There’s lots of talk about gay marriage, more so in America where it’s illegal, less so in Canada where it’s a done deal and therefore a moot topic, from the point of view of the victors. There’s also lots of talk Against Marriage by queers of all stripes. Much of the anti-marriage discussion is also anti-monogamy, voiced by advocates of polyamory, and I wholeheartedly agree with most of it.

The basic premise is that monogamy forces people to confine themselves to one partner when they love and desire many people. It confines people to have sex with only one partner when they could enjoy sex with many people that they also care about. The effect of monogamy on the individual is to repress their queer desires and deny them the love of people who could be a loving, nurturing presence in their lives. The effect of monogamy on communities (and not just queer communities) is to fragment them and isolate people into nuclear households that stunt the growth of community life. From the perspective of the polyamourists, their preferred way of life is to partner with more than one, even many people. To the queer sex radicals, the answer is to engage in sex with multiple partners, whether casually or more intimately.

But I haven’t heard much about another kind of resistance to monogamy: being alone. People who have been in long-term relationships with a partner, or even more than one partner, sometimes need to be alone. We need relationship breaks of a few days, relationship vacations of a week or more, even relationship sabbaticals of six months or a year or more. We need time to be alone to figure out who we are to ourselves, apart from our relationships. We need to get back in touch with that primary relationship—our selves. Sometimes we can be so caught up in a partnership, a dating and club scene, a community effort, that we don’t even know who we are to ourselves. We need to check in with ourselves, our repressed needs and desires, our dreams and goals, our skills and talents, our creative time for recreation and play, our spirituality.

The ethic of monogamy also denies people the time to be alone. Being forced into monogamy also often means never getting a break from it, never getting to spend days and weeks at a time in your own company, thinking your own thoughts, feeling your own feelings. It means being forced into a situation where you have to “let the other person know” everything you are doing or plan to do, constantly checking in with your partner or multiple partners to make sure “it’s ok if” you want to do x, y or z.

I love that time alone and I love the freedom of just being able to walk out of my house and wander where I please without having to tell anyone. I love wandering the streets of a city, having no destination, but just walking and experiencing life in the moment: people-watching, window-shopping, running into a friend, conversing with a stranger, or happening upon some free cultural event—a concert in the park.

Although I’m open to new relationships, even polyamorous relationships, what I cherish more than anything is time to be alone. After 14 years of working hard in a committed relationship, I deserve some time to myself. What I want more than anything is freedom—freedom to love whom I choose to love, yes, but most of all, freedom to enjoy my own company, to enjoy the silence or the noise that I want to make; freedom to come and go as I please; freedom to just go about my day without having to answer to anyone, make plans or check-in with anyone. I can really move in my body any way and go any where I choose. My body is mine, my days are mine, my experience is mine, unfiltered by the needs and opinions of another.

Besides the push to complicate our lives with multiple relationships, maybe people should consider another kind resistance to monogamy--the joy of being alone.

Of course, that means resisting the other socially enforced state of being: child-bearing. To be truly free and alone, one must be childless and resist having children. Child-rearing is something that is socially sanctioned not only for monogamous gay and straight couples, but for single women, including lesbians, and even polyamorous partners. But that's the topic of another post.