#compulsory monogamy

[a-queer-seminarian]

"Having been trained in coupled heterosexuality, most contemporary Americans are of course likely to do badly (or, rather, worse) at anything else. ...The failure of polyamorous queer communities may not vindicate monogamous heterosexuality so much as disclose its reach over those who try to escape it."

- Mark Jordan in Blessing Same-Sex Unions, 2005

[eusuntgratie]

no one wants to hear this but stop shitting on taylor for saying she didn’t care that he drunk kissed a girl. not everyone has the same relationship boundaries and expectations. i would feel exactly how taylor said she felt about it. she’s not a terrible person or weak or stupid for not viewing a kiss the same way most people do.

[raavenb2619]

[ID: The epic handshake meme. A person on the left, labelled “nonpartnering aros”, grabs the hand of a person on the right, labelled “polyamorous people”. Their hands are labelled “resisting compulsory monogamy”. End ID]

[cocomingox]

“Paradoxically, as the moral grip of religious patriarchy has loosened its hold in the West, the doctrine of monogamous romance has become ever more entrenched. Marriage was once understood as a practical, domestic arrangement that involved a certain amount of self-denial. Now your life partner is also supposed to answer your every intimate and practical need, from orgasms to organizing the school run.

Polyamory is a response to the understanding that, for a great many of us, that ideal is impractical, if not an active source of unhappiness. People have all sorts of needs at different times in their lives — for love, companionship, care and intimacy, sexual adventure and self-expression — and expecting one person to be able to meet them all is not just unrealistic, it’s unreasonable. Women in particular, who often end up doing the bulk of the emotional labor in traditional, monogamous, heterosexual relationships, don’t have the energy to be anyone’s everything.

I don’t expect anyone to be everything to me. I want my freedom and I want to be ethical and I also want care and affection and pleasure in my life. I guess I’m greedy. I guess I’m a woman who wants to have it all. It’s just that my version of “having it all” is a little different from the picture of marriage, mortgage and monogamy to which I was raised to aspire.

Not all polyamorous relationships work out — nor do all conventional relationships. We’re making it up as we go along. It would be helpful to be able to do that without also having to deal with prejudice and suspicion.

It’s easy to see where the suspicion comes from. The idea of desire without bounds or limits is threatening. It’s a threat to a social order that exerts control by putting fences around our fantasies and making it wicked to want anything unsanctioned. It’s a threat to a society that has developed around the idea of mandatory heterosexual partnership as a way to organize households. It’s threatening because it’s utopian in a culture whose imagination is dystopian because it’s about pleasure and abundance in a culture that imposes scarcity and self-denial. Freedom is often frightening — and polyamory is about balancing freedom with mutual care. In this atomized society, that’s still a radical idea.”

— taken from “Bitch Doctrine” by Laurie Penny

[a-queer-seminarian]

“The polyamorous Christ: on the sexual ethics of incarnation”  David W. Congdon, 2025

[Full article here]

Feminist and queer theologians have long pushed back against the assumption that the salvific and the erotic are antithetical to each other, but the explicit challenge to mononormativity remains relatively new and largely unexplored outside of a handful of scholars. There are a number of specifically Christian reasons for this, but two general reasons are worth mentioning here. 

First, the reticence to challenge mononormativity is due in no small part to a widespread confusion between polyamory and polygamy, along with a pervasive fear that permitting polyamory might open the door to patriarchal polygynous marriages.

The irony here is that monogamous marriages are no less replete with patriarchal norms. The enemy of patriarchy is not monogamy but consent, and consent and equity can occur as much within a plural marriage as within a monogamous one. 

Given the extent to which patriarchy remains tolerated, even at times celebrated in some circles, the cultural bias against polygamy cannot be explained as a concern for women’s agency but instead reflects the general assumption that polygamy is culturally alien to (and incompatible with) ‘civilized’ western society. 

The belief that monogamy is superior to polygamy has its roots in European colonialism, in which Christian colonizers justified their right to dominate others by framing polygamy as inferior.

In Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), a founding text in modern sexology, Richard von Krafft-Ebing states that monogamous ‘Christian nations’ have a ‘mental and material superiority over the polygamic races, and especially over Islam.’ Today’s rhetoric about polygamy may not always be so explicitly racist, Orientalist, and Islamophobic, but the belief in the superiority of (white Christian) monogamy remains firmly ensconced within the West. Polyamory is not polygamy, however, and a theology of polyamory does not depend on defending polygamy any more than queer theology depends on defending same-sex marriage. 

Second, the resistance to challenging mononormativity stems additionally from the assumption that the alternative would be polynormativity – the belief that nonmonogamy and polyamory ought to be normative in society…

The proper alternative to mononormativity is not polynormativity, however, but rather an openness to multiple possibilities. Another way to describe mononormativity is the term ‘compulsory monogamy,’ coined by Columbia law professor Elizabeth Emens. Her article on the subject uses the model of Adrienne Rich’s ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ to describe the way monogamy, much like heterosexuality, is not simply a natural feature of human existence but rather a norm imposed upon society and rigorously enforced through a system of laws, customs, and regulations. Compulsory monogamy, or mononormativity, is thus a system of control that makes monogamy obligatory, rather than optional. 

[anarcho-smarmyism]

"Compulsory heterosexuality emerged as a term during the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in 1976, where it was named as one of the 'crimes against women', particularly in the context of forcing lesbians to have heterosexual sex and remain in heterosexual partnerships. It then moved into the broader academic vocabulary when Adrienne Rich published a piece in 1980 which made the connection between compulsory heterosexuality, feminism, and compulsory monogamy. According to gender studies scholar Angela Willey, since then 'compulsory monogamy' has grown as a term and 'has been used to describe the deeply normalized status of coupling, especially for women'.

Willey continues: 'To say that monogamy is compulsory is to call attention to constraints on our ability to imagine alternatives. The visibility of alternative relationship models can challenge monogamy's grip on our imaginations, but it can also reinforce its status.' In other words, it is important to see other forms of relationships so that we perceive these as options for ourselves, and we must be careful not to treat nonmonogamy as a deviant alternative to be mocked. 'The couple remains the primary legal unit . . . and a building block of contemporary culture.' This is exemplified by the fact that most countries do not allow legal recognition of partnerships of more than two people."

-Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality by Julia Shaw

[saga-ordsmed]

I'm sorry, but I have a (half-serious) soap box moment: Plots and character developments driven by a focus on the rivalry in a love triangle are insufferable.

Just be poly; you're experiencing desire for (at least) two persons simultaneously; why insist that that's a problem? There's no moral failure in feeling attraction and affection for more than one individual; the will to sever bonds for the sake of a single connection is no evidence for moral superiority. Ultimatums and sacrifices don't accomplish meaningful relationships; agency, fair boundaries, genuine support, and honest vulnerability do.

Go fuck around and find out.

Let a girl (gn) have all the dicks and pussies, affection and intimacy she desires.

[thou8hts-and-ideas]

I’ve never seen a heteronormative monogamous couple where I didn’t think the cis woman would be 1000X better off without her cis male partner.

Everyone is celebrating this couple’s anniversary on fb, but he floats in and out of their home on his whim, she is a single mum most of the time, working full time and children and household, then he comes home for a night or two, sometimes 10oclock at night, expects dinner, and disappears again for another few weeks.

Another couple I know he treats her like a child- he was so much older when they met, and now they’re both older but she is forever his baby, and micromanages her like a child. She is suffocated. And they’re both so unhappy they’re cheating on each other. How do I know? He slid into my DMs.

Same with another couple. He slides into my DMs and tells me all sorts of things he wants to do the moment he finds out I’m single. And another couple. These “monogamous” married men have no shame.

I can’t think of a single couple I know irl I would consider a healthy relationship. I know too much.

Yet these same friends. These same ones cheating on their husbands, whose husbands tell me in their DMs are cheating on their wives, these women who are doing all the work for their families and households and looking after their husbands as though they’re an extra child, they’re telling ME that what I’m doing is immoral. That being polyamorous is evil and wrong. It’s so freaking backwards. I just can’t with these ppl. I could out them all, but I couldn’t break their hearts like they do mine. Why do ppl tell me too many secrets? 😖