This is a great read about what polyamory means to Maxine, and I identify with much of it myself. I highly recommend reading the whole post. Here’s an excerpt of it to tickle your interest:
For me, being ‘poly’ is tied to my definition of what Love is. I believe that if you love someone, you want them to be happy, whether that means they are with you or without you – this applies both in the long-term, as in ‘who would I like to spend the rest of my life with?’ and the short, as in ‘who would I like to spend this evening with?’. To me, loving someone means facilitating their happiness, or giving them space to create their own, in the best way you can.
If that sounds like a masochistic approach to relationships, it can be. In my early years of relating to people, this meant I gave a hell of a lot and expected little in return. However, having matured a bit since, and gained a lot more experience, the flip-side of this is that I now expect my partners – all of my partners – to feel the same way about me.
Obviously, what will make me happiest at any given moment is not always what will make my partner(s) happy. There is always a balance to be struck, and compromises to be made. Sometimes partnerships are just plain incompatible, and end up dissolving – but any two people who love each other in the way I defined above will care for and support each other even through break-ups.
There are still hard times: In the long-term sense, letting go of someone you’re madly in love with but not well suited to is still damned hard, and in the short term so is spending an evening alone when you really don’t want to, because it’s better for someone else. Sometimes the best thing you can do for someone else’s happiness is nothing at all, and coming to terms with that can also be tough.
The bit that makes it worth it though: knowing that the person you’re spending time with is there because they want to be with you, not because you’ve blackmailed them into it, or because they have nowhere better to be. That in itself is a heck of a boost in self-esteem.
She goes on to say, and this is a great analogy of why more than one person is important to someone who identifies and polyamorous:
Often after explaining all this, I still get asked why it is that I want to be sexual with more than one person – why I want to have more than one relationship at a time. My answer is a question: Why would anyone want to have dinner with more than one person? Or play tennis with more than one person? Or have a conversation with more than one person? The experiences are different – and an extra bonus is that there is always something new to learn from every new relationship – if you have parallel relationships, your existing partners benefit from this (believe me, I know!).
You can read her full blog post here.
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