Suck it Up and Love

I have come to see particularly why semi-extreme social conservatives lack any appreciation for gay marriage.  I have come to see this via an experience of my own, as I recently confronted a thought process involving polyamory.  I made my way into a consideration of this particular option for romance in my own life.  For a long while polyamory breached my awareness as a mere ideal, so ridiculous as to be a myth.  Then slowly, many of my closest friends began to engage in some form of polyamory, meaning most generally to have multiple serious sexual relationships at a time.  The book entitled The Ethical Slut entered my view, and then here I was, as open as I am, fearing that this new even more liberal position would haunt my own quixotic wits.  And so it has.

I was so inculcated into the idealized notion of finding the one that I felt viscerally anxious about the idea of there being an alternative to this goal.  The possibility that we might love multiple people in our lives, and in essentially fully realized romantic relationships with multiple people, gave me serious pause.  Even a lesser option, open relationships, gave me serious pause.  Open relationships are often also said to be a form of polyamory--where two people are primary lovers who sometimes additionally involve themselves in less serious sexual affairs.  Granted, I was not devastated, angered, or violent towards these new ideas about sex.  I merely felt in the pit of my sternum a profound weirdness, and profound fear.  What if this polyamory spreads and becomes popular?  How, then, would I find people who might want to love me monogamously?  For, although this idea was not in itself particularly threatening, it became extremely threatening to me if it meant my own way of life, my own strategies for getting meaning and purpose, would all disappear.  My thoughts then would leap, at these points, into other thoughts about how I might actually become violent to protect my own way of life.  So entrenched, so hot and bothered, was I!  If I weren't obviously more enlightened than Christian Evangelicals, I might have actually decided to judge polyamory and polyamorous people as crazy, to be avoided, and treated when caught.

But I am not these things because I believe in inclusiveness and in the right to happiness for all.  If there is one right that I believe ought to be granted to every individual it is this right.  So if there are individuals on this earth who think that polyamory is the best way for their own meaning and purpose, happiness, then how could I justify even only disagreeing with their right to follow their hearts?  If there is evil, doing so would be.  And if there are only a few people on this earth, if there is only me left who prefers monogamy, I bet that after a struggle I might get used to it myself.  But, see, I am actually very satisfied and happy where I am.  And so then, why and what motivation would I have to change unless I absolutely had to?  As the old saying goes, don't fix what ain't broke!  Back in the day, see, we weren't merely cruel capitalists.  In any case, it was at this point that I realized that it really wasn't a big deal, that life wouldn't be over, and that meaning and purpose would still be available to me.  And for now, I am finding the kind of monogamy that makes me happy.  It turns out there are actually quite a few people out there, in the big'ol' world, who still want what I want too.

Thus although I have come to see why semi-extreme social conservatives might be offended by gay marriage, or by homosexuality in general, I also see how it is possible for them to suck it up and love.