When HR is in Charge of the Sex
In Which I Observe How Jane Austen Is More Romantic Than A Polycule
I don’t know about you, but, as one generally distracted by the news, the fracturing of my attention is even worse than usual. Normally I look at Twitter once or twice a day and then depend on others to send me interesting items of note. The last four days, however, I find I have my phone constantly in my hand. If it were the times of my youth, I would have scrapped everything to watch Ye Olde Television. I must not be alone, for while I have been getting an ache in my scrolling thumb, Matt went viral for posting this picture of our Sunday evening
with the caption
I have four daughters. That means I have spent approximately 1/3 of my fatherly life watching the six hour version of Pride and Prejudice.
As I’m typing this the post has 86,000 likes and 2.4 Million views. There are also 1200 comments, many of them brilliant memes and gifs. This, apparently, was the content we needed most in the midst of a most stressful and alarming weekend.
Amazingly, a good number of people in this fair land did not know that there even was a six-hour version of my favorite novel. How is it possible that some living people have only seen the Keira Knightly version? What is the world coming to?
I felt like I was watching it for the first time, instead of the twentieth. I wasn’t sure why until, wandering around the New York Times, it occurred to me that I am living in a different moral cosmos than a lot of other people. My assumptions about good and evil are excessively old-fashioned. Indeed, observing, with the usual bated breath, the trainwreck of Lydia and Wickam I suddenly felt at home, a brief inhilation of familiar air the way one relaxes amongst one’s own people. Which must mean that, day to day, I am living in an ethical foreign land. The entire premise of the story—that it is wicked and disastrous to run away and live with a man to whom one is not married—is on the precipice of becoming unintelligible for the vast majority of people living in the West. People like Maddie of TikTok, who was recently trying to wrap her mind around someone wanting to keep a child, for example. Or all the people in this Polycule in Boston.
What is a Polycule? The Times has cobbled together a lustrous definition:
The word “polycule” is a synthesis of polyamory — engaging in multiple romantic relationships — and molecule. It’s not clear when the word was coined, but it seems to have started catching on around 15 years ago to suggest an intricate structure formed of people with overlapping deep attachments: romantic, sexual, sensual, platonic. It’s difficult to describe a polycule. Words like “family” and “network” are used, but neither on its own captures it. Perhaps it’s best left to a polycule itself to offer descriptions. These are the voices and images of people who are part of a polycule in the Boston area.
Isn’t that charming? It’s romantic and intricate and sensual. It’s so much better than an ordinary family comprised of a man and a woman who have pledged themselves to each other to be a mutual support, help, and comfort in sickness and in health, forsaking all others as long as they both shall live. That’s so lame. Twenty people throwing off the pedantic shackles of tradition is going to be edgy and exciting. Here is how it all began:
A bunch of couples met in the summer of 2020. Over the next year, we were all dating and developing friendships with several couples and individuals that eventually blossomed into this community. It’s an evolving organism that looks entirely different from everyone’s perspective.
Hmmm, I wonder how glistering this blossoming is going to be? I wonder what the evolution of human sexual relationships will amount to. I expect it will be pure candescent utopia, the sudden dawning of a golden age. It will be lots more pulchritudinous than those old, stupid ways of faithfulness, prudence, self-sacrifice, and humor. Which is to say, as you read the piece, don’t believe your lying eyes:
It’s definitely not a fixed or closed thing, and the relations and connections have shifted and grown and continue to do so.
Things that are fixed—like the moral guardrails that preserve the individual soul and the society in which that soul abides—are bad. Closed things—like the marriage bond—are so unconscionably lame. It’s better to throw everything up into the air and trust to chance. Especially since, when everything falls back to the ground, the things are guaranteed to fall into scintillating and satisfying order. You won’t get the usual power structures, for example. You certainly won’t get any pain or heartbreak. You won’t discover that the second verse is the same as the first except slightly out of tune and uncomfortable to sing.
This is my favorite line in the whole thing:
Our polycule is female-run. It’s the female-identified people who spearhead. We convene, we plan, we call the shots. It’s a bunch of queer women who say we’re not going to follow the rules.
…by creating a whole bunch of new rules that look sort of vaguely just like the old rules, only with a new set of vocabulary. Remember though:
It’s freedom. I am so grateful to be a part of it. I have this abundance of love to give. I feel so in my power. We all approach ENM, ethical nonmonogamy, differently. Everyone is so deeply in love with each other, whether or not it’s romantic love.
Color me bemused that some of the love in this big exciting mix-up of non-rule following gender queerness is not going to be “romantic.” In fact, I don’t think it is too much to say that we are about to encounter what happens when the transgressive delights of the Sexual Revolution are devoured by HR. Some people will have sex, and the ones who don’t will smile, with just a soupcon of trauma mixed in with their self-care.
You’ll have to click on the article to see the judiciously composed photographs. Meanwhile, I will pull out the bits that seem like a full measure of Cope, pressed down, shaken together, pouring out into our lonely laps:
I identified as a single guy. I went from that to dating nonmonogamously. And I fell in love with someone who was already in love with more than one other person. The fear of abandonment that I’d been programmed from Day 1 to expect, I had a huge amount of stress about that. And of expressing too much anxiety. I spent a lot of time suffering alone during the first months because I didn’t want to overwhelm my new partner and have them realize, Hey, you know what, this is just too much of a pain in the ass, and I need you to do more work to reach the level where you need to be.
When I hear the word “ethical nonmanogamy” I of course think of some glamerous movie, the Hollywood golden hue of self-affirming love filmed from a variety of perfect angles, the dialogue well timed, and most of all, the freedom of free sex, which is the age’s highest good. Funny, though, that because a large group of people trying to throw off constraint is just like every other time anyone has done that. Those on the low-end of the heirarchy are going to bear the burden of the system’s dysfunction. The female “led” version of social order turns out not to be egalitarian. It requires an underclass of men, who by their own willing participation, work on themselves by the renewing of their willing submission. It’s like the old business of sacrificing oneself for the sake of others, except that its the sacrifice of a thousand therapy sessions, of salving the wounds of disappointment over and over.
This whole exercise feels like a black hole. They pull people in who turn ever more towards themselves. They aren’t building a city or even a tower, they’re building themselves, because that is the highest and most estimable expression of what is good. It wasn’t always like this, of course. Before Gender Studies dawned upon the hearts of all young ladies:
I was enthralled in college with gender-studies theory. I started to articulate that I was queer. I identify anywhere from femme to nonbinary, depending on the day. My pronouns are she/they. Gender studies is where I realized that nonmonogamy was an option. I had a professor who showed us this wheel about the accepted forms of sexuality and gender identity, and at the outside of the wheel were all the forms that aren’t accepted. And I was like, Oh, I fall into the outside.
What’s so silly, of course, is that “nonmonogamy”—previously called Sexual Immorality—has been around for almost as long as people have. But some people were literally born yesterday and think they’ve invented something clever. Don’t forget guys, there is so so so much work to do:
My husband and I are very, very different, which is our strength. He’s a frat bro who loves sports, and I’m a radical alien witch academic nerd. In the beginning, we did all the typical stuff. Read the books on nonmonogamy, did the relationship check-ins. We’d sit down, take notes. We did every exercise in the books, listened to every podcast. We learned a strategy from the Multiamory podcast called “agile scrum,” which was adapted from business-meeting models. We utilized that format. We did that for a year and a half, at least once a month, sometimes six to 10 hours of hard poly-processing. That gave us great communication tactics.
I hate the word “utilize.” It’s moved up to the same levels of loathing, for me, as “impactfulness.” Can’t we just “use” things? Why do we have to “utilize” them? This is so terrible. But not just for me:
At the start, I was going through some depression, and when we had sex I had so much stress. There were issues in the bedroom with her, and that happened many times, which caused more stress. She started seeing this dude who was an absolute stud, having sex with him and having a great-ass time, and I felt totally lame and inadequate.
That was really hard for me, for obvious reasons. I felt like, I’m a hundred percent replaceable. It took a lot of conversations. She was like, There’s nothing wrong with you, this is going to pass, therapy will help. Lots of tears were shed. But medication helped me, talk therapy helped me, changing the way we do things helped. That’s where feelings are not facts really mattered. Because I would ask her questions, and she would be like, No, I don’t feel that way; and I would be like, I know you like being with him more than me; and she would say, I’m not lying to you, it’s different, but it doesn’t make me love you less, you provide so much more to my life than just sex. I totally get it now. That was the first instance of feelings are not facts. They feel like it. But they ain’t facts.
Having to be medicated to endure life in a Polycule was not on my 2024 Bingo Card. But who am I kidding? Nothing that’s happened this year has been in the least bit expected by me.
Also, it’s so great that sex, which has, for a hot minute, been the highest and best expression of personhood, is not actually awesome for everyone. Perhaps not even most people. But the allure, the promise of it remains, as usual, just over there. If you squint, and turn the corner, and go several blocks, and gaze at the horizon, and blink again, and then eat a bag of potato chips, and then sit down to smoke something with the nieghbors you’ll probably find it pretty soon. There are books that will help you on your journey:
Resources always help, books like “The Ethical Slut” and “Polysecure.” But undoing the monogamous script, the socialization, is really, really difficult.
Yeah, it is difficult. There are at least two reasons for that. The first is that it is embedded in our cultural memory for sensible and just reasons. Monogamy is good for women and good for men. And it is especially good for children. Second, it is written on the conscience of the human heart by God himself, for it reflects what kind of God he is. He is faithful. He doesn’t cheat or lie. He loves until the end. He lays down his life for the beloved. All cultures that devote themselves to knowing him, both individually and corproately, quickly let go of “nonmonogamy” because it is so clearly the dumbest possible way to organize a society.
Anyway, here come the Rules:
In the polycule, it ranges from people who really don’t have rules to we’re only going to date people together or we’re going to participate in the group only as friendships, or as sensual friendships, or we’re only going to be sexually intimate at gatherings, and outside of that we’re not going to date anyone individually. We keep track in group chats.
I’m glad to know I’m not the only one keeping track of things in group chats. Except that mine are largely about work and not about the delights of, again, what was promised as a utopian dream. Imagine having to sort out the details of all the exciting sex in a group chat. Christian history, O Best Beloved, is seriously chuckling about how lame this sounds.
Scheduling can be very tricky. Making sure there’s still one or two evenings every week when we spend quality time together. Overnights is something we’re discussing now. We don’t sleep over individually with anyone we’re dating; we only do that when we’re dating someone together.
This isn’t at all what I expected! Just kidding, I totally did. Trying to arrange things comfortably for twenty people is always exhuasting, whether it is lunch or the sex afterwards. And that is why it should only be lunch, and all the people who are properly married should go home and not particpate in this nonsense.
Don’t forget, though, it’s all about you!
I don’t ask anyone’s permission on anything. I spend 60 percent of my time in my house with my nesting partner and about 25 percent of my time with another partner, and although I technically have one home right now, I’m in the process of building homes with multiple partners. There are check-ins, but the check-ins aren’t for permission. It’s, I’m doing these things, I’m going to be gone for these two weeks, what do you need from me?
I need you to count others as more significant than yourself. That’s what I need. I need you to become a Christian and learn that the longings of your soul cannot be satisfied by lame HR sex. I need you to become a wise woman who builds just the one home in the midst of other people who build their homes so that you can learn the rational creature comforts of caring about other people, like children.
Nobody cares about me, of course, which is why we have to have so many stupid words like “utilize,” “impactfulness,” and this next one which is also pretty ridiculous:
We have a lot of compersion — being happy seeing your partner happy with one of their other partners — for each other. There are times when my wife will meet someone she knows I’ll be attracted to, and she’ll say, You have to meet my husband. She’ll wingman me. Or I’m talking to this guy, and I think, She would really like this guy. We do that for each other.
All joking aside, what a horrible way to think about another person. There you are with someone you’ve pledged your life to, and that person is thinking of what other people you could have sex with, and you likewise. This is just ugly. It’s not freeing. It’s not exciting. It’s not even subversive. It’s cruel and paltry and miserly and selfish.
There’s something that feels radical about it, that feels liberating, that really speaks to empowerment, especially for women or queer or nonbinary individuals. It’s loving people in a very unapologetic way, not conforming to norms. We know why monogamy is still the dominant structure. The patriarchy. The lack of rights women had. As a woman, and as a queer woman, being able to live my life as authentically as possible without needing my husband’s permission, that’s empowering.
I think “empowering” is not quite the word I’m thinking of. What’s the one where you use other people for your own purposes? Or the one where you exerize unjust power over others for your own gain rather than for their good? Or the one where you lie and call it “authentic.”
What’s so funny is that submission to the patriarchy, at least in the West, hasn’t included the abject subserviance of women. Obedience mostly looks like letting men be who they really are. It looks like not trampling down the personhood of either party. It looks like kindly deference. It looks like offering wise counsel but then not interfering in the reasonable plans and thoughts of men. It looks like being sensible enough not to be a girl-boss or a battle axe. Most women still know this, mercifully.
Unhappily, as the war between men and women has been inflamed yet again, a lot of people have become lonely and wretched. They needed the Holy Spirit to bind them into a community of real, Godly, love—the self-giving kind where you pour out yourself for another, the kind displayed in the glory of Cross of Christ—but instead they ended up with a laywer, a doctor, and a physical therapist:
I was in a very bad car accident in the fall, and I felt so supported. I had 20 text messages from people in the polycule — this is the doctor I know, this is the lawyer I have, this is the physical therapist, so many resources.
All these many paragraphs you may have been wondering whether there are any kids in the mix. There are three:
I have one partner now with three kids. He is transmasc, and he’s radical about the way he raises them. They’re radically home-schooled. They’re 17 and nonbinary, 6 and 5. They know everything in age-appropriate ways. They’ve seen their mommy undergo the transmasc experience, seen their mom become who they really are.
I was up late last night with him in a hotel room, and the 17-year-old was in the room snoozing, so we just sat on the bathroom floor chatting about our relationship all night, and while that was happening my husband was texting to say, Oh, I got a last-minute match, so I’m going to meet this girl for a date. And then I get a text while we were still on the bathroom floor vibing, it was 4 in the morning, and he said, We had a great date, a great connection, she’s looking for friends with benefits, we had sex. And I was smiling. You know you’re really poly when you’re with one of your partners talking about how much you love each other and you’re so happy your husband had this awesome night. Of course, I experience pangs of jealousy, but there are these moments, these gems, of being so happy for someone else’s happiness.
Of course of course. There are always pangs of jealousy. But those can be supressed because of “selflessness,” a subject I am fond of thinking about. Isn’t this tragic. The trait—caring about other people—is there, but the faculty, the heart formed by the proper knowledge of good and evil isn’t there. It’s been lost in the group chat somewhere.
For indeed, there are some kinds of jealousy that are wicked, of course. And there are many kinds of love that are false. And there is the bright, brittle smile that masks loss wrought by toxic lies. The lie, for example, that its wrong to cling to one person for the whole of one’s life.
God is jealous of us, his Bride, because we belong to him, because he purchased us back from the ruin of sin by the blood of the Cross. When we run away to other gods, especially those we fashion for ourselves, it is like becoming gender queer, getting a full body tatoo, and moving to Boston to get on the “hot” sex. It’s such a terrible trade off that God, though he has not a body, would tear out his hair and fire off a volley of wrathful tweeting prophets if he hadn’t already in the book he wrote himself.
Whenever you veer outside the confines of the status quo, it is political. We’re really intentional about the way we want to connect, really questioning why one type of relationship has to be more significant than others. For the first time in my life, I’ve found community, in a true sense. These are people who really show up for each other in beautiful ways, people who aren’t guarded around each other. It’s just pure love. I can’t imagine my life without it now.
This breaks my heart. For each of these twenty people have immortal souls who, in a true sense, were formed and made for a certain kind of love, a certain kind of communion with God and with others. They were made for beauty, for wonder, for order, for intimacy, for understanding, for work, for rest, for love, for joy.
Anyway, remember, everything is awesome:
The men are important; they do have value. What has been valuable is being around men who want to be around empowered women, who aren’t intimidated. It’s not like they’re wimpy guys — to me, they’re strong because they’re not threatened.
I dunno. I think any man who agrees to be in a Polycule and farm out his wife to have sex with other people is, definitionally, a “wimp.” In Ye Olde Bible Times he would recieve a harsh but just punishment for his wickedness.
For women, though, while the man does factor in some of the time, it really is all about the house. Not many of us get to be mistress of Pemberly. But everyone wants a comfortable home, even if it means being married to Mr. Collins.
The structure of the nuclear family, the nuclear marriage, needs to shift. It’s really hard to afford a house. Some of us are thinking of moving into a place with four or five bedrooms where eight or nine of us could live together. We could share the burden of bills. It’s just more realistic. And it would be a community space. We would hold events and gather and play and have this endless sleepover. If I get to do this, I will have achieved something great — great emotionally and great in terms of social transformation.
Well, there you are. Just one big endless, sex-less, boring sleepover. If this is the sort of social transformation that excites you, may God have mercy on your soul. As for me and my house, we will cue Mr. Darcy and Miss Elizabeth Bennet back up and go live in a world of beauty, order, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-respect, decency, and love.
Have a nice day!
I love this paragraph:
What’s so funny is that submission to the patriarchy, at least in the West, hasn’t included the abject subserviance of women. Obedience mostly looks like letting men be who they really are. It looks like not trampling down the personhood of either party. It looks like kindly deference. It looks like offering wise counsel but then not interfering in the reasonable plans and thoughts of men. It looks like being sensible enough not to be a girl-boss or a battle axe. Most women still know this, mercifully.
My wonderful, stalwart, Christian husband and I will soon celebrate our 29th anniversary. I regularly pray about how I can build my husband up and strengthen our marriage. The results, by God's grace, look very much like your description of Christian submission -- letting him be himself, offering counsel which I pray is wise, and supporting his plans. I would add it's very good for wives to notice the quiet accomplishments and self-sacrificing service of their godly husbands, and show our admiration.
My prediction is that this polycule will dissolve, acrimoniously, within three years, especially if they buy a house.
Thomas Sowell says that there are two views of human nature: constrained and unconstrained. These people believe that humanity is the latter: we can make reality by our decisions, and reality will become what we decide - we can be "polyamorous" and it will work out how we decide, without jealousy or pain. But we who know God know that humanity is constrained - there is a human nature, and that nature only flourishes by keeping to God's design. Since we are sinners, even if we have been forgiven, following God's design is neither easy nor perfect, but it reaps far better results than denying God's design for a faithful marriage of one man and one woman who are faithful to one another.
As one approaching his 49th wedding anniversary, I can say that faithfulness, openness of heart, and mutual self-sacrifice brings a depth of relationship far more satisfying than physical pleasure, as wonderful as that is. Without repentance, these people will never know what they are missing.