Do Relationships Need Freedom Too?

Autonomy, Attachment, and the Tragedy of Finitude

Here’s a story from my days of non-monogamy: I was sitting down for a home-cooked dinner with a newer partner when another partner messaged me, expressing anxiety and overwhelm and requesting my presence at once. With warm and delicious food sitting right there in front of me, my stomach sank. I sat in silent tension for several seconds before sharing what was going on with the partner I was about to eat with and, awkwardly, excusing myself to tend to my other partner in need. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, and a rising number of emotional crises were beginning to emerge every time I tried to hang out with this newer person, despite explicit consent being granted and everyone being allegedly supportive of the non-monogamous situation. It quickly became clear that, despite the idealistic commitments, there were limitations on the freedom that any one relationship of mine could have.

I learned, the hard way, that there is a different dimension of freedom in play: you not only have to consider the freedom of individuals but also the freedom of relationships.

I was a practitioner of what was then (and presumably still is) called ‘Ethical Non-Monogamy’. Within that framework, exclusive romantic commitments between two people are seen as, well, excluding - excluding the possibility of full self-expression for the individuals involved, restricting their freedom to be everything that they could be. Being free means the freedom to be whoever you want to be, and being with whoever you want to be with is seen as a critical part of this freedom.

The ‘Ethical’ part of ‘Ethical Non-Monogamy’ means ‘getting explicit consent from everyone involved’. This is what distinguishes the ideal from behaviors like cheating on partners or lying about your true desires. On top of this, more socially-progressive practitioners of ethical non-monogamy can also see it as an expression of a deeper commitment to liberation, an emancipation that can only come from the dismantling of oppressive social structures. Leftier non-monogamists see themselves as directly opposing relational values of “purity” and “scarcity”, values which they see as being made up and coercively impressed on people to keep them pacified and afraid.

I am sympathetic to these perspectives, and think the world is better off for having these conversations. I committed to the ideal of non-monogamy for a long time, and I remain grateful for the experiences that I had. As you might guess given that I described that era of my life in the past tense, they weren’t all good experiences - beyond a lot of initial thrills, there were a lot of painful and surprising experiences like the interrupted non-dinner that I pointed to above.

Put directly, I learned that a relationship needs to have its own autonomy in order to thrive.

This might not be an issue when your relational life is a series of undemanding flings. The issues I’m pointing to come up when you become attached to somebody, when you need consistency and comfort and some sort of trust in a future together. This means that the relationship will require maintenance, a deliberate prioritization of the relationship where both parties deliberately allocate attention and time to be together and to work through difficult emotional situations when they arise. Relationships require some degree of work and attention and time that does not immediately congeal with the spontaneous lifestyle of the unattached individual.

Meeting those commitments, rising to that challenge, creates access to deeper love and greater joy, at least in my experience. Relationships grow when you put energy into them. This is a wonderful phenomenon, but it creates challenges when attempting to grow relationships with multiple people at the same time.

If you’re dating multiple people, you might have to cancel plans with one person because of an emotional conflict with another person. A date night with person A might be nice, but person B is really upset with you right now, and spending time with person A right now is going to delay and aggravate the path to resolution with person B. Person A might be important to you, but you need them to accept that Person B needs to take priority right now. Or, maybe person B just needs to deal with their issues on their own, or seek comfort from one of THEIR other partners instead. Either way your divided relational life means that neither relationship A nor relationship B will get the uninterrupted attention and care that they need from you. There is a maximum amount of attention and time that you have to allocate, no matter how big and distinct your feelings might be.

This might not present itself immediately. Over time, however, relationships tend to deepen and expand, disclosing new needs and new possibilities. What might start as a no-strings fling can evolve into something bigger, something surprisingly precious to you, and now out of nowhere you want to move in together. You want to travel the world. You want to move to a different city. Now what? Dating multiple people means that there are needs and commitments to others to take into account - making decisions in any relationship means making decisions about every relationship. Do you put a cap on the involvement you permit with any one person, to permit everyone to have the same equal share of you? If you do want to escalate a relationship, do you do the work to console and re-commit to every other person you’re seeing to make them comfortable too? If one person doesn’t feel comfortable with you escalating with another partner, what do you do?

That’s not to say that non-intimate relationships and situations can’t also demand attention and growth and compromise. You could have to cancel date night because of a work emergency, or a sick parent/child. If you really want to move to a different city and your current partner does not, you still have difficult decisions to make. These are valid concerns, but I still believe that intimate relationships are distinct - intimate relationships are defined by their deliberate elevation of attachment. You can get attached to a lot of situations and people, but intimate relationships are where you seek attachment on purpose. Relationships are where attachment is the number one priority.

Meeting that attachment priority is, ultimately, only possible when the autonomy of the attachment relationship is identified and prioritized. “I am committing to love you and be there for you no matter what” makes for a much more secure foundation than “I am committing to love you and be there for you unless another lover needs me more or feels threatened or just feels more exciting to me in a given moment”. This doesn’t mean that committed couples can’t grow apart, or that discovering that you want different things is impossible, or that you should self-sacrifice yourself to submit to a relationship that your heart isn’t in anymore. It also isn’t to suggest that artificial, fear-driven walls be drawn around every connection we make, as if rules could somehow deliver the attachment we crave.

To be very clear, the issues that I’m raising here are practical ones, not moral ones. I have nothing against human desire, nor the idea that different people could illuminate different parts of you as intimate partners, nor the idea that different chemistries and needs could make a polycule situation sustainable, at least for a while.

Communication and willingness to grow can make open relating an extraordinary source of growth and strength. My ultimate challenge is that there are feelings and relationships that cannot be made to fit into a non-monogamous framework, no matter how healed and communicative everyone might be. In my experience, it is those very feelings and relationships that have proven to be truly invaluable.

I could be wrong, and maybe I missed something and really didn’t do it right. If you are 100% romantically available for multiple people who are also 100% romantically available for you, I would love to hear about it.

I’ll close with a bigger picture thought: the finitude of human life is tragic, and complicating said finitude can make it even more tragic still.