Opening relationships

Anyone who watched the most recent “New Girl” season finale saw a character conflicted with choosing between two women, both demanding that he commit to one or the other.

This past Tuesday’s premiere saw that same character seeking advice from his friend, who nodded sagely and immediately pronounced, “Looks like you’re gonna have to choose.”

While this plotline offers the opportunity for cheap, overused laughs that stem from lovers hushed behind closet doors and under beds, it fosters incredibly narrow views of relationships.

Namely, monogamy is love’s singular possibility, and people are property.

What people fail to realize about “soul mates” is they aren’t born out of bolts of lightning.

It’s not a look across a crowded room. It’s a symbiotic partnership that you build together over time, meaning you could potentially have more than one.

Pop culture has failed to introduce polygamy in a way that isn’t chiding or hurtful or mocking (or Mormon).

This is surprising, particularly in a country where independence is a founding principle and this type of relationship offers more agency than a full-time commitment to one individual’s happiness.

Typically, people will have more than one lover in their lifetime. That’s how they grow emotionally and explore themselves further. Non-monogamy just means this doesn’t have to happen successively.

I’m not talking about the “hook-up culture” today’s college students have been purported to perpetuate or some misguided excuse to cheat.

Just the opposite. A non-monogamous type of relationship requires communication and honesty. And time. And energy. It is by no means an easy way out.

And it is by no means a new idea.

Sustaining multiple sexual partners is a practice that has existed in religion for thousands of years. It was seen in the upper classes of Rome before its fall, but while this type of relationship offered a lot more variety, conceptions of women as property led to monogamy’s stranglehold on culture.

But recently, at least in American culture, marriage isn’t being pushed so hard by parents.

Between dating apps, the rise of feminism and the boredom of suburbia that spawned an entire Green Day album, people are realizing the old “ideal” of settling down isn’t inherently valuable.

It’s evolutionarily built into our bodies that “love” chemicals should dissipate. We were instinctively made to impregnate, raise a baby and repeat.

Love could be described as the societally introduced choice you make after that duty to populate the planet is performed.

Obviously, making it past a year with a partner doesn’t mean they’re yours forever.

We’re one of few species that doesn’t just have period of estrus, but enjoys sex for pleasure.

You can love other people at the same time. You can be open to other bonds.

There’s no such thing as an easy relationship. All number of parties involved have to figure out what they want from each other and pursue it respectfully and honestly and sometimes non-monogamously.

­— ashhendr@indiana.edu