Response to Juliet Allen podcast on monogamy vs polyamory. Co-masturbation and co-witnessing: The Thresholder.
Consider that monogamous and polyamorous are not opposites in any way. Monogamy means one sexual partner. Polyamorous means many loves.
Polyamory is not a lifestyle choice. It is a sexual orientation. No more than a person can choose to be homosexual when they are not, someone cannot choose to be polyamorous. Nor can a partner have a ‘poly lifestyle’ when that is not innately who they are. It sounds to me that in choosing monogamy, you are choosing to be true to yourself.
What makes the distinction is usually compersion, which is a kind of erotic empathy. When one feels compersion, they love what their partner does and feels, whatever it might be. If your partner shows up in your presence fresh from being with another lover, you will love their mixed scent and consider it a privilege to be near. Your love for them includes all of their experiences and all of their desires.
This is a rare state of being; most people are jealous and often feel disgusted by the notion that their partner has been with someone else. This can even extend to their partners in the distant past. Compersion embraces the whole sexual past of your partner — and their future. Compersion honors that your lover will have other lovers. There are people who feels this way and they are rare. But a nonmonogamous situation can and probably will be living hell without compersion.
One thing to get out of the way is that in our world today, nearly no human being is monogamous. I have seen that men and women both have this strong tendency, which they can set aside for a while. But tantra teaches that we live in the world of time and transience and that the current form of all relationships eventually ends.
Monogamous means one sexual partner for life. Whether you call it cheating or not, a great many people have more than one sexual partner at the same time. But rather than be open about it, they compartmentalize, and this is character-dividing.
There are a diversity of biological qualities of human beings that indicate that both sexes have a drive for multiple sex partners, regardless of the spiritual quality of the relationship. The book Sex At Dawn by Ryan and Jetha (2010) talks about these biological qualities, including the desire for sperm competition and why women are so vocal during sex, advertising their pleasure to the household, the tribe or the village. That “men spread their seed” is only half of the story. An ovulating woman will be horny to fuck and that can include more than one person the same day.
In our time, nearly everyone in our time goes from partner to partner. This is called serial monogamy, but I call it serial nonmonogamy. It’s considered OK as long as the latest partner is thought of as “the one” no matter what has happened in the past.
Consider, though, that monogamous and polyamorous are not opposites in any way. Monogamy means one sexual partner. Polyamorous means many loves. When you study jealousy, you can often find that people who are sexually monogamous and have sexually monogamous mates are jealous of their partner’s close friends. Love interests can take many forms; a man and his longtime secretary or assistant can have a bonded love affair even if they are never sexual with one another.
The capacity to be emotionally loyal to two or several people (true polyamory) is a discipline of maturity. It honors a basic fact of an honest life. The capacity to love forever anyone that one has ever been in love with is an ability or state that some people have; I am one of them. Once I fall in love, I never really fall out of love and I am not saying that I “carry a torch.” To me love means a soul bond.
There is one other factor for today, and that is one’s relationship to oneself. All love and all sexuality are ultimately moderated by one’s inner relationship. One of the core principles of tantra is that it’s a journey of integrating the seemingly opposite other; it is the path of the wholeness of self, and understanding that very often sexual attraction of the opposite sex is a projection.
How you feel about yourself, and whether your psyche is whole or has a tropism for wholeness and being a unified person is going to be the single most important mediator of your relationships with others.
This is the basis of my proposal that the most important sex people can have is to masturbate in the presence of their partners, proposed partners and even past partners. I suggest doing this with a mirror in the space. Exploring one’s inner dimensions and one’s comfort with oneself and one’s orgasm in the presence of another is to explore both one’s own sexuality and to see where the relationship is at in terms of mutual acceptance.
Humans, like bonobos, can take great pleasure in masturbating in groups as well. Though this is not part of Western society or any traditional tantra that I know of, it is a frontier. Group masturbation has had a few moments here and there, such as early in the HIV/AIDS era (the jack and jill off). There are some sex clubs that have masturbation night, though they are rare. It’s an unusual form of loving, sexual and therapeutic expression. Last night my friend Neal described what he called co-masturbation and co-witnessing as some of the deepest and most beautiful experiences of his life, not just sexual but in any form.
I would agree. My word for people who are adepts at these skills is “thresholder.” They are those who help accompany people to the edge of their inner being and face the abyss of who they are, without emotional or sexual attachment.
I’ve written a lot about this and I will answer any questions or any request from another participant in this forum and share some of that writing, which I offer freely to anyone who may benefit.
I would love to open up the discussion of co-masturbation and co-witnessing, both same sex and mixed sex experiences.