LUXURY BELIEFS, LUXURY LIFESTYLES: Freddie DeBoer: Polyamory is a Luxury of the Affluent, Just Like Everything Else We Have and Do: “X works better for the most educated/accomplished” is just generically true.
That was true with drugs like LSD, heroin, and cocaine, too. Of course, “better” doesn’t mean “well.” But generally speaking the better-off have more reserves, financial and otherwise, to support them during risky behavior.
An alternative take: You Don’t Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books.
Yesterday I criticized The Atlantic’s recent invective against polyamory (subscriber-only post, sorry). Today I want to zoom away from the specific bad arguments and examine the overall form of the article.
The overall form was: “I read a memoir about polyamory, everyone involved seemed awful and unhappy, and now I hate polyamorous people.” This is a common pattern. Sometimes, if someone’s very careful, they read three or four books about polyamory. Everyone in all the books is awful and unhappy. Then they conclude they hate polyamorous people.
But this is an unfair generalization. They should hate people who write books. . . .
I know many people in happy, successful, polyamorous relationships. None of them write advice books. If they did, they would say something vapid, like “Treat every day as a gift from God.”
The actual best-known polyamory advice book is More Than Two, by Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert. A few years after it was written, Eve and three of Franklin’s other partners accused him of abuse, which he vehemently denied and turned back on her. Every so often I check to see how things are going, and one of them has come up with some new volley against the other.
In retrospect, I think it’s not surprising that the best-known relationship advice book was written by people in a terrible relationship. Terrible relationships have a way of making you overanalyze your relationship dynamics. They encourage you to come up with lots of strategies for dealing with conflict, given all the conflict you’re constantly getting into. They happen when you’re the sort of person who over-promises and under-delivers, which is also the kind of person who can write an exciting-sounding book shilling something.
Well, maybe you should just hate the kind of people who write books on relationships. Plus: “Not all memoirs are written by narcissists. Some are written by activists. This is not an improvement.”
And this sounds right: “I think this goes beyond polyamory. The people I know from various oft-discussed groups – transgender, super-religious, autistic, rich, etc – are all nicer and more normal than their public representatives would lead you to believe.”