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Ooh. Lovely idea for a thread. Thanks, Money$hot. I'd be particularly interested to know how people's thoughts on this issue intersect with their thoughts on monogamy vs polyamory, and on their belief in "soulmates" or whatever.
I feel a bit apologetic about being difficult to categorize in all these terms, but on the other hand I might be bringing some new ideas to the table, so maybe that's useful. The thing with me is that I'm endogamous (this is a theory I ripped off from an Australian YA book called Mister Enigmatic). Most people are exogamous - they're basically attracted to sexy strangers, and then the romance plot develops along familiar Pride-and-Prejudice type lines as the attraction to the Other has to negotiate with the familiarity and friendship that grow up in a longer-term relationship. But some people are endogamous, and for them sexual attraction is dependent on knowing and loving the other person first. (If you know & love them for too long before it turns sexual, though, they fall under the incest taboo and you stop fancying them. It is a terrible curse to be endogamous oh yes.) So that is me. But also - and this took me a long time to work out - my visual pleasure centres are kind of disjunct from my wanting-to-have-sex drives. So there are a lot of people that I love looking at - a woman I saw at a demo one time, a boy with long hair who shops at the same greengrocer as me, Alan Rickman, Michael Stipe, Dana out of the L-Word, Shane out of the L-Word, Ivan out of the L-Word, hell, everyone out of the L-Word except Tim... Ahem. What was I saying? Oh, yes. Endogamous for sex, exogamous for looking, that is I.
Anyway, so how does all that pan out in terms of fidelity and polylookery? Obviously, when there's no danger that I'll actually shag any of the people I like looking at, it makes it a lot easier to enjoy having crushes, and to get really happy when my girlfriend has crushes ditto. But OTOH, because our sexual relationship evolved out of a friendship, I'm really aware of how arbitrary it would have been to not have sex when we reached a certain point, so I don't feel like it would make any sense for us to be monogamous: why should I put an arbitrary stopping-point on how intimate my girlfriend is allowed to be with other people, or dictate how much she is allowed to love them? I love how much she loves her friends. I would never want to put a stop to that.
The True Person thing is interesting to me because my main role model - the couple I know who are definitely each other's True People, and found each other very early in life - are non-monogamous, so I don't think having a True Person necessitates only having sex with one person for the rest of your life. But I don't know anyone who has more than one True Person, so I don't know how that works yet. I'm still working it out and gathering data... |
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