We are just six years away from love’s last big win in the Supreme Court, and already love is on the warpath again.
Harvard Law Today has a feature up this week on polyamory and the law, noting that the Massachusetts towns of Arlington, Cambridge, and Sommerville have all recently extended their legal definitions of domestic partnerships to include polyamorous relationships.
“I don’t understand why polyamory is problematic,” Harvard Law School student and member of the LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic Natasha Aggarwal told Harvard Law Today. “From my perspective, it just means there is more love in the world, that your heart is so big you are capable of loving multiple people in the same capacity at the same time.”
It just means more love. Who could be against that?
Well, for starters, there is a lot of doubt about how much “love” really has to do with some people’s push for so-called “consensually nonmonogamous” relationships. First of all, it should be noted that of all “nonmonogamous” relationships, the vast majority of them, two-thirds, are nonconsensual.
But just how “consensual” are the remaining third of nonmonogamous relationships? Not very. Not only are heterosexual men more than four times as likely to be the one who asked their female partner to agree to a nonmonogamous relationship, but only about half the people in “consensual” nonmonogamous relationships say that the desire to become nonmonogamous was equal.
Sounds like there is a lot of emotional pressure pushing people to do things they don’t really want to do. That’s not very loving. No wonder those people who are in supposedly “consensual” nonmonogamous relationships report far less relationship satisfaction than people who are in committed monogamous relationships.
Maybe polyamory will remain a curiosity of deep-blue cities such as Cambridge, Massachusetts. But with one of the nation’s two political parties embracing a movement that seeks to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” we can’t be too confident.
