I've lately felt an unfortunate pressure to defend polyamory again (with apologies to etymologists). I usually ignore the judgments of the uninformed, but then there's the friend of a friend who may or may not have been joking when she scoffed that she'd never let me near her boyfriend. And the
polyamory-focused indie film that's actually
all about how it's kooky and doomed. And the absolutist, all-caps-laced rant on the usually sex-positive
The Stranger blog with profound metaphors like "such idiotic bullshit" and questions like, "Ever wonder why they all will fuck any damn thing that will hold still long enough?" So I could use my blog to paraphrase all the same points of
The Ethical Slut,
Opening Up, and
Polyamory Weekly. But they're already making the crafted argument/explanation pretty well. My personal version is mostly sentimental: I love two people.
And I remember one poly-book-club meeting where someone suggested we all go around the table and tell everyone "why" we're poly. It irritated me, because it had nothing to do with the book we'd read, and do monogamous people ever go around a table explaining why they're monogamous? I politely listened to the chain of people paraphrasing
The Ethical Slut, and I didn't disagree with any of it, except that I had to wonder about the poly community's talking-about-our-feelings fetish. When it got to me, I simply stated, "I'm in love with two people. I don't want to lie to either of them. ...That's it, really."
