CULTURE.
Enough is Enough
THE NEW SCHOOL | FALL 2023
The biggest mistake of my romantic life was polyamory. I blame capitalism.
It is July 2021, a comfortably warm night in Bushwick. After the long COVID-19 winter, a relaxing of temperatures and mandates has driven the hipsters out of their urban bunkers and back into the world. They are reacquainting themselves with their favorite haunts and rediscovering why it’s worth it to live in this cramped, dirty, expensive city. Hope is in the air — even love. At least it was for me.
When I’m stable long enough, I start to look around for love. (Weezer, “Pink Triangle.”)
Fresh off my latest rock bottom, I was in rare form: feeling okay. So when an invite popped into my texts to go dance, I accepted. Donning my best outfit — black suede Paul Smith boots with a chunky sole, flowy midnight blue Christophe Lemaire trousers and a vintage gray and white paneled short-sleeve zip-up — I was ready to strut. After a quick ride on the L train, I arrived at Eris. It was New Wave Night, my favorite.
Entering the venue, my senses were flooded with pleasing stimuli: hazy air, mood lighting, hypnotic projections, and a crowd of beautiful weirdos undulating to The Cure’s “Lovesong.” I was feeling good about my life choices. Among the bodies, one loomed over the rest: an unusually tall, strikingly thin girl, whose jerky yet graceful movements transfixed me. Love at first sight is a strong phrase… but it exists for a reason. I must have caught her eye, too, because she started gazing at me from across the floor. A dance within a dance ensued, with each of us smiling at the other as we swayed back and forth, glancing and then looking away while pretending to survey the room, brushing shoulders as we twirled round and round.
The climax came when she abruptly stopped dancing, stood in place, and stared at me. Up to that point, I had been too shy to transgress the stranger barrier, but this gesture, half permission, half dare, emboldened me, and I felt my thick boots clomp over to her. “I like your moves,” I shouted into her ear, goofy and dazed. “Thanks, I like yours, too!” she yelled back. What followed was the sort of exchange that makes conversation feel like a drug: a complete emotional synching up, as if one mind were being expressed in two voices. A real trip.
What came next was a densely packed, three-month open relationship ending in heartbreak just before Halloween. Trick or treat. In my postmortem, lovelorn musings, I sought to pinpoint what went wrong. That first night wasn’t a fluke — we were simpatico. We had the same silly, self-deprecating sense of humor, cringed at the same cultural cliches, enjoyed the same food, movies and music, shared the same gentle, curious temperament. It was love, the genuine item. But a month and a half into our dalliance, she slept with someone else. And then another person. And then I slept with someone else. What began as something light, pure and honest became heavy, tainted and cynical.
The details aren’t important. The souring of a relationship through jealousy, suspicion and spite is a tale as old as time. What matters is that I could have avoided this and chose not to. A few weeks into seeing each other, she suggested we be exclusive. I hedged, asking her if that was really what she wanted given that she’d just left a long-term relationship. Really, I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted. I had moved to the city just a year ago, and flirting had only become viable in the past few months. The Brooklyn consensus was decidedly non-monogamous — to a political, even moral degree. I decided to get with the times. So I talked my way out of her offer, unwittingly dooming us.
I should clarify that I’m not invested in debating whether polyamory is good or bad. I do believe it works — is necessary even — for certain people. But judging by the high failure rate I’ve observed, I think that for it to make sense, a high libido and an even higher jealousy threshold need to be present. For these enlightened, horny individuals, I get the motivation behind such an arrangement. But for the rest of us jealous bell-curvers, whence comes this impulse?
I had everything I’d ever wanted with this person, a connection spanning the physical, mental, emotional and creative (plus a storybook meet-cute). Why didn’t I just accept it, protect it? As I miserably swiped through Tinder profiles as if they were eBay listings, it dawned on me that capitalism might be to blame. I had applied consumerist logic to my romantic life, assuming that more equals better. Karl Marx’s base-superstructure model posits that our cultural behavior is shaped by the ideology of its economic undergirding. In this case, I had reduced my romantic prospects to sexual commodities and figured, why limit myself to just one? This “never-enough” mentality, with its emphasis on quantity over quality, blinded me to what I had and dashed my chances with someone I could have spent the rest of my life with.
This is not to say that all practitioners of polyamory are simply brainwashed by capitalism. But I do think we need to investigate the motives behind our actions, even (and especially) when they’re supposed cultural virtues. Sexual liberation is an important step in the struggle toward a more just world. However, we’ve seen how this and other social movements can be commodified and sold back to us, reproducing oppressive systems instead of dismantling them. So, the next time someone you’ve fallen in love with asks if you want to keep your love to yourselves, don’t be afraid to say yes. In this day and age, being content with what you have is a radical act.