Episode 92 - Non-Monogamous Love with Justin L. Clardy

Transcript

Ellie: 0:04

Hello, and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:14

The podcast where two friends who are in non-monogamous relationships talk about all sorts of personal and philosophical things.

Ellie: 0:22

I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:24

And I'm Dr. David Peña Guzman.

Ellie: 0:26

And David, the truth is, we have limited recording time for this intro to the interview because we just came from a two hour merch meeting. We are finalizing our Overthink merch, which people have been asking us to do for a while. No big deal. And we have finally had the resources to pay some students to help us, our wonderful students, Aaron and Emilio, who you might've heard us mention on the podcast.

David: 0:50

Yeah, and so we have amazing merch that's going to be coming out. Look out for that in social media.

Ellie: 0:55

No, David, by the time this episode comes out, the merch will be out. This is why I'm mentioning it.

David: 1:00

Yeah. The temporality of podcasting is bizarre. It's a topsy turvy world where like future is past and past is future. So let me rephrase in the future when you're listening to this, our merch is already available. So go and check it out.

Ellie: 1:13

Yeah. And I think it's shop.overthinkpodcast.com.

David: 1:20

We'll make it available online somewhere. We promise.

Ellie: 1:23

Yes. No, you can also, you can check out our Overthink merch online. We've got like fun little hats that say, you know, philosophical slogans, et cetera. At risk of this sounding like an advertisement, however. So if you want to buy our merch, please buy our merch. It's really fun. I'm loving it. I'm super excited about it. But you can also listen to this episode and it is not an advertisement for our merch. I promise. David, non-monogamous relationships.

David: 1:44

Non-monogamous relationships, which by the way, we do have some merch that makes reference to polyamory. So that's just a connection to the episode today.

Ellie: 1:53

Yeah, it's a hat that says poly and then in parentheses, morphously perverse. It's a Freud reference. We got it in sweatshirt form too.

David: 2:01

It's very cute, but we had a major debate about whether the proper grammatical rendition of that phrase should be parent parentheses or ellipses. So you'll let us know what you think. So, non monogamous relationships, you and I, Ellie, have done a four part series in the past about relationships. We talked about marriage, we talked about monogamy, we talked about open relationships and polyamory. And we have been very open, I would say, in this podcast about echoing the notion that the personal is political and the personal is also philosophical, about our own experience in non monogamous relationships. And you and I are both in what, is it fair to characterize your relationship as an open relationship? Or would you characterize it as a polyamorous relationship?

Ellie: 2:50

I would characterize it as an open relationship.

David: 2:52

Yeah, so I also would characterize my relationship as an open relationship, although ever since we did that previous episode on polyamory, I have been thinking a lot about what is at stake for me in that label. Why am I attaching some sort of value to the hierarchy that typically differentiates open relationships from polyamorous relationships? And so I would say that right now I'm going through a process of self rediscovery where I'm trying to articulate to myself and in conjunction with my partner what kind of relationship we want to have and we actually do have as a matter of fact, and I'm no longer sure that I understand what space we occupy in terms of that distinction.

Ellie: 3:41

Yeah. And so I think maybe what we're talking about today is a good invitation to think through that a little bit more. One of the reasons that we wanted to do this episode is that even though we have an episode on polyamory and an episode on open relationships, we have heard from so many of you that these have been your favorite Overthink episodes and that you would love to hear more. And it just so happens that Justin Clardy, a philosopher whose earlier work we talked about has written a book on this recently. So we're going to be interviewing him. The book is called why it's okay to not be monogamous. And I think before David, we talk a little bit more about our sort of, personal experience of this, it's important to define what we're talking about. This episode is called non monogamous love, actually not even relationships. And I think for me, what non monogamous love means is a kind of love that dethrones the idea that romantic love in an exclusive couple form is the be all end all of life. And I think I grew up in a context, even though this was like turn of the 21st century in California, in some ways pretty progressive. I grew up in a context, nonetheless, in which girls were really encouraged to see their purpose in life as finding a marriage, specifically marriage with a man or a long term partnership, right? And I think as much as we want to believe that culture has moved beyond that, every time I teach feminist philosophy, love and friendship, women and love, I have a few variations of classes where we talk about this stuff. My students, especially women students, are like, yeah, this is the kind of stuff that I was raised on. It's all over the place in the media. And so what are we talking about when we're talking about resisting that? Technically speaking, monogamy means single spouse. But Justin Clardy argues in the book, Why It's Okay to Not Be Monogamous, that we need to think about monogamy in broader terms, and therefore think about non monogamous love, you know, in turn in broader terms as well. So, Clardy says that monogamy is a social convention that centralizes dyadic relationships that are romantically exclusive. So, monogamy, even though etymologically speaking it means single spouse, effectively what it means in our society, and I think this is true in everyday language, is that you have a single partner with whom you have a dyadic relationship, right? A relationship between two, and you are romantically exclusive. And he notes that romantically exclusive is a combination of sexual exclusivity and emotional exclusivity. So when we're talking about non monogamous love, we're talking about love that imagines otherwise what love can look like beyond these strictures. And one way that that shows up is by decentralizing or dethroning romantic coupledom and marriage from the central role in the good life, which maybe is a good thing because I read there's this 2015 study that says that married people have lower levels of satisfaction than unmarried people.

David: 6:40

Oh my God, well, as listeners know, I got married in the last year, so maybe that explains why my wellbeing has gone down. Thank you, to my partner, Rabih, for that.

Ellie: 6:50

I think worse for women. I don't remember if that was in this study, but it's definitely like there are other studies showing that the wellbeing is, it takes a bigger hit for women than for men. So maybe you're in the clear here, David.

David: 7:00

Yeah, yeah, maybe I'm doing well and I'm just like a typical man, like complaining about actually being in a pretty comfortable position. And the study that you mentioned makes sense when we think about the different expectations that are placed on women and men in these marriages. But what I also like is that non monogamous love as a concept and as a practice invites us to, in some cases, dissociate, not just the coupledom that is assumed to be the basic building of a good life, but you mentioned that there is also this emphasis on emotional exclusivity and sexual exclusivity. And there are some forms of non monogamy where those two things are dissociated, where you can get, and this is typically open relationships, where you get to have emotional exclusivity with one person, but not necessarily sexual exclusivity. Or I could imagine there, I'm not super familiar with the inverse, a case where you have sexual exclusivity with one person, and emotional availability to others romantically?

Ellie: 8:03

I mean, that's like most marriages at a certain point.

David: 8:07

Well, at some point, yes. But thinking about the psychological impact that marriage has because of this restriction that it places on our affective and sexual lives, I think it's a good place to begin this exploration of what it means to take a journey into non monogamous love.

Ellie: 8:25

Yeah, and I want to go back to something that you said a moment ago because you suggested that open relationships typically feature emotional exclusivity, but not sexual exclusivity, and I just want to push back on that a little bit because I don't think that's necessarily true. Sure, there are definitely forms of open relationships, especially swinging, right? The notion of a swinger is somebody who has sex with other people but doesn't have emotional exclusivity with them. But there's a lot of people in open relationships, including myself, who don't have that at all. And in fact, for me personally, being in an open relationship is so not primarily about sex, or about the possibility of being with other people in that sense. It's much more, and I talked about this I think in the open relationships episode, about a different outlook on life, and sort of the obligations and duties that you have to your partner and to yourself. But that said, I also think there's really something to be said for pair bonding for a lot of people. And so there's one reason that I would say that I'm in an open relationship rather than being polyamorous is that I have a primary partner that I have a really strong pair bond with. And I think there's something beautiful to that. That's definitely not for everybody. There, there are some people for whom monogamy is a much better option and there are others for whom polyamory is a much better option. And there are many options besides that.

David: 9:41

Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Ellie: 9:45

Absolutely. Why not? But I personally really benefit from having a partner in my life that I share certain, family care duties with, as well as a lot of other things in my life with. But that doesn't mean that I have strictures on what we can do outside of that.

David: 10:03

No, but I, so I think we might disagree on this point because I do believe that in its typical form, and so here I'm not denying the existence of variations, but in general, when people talk about being in an open relationship, typically they mean having a primary partner, again, because of that pair bonding experience or desire that you just alluded to, Ellie, where the openness really is an openness to explore sexual activity with others. other partners. But what defines the primary partner is precisely that they are given a kind of intimacy, emotional intimacy or relationship access. Maybe that's not the right term, but emotional intimacy is the right term, that other people wouldn't quite be offered. And so built into the very structure of an open relationship is a kind of closing off of an emotional space that is reserved for a primary partner, which is what makes them primary partner, which is why I do think open relationships tend to favor sexual openness, but not necessarily romantic openness in that way. So I stand by my definition.

Ellie: 11:07

So I, I think what, I think that altered version that you just gave, I think that's fair to say. I want to move a little bit away from the way that we're talking about it though, which is still, I think, in terms of love as romantic love, because part of what I like about thinking about non monogamous love is actually just dethroning romance in general. And so one of the things that I really like about Justin's book is that there's an emphasis on the fact that being non monogamous doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a particular romantic formation. You can be single and non monogamous. So let's take a single person who maybe dates now and then, but doesn't have a strong romantic bond with any partner. Or maybe they're aromantic.

David: 11:50

Like me in my 20s in grad school.

Ellie: 11:53

Yeah, Yeah well, but then has really solid relationships outside of that and their friends are family to them. And so once we think about dethroning that couple form, we can open ourselves up to a new way of thinking that encourages actually taking other relationships more seriously because part of the problem with taking romantic coupledoms as seriously as our society does is that we end up taking friendships, relationships with self, relationships with family, mentoring relationships, all kinds of other relationships, less seriously.

David: 12:26

Yes, I agree with that, especially because the point here is not just that non monogamous love encourages us to think beyond the dyad or the couple or the two people who make up the relationship form, but that it actually pushes us to reimagine what it is that we value about any kind of relationship that we have. What is it about my relationship, as you said, to my mentor or to my neighbor that I value and that prevents me from calling it romantic or emotional in the same way in which I might call, again, that more traditional pair bonding relationship, romantic or emotional. And I think the example that is often used in the philosophical literature on non monogamies that is very persuasive in this regard is friendship, right? Why Is it that we don't put our relationships with our friends on the same level or on the same pedestal that we put relationships that from the beginning under our culture are kind of oriented towards this coupledom, potentially marriage down the road?

Ellie: 13:33

Mm hmm. Yeah, and I have a very cynical answer for that from Marina Adshade, who's done some research on this. And this is research done on marriage and capitalism specifically, where Adshade suggests that marriage used to be seen as a unit of production, right? You would work together, say, if you were farmers, like the wife and the husband would have a division of labor on the farm such that they would be coworkers, essentially, but under capitalism, which emphasizes more the individual role, especially lately of being consumers. The married couple has gone from being a unit of production to a unit of consumption. And so the family is a consuming unit. And you can see this, Adshadi suggests, in terms of how we think about compatibility. Our compatibility is often framed in terms of consumer preferences rather than reproductive potential, she says. So even though you have this rise of a way of thinking about compatibility that is non heteronormative, there's still this sense of like, well, do they like to go to the opera or go to the baseball game? And there's this new form of coupledom that is organized around being consumers. And I don't know exactly why we might say that would be valued over friendship, but it probably has to do with cohabitation, right? This idea that as. a couple who lives together and has a family together, you are this unit of consumption.

David: 15:00

Well, no, and the connection to capitalism is just right, because in doing research about non monogamy and polyamory, I ran into a sociological study mentioning precisely this point in connection, to student debt, where a lot of students, especially when they come out of their college degree, start making decisions about whether or not they would marry another person, primarily based on whether they have similar levels of debt, because then they would worry if I don't have any debt and my partner has a ton of debt, um, you know, it raises certain considerations about that "compatibility" that is not really emotional or affective compatibility. It's actually. compatibility at the level of economics. And when people think about the kind of partner that they ultimately might want to choose under this kind of traditional framework of what love is, what comes to mind is not just consumer preferences, like, oh, do we like the same things? Although that is also part of it. It's also purchasing power, class origin, and I would say intergenerational wealth, right? This is where like the whole discussion about things like prenups kicks in and it just brings to the foreground the extent to which decisions that we would like to believe are driven by our sentiments are actually driven by judgments, consciously or not, about the kind of class position that we want to occupy or can occupy.

Ellie: 16:27

And in addition to what you're talking about, David, which is the selection of partners based on similar levels of class privilege, there's also a way that the economic and legal systems under which we currently live actually make it impossible for people with more than one partner to extend their same privileges, economic privileges to other people and we talked a lot in our marriage episode about all the tax benefits that marriage brings. And I was also thinking about this recently because I had to sign up for my 2024 health insurance. And I was thinking about putting my partner on my health insurance because he works in the film industry and there have been a lot of strikes this past year. And even though he's not in one of the unions that's been on strike, it's had knock on effects for his work in post production, which means that it's been challenging to get enough work in 2023 to maintain his benefits through the union for the following year. So I was like, you know what? I've got great benefits through the university. Maybe you can get on my plan. And there was this clause that made you confirm that this person was your only domestic partner. And so anyone who lives in a polyamorous household would either have to lie or deny a partner benefits. Yeah, yeah, and it wasn't even like, this is the partner I'm choosing for these benefits. It said, this is my sole domestic partner. You had to agree to that. And thatis so messed up. But for me, actually, the really pertinent point was that you also had to be domestic partners to begin with, you have to live with your partner in order for them to receive your benefits. And so my partner actually couldn't get my benefits because we live separately. I love living alone. He loves living alone. Who knows what the future will hold. But for now, there's no plan for us to move in together. But literally that's preventing him from being on my health insurance. Like the legal system is encouraging us to create this unit of consumption through romantic coupledom that manifests in our cohabitating.

David: 18:35

Yeah. Okay. So I have two thoughts about this ellie. One is that during COVID, France passed a law to allow romantic partners who are not married. Who are dating a French person to have a special visa to come and spend time with them during COVID because everything was shut down. And so I applied for that visa. It was called Love is Not Tourism. And so it gave me a special visa to enter France during COVID. And then I went back before this episode to look at the fine print and it also stipulated that you could only be one person, even though the whole point about this is that these are not married people, it's just supposed to be about love. But built into the fine print of this piece of legislation was the assumption that a French person could only be in love that is not tourism with one other person from outside of France. And the second thought is that And I will ask Justin when we interview him about this, the legal side of things, because there have been a number of legal cases recently where people push on the boundary. And one of them was a case in New York City just last year in 2022 that was not about healthcare, but it was about tenant rights and whether you can pass your, what's the term for like your contract with your landlord.

Ellie: 19:54

Lease.

David: 19:55

Yeah, thank you. Whether you can pass your lease, to a partner with whom you are not married that doesn't live in the same apartment unit as you, but who is an important component of your emotional life. And so very interesting things happening in the law concerning the status of non monogamous relationship forms.

Ellie: 20:19

Okay, well there is so much more to talk about here, but we have to move on to our interview which will allow us to talk about all of this stuff more.

David: 20:28

Today we are talking about non monogamous love.

Ellie: 20:32

How does our society's emphasis on romantic coupledom limit our imagination for what love can look like?

David: 20:38

What does it mean to be ethically non monogamous?

Ellie: 20:42

And, is being polyamorous an identity or a set of practices and behaviors? Justin clardy is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara University. A specialist philosophy of love with an emphasis on polyamory and the intersections of love and race. Dr. Clardy is the author of numerous publications on these topics as well as the book Why It's Okay to Not Be Monogamous. He also co-hosts the podcast PAGES pod. Justin we're so happy to have you on Overthink today. Welcome!

Justin: 21:15

Hey, hey, hey, what's up, y'all?

David: 21:16

Oh, not much, just here having had a great time reading your book and very excited about this conversation about non monogamies.

Justin: 21:24

Well, that makes one of us. Well, no, I appreciate you guys. I appreciate you guys having me. Um, yeah, I'm excited for the conversation too.

Ellie: 21:31

Yeah. Yeah. Because we've already talked about your work on overthink before, uh, in our polyamory episode, but we are excited to actually be speaking with you today. So David, you want to get us started?

David: 21:44

So, I mean, I want to begin at a basic level for the conversation that will then set us up for digging into the details down the road as the interview progresses. And it's because non monogamy, whether in the singular or in the plural, non monogamies has been getting a lot of attention in recent years. Yet, as you point out in your book, it's really the opposite. difficult to define what this term actually means. For one, non monogamy isn't actually one thing. It's many things. It's a spectrum of relationship types. Additionally, non monogamy is what in your book you call a privative concept, meaning that it is largely defined parasitically by its rejection of monogamy rather than by having any essential content of its own. So talk to us about how you understand non monogamy in your work. What does it include? And how can we talk about it meaningfully if it is, as you say, privative?

Justin: 22:44

Good. Yeah, you can't really talk about non monogamy without talking about monogamy. And so for me I understand monogamy as a collection of beliefs about intimate relationships, which ones are valuable, so on and so forth. And so in my work, I think about monogamy as being characterized by at least a few central beliefs, which include that romantic intimate relationships are dyadic which is sort of to say that they exist among two and only two people. They're also characterized by a pair of exclusivities that I call romantic exclusivity, but that's broken into two parts, right? The first is a certain kind of emotional exclusivity. So the object of our affections inside of the romantic relationship, right? There's usually this restriction, from extending those kinds of affections or emotions to people who exist outside of that relationship or relationships that exist outside of that relationship. So that I call like a kind of emotional exclusivity, but then also, a certain kind of sexual exclusivity. So there's this belief that romantic intimate relationships are characterized by the fact that. The two people in the relationship are having sex with one another and only one another. Um, and so these two exclusivities, emotional or affective exclusivity, as well as sexual exclusivity, round out this collection of beliefs that characterize monogamy. So, you get non monogamy as a privative concept, as like a rejection of these beliefs, right? And so, non, literally before the word monogamy as a prefix works to negate it. And, you know, sometimes I like to understand the hyphen between non monogamy as a kind of tilde, like a logical operator that's kind of saying, look, not this, right? And so, yeah, and if you guys get a little bit of feedback from the lawnmower, it's just because I like keep my grasses clean and neat. So we'll proceed through that. But yeah, David, I think, I think it's really interesting that you say, how might we talk meaningfully about non monogamy if it's a privative concept? I guess I want you to maybe say a little bit more there. Are you meaning, are we assuming here that meaning takes the form of positive content only?

David: 25:03

I think at some point, especially when we're thinking about a concrete relationship, that one that people might consider either for themselves or in their surroundings, the discussion does have to take a slightly positive turn at some point. And so, of course, every relationship has positive content insofar as it is a particular relationship, right? And so my worry is that sometimes when we talk about non monogamy or non monogamies, In general, it's hard to pin down what we're talking about because there are so many different variations and a lot can be lost in that space.

Justin: 25:38

Yeah. Interesting. I think that maybe we find some of the positive content or thinking meaningfully or talking meaningfully about non monogamy in the forms of relationship that it takes on. In the book, I talk a lot about friendship as being one of these forms. And so where we might find space to sneak in some positive content under what I would sort of view as like a non monogamous umbrella, perhaps it'd be found in how we come to define. The set of expectations or shared activities that we wish for those particular relationships to have so we can talk about friendship and say, I don't know, Bob is my friend and Bob and my relationship is characterized by watching Netflix movies and eating Thai food together, but I also have a friend named Sam with whom I may or may not enjoy doing the same set of activities with or different set of activities with. And straightforwardly here we have friendship as a kind of non monogamy, but yeah, I don't know that I think about the word or language around non monogamy as needing to advance a particular kind of, I don't know, positive content. So, yeah, maybe that's what I'll say there.

Ellie: 26:52

Yeah, and maybe one way of thinking about that is just exploding that framework that has us put romantic relationships above all other sorts of relationships as well, which as you mentioned in the book, Elizabeth Brake calls amatonormativity. And when we do that, I think what we find is this proliferation of different kinds of relationships in our lives that are already existent, that don't have a monogamous form. You mentioned friendship being one of them, but I also think periods of singlehood are really interesting in this respect. And that's also something that you talk about in the book. And one way that I like to think about being single is as a relationship with oneself as well. And whether you're a super single, which is a term I learned from your book, these folks who really embrace singlehood as an existential choice, resisting amatonormativity, or whether you would like to have romantic relationships at some point, but you don't now. And so you're "single for the time being." That's also a way of thinking non monogamously, and when you're single, you're also having all kinds of other relationships as well. They just might not be romantic or sexual.

Justin: 28:08

No, agreed. Agreed. And yeah,I think that how we think to imbue our lives with meaning in these gaps, whether it be as singles or in relationships with our friends, so on and so forth, I mean, to kind of tie it back to David's question, I think that we are creatures that cannot avoid being active, right? I do think that sort of like the kind of thing that we are drives us to activity. And as I think is true for many folks as best we can try to find or make meaning in those sets of activities. And I think that that is perhaps in our hobbies or in our solitude, even write the sort of enjoyment or meaningful time spent with oneself. I think that meaning kind of enters into this discussion when we think about how those relationships, whether with oneself or with other friends or lovers or so on and so forth, how those relationships' content get filled. Uh, but I don't know yet. I don't know that sort of non monogamy. I don't know if it functions to offer that positive content. I think it's meaningful in how it negates beliefs that I find to be, destructive in many cases, oppressive, so on and so forth.

Ellie: 29:23

And can you say a little bit more about what you find to be destructive or oppressive about norms of monogamy?

Justin: 29:29

Absoluely. For me, throughout literature and ethics and philosophy we encounter talk of agency so often when we think about relationships and around agency, we critically examine einstances where agency seems to be compromised, right, as a kind of ethical wrong, whether that's through duress or coercion, so on and so forth. And I think that the normative pressure that monogamous ideologies generate, particularly in Western societies, have an effect of constraining individual agency. So whether or not we're actively choosing to exist in monogamous relationships for ourselves as a result of having considered the alternatives or not, I think matters here. And in a society where much of the love industrial complex is committed to oversaturating media books, movies, songs, so on and so forth with a particular message or narrative about love, I do think is particularly dangerous precisely because of the way it might compel us without sort of reflexive consideration about, Hey, What kinds of relationships would we like for ourselves? And am I choosing this of my own volition from my own agency? Or is this some script that I'm reproducing?

David: 30:57

Yeah. And I mean, this raises an entirely different question for me about the importance and the limits of self knowledge in cultures where there are these social strips and these pressures, because at some point in your book, you cite the research of Deborah Annapol on the importance of self knowledge in the context of non monogamies where you really have to come to the table having done some level of work about your desires, about your fears, about what triggers your jealousy, so on and so forth. And living in a culture where we're told that all relationships must follow these particular forms. It introduces a problem of self knowledge, even at the level of consent and choice, right? Am I choosing to be in a monogamous relationship because that's what I really want? Or is this something outside of which I have never thought? And therefore I can't generate an alternative in a way that feels natural.

Justin: 31:51

Yeah. I appreciate that point, David. And as I was hearing you articulate it, it made me think about whether or not an opposed language of self knowledge is most apt or something more like self examination. Right? Because I think about self knowledge as implying a certain kind of stasis, a certain kind of like static self, like, oh, here I can take a snapshot of who I am, study that, and arrive at this destination of self knowledge. When I think that life and sort of existing in relationship with others, I don't know that the self is ever that static, right? It's something that seems to always be in motion and you know, what I hope that encountering this book and some of the arguments that I make in it give people reason to do is pause or hesitate to at least examine oneself when making these kinds of choices. So, yeah, so I'm okay with self knowledge, but in case that there are some epistemologists who are very critical in the audience, I think that self examination might be just as suitable.

Ellie: 32:54

We have not only done a self knowledge episode, but I am working a book right now I'm working with that concept quite a lot. So I appreciate that the term is fraught, but I really like term self examination here. And I want to just share a personal anecdote in relation to this, because it really came to mind as you both were talking, I feel like in a weird sense, my awakening to non monogamy first came about when I was still monogamous as a college student and had my first true experience of heartbreak because somebody that I was in love with, we mutually broke up for external reasons, I was studying abroad and I thought I was going to be gone for the whole year and so it didn't make sense to stay together because this was before the era of FaceTime and all of those things. And so we broke up because I was going to be gone for a year. And then he started dating somebody else pretty quickly and really fell in love with that person. And that experience for me, I was also just... like, alone in Paris, studying abroad, so sad and depressed.

Justin: 33:59

There are worse places to experience heartbreak.

Track 5: 34:01

There certainly are, and I was studying Simone de Beauvoir at the time, who has a story of this menage a trois relationship in her novel She Came to Stay. And reading that novel, which is about a non monogamous relationship, confronted me with the sheer fact that I couldn't get my head around the idea that somebody I was still in love with and that I had shared such a wonderful relationship with could be in love with somebody else. Like I just, couldn't wrap my head around that. And being a young philosophy student reading Simone de Beauvoir, I thought, well, you know, that's just because Hegel was right that interpersonal relationships are fundamentally conflict. And so I came to this awakening that even though I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that somebody I loved loved somebody else there, it must be true. And it didn't mean that we hadn't had a loving relationship as well, even though I couldn't understand how, if we had had such a loving relationship he could have moved on to somebody else. And I think that experience just kind of unlocked something for me that since then has changed quite a lot. Because David, you mentioned there being this way that we're not really aware of how monogamous norms shape us culturally and as individuals.

Ellie: 35:20

And what's happened to me since is that that idea that I came to, that you know, I can't wrap my head around somebody else's desire for another person, but I can sort of conceptually know that it's not threatening, that's given way to new experiences as I've been in a long journey into non monogamy where actually now I feel like I can wrap my head around it and it's totally conceivable and understandable and beautiful to me that somebody that I love can also love somebody else in a romantic way. And so that's to say, I feel like, I don't know what you all think about this either philosophically or and or personally, but how deeply feelings can shift around all of this kind of stuff. If you undertake this process of self examination, although it means accepting some of the bumps that come along the way.

Justin: 36:08

Yeah, no, absolutely. Like, I think that there's so much like in that anecdote, Ellie, that I kind of want to like touch on if I'm allowed the space,

Ellie: 36:17

Yeah. Please.

Justin: 36:19

Some of what you said takes me back to David's earlier question, how can we talk or think meaningfully about non monogamy and as you were describing this experience, right? I'm hearing you use the word love, right? And in the book, I make a distinction between non monogamy as a concept that perhaps maybe more aptly pertains to relationship formation, which I know that you guys have talked about here on the cast, but then polyamory, right? Being a certain kind of non monogamy that does centralize valuable relationships and indeed relationships that become so valuable to us that they do take on the sort of like moniker of love. And I think perhaps that's one distinction to connect to David's earlier point, but also, you know, so much about the norms shaping us and presenting us with things to wrap our minds around when we encounter non monogamy. I think about how monogamous norms situate time on a linear structure, right? A colleague and peer of mine, Carrie Jenkins talks about, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby and the baby carriage. And as you were talking, Ellie, you were talking about your former suitor as having moved on so quickly. One of the things that I feel like non monogamy has brought me to confront is not just how I think about relationships and the norms associated with it, with those, but also around time, right around like what seems fast or not, what seems slow or not relationship tempo. And so, I think that you're absolutely right that this self examination, not only do you need to prepare yourself for the darker underbelly that perhaps is yourself. Like, why am I so troubled by the fact that a person that I'm interested in likes this other person's music. And it's just like, ah, that's so annoying. But also other things when we encounter the world as a result of that self examination, right? It can be an intimidating experience, not only because of what I'll find out about myself, but then what I'll find out about the world, like how time functions and how relationships orient us toward those things such that. When I find myself on a journey of non monogamy and rejecting that collection of beliefs, it does kind of feel like an abyss, you know, here we are out into the world or unto the world, depending, right. And trying to find a way. And so yeah, it's, yeah, I think community is really important because there has been, at least for me and my journeys as well.

David: 38:56

Yeah, and I really love this injection of the concept of timing to the discussion because of course that linear progression from being a child to entering into the era of romance to then this progression that you mentioned of dating, marriage, baby and then repeat over the course of generations, once you take that cookie cutter framework of human experience out of the equation, you come face to face with the plurality of relationship types. And I think for me, what it brings into focus is what it means to enter into a relationship without the certainty that we know ahead of time what those relationships will look like. Without having that guarantee that we are trying to approach or embody a certain ideal that we have inherited from the past. And that's a question about the relationship. between meaning and finitude and the fragility of human bonds. And one of the concepts in your book that I think this is related to is the concept of specialness. Because sometimes we get this argument that's very common when people talk about non monogamies in general, but polyamory in particular, which is that one of the problems with polyamory is that since you are one of many relata, you know, the term here for the people in a relationship, then you're no longer special. You're not the focus of somebody else's efforts, their time, their energy, and more importantly, you're not the focal point around which their experience of time is organized. And I recently, well, not so recently, this was like a year ago already, I had dinner with a friend of mine who is a psychoanalyst and he was defending monogamy. And he basically made the argument that, love entails death. And what I took him to mean is simply that when you enter into a monogamous relationship, that willingness to cut every other romantic possibility out of the equation, the expression of love. And so you find somebody that is so unique and so special that you self impose this kind of existential amputation. And that amputation in turn is what renders that person special, which in turn makes the act of sacrifice worth it all. And so in your book, you have an entire section devoted to this notion that, well, if you're in a polyamorous relationship, then you're no longer special. And so I'm wondering whether you can talk to us a little bit about that. How do we think about what it means to be special and what it means to see somebody else as special when we are one of many, and when there is this question of finitude and temporality in the picture.

Justin: 41:44

Yeah. Yeah. No good. Again, you guys are coming with it today. I mean, there's a lot, there's a lot there. The first thing I want to say is, one of the things that I hope that the book does is reorients people's aptitude and their ability to perceive what's already happening around them. So one of the strategies I use in the book is to say, hey. Maybe non monogamy is not so weird when we think about maybe friendships or singles as also being kinds of non monogamous, right? And I mean, within the sort of literature on non monogamy, we can qualify this non monogamy by talking about it being consensual or ethical or so on and so forth, right? But they're non monogamy on my view, point blank. Another way that I try to utilize that same strategy when thinking about specialness is I have a background as an athlete as well as when I was an undergrad or when I was in school,I became a part of our fraternity. And so why I go to athletics and fraternity, like membership on this point is because usually we think about one's members on one's own team as being special, especially from the perspective of the coach, right? All of his players or her players or their players are special within the context of, say, a fraternity and its membership. All of the members are special right now. We can talk more about problematic divisions between self and other or us and them. Right. But it does show that this sort of like concept of usness which we might think to be closely acquainted with this notion of speciality can extend beyond just this one to one ratio between different kinds of individuals. I think that's the first thing to say. We have these examples already in friendships, on teams, in fraternities, so on and so forth, where collections of people are thought of as special in relation to like other folks. So I think the same thing happens and can happen in non monogamous relationships, right? This idea that there's a, maybe a smaller collection of people who I guess larger than just the one, but I don't see it as a complicated thing to understand how collections of more than one can be special. But then I also want to talk about this bit about sacrifice because. It makes me think about how much of the narratives that we receive around love and loving we inherit from, say, Western Christianity.

I think here about John 3: 44:22

16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. And here we see love paired with sacrifice, in a doctrine that many people find central to how they go about their loving lives. And it also makes me think about these sort of union views within the philosophy of love that have been made famous by like Robert Nozick and things like this, where the merging of self with other sort of requires out of necessity, a certain kind of sacrifice. And I don't think that those views of love have really ever been palatable to me. I don't want love that entails the destruction of myself. When I think about love and partnership and things like this, I think about care, aid, and assistance as we traverse life. Right. And I don't necessarily want to do that alone and I don't necessarily want to do it at my own expense, but I do think that there has been a way that this. Notion of sacrifice, whether it be of self or others, in the case that we find ourselves in a romantic relationship and jettison entirely our friendships. I don't know. I do think that there's been a way of packaging that message as being desirable, fulfilling, contributing to flourishing, but I think that's one of the things that my thinking in this particular book tries to, to challenge. Yeah.

Ellie: 45:49

Yeah. great. So I think we have time, Justin, for two more questions. I'll ask one and then we can give David the final one because one thing that I often increasingly hear people imply, if not explicitly talk about, is the idea that being polyamorous is an identity or even a sexuality. And I'll confess, I find this to be a sort of foreign and in some ways, problematic notion, this idea that you're polyamorous in the same way that you might be gay or straight. And so I wonder what you think about that. Do you see polyamory as an identity? You know, you're born not to be monogamous or are born to be monogamous, or is it a behavior that anyone can partake in that's not necessarily tied to identity in a deeper sense?

Justin: 46:39

Yeah. I appreciate this question. So I don't know that I spend too much time on whether we're born this way or not, because I think I understand identities as being political. I think about them in that way as being tethered to like liberal states and the pursuit of rights, thinking about oneself as existing in a part of a group that ought to be protected by the mechanisms that the state has to protect it. And I think that whether or not people are born polyamorous or non monogamous or not, the fact remains that people have elected to adopt a self description of themselves as such. That's the starting point where we ought to start because on the basis of that, in monogamous leaning societies, folks are excluded, ostracized, and oppressed. And so I appreciate that question. I do think, however, that there is a way we might understand non monogamy or polyamory or even monogamy as an identity. And what I talk about in the book is, given that monogamy is a set of beliefs and non monogamy is a rejection of that set of beliefs. We can think about, These beliefs as finding resonance in a particular subject or person, right? This idea that, okay, sex with only this person that just seems like right. That seems right with me that resonates, whether it's because you're born that way, whether it's because you come from a household that predominantly, preached monogamy, so on and so forth. That just finds resonance with me. And I think that this kind of resonance can exist at maybe more shallow or deeper levels when people find themselves having deep resonance with some proposition that monogamy or polyamory or non monogamy makes, I think that there'll be more likely to make the political choice to adopt like a self description of such as polyamorous or non monogamous, so on and so forth.

David: 48:42

Yeah. Well, in this description, talking about descriptions of things and of people, this description of identities as political and politically useful, I think guides into the last question that I want to ask, which is about politics and the role of the state in recognizing the validity of different relationship types because in recent years, we've seen a number of moves on the part of people who do adopt these self descriptions to fight for the recognition of those relationships legally. So, for example, in 2020 you mentioned how the U. S. city of Somerville, Massachusetts extended rights to polyamorous relationships that were historically reserved for spouses in a marriage. And you also give the example of three gay men who are in a polyamorous relationship who succeeded at getting California to put all three of their names on their child's birth certificate. And so there are these demands that are being placed on the state by citizens who find themselves embracing these self descriptions and wanting them to be reflected back to them at the level of law. And so my question for you is, given this, what concrete obligations do liberal states have towards citizens in non monogamous relationship structures?

Justin: 50:05

Yeah, good. I think that's a really good question. And non monogamous scholars as well as non monogamous practitioners go back and forth on this, right? You have a handful of folks who say the state has a duty to extend marriage rights to non traditional families, non traditional relationships like polyamorous, so on and so forth. And then you have sort of other factions of folks who are also non monogamous who don't really feel like the state has any role to play in the regulation of private relationships, right? And so they don't want marriage rights. They want the state to get out of the way entirely, perhaps to abolish its institution of marriage. And so I guess one thing that I'll qualify my comments by saying, it really depends on whether or not the liberal society that we have in mind is committed to having an institution of marriage. I think that if we take it back to Mills or Hobbes, like state of nature, original position type thing, we can really ask critical questions as to whether or not a just society from this starting point is a society that is is complete with an institution of marriage. And of course, how we answer that question is going to be related to how we think about family, family formation, kinship, so on and so forth. But I don't know if, say, we're thinking about the original position or starting a society anew, whether we would arrive at the conclusion that that society needs an institution of marriage. So I'm open to that, but so far as a society is committed to retaining its institution of marriage, then I think that we have grounds for thinking about what the responsibilities of an institution like that are to its citizens, concretely perhaps beginning to organize an agenda. I want to investigate a little bit more what the folks on the front lines in Massachusetts were doing in order to lead up to Somerville actually expanding in that direction. I haven't been able to really interview those subjects or anything like that. So if any grant institutions are listening I definitely would like to continue that research. But yeah there's also been pride conferences. I was a part of black poly pride back in 2018, which was held in Dallas, Texas, where black polyamories came together to share best practices, as well as different philosophies in approaching their non monogamies, so on and so forth. But there was also space for like sociality, which I think is important to cooperation in public sphere or getting any kind of like agenda pass on and something like that. But yeah, I think those are some places, where we can start to organize, arrive at an agenda and then push the state to pass that agenda. And that's an uphill battle. You know, that's an uphill battle. The United States, hasn't really revisited cases that consider plural marriage since the late 1800s. So that's the kind of nature of the beast we'd be thinking about organizing against and fighting and hopefully winning, but yeah.

David: 53:20

Justin, this has been a really great discussion. We are very thankful for your time. Speaking about time...

Ellie: 53:27

One thing I, one thing I want to say on that too, is that, you know, there's such limited time in an interview like this, but one of the things that I really like about your book is that it kind of addresses all the most common objections to polyamory and non monogamy in general, and expands a vision of what it looks like as well. And so I would just. Say for listeners who are like, what about these other burning questions that I have? I really recommend the book because it's likely that even though it's a succinct book, you'll find some of the answers that you're looking for within it as well. And I know that you're working on another book specifically on Black polyamory, so I can't wait for that too. So listeners, stay tuned for that. And Justin, thank you so much for joining us today on Overthink. It's been great talking with you as always.

Justin: 54:12

For sure. Thank you. And if I may say one more thing I do run a reading group called Pages the Reading Group. We're PagesTRG across all platforms as well as the internet www.pagestrg.com. And I mean, I encourage all listening to tap in with us and engage. We talk, of course, about love and non monogamy, but also there's a plethora of reading and recommendations and discussions that we have over there that if you liked this conversation, you perhaps might like something over there too, so.

Ellie: 54:44

Awesome. Well, check it out, folks. And, yeah, thank you again.

Justin: 54:49

All right, thanks.

Ellie: 54:55

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David: 55:16

Ellie, so much food for thought here. What are the thoughts that you are processing as food?

Ellie: 55:21

I'm still thinking a little bit more about this idea of specialness, this notion that romantic love involves putting one person above all others in a way that is not like some negative hierarchy, but actually just an avowal of how special they are to you. And anytime this argument comes up, it reminds me of how I felt so, so threatened when I was first experiencing that heartbreak that I talked about in the main episode, where this partner that I had moved on quicker than I would have liked. And the reason that was so threatening to me is because I felt fundamentally unspecial. The way that I tend to think about this is that somebody loving multiple people actually doesn't mean that they're treating those people as unspecial at all. Like, I think it's absolutely possible to treat multiple people as special. The problem comes when the shoe is on the other foot and it can be really hard to feel special when you know that somebody that you love in a romantic way still thinks that you're special, still values you as special when they're also in relationship with other people. And so I feel like that's actually been where a lot of my work, my psychological work on myself around this has come. And I've come to the conclusion that, yeah, it's actually very possible to still feel special while knowing that your partner is in relationships with other people too. But it's really hard work to undo the conditioning that we have around that.

David: 56:51

Yeah, I mean, when we began this episode, I mentioned that this is something that I have begun to question about myself as somebody who identifies as being in an open relationship and this kind of transformation of my thinking and my feelings about my own relationship hinge on this precise issue that I no longer understand what I am latching onto in requiring this kind of specialness or this hierarchy where I am the one above all others for my partner, even if we are in an open relationship. And so I think my sentiments are moving very clearly in the direction of polyamory. Only in the sense that I want to shed this need that comes from somewhere and that is deeply buried into my way of thinking about romance that there's something about specialness that I need. And one important thing that, that comes out of this actually from Justin's book is that often when people think about that concept of specialness, they say, well, no, you can't really deal with multiple partners at the same time because eventually there's going to be a limit. You can only do so many things. You can only do so many gestures of romance. You have only so much time to go to so many dinners. And Justin says, well, that might be true. I said description of the kinds of limited creatures that we are, but it doesn't mean that everybody has the same relational bandwidth. And I really like that concept that he introduces where he says, look, maybe for some people, yes, their hands are full with one other partner, but it doesn't mean that that's the same for everybody. There might be people who have a wider relational bandwidth and who can navigate complex multi relata relationships without feeling as if one person is getting the short end of the stick or that they are neglecting one or multiple partners. And so I think being respectful. To the diversity of relational bandwidths is important. And it's a concept that I, that just stuck with me for thinking about the fact that different people can maintain these relationships in a very productive and emotionally uplifting way.

Ellie: 59:01

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Justin: 59:20

Go to overthinkpodcast. com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram at overthink_pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Emilio Esquivel Marquez, and Samuel P. K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.