Polyamory Primer

A guide

At the end of the 20th century, an old practice acquired a new theory.

The theory explained that it was possible to maintain what were called open relationships,

if you could get everyone involved to agree on certain conditions of public information.

In other words, you could sleep around and not have your bf/gf/husband/wife leave you . . .

. . . as long as they were never exposed to the details of your other affairs.

What this meant was the restriction of information.

Contrary to a popular slogan of the time, information did not want to be free.

But by imprisoning information, you could be free.

You both agreed to be non-exclusive, promising that the other would not know when, where, how,

and with whom.

No hints.

No confessions.

No clues.

No detective work, either.

What was secret must stay secret.  That was the whole of the law.

If both partners accepted this, then they were free to kiss. 

But not to tell.

The most serious betrayal was raw information.

Text became privileged space, dense with meaning and implicated currents of

desire and impact.  Intercourse and the physical plane devolved to the merely

symbolic.

Social identities crept inward, byzantine architectures constructed with meticulous

precision; levels of fact, innuendo, discourse and negotiation buried and nested and

folded into an onionskin of selves ever more dense and self-referential.

New truths were announced:

“Identity is plural.”

“Communication is fiction.”

“Relation is artifice.”

But when was this ever not the case?

And so secrecy became the new honesty.

And the real was exposed as threaded with necessary subjectivity and Heisenbergian

mutations.

A great theory!

Maybe.

But in practice . . .

(as you might imagine)

. . . it never quite worked out that way.

Because although identities are constructed . . .

and although the real is not separable from the subjective . . .

and although we do create meaning through narrative, with the structural implications of

discourse and text . . .

. . . our actions define us too.

Whether or not we’re good at the spin.

All stories are built upon actions.  Every act creates a meaning.  And acts, like Derridian speech, are things that cannot be erased,

taken back, untraced. 

They do not leave us unscathed.

In the end, the information gets free.

And it’s not the information, but the act,

that makes the impact,

that creates the meaning,

that constructs the real.

That breaks the heart.

Or rather, it is the information.

But it’s also the act.

There’s no escape from one into the other.

One is the Other.

In summary, let’s review:

The theory states,

It’s not what you do . . .

. . . it’s how you say it.

“In Search of Adele H,” a Twitter movie, https://twitter.com/adelehugo