Gay marriage is an attack on the institution of marriage. Somehow straight people’s love is diminished by queer people’s love. Love for one person is mutually exclusive with love for another.
In the spirit of Pride week, I wanted to write about something queer, so I thought I’d make an attack on the above statements. I thought about writing about the hate-driven atrocities of the week — the murder of Christina Grimmie and the slaughter in Orlando — but apart from the inevitably insufficient recognition of the sometimes tragically unpredictable nature of life and the immense travesty of it all, sending my heartfelt thoughts and prayers to everyone involved and an emotional call for a reform of gun control, I have no insight to offer. It is something that defies understanding. But I think that makes talking about and celebrating love all the more important.
So let’s talk about love. I want to talk about how love never has to be contradictory unless we let it be, both on the personal level and on a more societal level. On the personal level, I think it is easy to get jealous of sources of love that the people we love have that take their time away from us. It is easy to forget that it is time that is limited, not love. There are so many types of love that one person cannot possibly replace all of them. To shut yourself off to many sources of love is unnecessary and unhealthy. Think about it.
You can have a romantic, intellectual, physical, friend, even musical crush on someone. They all feel different and provide different things. And above all, none of them detract from your existing relationships (unless you let them). As a platonic example, my love for my family in no way detracts from my love for my friends. Even when I have to decide between spending time with one or the other, that is a temporal decision, not any sort of declaration of value to me.
In the same way, I have learned that romantic relationships do not have to be contradictory, either. The reason that cheating in a romantic relationship is wrong is because most people agree to be exclusive after a certain amount of time. It is certainly a valid choice to make, but it is also a societally-imposed one. It is important to recognize that the wrong in cheating is that it betrays your partner’s trust because you have both agreed to choose to do something to honor your relationship. Cheating is not wrong because loving one person is in some way inherently contradictory to loving someone else. How could it be? We love our parents, siblings, friends and romantic partners all at once and still have love to spare.
Every romantic love feels different and happens for different reasons, just like platonic love. Really, life is already polyamorous. And the more polyamorous it is, the better. The word tends to be applied only to those with more than one romantic love, but personally I like a more broad definition of the word. I think the beauty of polyamorous relationships is that it intrinsically comes with a mentality that does not see love as a threat. I think that is beautiful and that we can all learn from it.
On a more societal level, the same principle still applies: love never has to contradict love. As most Americans have figured out by now, gay marriage in no way undermines straight marriage. It’s even in the Bible: “This is my commandment: that you love one another” John 15:12.
There are so many examples of where love doesn’t contradict itself that it would be ridiculous to list them all. Nationalism is a good example. Personally, I think of countries and their governments as parents and citizens as children. As a parent, your first job is to protect your own children, but you can, do and should instinctively feel a strong responsibility to all children. If any child is in danger, then it is your duty to do everything within your power to protect them. Love for one does not preclude, and even necessitates, love for the other. The same goes for pretty much everything under the sun. Perhaps this last example is a bit of a stretch from polyamory, but as I said, I like a broad definition of the word.
At Pulse, a man felt threatened by people who loved others of the same gender so much that he took 49 people’s lives. If nothing else, and if no good can come of it (with 49 innocent people dead I will not pretend that anything to be learned from it will ever be close to worth it, or even a step toward redemption), then Pulse serves as a warning against the danger of seeing love as contradictory and of being threatened by it.
Whether or not anyone chooses to be polyamorous in their love lives, I think the mentality of seeing love as a threat is a dangerous and unnecessary one, and I think it is important to have a polyamorous mentality in life — one that appreciates love no matter what it looks like, one that sees love as unambiguously good and one that knows that love never has to be a threat to you.
