Age Against the Machine: Polyamory’s
One thing for certain about monogamy… it thrives off of familiarity!
People are like “well, THAT person is married, has a two-storey duplex, blue-and-white picket fence, 2.7 children, a golden retriever, a 50″ flat-screen TV, a Honda Accord and a job working in some corner office in Corporation X. They MUST be happy and secure. That’s what I want too! Because if I get that, then I’ll be just as happy as they are…”
But, who knows if they are happy… or even secure! All we know is that they possess something, and in a world where youth and freedom and innocence and even power can be taken away so quickly… the desire to simply possess something is overwhelmingly present in all too many people’s minds. They just want to control something, be sure of something, and guarantee something where they normally couldn’t even 100% guarantee the amount of money on their next paycheck, whether they will have sex with anyone this weekend, or that the weather on Saturday is going to be nice on their only day off!
So, people see other people with sexy partners, and want the same thing. The EXACT same thing, foolishly. Jay-Z and Beyoncé got married and had a child? We should too! Or some variation on the phenomenon, ha ha. But essentially, many humans are mimicking the success they feel their peers and idols and mentors are experiencing.
But what if your value system is drastically different from anyone else you know?
If you want to explore celibacy in high school, you’ll be different than most. If you want to explore BDSM in your twenties, you’ll be different than some. If you want to explore the wife/husband swapping lifestyle when you’re married, you’ll be different than others. If you want to even explore bi-sexuality, anal sex, trans-sexual playing, then you will be into different things than your peers. There is always some kind of point where a singular person separates from the group, the masses, and the society they live in within their sexual preferences. Even down to the smallest detail, this will be true in the most vanilla, heterosexual monogamous relationship. We all have our own individual sexual identity, and this is how it should be!
But the easiest way to see this truth may be like so: in a family of five children, if one of them is gay/lesbian/trans, there is NO way that child will experience the same path of intimacy and relationship development as the rest of their siblings. So why even try?
I say this because there’s one realm of sexuality that is somewhat taboo (not as taboo as race, or certain extreme-edge fetishes) and it rarely gets spoken about, but it’s REAL, and it’s AMAZING to ascend limitations around. This realm of sexuality I speak about is the realm of AGE.
I’d say the majority of people in the world are socialized to seek romantic partners somewhat around their age bracket, economic status, intellectual proximity, etc. But if there’s ONE factor that people lean towards connecting equally on, it’s AGE. We have been conditioned, raised, bred and taught that we might find the best partners with someone who’s exactly, or near our age. (Or even “twice our age, minus seven years” or “seven years younger” or whatever mystical magical reasoning a woman or a person has been told, to find their formula for true love, haha…) The reasoning is invisible and unreliable, as well as inconsistently true. Yes, we may find wonderful symbiosis with someone who is the exact same age as us when we are 14 or 21, and they may be going through the same/similar socio-economic trials and tribulations as we are, thus allowing our parallel developmental arcs to bend and expand at a similar rate, within a similar comfort zone. I concede this may be true. It also may be false as fuck for a million reasons too, and you may be dooming yourself to a world of impossible options by trying to ONLY date people your age!
Find what you’re looking for at PolyamoryDate.com!
What if you were a sexually precocious child? What if you were a sheltered child? What if you were an adopted child? What if you were a child of constantly travelling parents? What if you were an intellectually gifted child? What if you were the child of divorce? What if you were a bi-racial child? What if you were the youngest child in a family of five or the oldest child in a family of eight? There are a million factors that could lead to your development being different than someone your age, and thus, your values, needs and dreams and directions are different than your potential partner.
Therefore, you may have better chemistry with older women! Or older men! Or younger women, or younger men… judgement is foolish here. The fact is, the point of relationships is to find someone COMPATIBLE with you… not someone visually and socially aesthetically complimentary. You DON’T have to be Barbie and you DON’T need to find Ken. A perfectly fine relationship could be made between Strawberry Shortcake and ALF, if so desired! Work with me, folks!
Some satisfying degree of emotional, spiritual, economic, intellectual, physical, mental and sexual balance is all that we are trying to achieve in our relationships, right? That can happen with ANYONE. Potentially, it truly can. In polyamory, seeing as it’s about negotiating differences until a beautiful balance is born, a supposedly-unbreachable boundary like “age” can be transcended with respect, communication, and sacred intentions.
I’m currently enjoying blissful, argument-free, honest, safe, consensual and honestly fantastic polyamorous relationships with women in their twenties, thirties, and forties. And I just went on a first rendezvous in the park with a woman in her fifties, and I ADORE her! We shared a first kiss at the end of the night, and it was magnificent joy beyond description.
Relationships are about growth. If two people are growing at different speeds, they won’t be balanced together and thus probably not be truly happy together. And it doesn’t matter if they both have the exact same birthday, if they both don’t want the same things in a relationship from the other person, then age won’t matter.
But those May-December relationships, where some older lady wants something that a younger man is happy to provide? If we remove our preconceived judgements from their bonding, then maybe we can appreciate the depth of diversity and potential bliss available to us all, by realizing that ageism is just as sexually limiting as racism, classism or any other negative-ism that creates fear and destroys love!
In hope and love,
Addi Stewart
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