Polygamy, Polygyny, Polyamory and the Triad of Lou Andreas-Salomé
Posted on 28. Jan, 2011 by Stephen Kastner in A Sex Blog
Wittgenstein once wrote, “If you believe that our concepts are the right ones, the ones suited to intelligent human beings, that anyone with different ones would not realize something that we realize, then imagine certain general facts of nature different from the way they are and conceptual structures different from our own will appear natural to you.”
Lou Andreas-Salomé
“Everybody’s gotta learn sometimes,” says the Beck lyric that launches the film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Each day I awake to a dream thread, a thin filament that I can choose to follow or ignore. If my eternally busy chatter-mind starts to take over… the dream’s filament thread is surely lost. But, if I immediately concentrate and begin to gently pull, tracing the thread in a state of no-mind, I am rewarded with gifts and surprises.
A few days ago, it was one of those traced threads that led me to discover and learn more about a Russian lover named Lou… and a very powerful triforce. Lou Andreas-Salomé was at the core of a ménage à trois that included Paul Ree and Friedrich Nietzsche. She went on to have a lifelong relationship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, 15 years her junior. It was Salomé who began calling him Rainer rather than René, taught him Russian, introduced him to Pushkin and Tolstoy.
Lou Andreas-Salomé, Paul Ree and Friedrich Nietzsche
All of which leads me to… Triad, a 60′s Jefferson Airplane song of free-love, that pokes at social norms in asking, “Why can’t we go on as three?” – a simple philosophical question about polyamory.
The Airplane song is said to have been derived from ideas contained in the specific works of Robert A. Heinlein that include: Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love, Friday, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Number of the Beast, and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
Polygamy (from πολύς γάμος polys gamos, translated literally in Late Greek as “often married” is a form of marriage in which a person has more than one spouse at the same time, as opposed to monogamy in which a person has only one spouse at a time. When a man has more than one wife, the relationship is called polygyny; and when a woman has more than one husband, it is called polyandry. If a marriage includes multiple husbands and wives, it can be called group marriage.
According to the Ethnographic Atlas Codebook, a 1998 study of 1,231 societies in world culture edited by J. Patrick Gray, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, it is noted that:
- only 186 were monogamous.
- 453 had occasional polygyny,
- 588 had more frequent polygyny, and
- 4 had polyandry.
It seems that somehow Americans have been deluded into believing the one-man-one-woman relationship model is some kind of global standard. It’s not. Perhaps if we can apply the words of Wittgenstein we might open up a crack through which a new vision of relationships might be considered. Click to listen to Maureen Cavanaugh, host of These Days on radio KPBS: The Future of Marriage and Non-Traditional Relationships.
The emotions that invoke, oppose or handicap open relationships have been documented. In Dr. Deborah M. Anapol’s book Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits : Secrets of Sustainable Intimate Relationships
Ninety percent of the animal world does not follow pair-bonding. As a species, humans attempt monogamy and usually fail. So why not redefine a new set of ethical standards? The UUs for Polyamory Awareness defines polyamory as the philosophy and practice of loving or relating intimately to more than one other person at a time with honesty and integrity. They are one of many organizations that seek to define new ways of making loving relationships.
According to Jennifer Baker of the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri, 50% percent of first marriages, 67% of second and 74% of third marriages end in divorce.
There’s just one answer comes to me
Sister-lovers, water brothers
And in time, maybe others
So you see, what we can do, is to try something new
If you’re crazy too
I don’t really see
Why can’t we go on as three.
-Triad, Jefferson Airplane
Have you ever considered or been engaged in a polyamorous relationship? Please, add your comments below…
