This section will feature interviews with folks living in a polyamorous lifestyle. If you are involved in a poly relationship in any way, or are a poly friendly professional who would like to be interviewed for this section, contact us for more information.

Previous Interviews With A Poly can be found in the Interview Archives.

Interview With a Poly
December 09, 2005

This interview was conducted by our very own PolyAnna. Any comments or questions can be directed to her in the Letters to the Editor section of our user forums, or via email here.

Many thanks to Dr. Goodman for taking the time out of his busy life to conduct this interview with us.

On Tuesday, December 6, 2005, I conducted an interview with Michael Dean Goodman, Ph.D., D.D, and Director of PARA – The Center for Realization. Dr. Goodman offers counseling for individuals, couples, or groups in person or by phone nationwide. He has 30-years professional experience. He is a past board member of the Washington DC polyamory support group. He’s personally experienced with polyamory and other non-traditional relationship styles. Dr. Goodman focuses on issues of relationship (mono- or poly-amory), communication, masculine/feminine energies, sexuality, kink/fetish, power exchange, fear/anger/depression, beginnings/endings, independence/intimacy, grief/loss, personal identity, integrating sexuality/love/spirituality, and spiritual growth. He specializes in healing early-life traumas and other old programming which blocks the flow of life. He believes in rapid, effective, solution-oriented work. Dr Goodman also offers tantra workshops and personal educational sessions nationally. He is the author of two soon-to-be-published books.

I had over two hours worth of tape to transcribe, and I started out by attempting to put it into the usual question/answer interview style, but it just wasn’t working. It didn’t flow correctly when I tried to put it into the “normal” interview box, and I felt that I would be doing a huge disservice to the readers of this particular interview, because my conversation with Dr. Goodman certainly flowed. In attempting to do this man and his thoughts, feelings, and ideas the justice that he deserves, I offer you the following, in Michael Goodman’s own words:

Opening Thoughts:
There is a preconception by society that everyone lives under the umbrella of “normal.” Just as an unrelated example, several years ago Reader’s Digest did a confidential survey of its very conservative reading audience. Said survey was about people who had had a spiritual/new age experience. Many saw ghosts, had a near death experience, had a visit from a departed loved one, and had contact with something transcendental. They all stated that they didn’t tell people about those experiences for fear of being thought crazy. If asked the same question in public, the same people probably wouldn’t admit to their experience. Maybe one in 50 would have owned up, when in fact, the real statistics were one in two.

It’s the same thing with relationships. A certain percentage of people are gay, a certain percent bisexual, a certain percent into BDSM or polyamory or swinging or open relationships, and those are the recorded facts and statistics. Many more people operate under secrecy. They don’t own up because they think everyone will think they are weird. The truth is that there are a lot of “weird” people out there; they just keep it quiet.

Coming Out of the Poly Closet:
Most everyone has a certain point when they feel like, “Okay I have to come out now; I have to proclaim my “polyness.” Often I will say to them, “Okay that’s wonderful, and I’m happy for you that you are so comfortable and confident, but now you need to look at WHY. Why do you want to tell everyone in your family, your boss, etc.? Will it serve any purpose other than to make you feel good? Will it just make them feel awkward? If you had a regular vanilla sexual practice, would you still feel compelled to tell people about it? Would your co-workers want to know that you like this sexual position or this toy? The answer is ‘No, that’s inappropriate.’ That’s private. That makes people uncomfortable. Well then why tell them other things just to make you feel good?”

Sometimes there is a purpose in coming out, and sometimes people need to stop and ask themselves, “Why do I really want to do this?” You need to assess whether or not you have some hidden agenda, some hidden motive. People need to take a few deep breaths before they just come charging out of the poly closet. Sometimes coming out can be very healthy. Sometimes there are hidden motives. Each person has to decide based on their own situation, but don’t just act on some kind of inspired notion. Stop. Think about it. Talk to the people involved. You can’t just make the decision for everybody. Be brutally honest with yourself. Make sure that it’s useful. The same goes when coming out to your children. Consider their age, their maturity level, how much they actually want to know. Ask yourself, “Just how far out do I need to come?”

Definition of Poly:
My definition of poly is a little bigger than what a number of people think it is. Poly means “many.” Amory means “love.” We don’t say polysexuality. We don’t call ourselves polysexuals. We call it polyamory, and I don’t see amory as just romantic love. There are many different kinds of love: sexual love, heart love, emotional love, spiritual love; there are just lots of forms of love. So I think polyamory means many sources of fulfillment of different kinds of love and needs. Love means a lot of things. Sex is just the version of it that scares everybody. That’s about polysexuality, which is different than polyamory.

We have a model of relationship in our society, and everyone assumes that monogamy, a one man/one woman marriage is the correct model. Not only do we have that model, we have a model about how to find that person. Well, you fall in love. It’s a romantic infatuation model. You meet a person and you think, “Ah. This is it. I have to spend the rest of my life with only you.” I’m not anti-romance. I like romance; it’s a wonderful feeling. It’s also a relatively new model. We think that this is the way life is, but really it’s only been this way for the last four or five hundred years. Before that, people didn’t marry for romance or love. People married because families wanted to bond together, or they married through arranged marriages, or they married because of some sort of expectation, or they married to simply share the responsibilities of daily life. There were all kinds of things going on, but this idea of “falling in love” is a fairly recent one.

People used to have a family life, a spiritual life, and hobbies. Everyone had a place they could go to get their different needs met, but now a days people move away from their family; they move away from their spiritual tradition, from their neighborhood, and they go and live among strangers. So people become pressured to find “the one,” and once they do, they make it doubly worse by saying, “Not only are you the one, I’m going to make you the fulfiller of every need I have. I want you to be my mommy, my lover, my spiritual guide, someone I can talk to when I have problems.” We make our spouse or partner try to fulfill so many roles that it would take a super person to do. It’s very destructive, and so my idea of polyamory is to undo this behavior.

Many people say, “I am absolutely not polyamorous,” but I would argue that under my bigger definition—that it’s not just sexual but that it’s getting needs fulfilled, needs for love, needs for attention, it’s “multiple-amory”, polyamory, multiple ways of getting your needs fulfilled—that almost everybody is practicing some degree of polyamory. It’s just that some are very small, maybe 2%; some are 10%, and some are more. When the average person in society hears “polyamory”, they think “polysexuality.” They think that having sex with multiple people is the only criteria for polyamory.

We set up this unconscious model in our society that to be a success in a relationship, you have to be a superwoman or superman, to be everything. One of the great benefits of polyamory is that it makes people negotiate and to really look into themselves and explore places that most couples have never ever gone, so it can be a great tool in unfolding self-knowledge and really learning about yourself. It can be a great explorative tool, and you really get to know your partner(s).

The Difference Between Polyamory and Monogamy:
It’s so tempting to make the horrible mistake of making polyamory and monogamy different poles. They are not. The opposite of monogamy is polygamy, and that’s a sexual scale. The opposite of polyamory is monoamory: getting love from just one person, NOT sex from just one person. We’re tempted so often to fall into this, and thus we redefine polyamory as polysexuality. We shouldn’t. The opposite of polyamory is monoamory—the idea that one person can give me everything I need. Everything. So why does it keep evolving back down to sex? Why does sex become the big issue in this? Why is it that a person doesn’t get jealous when their partner wants to spend time doing something else, like a stamp club?

We have a very narrow definition of what cheating is. Where do we get these ideas of what it means to cheat? If you look back historically, it comes from the whole religious tradition. One of the original Ten Commandments says, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” But what does the original word mean? If you look way back to what that word meant, to adulterate meant to make something impure, to make it unable to be used for its original purpose. When it said, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” it simply meant that you must not adulterate the lineage of a family. In those days, when a father died, the flock and the land went to his sons. If the wife had gone out and had sex with someone else, there was no way to prove that the child belonged to the husband. You couldn’t maintain societal integrity if there was any question about paternal lineage. There would be wars fought over it, false claims made, so the concept that you had non-adulterated children was essential to live. In the Bible, there were men who had multiple wives. They were not punished. They were not sinning. They were not committing adultery. They kept their lineage pure.

Another of the Ten Commandments says, “Thou shalt not covet they neighbor’s wife.” Covet is a financial thing. If the whole structure of society is a man and a woman and the children and the family and your flock and the land and your ranking in society, then it’s a terrible thing to covet someone’s spouse because you are breaking up the essential social economic unit of the society that makes everything stable. It was hard enough, in those days, to find a partner and make it work. It could just have easily have said, “Thou shalt not covet they neighbors wives.” It simply meant, “Don’t be a jerk and go break up what’s working and create a mess in society.” It does not say, “Thou shalt not covet the three unmarried daughters of Jacob;” it just says, “Don’t go break up what’s already been established.” Adultery and covet. That’s all. It never said anything about monogamy.

Does Poly Work?
People have a huge amount of trouble making monogamy work. There’s a huge divorce rate. There are very few people who have the simple set of skills to make a one on one relationship work. How do we learn to have a relationship? No one teaches us how to have sex, how to have love, how to communicate. Of al the skills we need to have to have a relationship, no one teaches any of them to us. So the thing about polyamory is it’s difficult. Even though I’m a believer in it, and even though I practice it, I have to admit that it’s difficult. Here we have two people who never really learned to communicate, and then we add another person (other people). It’s just become exponentially harder. So what I would say to people is this: in order to really make polyamory work, you’ve got to have some mastery of monoamory skills. If a person can’t make some kind of intimate relationship with one person work, how are they going to do it with two or three or…?

If I wanted to make a really crude, gross distinction, I would say that there are two groups of people who practice polyamory. One, there are the people who use poly to try and fix problems in a relationship that really need to be fixed by just working on their monoamory skills. They need to learn to communicate, to be honest, and to work on their own issues. They actually use poly to avoid intimacy. They spread themselves out enough that no one really gets very much of them. They are using poly to hide from intimacy, to hide from their own issues.

Two, there are people who have some mastery of intimacy skills, and just recognize that they need more avenues of fulfillment. They want to practice real polyamory, not to hide from intimacy, not to hide from their own issues, but to actually expand and explore themselves, and it is difficult. When people ask me if they should practice polyamory, I tell them that they really need to have their eyes wide open, that they need to realize that it’s hard enough to have a relationship with one person that works, and that you’re going to have a lot of layers of complication. Yes, do it, but you’re really going to have to work at it. It’s a big focal thing. This is not something that’s just casual and easy, and on top of that, you are fighting a society that has its head in the sand and pretends that there’s no polyamory going on. This is not an easy road to go down. It’s a very beautiful road, very rich with rewards, but I don’t want to pretend to people that it’s either a cure-all for relationship problems or an easy fix, because it’s just not.

Swinging Versus Poly:
There’s a big debate in the poly world over whether or not the swingers are really polyamorous. In my experience, people who practice swinging are focusing more on the second chakra. They are resolving some sexual issues. They need some freedom about sex. I’m generalizing, but usually they don’t want love connections; they want sex connections. That, however, is a form of amory—sexual love. Who are we to say that those aren’t the lessons they need to be learning for their growth? They may need to test the waters, try it out. So I would include even that under the polyamory umbrella.

My Message to People Living a Mainstream Lifestyle:
The number one message I’d like to send is that poly doesn’t mean multiple sex partners, that it means something much bigger and much more profound than that. Polyamory is multiple sources of love, of nourishment. It’s not a scary thing. It’s a beautiful thing.

Final Thoughts:
Most people practice some form of polyamory, of getting their needs fulfilled in more than one place. It’s very healthy, and everybody does it already, to some extent in varying degrees. People should be more open to that. The biggest thing I would say to people is say “yes” to the people you love. The goal is to say yes to anything that won’t do harm, that isn’t dangerous. Open the flow; just say yes.

folks have read this interview.