| Chapter 1: | Operationalizing Fidelity |
sex but not love with others. In fact, many nonmonogamists experience jealousy and possessiveness when a primary partner develops intimate feelings or love for an outside partner. Partners often establish limits regarding how much extradyadic emotional intimacy is allowed in order to preserve the love in the primary bond. This is not the case, however, among polyamorists.
Polyamory in Discourse and Practice
Whereas some forms of nonmonogamy focus on multiple sexual partners, polyamory actively emphasizes romantic, love bonds between multiple partners. Some polyamorists invoke a dyadic, primary-partner design, and others eschew the mononormative template for more fluid relational arrangements involving multiple primaries or no primaries (Munson and Stelboum 1999). Polyamorists often fall in love with multiple partners and rarely restrict emotional intimacy with others, although commitment remains part of polyamorous relationships. For example, Cook (2005) interviewed seven long-term polyamorous couples, finding that mutual appreciation, emotional closeness, communication, and flexibility contributed to maintaining commitment in a primary relationship. Therefore, fidelity is also salient within polyamory; however, it is not necessarily dictated by either sexual or emotional exclusivity.
What literature exists on polyamory is largely instructional rather than analytical or sociological (Noel 2006). Books like The Ethical Slut (Easton and Liszt 1997) and The New Love without Limits (Anapol 1997) act as primers and resource manuals for those who wish to commence or are already engaged in polyamorous relationships. Recent scholarly efforts on polyamory are located within a cultural dialogue that seeks to challenge hegemonic narratives by illustrating the pervasive influences of heteronormativity and mononormativity in theory, practice, and research (Rich 1994; Lehr 1999; Warner 1999; Josephson 2005; Pieper and Bauer 2005). Several interviews with and ethnographies of polyamorists focus primarily on the discourse and politics of poly identities