Fidelity

Monogamy, polyamory, and the spirit of relationship

“Keeping faith” or “faithfulness” — that is, fidelity — is language often used to describe keeping one’s word sexually. It can also mean faithfulness to a cause or belief, something like loyalty. Or it can mean the exactness of a copy. A song that sounds similar to the original, when a recording is played, is considered to have high fidelity to the original.

A related question, for me, is: What is real? It’s such a boring question most of the time. It’s also one of the most important questions. I would suggest that there is a flame, a perceptible light, that is fidelity to the truth. That light is real, even if truth can be debated.

One of the strange things about this light is that I’ve seen it in habitual liars. So it isn’t only about whether words are true. But the truth of words seems relevant.

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To me, sexual fidelity is one of the most important things in the world. It is a way of reaching for this light. I could call the light a connection to God, and yet I felt this way before I believed in God.

My experiences having many sexual and romantic relationships, some long term and some shorter term, have demonstrated to my satisfaction that monogamous people are not better at fidelity than polyamorous people (or swingers, or whatever — there are distinctions between these subgroups). There’s a lot of cheating in this world.

I’ve spent time in several different sex subcultures, and I’ve talked to a lot of researchers about sexuality. One of my favorite studies is a meta-analysis finding that monogamous relationships are not statistically longer-lasting than polyamorous ones, nor are they shorter.¹ This is an interesting result because both monogamous and polyamorous people are prone to arguing that their way makes relationships last longer. It seems that both are incorrect.

In the end, what this study showed was that the best way to damage a relationship is to lie to one’s partner or break one’s promises to them. This is true whether one is monogamous or not.

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I want to live my life in fidelity to God. I don’t say or write those words very often, but they preoccupy me all the time. I suspect that some form of material fidelity is necessary to this goal.

I think about this question of how to express fidelity to the truth in my media work; I’ve taken various experimental approaches at my magazine. I think about this when I read about politics; I thought of it recently while reading about uses of violence as signaling outside wartime. If God is everything, then everything is an expression of God and observation of reality is observation of God. As such, one might surmise that learning about communication, in all its forms, is a way of learning about communication with God. So I pay particular attention to communication.

Various religions have various ideas of how to realize union with God in a sexual union. And different sexual subcultures have their own ideas. Any number of people in today’s world will suggest that monogamy is the only place to accomplish this. Yet I don’t think monogamy is the only way that fidelity can be expressed, not least because it has not been my observation that fidelity is consistently expressed in monogamy. I have seen healthy relationships and unhealthy relationships in so many different forms that I don’t judge purely by the form anymore.

There is always a sense in which the thing itself, whatever the thing in question, cannot be described. Some descriptions are better, though.

1. Rubel AN, Bogaert AF. Consensual Nonmonogamy: Psychological Well-Being and Relationship Quality Correlates. Journal of Sex Research. 2015;52(9):961-82. doi: 10.1080/00224499.2014.942722. Epub 2014 Sep 4. PMID: 25189189.