Vulnerable No More

Vulnerable No More

“This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

-Laertes to his son Polonius

No relationship model is without its weaknesses.  One inherent problem with polyamory seems to be exposed when you examine the relationships between honesty, intimacy and vulnerability.  Can a person have an intimate relationship, let alone many intimate relationships, when sharing their flawed humanity with someone else poses no threat to their own security of identity?

Melanie Beattie had a smash hit with her 1987 self-help book, Codependent No More, selling 8 million copies, 6 million in the United States.  Codependency is a major flaw of many relationships, and describes a tendency of individuals within a relationship to see their significant other as their sole source of value and identity, believing that their own happiness is derived from another person.  The codependent party generally becomes controlling of the party they hold responsible for their own happiness.  In many ways, this discussion is the flip-side of the codependency coin.

My primary girlfriend and I were talking about the almost religious devotion we have to a doctrine of open and honest communication.  We are honest to ourselves about who we are and what we want.  We take responsibility to provide those things for ourselves.  We communicate that honestly to our partners.  And in my case, I communicate that, as much as possible, to the internet.

In our view, intimacy is the ability to share yourself in all your human imperfection and find acceptance with your partner, and the reciprocation of this.  And it seems clear that the risk of rejection, the vulnerability you stare down when you share yourself with your partner, contributes greatly to the feeling of closeness you get to enjoy after revealing your secrets and finding that your partner still loves you.

Many polyamorists, me included, try very hard to have no secrets.  I strive to share everything with my partner, or anyone who cares to know.  My primary girlfriend pointed out that if all my secrets are already common knowledge, if I am so secure with myself that I’m able to share all of my humanity with whomever should like to see it, I am not taking much of a risk when I share those things with a partner.

Seeing the relationship between vulnerability and intimacy, my primary girlfriend inquired whether we should resolve to keep some openness and honesty just between the two of us. I'm really not sure either way.

On the one hand, intimacy is not only sharing yourself but accepting your partner, and that because my primary partner and I communicate much more than I do with my other partners or with the public at large, quantitatively, we offer more acceptance and therefore intimacy to one another than we find elsewhere.  And because accepting another person for who they are isn’t a binary construct but rather something that occurs by degrees and is communicated in a unique way within each relationship, our intimacy would therefore be qualitatively unique in some respects.

It is true, of course, that a new partner might not accept me, and decide not to see me as a result of something I am.  I’m still vulnerable to rejection.  At the same time, I am secure enough with myself that such judgment or rejection would not threaten my sense of self in any significant way.  If I have no vulnerability in that sense, it may seem like it would be difficult for me to have real intimacy, which in turn would suggest a lack of depth to my intimate relationships.

As a subjective and biased observer of my own relationships, I can tell you that I can’t really tell a difference in the depth of my intimate relationships when comparing my multiple relationships now to one-at-a-time relationships I’ve maintained in the past.  I certainly don’t feel less intimate in my relationships since becoming surer of myself and “less vulnerable”.  But I don’t really know.

What I do know is that I am happily without a codependent relationship at the moment, and would be very pleased to keep it that way, even at the expense of some degree of intimacy.