on "open relationships"

The mode termed “open relationship” is not only another restrictive cell to lock ourselves into—another cumbersome love-kit with strict prescriptions as to functionality and participation—but is devastatingly worse in regards to trying to develop a sense of eros. Open relationships are defined by, dependent on, and meaningful only with regards to the hegemonic paradigm already in place. An “open relationship” entails none of the restructuring necessary for eros and thus embodies none of its qualities and none of its expressions or manifestations. An “open relationship” is merely one in which one of two situations exists: a) there is no intention of developing deeply personal, vulnerable, or life-long ties, or b) the extent to which fidelity qua monogamy and meaningfulness have been fused is blatantly ignored: i.e. the hetero-normal paradigm is applied to multiple participating individuals simultaneously. Of course, the first scenario is superficial, avoids genuine intimacy, and thus falls outside of our purview. The latter scenario is one pregnant with disaster. The hetero-normal paradigm is a sickly and perverted collective convolution that distorts the underlying principles of beauty, passion, reverence, and the like on which it is based. Applying this system to multiple people simultaneously while making whatever slight or gross adaptations necessary to accommodate the polygamous brand of the perversion is not only equally undesirable—being as it is fraught with the same unhealthy and destructive expressions and manifestations—it will inevitably create even more misery and strife. An open relationship is simply unable to contend with our natural tendency to pair-bond and the con-fused yet ubiquitous diad of monogamy and meaningfulness.