My Old Priest Says Your Polyamory Sucks Cause You're Doing It Wrong.

Good advice can come from the most unlikely sources.

As a teenager, still under the delusion that I’d grow up to be a man, I was educated by a congregation of Oblates. Missionary priests who “offered themselves up to” Mary Immaculate, elevating the holy virgin in their faith. They considered themselves to be the perfect candidates to shape young boys into young Christian men.

I am nothing if not a symbol of their multiple failures.

Chapel was an exercise in astounding tedium. I’d try to unhitch my teenage mind from the rituals. Sit, stand, kneel, chant, stand, kneel, rinse, repeat. I’d allow myself the distraction of looking at the necks of boys sat in the pews in front of me. Their short, neat haircuts, collars stiff and starched. Some of those collars strained against necks with the burgeoning muscular strength of future football stars. Other boys in my teenage cohort sat prim and proper. The attentive set of their pious posture showing off the graceful curve of their napes, of necks the perfect diameter to encircle with your hands as you squeeze and pull them gently back towards you.

As I type this, I think I may have discovered the source of all those sudden erections I’d get during catholic mass. And here I thought it was all the standing and kneeling?

“Oh my god, please grant me perfect sorrow for my sins against you.”

While the tabernacle of my lust sustained me in these moments, occasionally a sermon would cut through the fugue of incense and disassociation. There’s one sermon that’s stayed with me, one that’s reverberated through my body for the last thirty years. The one about “the opposite of love”.

This order of Oblates was mostly made up of kindly men who carried an enthusiastic zeal to be helpful in the world. They’d rotate in and out from the missions in Indonesia, West Papua and New Guinea. The older ones staying to teach as their bodies slowly gave out. When it was his turn one such priest would diligently don his vestments and climb the steps of the altar. He’d only had a handful of sermons to tell and by God, he would tell these anecdotes year in and year out. He’d tell them as if they’d occurred to him the week before when really it was more likely to have been decades ago, or not at all. In one he’d describe an impromptu ministering to the boys in the schoolyard asking them about “the opposites of things”. His lofty and leading homily would rattle through the questions.

“Boys, what’s the opposite of up?” he claimed to ask them. “Down” he reported their reply.

“The opposite of left?”

“Right.”

“The opposite of on?”

“Off.”

“The opposite of black?”

“White.”

“The opposite of love?”

“Hate.”

“No!” he’d thunder at the pulpit. “The opposite of love is not hate! Love is an act of giving! Love is the act of generosity! Love is the gift of labour or compassion or time! The opposite of bestowing generosity is not the bestowing of malice… the opposite of bestowing generosity is the withholding of it!” He’d pause for effect despite us having heard the sermon only a week ago.

“Selfishness!” he’d intone, his hands shaking on the lectern, “Is the opposite of love!”

I’ve come to realise that these contrived words, this well-worn sermon, still lives within me. I carry it with me everywhere, but mostly I carry it with me when I go to sex parties. I carry his words into queer, orgiastic fuck-clubs. I carry them, leather and mesh-clad, while I reach for the lights, while I dance and feel the surge of the poppers or ket of just the sheer joy of a room full of queer bodies grinding against me. I carry the old priest’s words into dimly lit rooms, sanctuaries and sepulchers of men and women (and those both and those neither), those places to delight in the sensation of hot mouths against my skin, to I delight in the sweet satisfaction of plunging into another’s body, delight in the gasp of their breath and the clench of their core at the twining of our sexes.

This great cavalcade of lust and want only works if I’m considering the needs of others. The hard-earned circumstances of my life allow me a range of lovers, flings, fuckbuddies and hookups. I’ve seen so many embrace this life but through anarchy, so many who are satisfied by the declaration “I’ll be responsible for my own feelings and everyone else can be responsible for their own!”.

I see how easy it is to take this path.

It’s easy to focus on only you own emotional needs, only your own experience, and abdicate all responsibility for those around you. It’s easy to pretend that should harm come to them you are absolved… because it was their responsibility to take care of themselves, right?

Sounds super safe. Sounds really healthy. Sounds completely and utterly ethical.

I’ll get down off my high horse and admit that I’ve made mistakes. Just this week I apologized to someone who’d ghosted me two years ago. A chance encounter in the street led to me buying them a coffee and telling them I’d known I’d not been respectful all those years ago, how I disregarded boundaries of theirs. I explained how I knew it in the moment, knew that we should’ve stopped and re-looked at the lines we were crossing, but I let my sad, pathetic, desperation to be validated win out. I told them they deserved an apology and, despite their wish to also carry blame, I asked that they blame me. I didn’t ask for forgiveness, didn’t ask for absolution, only that they should consider themselves blameless. They deserved better than what they got from me. Their shame and regret was result of my actions and thus my responsibility.

Later they messaged, telling me it felt like a part of their soul had been healed.

I felt it too… and all I had to do was take responsibility for the shitty thing I’d done.

I sat with another lover over lunch and discussed how the complexities of our lives was making anything more than friendship untenable. Too much upheaval in our lives, too much change. Casual, intimate fun has a way of becoming an emotional life boat when the seemingly unsinkable ship in your life does exactly what you thought it would never do. We’d had such spectacular connection, delightful discoveries, but right now we could see how leaping into bed would lead down a path of dependency that could never be adequately fulfilled. So we took responsibility for each others feelings. They’re not the first lover I’ve had some version of this conversation with and they wont be the last.

I’d like to think the reason so many of my ex-lovers persist as friends is because of the time taken to talk through it, to validate how everyone feels. So much so that sometimes these flings, these dalliances are as easy to exit as it was to fall into. Sometimes the wild rambunctious fucking seems to happen spontaneously, bodies coming together, colliding like a couple of taxis on main street. Sometimes after the torrid want is satiated you settle back into a comfortable rhythm of friendship. A friendship that seems no different than it was before, save for the fact that now you’ll sit just a little closer, or that you’re not as shy to hold that hug a little longer. Sometimes all that changes is the warmth of their smile, that signal of safety and compassion from sharing your most vulnerable self and finding nothing but generosity in return.

I don’t want to be “Hurricane Seán” sweeping into people’s lives, lavishing them with attention, fucking them senseless before departing in a trail of devastation. No care, no consideration? Goddamn it would be so fucking easy to pretend to take responsibility for yourself, framing it as “self-care”, and not willing to “do emotional labour for others”.

My high-school priest was right… Love is an act of generosity.

As such I will love many, I will adore many, I will continue to fuck this extraordinary procession of wild, fascinating people, and I’ll do it with a generosity of heart. I’ll do it this way because I carry the words of this long-dead missionary, a man who could never begin to imagine the magnificence of the life I lead, a life that he’d likely think as being wicked and vile. But hey, I’m a generous sort, so it’s easy to say that I agree with him on this…

“The opposite of ‘love’ is not ‘hate’. The opposite of ‘love’ is ‘selfishness’.”

–S