This week’s newsletter is inspired by the need for unbundling passion, breaking traditions, freelancing and polyamory. And true to theme, this is a bit polyamorous - I serve you bits of several seemingly unconnected things.
Where I come from
Growing up, I had a distant cousin who dabbled in many different gigs for a living. This was way back in the early 2000s, before freelancing was even a thing. I think my family was quite concerned about her not holding a main stable job. The unspoken goal in life was to not end up like her.
I come from a fairly traditional household. I don’t mean orthodox. We are big on traditions kind of like Hritik Roshan in K3G. Tradition is so deeply imbibed in us that it almost feels wrong to not order a soup (by2), masala papad, gobi manchurian, kulcha and a mixed vegetable kadai exactly in the same order, when I go to a restaurant.
Breaking free
When I got married, I started exploring new cuisines and it wasn’t easy to follow my inherited ordering template. This was also a time when microbreweries became a thing in Bangalore and delicious appetisers became accessible to “family” crowd, so sometimes I’d never get to the main course.
But now, we have other problems - too much choice, we don’t concur on what to order. Hey, with freedom comes responsibility.
Embracing the appetiser culture
For the longest time (may be the last 70 years or so here in India), we’ve accepted monogamy as the way we do things. Nothing wrong with that. But the problem with it is that it makes any other form of relationships seem abnormal.
Take polyamory for instance. Sounds like the English cousin of adultery no?
But… it’s not quite.
For the uninitiated, Polyamory (from Greek πολύ poly, "many, several", and Latin amor, "love") is the practice of, or desire for, intimate relationships with more than one partner, with the informed consent of all partners involved. It has been described as "consensual, ethical, and responsible non-monogamy”.
The need for polyamory is fairly simple - it’s absurd to expect one human to satisfy all needs of another human, so some people like to hedge their bets with multiple partners. It’s sort of like choosing to fill your stomach with a bunch of different appetisers and skipping a main course altogether, which is okay.
Maybe it’s not that simple
Although we come from the land of Draupadi, her many husbands and their many more wives, today, polyamory is at best a blackmarket scene in India. When you don’t talk about something openly, it becomes harder to learn who’s in and who’s not.
As emotionally and logistically complex that polyamory can be, challenges that plague this market are fairly basic - alignment of intent and discovery.
A poly friend told me that if a couple wants to find love outside of their marriage, the man is most likely to find women who are cheating on their husbands and the woman is most likely to find men who are single - either yet to be married or divorced. This is ideally not what poly people are looking for, but they settle for what they can get.
My appetiser story
Recently, I was talking to a friend about work, and we instantly connected. I definitely saw material for a side project because I knew he had a full-time obsession already. So, I didn’t hesitate to propose a little exploration together.
That’s the thing about connection, you don’t really know where it’s meant to take you or how long it’s meant to last, you just know that you find someone interesting enough to start walking with them, and you’re comfortable figuring out what comes off it along the way.
Unfortunately, it turned out that my friend wasn’t in the same place as me - he wasn’t looking for a side project. He was looking for a full-time co-founder. He couldn’t afford to explore, not after having failed as an entrepreneur once.
His opportunity cost was far higher than mine. So, as life may have it, there was no alignment of intent and we didn’t pursue building a venture together.
Strangely, it reminded me of the challenges of finding love in polyamory.
Solving for discovery in polyamory
Knowing that I am in the relationship space, my poly friends say that it would be so cool if there were an app to find people who are genuinely poly, and all you ever had to worry about is building good communication within the group.
But I wondered if easing discovery would steal from the joy of falling in love?
Had there been an app that connected partners looking for side projects, I would have never connected with this friend at all, because he wouldn’t have been on one such. However, even though our collaboration didn’t work out, my conversations with him were a beautiful thing, I wouldn’t trade that for the efficiency of an app.
When you’ve experienced instant connection, it’s hard to have an app arrange that feeling for you. You can be on an app where all you ever share with others is intent, but continuing to pine for an organic connection like you’ve experienced once before.
So, if you’re polyamorous because you enjoy the experience of falling in love, being on an app to find love may not work.
Sneak peak into what I’m reading:
The stationery shop by Marjan Kamali - This is a love story set in 1953 Tehran that is depressingly familiar, yet not really. It’s about young love, and how its memories are hard to erase, may be because we don’t want to erase them.
How Corona virus is changing the dating game - Exploring possibilities with lower expectations is always a good thing. This is the story of only a small number of people, while most others have carefully stayed away from the market to give themselves a break, which is much needed sometimes, I tell you.