relational anarchy

Five hundred years ago, La Celestina was a radical play that championed the right to marry whomever you wanted for love, in an era when most marriages served other purposes. Similarly, in the court of Louis XIV, only the king's closest and most trusted men were allowed to wear heels, and a hundred years ago, pink was defined as a masculine color. This is how Alejandro Thompson, an educational psychologist and relational anarchist, our interviewee today, begins .

We evolve (or devolve), our ways of relating change, what is supposedly considered the norm is constantly being modified, and we are discovering new models and formats of relationships. All of this leads us to talk about monogamy, open relationships, polyamory, and relationship anarchy. Does our DNA really dictate how we should relate? What are relationships like from a relationship anarchy perspective? Are we born monogamous, or do we become monogamous?

What is Relational Anarchy?

Relational anarchy builds on theories of political and social anarchy to deny hierarchy within relationships. They give up all kinds of expectations and pretend not to differentiate relationships into categories; There are no relationships of friendship or love, they all have the same importance. This does not mean ignoring commitment, as Thompson explains a posteriori, but balancing all relationships without comparing or classifying them, and assuming that neither component wants to hurt the other, therefore, there is no reason for mistrust.

Interview about non-normative relationships

Do you consider that monogamy is natural or intrinsic to our nature?

If we were to take a truly traditional approach and go back to the origins of our species, many anthropologists would point out that there is nothing intrinsic to human beings that indicates we are a monogamous species. I would direct your attention to books like * Sex at Dawn* by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, two anthropologists who argue precisely that in the beginning, human beings were communal and polyamorous.

What I do believe is that our capacity to love is something very personal, individual, and tied to our identity . There are people who can only have monogamous relationships because the intensity with which they love is only capable of being dedicated to one person, and that's okay.

But I also consider that there are many people in monogamous relationships who have not known an alternative and feel suffocated by them. I believe that, like sexual orientation and gender identity, everyone's form of relationship exists on a spectrum from monogamy to relational anarchy and that it varies depending on how each person feels and defines love, in my opinion. opinion is not a choice, it is not possible to force someone to feel love in a certain way.

What do you think determines whether a person tends towards monogamy or other types of non-normative relationships?

No one can be forced into polyamory or relationship anarchism out of conviction, just as no one should be forced into monogamy as is currently the norm . Becoming polyamorous or relationship anarchist is not like becoming vegan.

Polyamorous, relational anarchist or monogamous, you just need to take a good introspective journey to discover it, what I jokingly call “mental origami”, just like sexual orientation and gender identity. There are a lot of polyamorous people in the closet who don't know it yet and who suffer in their relationships. The only thing I defend is that relationships are not toxic, that there is emotional intelligence and that care is taken with co-dependence. This can happen in any relational way, it is not unique to any type of relationship.

How will you know which relationship model suits you best?

I believe that there are people who, after performing the “mental origami”, come to the conclusion that they are monogamous, that they are only capable of feeling certain feelings at a certain intensity exclusively with one person, and that is perfect.

But I also believe that there are external influences that are gradually eroding and that make invisible any type of relationship that is not monogamy, whether in your cultural, social, political or religious environment.

There are far more monogamous relationships than monogamous people, and that's because that's how our societies frame it . As with almost everything, norms are an illusion and a prison for many. Breaking free from the idea that norms exist is crucial. The basic philosophical questions to ask oneself to discover one's own relationship style are, "What is love to me?", "Are there different kinds of love?", "What does falling in love mean to me? " , etc. And if you want to examine how much external influence affects each answer, ask yourself, "Why do I think this way?" By maintaining this Socratic dialogue with yourself and being honest in your answers, you discover how you feel and what kind of relationship you most identify with.

Is it possible that a person who considers himself monogamous can have a relationship with a person who is not?

Yes, resounding. As human beings we like symmetry and we tend to think that both parties in a relationship have to be symmetrical, if this is not the case we tend to think that an injustice is being committed or that someone is taking advantage of someone.

For a monogamous person to be in a relationship with someone who isn't, they must be aware of how they feel about love, feel very secure in their relationship, and understand that their partner's love is never in question or invalidated simply because their partner loves other people. In fact, they might even be happy for their partner when they share that they've met someone interesting or special and not feel threatened . We talk a lot in this society about jealousy, but very little about compersion (not understanding), which is its opposite feeling and means precisely feeling happy when someone you love is happy with someone else or doing something unrelated to you . A monogamous person may not want, be able, or need to feel such a deep connection with other people, but they can understand that their partner does, and I find that very beautiful.

What is a relationship based on relational anarchy for you?

Relationship anarchy is often classified, wrongly in my opinion, within polyamory. But there is a fundamental characteristic that differentiates them. In polyamory you have several love relationships, but they continue to be distinguished from the rest of the relationships in your life, in relational anarchy they are not.

Every relationship is a conversation between two people that begins to develop from the moment you greet someone . An essential component of all forms of anarchism is the questioning of what has already been established and categorized for analysis and evaluation. A relational anarchist views every relationship without categories or orders of importance. This doesn't mean you have the same relationship with your landlady as you do with your father or your best friend, but rather that all of them have been built upon the conversations you've had with them. The degree and nature of the commitment established with each of these people is different, and you might consider your relationship with your best friend more important than the one you have with your boss, but even that can change by the end of the month.

The important thing is that you choose to share time and activities with different people but, for me, when you reach certain levels of intimacy, trust, etc. you begin to not distinguish which person is more important. because they are all equally important.

The absence of hierarchy is noted in that love equals friendship. I have a very romantic vision of friendship that makes me think that for me friendship is the form of love with the highest level of purity. Just as Valencians only call paella Valenciana paella and the rest is rice with things, I feel that friendship is love and the rest is love with things.

On a theoretical level, RA sounds fascinating, as well as polyamory, but are there any kind of guidelines that can be followed to learn to lead this type of relationship or is it perhaps something that one is born with? “Are you born or made anarchist/polyamorous”?

An anarchist/polyamorous person is discovered. We are born without knowing how we feel, without the tools for introspection. With luck, we develop emotional intelligence and critical thinking that allow us to examine ourselves and decide how we are most comfortable and why we are more comfortable in one way or another. Is it external influence, upbringing, or an internal and unshakeable feeling? Exploring and discovering oneself is fundamental to knowing how one feels and how one feels; it is a matter of identity.

To what extent are insecurities related to the desire to have a monogamous relationship? Do confident people tend to have less normative relationships?

They're not related, and they're not. We all have insecurities. Some people are terrified of being alone and jump from relationship to relationship to avoid it, whether they're monogamous or polyamorous flings. To explore yourself, you have to question things, and to question things, you have to be unsure of the answers . Neither insecurity nor security is good. You can be confident and an unbearable narcissist, or you can be insecure but live with your insecurity honestly, and it's completely unrelated to how you relate to others.

Another of the premises of Relational Anarchy is that “Radical relationships must have conversation and communication as their central axis, not as a state of emergency that only appears when there are “problems”. Shouldn't all relationships be like this? Why are there so many communication problems between normative couples?

Conversation is the basis of every human relationship, whatever its type. The conversation can be divided into components such as intellectual, affective, intimacy or physical. Sex is nothing more than a physical and intimacy component of the conversation you have with a person.

We often avoid communicating our feelings because of how they might affect others or for fear of being contradictory, because we aren't even sure what we feel. Other times we procrastinate until we have something concise to say. We're all affected by the idea that if we're not clear about something, if we're undecided, it's not worth communicating. But I think it's important to reclaim indecision and contradiction as something human and say, " I feel this way, I don't know why I feel it or if it has anything to do with you, but I feel it. Maybe tomorrow I'll feel the opposite and I don't know why, but perhaps in the future I'll figure it out ."

Any relationship, whatever its type, benefits from honesty, although such honesty may harm the other, if we feel something contrary to the terms of the relationship and we risk having to re-examine those terms and, therefore, to end the relationship or to see it differently. I think that when you are in a monogamous relationship there is more at stake when it comes to communication, which increases that risk and therefore that fear, but I do not think that the lack of communication is exclusive to monogamy.

Do you have any kind of question that a couple can ask when trying to have a deep conversation or a guide to start a healthy relationship, whatever it is? 

I would begin by establishing that talking to that person is a safe, judgment-free space, that both people love each other, and that nothing said will change that . Then, we would need to practice empathy to understand how they feel and conceptualize love with them, including whether or not there are different types of love.

Then it is necessary to examine if these two visions are compatible and in what way, symmetric or asymmetric, and be honest with the result.

To people in closed relationships who want to open their relationship and have asked me, I always say the same thing: “Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re ‘opening’ the same relationship you’ve had. You’re ending that relationship and starting another one from scratch with different terms .” They always tell me that this advice has helped them.

If you want to read the full interview, here it is: Thompson's full interview.

You might be interested in these series about LGBT content.

Resources to understand Relational Anarchy

• The book by Juan Carlos Pérez Cortés, relational anarchy. The revolution from the links.
• YouTube channel of Juan Carlos Pérez Cortés

• CLARÍN EDITORIAL, (2018) Free love there is not one. What is relationship anarchy and why does it completely change the way we look at love relationships. Clarín. Viewed at: https://www.clarin.com/entremujeres/pareja/anarquia-relacional-cambia-completamente-mirada-relaciones-amorosas_0_GPqiiWfe0.html