Updated Dec. 5, 2024 at 6:25 p.m.*
BUENOS AIRES — Why and how would a couple choose polyamory? The reasons may be diverse but in this case, the answer may come as a surprise: “We opened the relationship because we believed there was a possibility of changing the world,” the protagonists said.
Juan Pablo D’Orto and Cecilia Figlioli are part of a foursome that also includes Florencia and Sebastián. The four of them live together and raise a son.
D’Orto and Figlioli are well-known in the world of polyamory in Argentina, as pioneering researchers into the socio-cultural origins of our notions of love and relationships. They created the Polyclinic (la Policlínica), an advice center for anyone curious about the possibilities of polyamory, and co-authored La revolución sexoafectiva (The Sexual-Affective Revolution), which explores social themes including concepts of fidelity, marriage, romantic love and patriarchy.
From monk to multiple partners
Twenty years back, it would have been unexpected to put it mildly, to find Figlioli and D’Orto in a polyamorous family.
For more than five years, D’Orto was a monk, before leaving the monastic life to begin a traditional monogamous relationship with Figlioli, a friend since high school.
It took them time and many questions before they would consider opening up the relationship. When they understood not only their own feelings, but also the sheer weight of cultural factors over what is said to be “natural,” there was no turning back.
Polyamory and open relationships should not be seen as a threat to anything.
All the “good things” in the history of sexual and affective relations, says D’Orto, are “constructions, tools created by people who said at some point, ‘we’ll make a new way of relating to one another, of saying we love each other or of starting a family, raising children, living together or sharing our lives.’ Those constructions always entail better possibilities than the ones we had.”
But first there is a transition period, he adds, in which “things aren’t always easy, and there is pain.”
He says we should expect “resistance to changes” and controversy around new relationship formats. But polyamory and open relationships should not be seen as a threat to anything, he adds, being “new ideas, new processes and new forms of self-organization that haven’t come to destroy the family, the couple and certainly not love, but to give them new possibilities.”
Traditional privileges and infidelity
At the Polyclinic, the two are constanting resolving queries and prejudices on multiple and open relationships, and what they see most is resistance to family-style configurations outside the traditional family model.
Rejection is partly to do with ignorance, they say, but other times it comes from a fear of losing “privileges.” D’Orto suggests intimate relations are often unequal in the terms of the give-and-take, and a “part of society [resists] because it’s having a ball and says ‘I don’t want my partner to have what I have.'”
He mentions male infidelity as the classic example. Few men, D’Orto says, could tolerate the wife who “washes… cooks for the kids, and takes them to the kindergarten while I’m with the other [woman], wanting an open relationship.”
Male infidelity is “organized,” he says, but that is now starting to happen with female infidelity. Cecilia points out that “infidelity is a part of monogamy.”
Active and participatory
Prior agreements are usually cited as part of the non-monogamous relationship, its transitional processes and mutations. But Figlioli is surprised that talk of an evolving relationship is usually restricted to the issue of sexual partners.
There is a lot of confusion, she says, “and we see it a lot at the Polyclinic or in the workshops we do. When they talk about couple agreements it seems the only thing to be agreed on concerns ending sexual and affective exclusivity.”
And yet a crucial element that needs agreement in a healthy and pleasurable relationship is respect for personal spaces, and that, says Figlioli, was becoming an increasing focus of discussion in both monogamous and open relationships. She says a “satisfying relationship has to do with the possibility of having those personal spaces that are autonomous from the couple.”
People often think they have a pact but they’re really prohibitions or exercise of control.
Monogamous relationships, she adds, can become stifling precisely for the lack of “autonomous spaces. A relationship needn’t be open to be satisfying, but what it does need is to not have someone watching over you. Sometimes it feels like people are living with the police. ‘Where are you going? Where were you? Who were you with? Exact location?.'”
Relationships, Figlioli says, should be flexible, consensual and for specific situations. People often think they have a pact, she adds, “but they’re really prohibitions or exercise of control through agreements in an open relationship. Agreement must be active and participatory. There is no sense of consensus when it’s always the same person proposing and the other one saying yes or no.”
Matters of the heart
Figlioli says it’s “fundamental to understand the context or world we live in, and that means considering monogamy and its origins in socio-political and historical terms.”
She adds, “nobody believes us, but we opened the relationship because we believed there was a possibility of changing the world.” The couple did research, she adds, including its own field research, by proposing a relationship model “based on non-possession, consensus, consent and communication.”
Romantic love, that sum of ideas that sustain monogamy, didn’t always exist.
It wasn’t always easy. Initially, Figlioli admits she felt jealous while D’Orto “was in Narnia.” A project like this won’t work, she says, “if you don’t change your ideas, because it has to do with how you see the world. It seems as if couple matters are ‘matters of the heart’ when in fact, the monogamy we know today relates to a specific political, economic and social period in time. Romantic love, that sum of ideas that sustain monogamy, didn’t always exist.”
Today, Cecilia Figlioli and Juan Pablo D’Orto’s polyamorous household also includes Sebastián, Florencia and a 12-year-old boy they’re raising together. In almost 20 years as a couple, “a lot of people have come and gone.”
They stress that the family is itself open, allowing each member to have relations with others outside. And how is all this explained to their child? He knew everything “from the first day,” they tell us, adding they’re entirely in favor of Argentina’s integral sexual education law, “and whatever else he asks, we tell him.”
*Originally published Oct. 24, 2024, this article was updated Dec. 5, 2024 with enriched media.
