Agamia: a totally free way to live relationships

With the passage of decades and the expansion of welfare societies, new ways of loving have appeared. Yes before it was practically an obligation to marry a person of the opposite sex and having children (or dedicating one's life to a god), today the creation of affective bonds is much freer.

Homosexual marriage, for example, means that regardless of sexual orientation, one has the same rights when it comes to getting married, while the option of not having a partner is increasingly accepted socially (although there is still a certain stigma about single women from certain age). In addition, in recent years proposals such as polyamory or relational anarchy have begun to question the idea of ​​romantic love and a traditional monogamous couple.

However, for some people there is still a long way to go to make freedom in affective life something really present in our societies. It is from these kinds of positions that the concept of agamia, an idea as revolutionary as it is controversial.

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What is agamy?

Agamy is, fundamentally, the absence of what is called fallow deer, which is a union between two people that has marriage as a point of reference. In courtship, for example, is an example of fallow deer, since culturally it is seen as a prelude to marriage, but there are many other similar cases.

For example, the relationship between two lovers, who are not formally considered a couple, is also fallow deer, in the vast majority of cases. Why? Because they cannot remain indifferent to the possibility that oneself, or the other person, seeks to formalize the relationship, and accept that possibility as something normal, which should condition their way of behaving in front of the other. After all, sex is no stranger to fallow deer, but rather it is what has given rise to its existence.

Something as simple as pretending disinterest in the other person in specific cases, for example, is usually a way of trying not to give the image of a person in love: courtship and marriage act as background noise in the face of what needs to be positioned.

Thus the defenders of agamy they tend to criticize the idea of ​​polyamory pointing out that, in practice, it is a way of loving having as a point of reference the traditional gamic relationship. Ultimately, all sorts of names and labels are established to define each of the forms of polyamory according to the degree to which they resemble each other. to the traditional monogamous couple, pointing out types of commitments that only make sense if they have internalized the affairs based on love Romantic.

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The relational standard of marriage

From the point of view of the defenders of agamy, our way of seeing love is conditioned by the strong cultural roots of marriage as a way to regulate affective life. For example, when we refer to the world of emotions, the word "relationship" speaks of a bond Typically based on romantic love, of which marriage has always been the ultimate expression.

To refer to other types of emotional ties, it is necessary to add adjectives, specifications that leave Of course, what is being talked about is not exactly a couple in love: friendship relationship, professional relationship, etc. Marriage continues to be the axis of affective relationships, that which serves as the maximum reference and that is impossible to ignore. At the same time, this class of links based on the fallow deer they create norms in other relationships: there is adultery, for example, seen as a violation of the norms in a non-formalized relationship through marriage, or the poor social acceptance of being attracted to someone who is married.

In other words, it is considered that there is only one possible choice: or agamia, which is the rejection of any relational standard in the affective (because in practice they are all based on the same), or the fallow deer, in which everything is measured according to the extent to which a bond resembles a courtship or marriage.

Love, seen from the agamic perspective

In agamy, what we normally think of as love is seen as just a concept that has emerged from of the expansion of a very concrete way of creating emotional ties: romantic love linked to marriage. From this perspective, our perception of affectivity is neither neutral nor innocent: it is judged from a relational standard based on marital-type bonds.

Thus, from the objective existence of matrimonial type bonds, a series of social norms, thought patterns and beliefs have appeared that, without realizing it, condition our way of living affectivity in all areas of our lives, both in monogamous and polygamous societies.

Marriage, which has historically been a way of perpetuating lineages (until not so long ago, directly trading with women, by the way), was seen as a material necessity to survive, and from this fact ideas and customs appeared to justify this practice psychologically. As the generations passed, the idea that relationships affective are either marriage or substitutes for it, so that today it is difficult to abandon the reference of fallow deer.

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A freer affectivity

The concept of agamy is striking because it is as simple as it is challenging. On the one hand, to define it, it is enough to say that it is the absence of unions inspired by marriage and courtship, I operate on the other hand, it is difficult to realize when these internalized mental schemes, based on sex, are acting Y the formal link regulated by collectively created rules.

Who knows if, as we have access to more comfortable lives and with less need to depend on the family unit, agamia becomes general.