Livre d'Or

So, the thing is that I am for several reasons excluded from Kiddushin. I can't have a halachically valid Jewish marriage, and therefore anything I do at all involving sex, romantic connections, whatever, is going to involve being somewhat creative about how I interpret halacha. And I'm going to attempt to summarize 20 years of wrestling with that, so it's not a simple question.

In my late teens I was starting to think about how I wanted to approach sex from a Jewishly informed, ethical standpoint. And I knew I was bi, I hadn't fully worked out everything about my identity and I still haven't, but I'm definitely attracted to both women and men. The basic halachic stance available to me is that I'm not allowed to have any sort of physical contact whatsoever with any men. I'm niddah, and I have absolutely no way of dealing with that because what mikveh in the world is going to immerse a non-Orthodox, unmarried woman? (OK, maybe that's an exaggeration, I think there's one place in LA, maybe, but certainly no mikveh in Europe is open to me.) On the other hand, pretty much no authority has any sort of issues with me doing anything at all with women, except maybe the Rambam who says that sex between two women isn't tznius. That's pretty much untenable for an egalitarian bi woman; I did consider and reject the option of essentially political lesbianism, but in the end decided that I was going to try to cobble together something less gendered but still within a Jewish framework as far as possible.

What I held to for a while was that I had sex only with people who were in some sense hypothetically permitted to me, people I "could have" married if I decided to get married. (At this time I was assuming I'd never marry, in fact, for reasons that aren't relevant here.) So I had sex in committed, publicly acknowledged, (serially) monogamous relationships with other Jews, who were not married to anyone else. But that still didn't deal with the issue of taharat mishpacha, and it felt like a weird compromise.

I broke up with my last long-term partner in 2004, and for a while I didn't have sex with anyone, in large part because I still wasn't entirely comfortable with how to reconcile my own ethics with the halacha. An then I had a brief and not as exciting as it sounds phase of having casual, or at least non-relationship, sex with non-Jews. At this time I was getting more involved in Queer communities and questioning relationship norms a bit, and still didn't expect to marry ever. Equally I was developing an idea of sexual ethics that was based a little bit on Musar and a little bit on Levinas, which mostly boils down to, treating sexual partners with the deepest continuous respect I can muster, never defaulting to using someone else's body for my pleasure, but treating all sex as profound intimacy with a fellow human being. That's a standard I still try to live up to, and it's certainly starting from my Judaism, but I can hardly call it halachic.

And then one such relatively casual connection turned into a serious relationship and eventually he asked me to marry him. And I spent about half a year trying to decide whether it was acceptable to me to marry a non-Jew, and I came down on the side that I was willing to make that commitment to my now husband as a life partner, although obviously we can't be married Jewishly.

There's AFAIK no plausible halachic basis for consensual polyamory, most certainly not for a woman to be involved with more than one male partner. It is completely assur for any married person to condone a partner's adultery as much as to commit it. But my marriage isn't Kiddushin anyway, so it's at least ambiguous what "adultery" means in this context. I'm not at all sure what I would do in the hypothetical case where a Jewishly married, Jewish man wanted to be in a poly relationship with me (assuming I had spare space for new relationships at all, which right now I really don't!)

Poly, for me, to some extent arises out of my commitment to Levinas-inspired love and respect for my partners. From where I am at the moment, it feels wrong to lay a claim to someone else's body or to restrict what connections they may want to form with other people. And of course people may mutually agree to be monogamous, I haven't forgotten that moral option though I have moved away from it.