Letter From America III

Brother Gbenga, you are assuming many things, and I will beg you not to. I am not a man, as you concluded in your reply to me. I am a woman. My name is Marissa Inyang-Brown, and I am a Nigerian American. I am Christian, like you, and I am not in any way pushing an agenda. Stating the obvious should not be something we frown at if indeed we want to make an impact on our generation and the society at large.

You have been patient with me with your responses, and I can sense you are growing weary of me in a way.

Please don’t be.

Like I said, “We are the ones who use our selfishness to make laws that go against nature. A river has its natural course, but man will dam the river and pretend that by damming it, he is not affecting other things that used to enjoy free access to the river unencumbered”.

You can make laws against nature and condemn the flow of reality under religious dogma, just know that nature will still have its way, whether in the secret or in the open.

I have refrained from using labels in my descriptions because I know how quickly people lose interest in facts once they are able to label them.

I am not polyanything, and I am not monoanything

I am only talking as a human being who is seeing a problem and looking for a solution that will help all of us live in freedom and enjoy that freedom within the acceptable boundaries of decency, faith, and the life of God, which we all share.

I accept that every individual has a right to choose, but nobody can be compelled or should be compelled to be like every other person. Labelling your own choice as godly despite its unfairness and labelling the choices made by another person as ungodly is the issue I am asking you to pay close attention to.

I am not here to advocate same sex marriage or sexual relationships between human beings and animals.

I am writing to you about the nature of human natural relationships between men and women. How it is naturally and why we ought to allow it to flow without forcing everybody to fit into the bottleneck of monogamy.

A person can be attracted to multiple people without acting on those feelings (spoiler alert: if you’ve ever developed a crush while already in a relationship, you’re not broken. For some people, that’s simply how attraction works.)

If you are either male or female and you have the following convictions or views about life, you are likely not naturally monogamous.

1. You view your love as an infinite, replenishing source

Some people see love as a limited resource: if you give it to someone else, there’s less left for your partner. I experience it differently. To me, love feels expansive — something that grows the more it’s shared.

Some people naturally experience love as something that expands rather than divides. They see love as an infinite, replenishing source that they can give to people. If this resonates with you, you are not crazy. You are just being yourself.

If you have found yourself saying…

“I have so much love to give.”

“I have so much love for you.”

To some people, loving someone deeply means that love must be protected, guarded, and reserved only for one person. The logic is simple: if love is limited, then giving it to someone else takes something away from your partner.

But for others, love doesn’t feel like that.

It doesn’t feel like a slice of cake where giving someone a piece means there is less left for everyone else.

To me, it feels more like a fire.

The more you share it, the more it spreads. The more warmth it creates.

Loving another person doesn’t subtract from the love you have for someone else. It doesn’t dilute it, weaken it, or make it any less real. If anything, the ability to love deeply often expands your emotional capacity rather than reducing it.

This doesn’t mean loving multiple people is always easy. In fact, it often requires more emotional awareness, more communication, and more responsibility than most traditional relationship models demand.

But the core mindset remains the same.

Love is not a scarce resource.

Attention might be limited. Time certainly is. Energy absolutely is.

But love itself? Love is something many people experience as regenerative.

And if you’ve ever looked at the people you care about — friends, family, partners — and thought “My heart somehow keeps making more room for all of you”, then you may already understand what this feels like.

That experience — the sense that your capacity to love expands rather than divides — is one of the perspectives that often leads people to explore.

Not because they want more partners. But because they recognize that their ability to love was never designed to fit into a single box in the first place.

2. You can develop feelings for multiple people without feeling less love for your partner

Some people have to fall out of love with one person before they can fall in love with another person, and some people can be in love with multiple people at the same time, with their love for one not affecting their love for the others. Most parents love all their children this way, and some people in a relationship love their partners that way.

Some view their love as an infinite, replenishing resource; you may find yourself having attraction or desire (usually physical for men, emotional for women) with multiple people… even when you’re already in a “monogamous” relationship.

So if you find yourself developing crushes even when you’re in a monogamous relationship, there is nothing wrong with you. It’s simply how human attraction works)

What truly matters is if you act on it or you don’t.

I remember once, an ex-partner of one of my best friends told me that being this way is just an “excuse” to cheat.

Later on, we found out that he had been cheating on my best friend.

With multiple women.

And it was not an isolated case; it also happened in his past relationships. Oh, the irony.

To be continued...