The Journal Of The InnKeeper

Reminder: A very large portion of poly people did not come to polyamory through "opening up a relationship".  There are more than one avenue to discovering polyamory.  If you never "opened up" a relationship, you are not alone, and not even a tiny minority.

I know it seems like it, because "couples who open up" are the only ones who ever get any air time, but I promise that you are part of a very large segment of the community.  I am one of them.  I never "opened up" a relationship.  I discovered my own internal desire for ethical non-monogamy when I didn't have any romantic or sexual partners at all and every relationship I got into after that point was deliberately non-monogamous from the moment I entered into it.  My partner, Franklin, has just never had a monogamous relationship in his life.

There are so many of us that we have a diverse collection of stories of how our relationships look.  My non-monogamous history looks very different from Franklin's history, even though neither of us tried to "open up" a previously monogamous relationship.  We are not a small segment of the poly community, NYT articles to the contrary.

Also, not all people who discovered polyamory for themselves while not in a couple ultimately become solo poly. Solo poly is not synonymous with "single". Just FYI.

www.morethantwo.com/polyprisonersdilemma.html

I wrote a rant a while back about my observation of a gender-based set of tendencies in the poly community. This is basically what I was talking about - People socialized as men have a higher tendency to start out defensively while people socialized as women have a higher tendency to start out cooperatively. But I don't mean that in the emotional sense, because often there is no clear gender line between people who feel *emotionally* cooperative and people who feel *emotionally* defensive.

So, let me expand a bit on what I mean there.

"I tend to see a lot of people in poly relationships who are very uncomfortable with the idea of meeting a lover’s other lovers. This is one of the most common sources of angst I’ve noticed for people who are polyamorous, especially if they’re fairly new to polyamory.

Meeting a lover’s other lover presents a host of opportunity for cooperation or defection. You can reach out to the other person and try to make that person feel welcome; you can be closed up and defensive to that person; you can even be actively hostile to that person. And, of course, your lover’s lover has similar choices."

When it comes to people who think about the idea of metamours, and who feel uncomfortable with the idea of meeting the metamours, I, personally, have not noticed any gender differences. Newbies, generally speaking, feel all kinds of anxiety about meeting metamours - should they or shouldn't they? How should they meet? When? Under what circumstances? Etc.

But when it comes to *actually* meeting, I've observed that, in heteronormative relationships (regardless of the gender or orientation of the participants, these are relationships that fall into heteronormative traits, habits, patterns, can take advantage of hetero privileges, etc.), it usually falls to the women to making it happen. Women are the ones encouraging the men to meet each other, and women are the ones voluntarily reaching out to other women to meet (or ask in the forums how to go about doing so).

Not without trepidation, not without playing dominance games, not without anxiety. But actually *doing* the emotional labor in poly relationships, I see more women doing more of the work.

In my observations, men have a tendency to just wait around until their women partners instigate or organize some kind of event that will bring the men into proximity with each other. Where they might bother to chat, if they happen to be near enough to hear each other, but unless they find some kind of common interest that sparks curiosity and enthusiasm, men have a tendency to just leave it at that and not put forth much effort to go uphill trying to build connection that takes some effort and doesn't happen spontaneously and easily. And if the men are the pivot points, they just sit back and let the women meet or not meet.

But women as the pivots have a tendency, in my observation, to keep talking and prodding their men partners to meet. They're the ones who schedule the dinner date, or host a party, or set up Skype for the men to meet each other. And if the women are the metamours, they are less likely to wait for their pivot man to insist on meeting and they'll send an email to their women metamours, introducing themselves and arranging a coffee date, or whatever.

These observations are not related to how each person *feels* about meeting metamours and not related to the *strategies* each person employs in meeting the metamours. I've seen people of all genders play out dominance games or pull rank or be passive aggressive, and I've seen people of all genders have excellent communication skills and get along well with metamours.

It's the *labor* that's involved that I had noticed often falls along gender lines and that's what I was ranting about in that post. And it has been my observation and experience that, when the women do all this early emotional labor involved in reaching out and establishing contact, then shit gets done because the groundwork has been laid.

Sometimes the "shit" that's getting done is productive. The women build friendships and a level of trust that enables them to weather turbulence in relationships because they built a foundation to have faith that trouble will eventually be worked out. That foundation gives them a sense of resiliency that makes the metamour relationships more likely to be successful and closer-knit.

And sometimes the "shit" that's getting done is not productive, including hierarchical primaries laying foundations for rank-pulling and place-setting and generally undermining the relationship between their partner and metamour. This is when the traps for hierarchy are set for future snapping shut on the poor secondaries and when cuckoos get the eggs in place to push out of the nest.

My point was that "shit gets done" because they start the work early.

But when men, generally speaking, just kind of passively allow their women partners to take the lead, they end up not having these sorts of foundations with their metamours. And then if a conflict ends up happening (which it doesn't always, but if it does), then the men don't have that connection, that trust that they will find a solution together through collaboration. They see themselves as on an island with their woman partner, who sometimes sails over to another island and stuff just kinda happens over there, and then she comes back. They don't see themselves as really *part* of their metamours.

And when men passively allow their women partners to do all the emotional labor in facilitating their own metamour relationships, that adds to the anxiety and stress and *effort* of the women maintaining those metamour relationships. Regardless of whether they all start out cooperating or not, the women metamours in this scenario are doing it all on their own while the men pivots just sit back and let them hash things out. The women carry the burden of maintaining both their romantic relationships and the metamour networks.

I generally have good metamour relationships. Not without their bumps, but pretty healthy and collaborative. But I'm an introvert and managing a lot of emotional relationships is fucking *exhausting*. It would be nice to have a little help facilitating, especially in the beginning when I don't know my metamour very well and we haven't yet found our common paths.

Add to that, the effort I have to put in to maintain *other people's* metamour relationships, because without me poking and prodding, none of my men partners have ever reached out on their own to meet each other.

I take that back - Sterling often reached out without me prodding him. He would often ask me if it was OK to contact one of my other partners and he would reach out to them. But he's the most social extrovert I've ever dated and has none of the social anxiety or concern that people might find his reaching out to be intrusive.

I've dated other extroverts before (and, in fact, I prefer to date extroverts to compensate for my own introversion), but they were either too concerned with pushing themselves on people, they gave up after a lack of reciprocation, or they were simply too passive and content to spend their energy on their own friends and partners.

And I see this *all the time* in other people's relationships too. Once I started seeing the gender split, I couldn't unsee it and it makes me very frustrated at how poor men's communication and collaboration skills are, especially initiating.

But all of that is a side-step to the point of this link. This link is focusing more on the things that people actually *do* to or for their metamours, not the more abstract application of, basically, using the cooperation / defection as a filter through which I see emotional labor.

"In a very literal sense, you make the social environment you live in. People take their cues from you. Even in a world of people who adopt a hostile, defecting strategy, it is possible to do well. On your first move, cooperate. Open yourself. Invite this other person into your life. Only if it is not reciprocated—only then do you become defensive, and stay that way only for as long as the other person is defensive."

"It turns out that even in complex situations, the simplest strategies tend to work the best. In fact, consistently, the programs that were most successful were nice, meaning they never defected before the opponent; retaliating, meaning they would defect if the opponent did, but only to the extent that the opponent did; forgiving, meaning they cooperated and forgave if the opposing program stopped defecting; and non-envious, meaning they did not attempt to score greater gains than the other program."

The bottom line is to start out being nice to someone, start out hopeful and optimistic and see your metamour as an opportunity instead of a threat. If you do that, they are more likely to do it in return. Couples keep asking how to get their potential "thirds" and "secondaries" to "respect" the primary relationship? The only way to do that is to start out by respecting your secondary and their other relationships.

You *have* to give first. But unicorn hunters never want to hear that answer. They *think* that they *are* respecting their secondaries, but the very act of wondering how to *make* someone "respect" a preexisting relationship is an act of disrespecting the other person. You get respect for giving it.

And then, you have to let them fuck up at least once first. That's the Tit For Two Tats strategy that this link mentions at the end. Start out being nice. Then, when they fuck up, assume good intentions and continue being nice. Only after they show a pattern of operating in bad faith do you start reacting defensively, not before.

Intimate relationships are not a medieval war game. If you try to put up battlements first to "protect the primary relationship" from this interloper that you're hoping will "respect" you, you will lose.

War strategies are basically methods for how powerful people fight each other to stalemates - both sides shore up their own walls first and then warily eye each other over the spikes in the walls and promise to cooperate as little as they can possibly get away with before the opposing side decides to retaliate. It's a game of how much can you optimize your own wins before you lose them in a battle when your opponent gets pissed off at your optimization.

Intimate relationships are the opposite. It's a trust fall. You have to open yourself up to vulnerability and you have to be willing to be hurt for the potential greater payoff in the future. Because you WILL be hurt. Your partners and your metamours will fuck up and your tender side will be exposed. That's the nature of the relationship.

But the goal here isn't to optimize our own gains *in spite* of an opposing force. The goal here is to build a cooperative structure where sometimes one side loses a little but sometimes the other side looses a little too and it all balances out in the end where both sides come out further ahead together than they would have alone. This takes them out of opposing sides and puts everyone on the same side.

The goal is to get out of the Prisoner's Dilemma entirely and build up systems where cooperation is always in everyone's best interest, and voluntarily taking turns conceding is in everyone's best interest because it'll payoff in the next round, and everyone is on the same team.

"You were with your partner and all of his other girlfriends? Did you feel ... I dunno, alone without anyone there for YOU?"

I wasn't there alone without anyone there for me.   I had plenty of people there "for me".  My partners' other partners are not on "his side".  We don't face off like some weird poly West Side Story.  My metamours are MY metamours, not just his partners.  My metamours are my family.  Even the ones I'm less close to.  We've built our own intimacy together, our own relationships, our own bonds.  Between the strength of our ties and the length of time we have been together, "his side" is also "my side".

Because we're in this together.

After all my past breakups, I typically have 2 outcomes (with few exceptions I'll get to in a minute) when it comes to metamours: 1) I was socially friendly with my metamours while we were together but not really intimate, so when we broke up, my metamours and I remained socially friendly because the poly community is small and we continued to cross social paths.  Some have faded out over the years, but no real drama.

Or 2) my ties to my metamours got even stronger and, in many cases, both of us lost all contact with the guy who brought us together but became even closer post-breakup, turning them into metafores.  The term "metafore" is a portmanteau of "metamour" and "before". It means a former metamour whose emotional bonds are still close after the breakup so that they still feel like a "metamour" even though they are technically no longer.

Not all former metamours become metafores - only those who still feel like "family" so that you still want to call them by a familial name.  Metamours who don't remain that close but who are still friendly and metamours who lose ties completely don't have a special title - friends or "former metamour" is usually used.

One exception to these two outcomes was when my relationship to an abuser ended and I had to cut off contact with his entire side of the network in order to prevent them from passing along information to the abuser that would help him keep tabs on his victim (a former metamour of mine) with whom I was still in contact.

But even then, even knowing that they were enabling an abuser, the loss of that family was devastating.  The loss of my entire support group was even worse for me than the breakup with the boyfriend itself.  Other exceptions were when the relationship between the mutual partner and his ex was so toxic that she and I either also split apart because of the breakup or we were never close to begin with.    

Although, interestingly, one metafore relationship  really only developed long after I had broken up with our mutual partner AND as *they* were going through their own breakup a couple years later.  He had begun dating her too close to the end of our relationship for us to have the opportunity to get to know each other while we were both still metamours, but we became friendly after my breakup with him, and then when they broke up, she and I bonded and became close.  So really, our mutual relationship with him was practically incidental to becoming friends with each other.

I do not develop the same level of close intimacy with all of my metamours.   I and some of my partners over the years have been ... let's say popular.  I have not been able to keep up with everyone that my partners have dated, especially when you add in the short-term relationships that never really took off.  And even with some of the longer-term relationships, we didn't always have a lot of depth to our friendly and genuinely caring feelings.

But when I think of all the times I have spent in the company of the amazing people that my partners have liked and loved over the years, it's never felt like two "sides" squaring up.  I've felt that way when I was monogamous and I met a partner's family-of-origin for the first time, but not when I was poly, and I've occasionally felt that way when meeting a partner's *friends* when the social group is not also made of polys.

But hanging out with his other partners?  Not that I can ever recall.   I've never felt out of place, isolated, alone, overwhelmed, or ganged up on.  In the kind of poly that we do, I've always felt like we were all our own individual bodies, weaving in and out of each other's lives, and their presence adds to my own tapestry of life.

And honestly?  My luck and skill with choosing partners has been way less successful than my luck and skill at forging healthy, supportive metamour relationships.  It's kind of ironic, given my former Chill Girl "I just don't get along with women" status.  I mean, I have some good relationships with exes and some not so good, but the majority of my ex-metamour relationships are, at worst, fade-outs and not blow-outs while many transitioned to metafores.

So no, when we all get together, it's never "don't you feel alone without anyone there for you?"  It's more like feeling that we are all there for each other and all there as individuals, not on anyone's "side".

It's more like coming home.

#MetamoursAreTheTrueTestOfPoly #AmorphousSquiggle #InternationalPolyJusticeLeague #IPJL #MetamoursMakeTheFamily #gratitude

I have written about the benefits of metamour relationships before, and I recently wrote about my frustration with feeling burdened by the default responsibility to maintain metamour relationships, and I'm also working on the section of my breakup book regarding the metamour's role in a breakup.   So this subject in general is on my mind.

I just want to make it clear to any current, former, and future metamours that, regardless of what happens between myself and any partner, our metamour relationship is on its own merits.  If we find value in a connection, I will maintain that connection independent of what is happening between myself and the person who brought us together.

If we have largely unrelated orbits, I will not force a connection between us no matter what is happening between myself and the person who brought us together.

Our connection is our connection.  We may not have been brought into each other's circles if it hadn't been for a mutual partner, but the size of those circles and how we maintain them is between us.  Our connection may be *influenced* by what's going on between either of us and our mutual partner, because, as I said before, we are not islands.

But you are not my friend, or my distant acquaintance, or even someone I don't connect with, *because* of our mutual partner.  You were *introduced* to me because of that mutual partner, but what we are together is because of who you and I are as people.

From a comment I made in another thread about the lesson I learned about metamours:

I am generally friends with my metamours and some of them are closer to me than our mutual partner. 2 of my closest friends are metafores (a metamour from before) where that metamour relationship lasted longer and is closer than the mutual partner who brought us together.

All that said, if I have a metamour who is "a drama starter", that is not a problem between her and me, that is a problem between my partner and me because he would think that it's acceptable to be involved with someone like that.

All relationships bring conflict. I have conflicted with every metamour I've ever had at one time or another. Occasionally the personality conflict is big enough that we choose to merely coexist. The rest of the time, the conflict is like any other - we work it out and get through it.

Think of metamour relationships like in-laws. You don't have a choice who your in-laws are - they come with your partner. If your partner keeps a relationship with them, that's because they see value in those relationships even if you don't have the same value system. You can try to befriend them or you can largely ignore them, whatever you think is appropriate for in-law relationships, but they *will* affect your romantic relationship one way or another depending on how close your partner is to them.

And if you have a problem with your in-laws, then you really have a problem with that partner for choosing to remain connected to them. If the problem is not about how they're influencing your relationship but just about personality differences, then you work through it with them directly until you find a balance you can both live with.

Poly people like to think we're inventing the wheel, that no one has ever done anything like what we do before. But most of the skills necessary to navigate poly relationships are available to us through our other relationships and our other practices.

Metamours are basically in-laws. You can't make your partner choose your in-laws based on your preferences without overriding agency and utilizing coercion so you learn to deal or you recognize that the problem is between you and your partner for having incompatible relationship goals.



"Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

From April 30, 2019

Y'know what? Breakups are not any easier when you're poly, and not even when you have casual hookups.

I knew before we started that my FWB and I had an expiration date. I knew that it was always going to be literally good friends with some extra and then back to friends. I "knew the deal going in" and it was always a lower emotional involvement than other relationships.

By mutual decision and a calm discussion, it still fucking hurts to lose a relationship. Having existing partners, having a really good date recently with a new person and feeling some NRE and hope about its potential, knowing ahead of time that the end was coming, knowing ahead of time that it was always temporary ... none of this stops it from hurting.

Poly people are still people. Loss isn't any less painful just because we have other partners. Loss also isn't any less painful just because we accepted the price when we accepted the deal.

I'm fine. I'll heal. But today I'm going to be sad.

www.quora.com/What-is-the-safest-most-discreet-way-to-find-a-suitable-man-for-my-wife-to-have-sex-with-We-are-new-to-this-type-of-open-relationship/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is the safest, most discreet way to find a suitable man for my wife to have sex with? We are new to this type of open relationship.

A. For the love of whatever you find holy, don't "find a suitable man for [your] wife". She is an adult woman. She has her own preferences, desires, opinions, needs, wants, and boundaries. And since it's her body and her experiences that'll be involved here, none of those things have anything at all to do with you.

I know, I know, "but she's my wife! What happens to her affects me!" Sorry, but in this case, it has nothing to do with you. She is the sole arbiter of her. Only she should have any say at all in what she does with her body, mind, emotions, and time. If she loves you, she'll take into consideration how her actions with another affect you, but ultimately, this is something that is happening *to her*. It's something that *she* is experiencing, not you. You are not relevant in this equation.

Therefore, you should not insert yourself into this experience for her - not to "find a suitable man" for her, not to control or dictate the encounter, not for anything. This is all about her, not you. Stay the fuck out of it.

As for "safe" and "discreet", several online dating apps are adequate for people looking for hookups. Your wife (and her alone) can create a profile sharing what she (and only she) is looking for, and she can be a grown up and do her own homework on vetting potential partners.
She chose you, didn't she? Either she is capable of finding her own partners that are good enough for her, or she isn't. If she isn't, that says something about you. If she is, then let her go about her business and trust that she loves you enough to take care of her relationship with you.

Relevant:

• You Can't Be Trusted - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/294586.html


• Before We Open Up, Let's Discuss Some Boundaries - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/359151.html


• It's Not All About You - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/313759.html


• Don't I Get A Say In Their Relationship? - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/311860.html


• But We NEED Rules To Keep People From Lying To Us! - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/310810.html

Related:

• What Kind Of Partner Will You Be When Your Partner Wants To Do Something Scary? - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/371654.html


• How do you bring a healthy third person into an existing marriage? - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/368069.html


• It Is Never OK To Restrict Someone Else Even If They "Agree" To It - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/363349.html


• On Autonomy And Agreements And "Boundaries" In Poly Relationships - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/359626.html


• I Love You, Just Don't Disrupt Anything - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/275094.html

www.quora.com/Are-you-in-an-open-relationship-If-so-what-is-the-most-challenging-part-for-you/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Are you in an open relationship? If so, what is the most challenging part for you?

A. Having to constantly answer questions about how “difficult” my relationships are, or people wondering how I deal with jealousy or scheduling … basically dealing with other people thinking that I’m doing anything at all different in my relationships than they’re doing.

I have relationships, just like everyone else. Some of them are effortless, some of them take work, some of them are totally wrong for me, some of them are bliss, pretty much all of them are some combination of the above, just like everyone else.

The only difference is that I have more than one romantic relationship at a time. Everyone has more than one relationship at a time - you all have parents, siblings, friends, coworkers, in-laws, relatives, exes, co-parents, etc. You all have to manage and juggle multiple important people in your lives. Those relationships are all different from each other, even when they have similarities.

We are having all the same relationships and they feel the same way to all of us. I’m just overlapping my romantic ones, that’s all. There’s nothing more or less challenging about my multiple romantic relationships than about any of my other relationships or about other people’s relationships.

www.quora.com/How-do-I-decrease-jealousy-to-a-minimum-when-in-an-open-relationschip/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. How do you personally deal with jealousy in your open relationship?

A. The same way I deal with any negative emotion - by introspecting and talking it out until I find the root cause, and then I address the root cause.

Honestly, it’s like people think jealousy is some magical mystery compulsion that comes over people from out of nowhere and totally takes them over like a brain-eating parasite or something.

Jealousy is just an emotion. So is anger. So is sadness. It’s not magic, it’s not a curse, it’s not a parasite or a disease, it’s just an emotion. We have emotions, we deal with them. Monogamy never prevented anyone from feeling jealousy either, I just don’t try to control my partners when I feel something negative. I look at it head-on and actually solve the problem.

www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-to-be-in-an-open-relationship/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Have you ever been in or seen an open relationship that worked?

A. These are always such weird questions.  Even though the divorce rate for monogamy is around 50% (for first marriages, it’s way higher for second and third marriages) and basically 100% for every relationship prior to the marriage, and even though abuse runs rampant in monogamous relationships, and we all know and have all been in relationships that ended and that the people came away with regretting ever getting into, nobody asks “have you ever been in or seen a closed or monogamous relationship that worked?”

And, as someone else already pointed out, you have to define what you mean by “worked”.  Some people think that the only marker for a “successful” relationship is if somebody dies.  Personally, I think that’s rather gruesome, but some people seem to think that one person outliving the other, no matter how happy or unhappy the people were before death claimed one of them, makes a relationship “successful”.

I’m of the camp that thinks any relationship that makes the participants feel content or satisfied with the relationship for the majority of the time together and/or accomplishes the goals they set out together, is a successful relationship, no matter how long it lasted.  As the saying goes - sometimes people come together for a reason or a season in addition to those that happen for a lifetime.

If I have a relationship with someone and we have certain goals or purposes for our relationship, and we accomplish them and then go our separate ways, happy with the outcome, that relationship would be successful to me.  If I have a relationship with someone that lasts only for a short time, and life then takes us in different directions, but we were happy and satisfied with our relationship while we were in it and content with the way that it ended even if we are also saddened by the separation, that would also count as a successful relationship to me.

By those measures, I’d say about half of my relationships since I started having polyamorous relationships have been successful, including the relationship I have with my spouse, who I’ve been with for over 14 years now (and in an openly poly relationship from the beginning).  One of my former romantic partners has transitioned to a platonic friend and business partner and we are writing a book together on how to break up ethically.  I’d say my relationship with him is one of my greater successes, as we’ve managed to find a way to make our relationship work for us through a bunch of different life stages and different needs from each other in ways that we are both happy with.

I’d say that’s also a pretty average track record for all of the poly relationships of all the people I’ve known in all my years as a community organizer in the poly community (which means I’ve known a TON of poly people).  Considering poly people have the potential to have more partners than monogamists do (unless someone is a *very* active serial monogamist) since we can overlap them, having a 50% or better success rate is pretty good.

However, since most monogamous people I know consider the mere act of ending a relationship to make it a failure, I’d say that, of all the monogamous people I’ve ever known (and since this is mostly still a monogamous society, I have also known a TON of mono people), the vast, vast, vast majority of monogamous relationships I’ve ever seen have not worked (using their own definition for “worked” or “worked out” or “successful”).  50% success vs. way more than 50% failure might imply that open relationships are probably more successful than monogamous ones.

The truth is, that all relationships work or don’t work because of the people in them, not because of the structure.  Some people are compatible together, many people aren’t, some people are compatible only in certain kinds of relationships (while many of those kinds of relationships are prohibited by the culture around them so they often don’t even get to try the one where they might actually “work” out), and some people are compatible together for a while and then less compatible as they grow and change over the course of their lives.

It’s never the structure of the relationship that makes it “work” or not “work”. It’s the people in the relationship.

www.quora.com/Have-you-ever-invited-another-person-into-your-marriage-If-so-what-was-the-outcome/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Have you ever invited another person into your marriage? If so, what was the outcome?

A. No, because it’s not possible.

People seem to think that they can build a house (a relationship) with someone, get it just the way they like it, then decide that they want it a little bit bigger, and merely add on a rumpus room to the back with no extra muss or fuss so that the house is mostly unchanged, just a little bit bigger and with little inconvenience to those who already lived there.

That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
 

Each relationship is its own thing, and requires nurturing in order to thrive. Even when 3 or more people are all romantically involved with each other, it’s not the same house just with more rooms. It’s more houses, perhaps all on the same property but sometimes not even that.

The more successful open relationships (and I define success by the happiness and satisfaction of the participants both during and after a relationship, not the longevity) operate on principles of individuality and respect for agency. Only when people who are partnered can see themselves as whole people, not halves of a whole, not partial people, not a relationship construct, are those people capable of having dynamic, vibrant, healthy, nuanced, 3-dimensional relationships with other people.

The people you get involved with deserve to be involved with a whole person, not a construct. They are not “joining your marriage”, they are relating to *you*, a human being, and anyone else they are getting involved with as well. That’s multiple relationships to maintain, not one giant relationship blob that just gets larger and subsumes everyone in its path.

I was polyamorous before I met my now-spouse. We got into a relationship as poly people and the relationship was polyamorous from the start. He and I have always had other partners and we had other partners when we started dating. Since we are both straight, the odds of us both dating the same person are almost nil.

However, one of his other girlfriends and I have a queerplatonic relationship that basically looks like a romantic relationship in all respects except for the sex. She was not “invited into our marriage”. He met her years ago at a kink convention that he and I and his other girlfriend attended. They hit it off. They began dating. She and I knew of each other through online poly communities, but after they started dating, we became very close and will remain “family” even if one or both of us ends our relationship with our mutual partner.

She is not a part of “our marriage”. She has her own relationship with him and her own relationship with me. Same as all of his other partners and he does the same with my other partners. Most of the metamours and metametamours (a metamour is one’s partner’s other partner) know each other and have friendships or other kinds of independent relationships with each other, so we have a large family dynamic together.

But each dyad, each partnership is its own relationship. And that’s the only way that each relationship can remain healthy.

Read these articles:

www.quora.com/For-women-would-you-move-into-a-house-with-a-couple-that-share-a-3rd-female-and-that-would-make-you-the-4th-female-All-share-a-bed-and-have-sex-with-each-other-Why-or-why-not/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. For women, would you move into a house with a couple that share a 3rd female and that would make you the 4th female? All share a bed and have sex with each other. Why or why not?

A.

1. I could not live with people who “share” other human beings like they’re a milkshake to be shared on a date.  I could not trust them to treat *me* as a human being, because they have clearly shown they are willing to dehumanize people for their own gratification.
    
2. I could not live with people who call women “females”.  There’s a whole body of literature on what’s wrong with that term.
    
3. I could not live with people who assume that cohabiting automatically means “would make you the 4th female”.  The question assumes that “move into a house” necessarily implies a polyfidelitious arrangement.  I’m not sure what kind of houses y’all have been living in, but I’ve had a number of roommates and housemates, some of whom were also romantically involved with each other, and never was simply “move into a house” defined as “would make you the 4th female”.  In order for that to happen, there would have to be an invitation to join their polyfidelitious relationship, not just live under their roof.
    
4. I am straight.  I am not sexually attracted to women.
    
5. I have autonomy.  To require me to have sex with anyone, even if they were the gender of my orientation, is coercive.  Even when I do enter into a romantic and sexual relationship, I still retain the ability to give and revoke consent at any time.  Sex is never a *requirement*.  If, at any time, someone is required to have sex with anyone in order to maintain their housing, that is deeply coercive indeed.  Certainly I would never get into a relationship with someone where sex with *other people* is required in order to maintain the relationships I want.  That’s really fucked up.
    
6. Even though I do enjoy group sex, I do not enjoy it all the time.  Every relationship needs to be nurtured on its own, which means that each of the 4 people in that house needs to be able to explore their individual relationships with each other person independently and each of those relationships needs to be able to grow in whatever ways that relationship wants to grow.  Forcing all of the relationships to be the “same” is also coercive and codependent.  So even assuming my orientation matched *and* I was interested in a sexual relationship with each person, I still wouldn’t join a group that expected group sex all the time.
   
   I was actually in a relationship that did that in a defacto way.  It was quite toxic and insidious.  They never said that group sex was expected or required, but they all insisted on spending so much group time together that nobody ever really got any alone-time with each other, and every time someone had sex without the others present, somebody would have some kind of emotional crisis about being “left out” or “abandoned” and it took weeks of tears and arguments to make everyone feel better again.  It was so bad that I eventually lost interest in sex completely because it was a minefield.
    
7. I have several sleep disorders.  I do not co-sleep well.  I always have my own bedroom for my own health and sanity.

In short, there is absolutely nothing about that scenario that is appealing and everything about it is a red flag for an abusive situation.  And I say this as someone who has a spouse that is a straight man who has (at least) 2 other partners where the 4 of us get together and have some kind of kinky group sex.

The difference is that there is no cohabitation, no expectations or requirements of co-sleeping, definitely no coercion where everyone is required to all have sex together (the 3 of us women are not actually in direct sexual relationships with each other, we are just all in a relationship with him), and none of us are treated as objects to be “shared”.  We all respect each other’s autonomy and see each other as human beings, not “female” animals, sex objects, need fulfillment machines, nannies, bang-maids, harem members, or possessions.

Every word in this question drips with entitlement, assumptions, misogyny, and co-dependence.  I wouldn’t enter into a scenario like this if I was homeless and desperately needed a place to stay for survival.

www.quora.com/Couples-who-have-stayed-in-nontraditional-long-term-relationships-swingers-poly-etc-How-do-you-feel-about-your-relationship-now-What-would-you-tell-young-couples-who-choose-that-lifestyle/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Couples who have stayed in nontraditional long term relationships (swingers, poly, etc.) How do you feel about your relationship now? What would you tell young couples who choose that lifestyle?

A. I feel content, satisfied, excited, loved, aroused, humbled, and inspired by my relationships now. Notice that I used the plural there. Because I’m polyamorous, I have more than one relationship.

I am not a couple. I am not half of a couple. I am a whole and complete person who also has partnerships with other whole and complete people. I have my own identity, my own agency, my own autonomy, as do my partners. Because we are whole and complete people, we are *able* to enter into mutually satisfying and fulfilling partnerships of equals and we are able to design the kind of relationships that make us happy. One cannot have ethical relationships with half-entities or incomplete people.

As Jessica said, if you’re starting out as a couple, you’re already doomed. I would tell all new “couples” that they need to first disentangle themselves and find their identities that they have subsumed into their relationship before trying to engage with other people, regardless of the style of non-monogamy or non-traditional relationship they’re interested in.

Everyone you get into any kind of relationship with deserves to be in a relationship with a whole and complete person, not a relationship construct.

Rediscover your identity. Take back your autonomy. Become whole and complete people who are in a partnership with each other. And *then* try something different.

The Most Skipped Step[s] When "Opening A Relationship" + 1

I would also tell people in couples that it is not possible to “open up” an existing relationship. All relationships are between individual people. You have to deconstruct your relationship first and then reconstruct it as a new, “open” version (whatever version that means for you) where two individual people are now in a relationship that accommodates whatever non-traditional format you’re pursuing.

You might have to literally break up first and then get back together with a renegotiated relationship structure. Practice saying that: “we are not ‘opening up’, we have deconstructed and are reconstructing a totally new relationship that is open to X”.

"Opening Up" A Relationship Doesn't Work, Try This Method Instead

And then basically read everything I write under my Couple Privilege and Unicorn Hunter tags on my blog (which, to be fair, has some strong overlap):

Entries tagged with unicorn hunting
Entries tagged with couple privilege

Mostly I tell young people not to try polyamory.  It’s not really something that you can just “try”, like test driving a car.  The car has no feelings about your inexperienced handling of it and subsequent return to the dealership.  These are real people you’re “experimenting” with, and we don’t like being people’s chemistry experiments.  We’re usually the ones who get blown up in the lab when you make a mistake and then decide that open relationships aren’t for you and you go back to your comfortable, safe, monogamous couple.

While nobody knows for sure what they want if they haven’t done it before (and people are notoriously bad at predicting what will make them happy), I would rather not see anyone “try” open relationships.  I would rather see people taking a really good, long, hard look at themselves, really considering all the options, and deciding that this is something they feel, down in their very soul, that they need to be doing right now.

They don’t have to decide for sure that they definitely *are* poly, or whatever.  They don’t have to decide ahead of time what their relationship structure will look like (in fact, please don’t do this either).  They don’t have to make a choice that they will be forced to stick with for the rest of their lives.  They just have to decide that they will be jumping, all-in, when they make that leap, that this is a decision they are wholeheartedly embracing, regardless of the outcome.

They can have some wibbles, some concerns, some doubts, some fears.  Courage is not the absence of fear.  It’s acknowledging the fear and then doing it anyway.  But when “couples”, or people go into open relationships and leave a “back door” open for themselves, that makes the people they are asking to entrust them with their hearts (or their bodies) disposable.  That’s a Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads.  That’s not fair, or ethical, for anyone.

If you can hear the cautionary tales and people like me saying that this is not a decision to make lightly, that you are responsible for how your actions affect those you get involved with, and you think about the type of relationships you’re attempting to have and you still really want them and feel like this is the right path for you to be on, then great.

But if you’re doing it because someone you love wants to and it’s the only way to keep them, if you think it might be “fun” to “try something new” or “spice up your relationship”, or you think that maybe you could be willing to explore something as long as there is a safety net for you to fall back on … don’t. Just … don’t.

And one last thing - listen to the community.  New couples have a tendency to come up with an idea and then relentlessly pursue it, while the veterans in that relationship style tell them there are better ways, and the new couples get mad at the community for being “mean” nor “not accepting” or “intolerant”.

Look, you’re not the first one to try this.  You’re also not a special snowflake who can somehow make all the same mistakes that thousands of people before you made but will come out of it with different outcomes.  The veterans are telling you things that often they wish they had known before starting out.  We’ve learned the hard way so that you don’t have to.  If the whole community is telling you that you’re “doing it wrong”, or you feel that everyone is against you, it’s probably something that *you’re* doing, not everyone else.

You’re going to have to learn some humility here and learn to listen to hard things from people who have been there, done that, wore out the t-shirt.  There is a *reason* why communities develop community wisdom or trends for how things are done.  You don’t need to burn your hand on the candle flame (or worse, burn someone else’s hand because you wanted to play with fire) - we learned a long time ago that fire is hot and how to play with it safely.  Listen to us and you’ll decrease the chances of anyone getting seriously burned.

https://poly.land/2017/06/22/crumple-zone-partners-bear-impact/

This feels like a very surface-level introduction to something that I've been complaining about for some time.  I don't have time to go into it more right now, but I think this will become inspiration for a longer post.

"if a person within the web is particularly skilled at doing emotional labor? They’ll often end up as a lightning rod for it."

"Folks who are in emotional crumple zones are the ones others worry the least about upsetting or hurting.  Not because they don’t have feelings.  And not because they don’t get hurt easily.

Indeed, many folks in the crumple zone are actually quite sensitive — to their own emotions and to the ones of those around them.  But the reality is that their own hurt feelings don’t cause inconvenience to others."

In my case, it plays out that I take responsibility for my own emotions and don't expect other people to "fix" me or do something about a problem that's internal to me.

The double edge to this sword is that I end up dating men who *like* the fact that I don't make them responsible for my own emotions.  But how is that a bad thing? you might ask.  Well, it becomes a bad thing because it attracts both emotionally mature people AND people who don't like to do any emotional labor in relationships and expect their partners to do it all for them.

So my partners get complacent that I'll do the work on myself and compensate for their lack of relationship management skill and they coast along in a relatively drama-free relationship.  Until I have an actual problem that requires their participation.   Suddenly it's all "drama" and "I can't handle this right now" and "I'm overwhelmed, I need to leave" and "you're too much work".

My last major breakup was with someone who ghosted me slowly.  After not having seen him in literally months, I asked him to tell me what kind of time commitment he *could* agree to.  He insisted that our previous agreement of spending a long weekend every other week at my house was doable.

After another couple of months of still not seeing him, I mentioned one date night per month, where we leave the house and do something that requires focused attention on each other. One date night per month.  Another month or two passed by with not only not seeing each other, but he also just stopped responding to my text messages.   I finally got to see him when he felt obligated to a favor he had agreed to a long time prior.

In that confrontation, his response was to accidentally admit that his video game time was taking precedence over my request for one date night per month of concentrated attention.  You see, I was fine to spend time with, as long as he didn't have to feel any inconvenience from my feelings.  As soon as I started expressing unhappiness at his lack of participation in our relationship, he got "overwhelmed".

When we saw each other regularly, he told me how soothing it was to be in my presence.  But when he stopped seeing me regularly and I started expressing sadness and disappointment, he pulled back even more to avoid facing my inconvenient emotions.

My most recent "minor" breakup was with someone who I knew would feel challenged by polyamory.   So I was as up front with him as possible, telling him that there would be challenges, but that I would work with him every step of the way.  After all, he was the one who insisted that he try, and I quote, "all in with an emotional connection or nothing".   I would have accepted a quick rebound fuck and moved on, but he insisted that it had to be a "real relationship" and I was dubious at his ability to handle that.

Just as I started to let my guard down and show him my vulnerabilities as part of this intimate relationship he insisted we have, he tells me that "a relationship shouldn't be this much work" (keep in mind we *hadn't yet actually started dating*, we just had 3 dates where we talked about what we were interested in) so he's getting back with his ex-gf because she already knows him and won't put any demands on him to grow or challenge his preconceptions of love.  Of course she won't, that's why he dumped her in the first place - he was bored and envisioning a lifetime of beige.  But now, faced with potential "challenges" and "growth", suddenly that life without challenge seemed safer.   Yes, he actually said all that.

I am always the partner who has to deal with my emotions on my own.  I'm the "poly veteran", so obvs I'm an expert and don't need help.  As soon as I exhibit any difficulty or ask for someone else's help in managing the relationship, I become "inconvenient", "challenging", and "difficult".

I'm the one people date because it's so "easy" to be in a relationship with me ... until it's not, and then I'm the one that gets dumped because fuck forbid my partner have to take the reins for a while and give me a space to be the mess in the relationship.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-helpful-rules-youve-ever-seen-or-used-in-an-open-relationship/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper?ch=1&share=5b18055e&srid=B7tY

Q. What are the most helpful rules you've ever seen or used in an open relationship?

A. I’ve never seen any helpful rules.  I’ve discovered that if a person wants to do a thing, a rule against it won’t stop them.  If a person genuinely wants to be the person you want them to be, then you don’t need any rules telling them how to be that person.  The most successful open relationships I’ve seen in all my decades in the poly community as an activist and educator tend to not have “rules”, if by “rules” you mean “you agree to this kind of behaviour and I agree to this kind of behaviour”.

The most successful open relationships I’ve seen tend to have good boundaries.  By “boundaries” I mean “this is how I want you to treat *me* and I will pay attention to how you want to be treated by me.”
 

But rules where the people’s behaviour for anything other than how they treat each other?  I’ve never seen any that were helpful.  As I said, if a person naturally didn’t want to do something against the rules, then a rule isn’t necessary, which means it’s not helpful.  If a person does really want to do a thing that’s against the rules, then the rule won’t stop them, which means that it’s not helpful.

People only follow rules for as long as they want to.  If they want to, they don’t really need to make it a rule.  If they don’t want to, the rule won’t stop them.

Q.  I’m interested in your comment that a person should introspect and possibly speak to a therapist about why polyamory isn’t right for them. I’ve tended to think of mono/poly as an orientation like straight or gay - do you see it differently?

A.  Polyamory is both an orientation and a description. It can be the type of *person* someone is, and it can also simply describe the *structure* of the relationship that a person is in. You do not, necessarily, need to be in a relationship that matches, exactly, your orientation. I’m not a swinger, for example, but I am in a relationship with someone who is, and our relationship structure more closely resembles a swinger relationship than a poly one.

There are some people, like me, who cannot be anything other than poly, and some who cannot be anything other than mono - meaning that it doesn’t matter how awesome the people around them are, that person simply does not develop romantic feelings for more than one person at a time. The switch for desiring other people just shuts off.

Most people are somewhere in the middle. They might have a preference, but could, under the right circumstances, be happy in a healthy relationship of either type. But the catch there is “under the right circumstances”. Because of the way that monogamy is perpetuated and revered in this country, most people are monogamous not because they’re “hardwired” that way, but because they have some serious insecurities and biases and assumptions about love and relationships and about themselves. These traits may go so deep that the effort to undo all that programming may simply be too much effort to bother trying to deprogram them, so *effectively* there is no real difference between this person being “naturally” monogamous and being trained to be monogamous.

But sometimes these traits can be unlearned. IF the person wants to unlearn them. It takes effort, and most people just don’t want to put in the effort. You can see it when people say “I couldn’t do that, I’m just a jealous person”. Jealousy is just an emotion, and dealing with jealousy is a skill that anyone can learn. Nobody says “I could never be in a non-monogamous relationship, I’m just an angry person”, even though someone with anger management issues most definitely would have trouble maintaining healthy relationships of any sort.

But jealousy holds an almost magical place in our culture of being an immovable, inevitable, overwhelming force that revolves around insecurity. Insecurities fight for their existence. They will convince you that you can’t live without them, that your very identity depends on having them.

It goes something like this: I don’t like pickles. I don’t want to learn to like pickles. Because then I will want to eat pickles. And I hate pickles. So that would suck.

So the reasons *why* someone does not want to be in a polyamory relationship matters. If the reason is “I simply don’t fall in love with anyone new once I’m in love with someone”, then they’re naturally monogamous. But that sort of monogamous person can actually be in a healthy poly relationship and be happy in it. We even have a term for that - mono/poly relationships. Just because their relationship is open, it doesn’t mean that anyone is *required* to have other partners.

If the only reason why they’re mono is because they don’t fall in love with more than one person, but they have no issues or insecurities or jealousy or anything about their partner, then a mono person of this sort can be happy in an open relationship where they don’t have any other partners, but their partner does.

But if you ask people why they don’t want to be in a poly relationship, you will get a range of answers, some of which include things like “I’m just a jealous person” and “I believe a woman owes her body to her husband” and “I just think you should care about what your partner does with other people” and things that reveal some deeper issues with bodily autonomy, agency, possession, misconceptions about what love is and about the role that sex plays in love, and a variety of other things.

These kinds of issues make for unhealthy monogamous relationships too, btw. So even if the person goes through therapy and ultimately still decides that they would rather have a monogamous relationship, working out these kinds of issues is still an important process.

I'm reading 19 Weeks, a kinky erotica novel by Franklin Veaux, where a woman suspects her husband of cheating on her, so she tries to catch him in the act, and in the process, discovers that their affair turns her on. But she's still really angry about the cheating, so she finds herself confronting them when she catches them, and instead of automatically threatening him with divorce, she insists that they owe her 19 weeks of catering to her desires since they spent 19 weeks ignoring hers for their own.

The story is an emotional processing of people who make some bad choices whose consequences lead them to a surprisingly functional D/s/s relationship with the woman in charge of her husband and his "concubine", as she ends up being called.

The story is pretty hot, but I'm straight with a slight gay male fetish. So, while re-reading it today, it occurred to me that I could make a few tweaks to the story and get a tale that would appeal more to someone like me.

In my story, the woman suspects her husband of infidelity, and she hides out in the house, waiting to catch him in the act. But what she doesn't realize is that her husband's new lover is another man.

While watching them start to have sex from her hiding place with the camera she's using to collect evidence for the eventual divorce, she discovers that voyeurism of two men gets her really aroused, and through the course of the book, she's forced to confront some of her assumptions about gender roles and orientation now that she recognizes this fetish.

As she is processing her anger and her surprising arousal when she confronts the two men, instead of simply threatening her husband with divorce, she somehow ends up demanding that the two men basically become her sex slaves to make up for the fact that they started their affair with no concern to how their behaviour would affect her.

Never having any experience or exposure to the world of kink, this experiment of hers unlocks desires she didn't even know she had, and leads her to discover kinks and fetishes she never knew existed, as our diminutive protagonist doms the fuck out of two much larger men, who bow to her every wish.

Except ... one time, she makes a mistake and crosses a line. As newbies will while they learn themselves and everyone's limits. She crosses a line and, overwhelmed with all these new conflicting feelings of shame, resentment, guilt, and a surprising desire for being dominated, the men rebel at their captor and collaborate to take her down - in a scene that both frighten and arouse everyone with its intensity of pleasurable feelings.

As she discovers a new kink she not only didn't know she had but would have been horrified to think anyone could actually *like* engaging in only a few weeks before, she decides to include this new activity of the men ganging up on her into their new routine ... except it will be done at *her* pleasure from now on, as she discovers a new vocab phrase - topping from the bottom.

What will happen after the time limit is up and everyone has served their time? Will she release them and the men go off together, without her? Will she try to "save her marriage" and go back to the way things used to be once their debt is paid, leaving the Other Man discarded and alone? Or will the three of them find a balance point, now that they know that this kind of arrangement can even exist, let alone work out?

I'm sure anyone reading this can guess where I would take this story if I were writing it.

Unfortunately, I am a pretty good writer, but erotica is not my area of expertise. I would love to read this book, though.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-basic-standard-rules-of-dating-concerning-seeing-more-than-one-person-at-a-time-Is-it-acceptable/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What are some of the basic standard rules of dating, concerning seeing more than one person at a time? Is it acceptable?

A. There are no “basic standard rules of dating … more than one person at a time”. Everyone does it differently.

However, there are some basic standards of *ethics* and those apply regardless of how many people you’re dating.

1. Don’t treat people as things. Other people are autonomous, sentient beings with their own agency. They are not supporting characters in the story starring You. They do not exist for you and you are not entitled to them or anything that belongs to them. Even in the context of a relationship. They are people and they are their own person.


2. Be honest with them about your desires, boundaries, limitations, and expectations. And in order to do that, you will need to also be honest with yourself about these same things.


3. Give other people the information they need to give informed consent to anything they do with you, including enter into a relationship in the first place. This is related to #2 because giving this information with people requires you to be honest about what you can do, what you’re willing to do, what you want to do, and what you can’t / won’t / don’t want to do.
   
   This includes the type of relationship you hope to have, in this case - dating more than one person at a time. They need to know that this is the deal, have all the information necessary to make their own choices and decisions, be free of coercion to make said choices and decisions, and then to agree on a relationship structure with you. If they can’t say “no”, then a “yes” is meaningless. So they need to be able to freely say yes or no to everything, and for that, they need information.


4. Build relationships on empowerment for the people in the relationships. The people in the relationships should always be more important than the relationship itself. The relationship is not a sentient being, although sometimes it feels like our relationships can run away from us and they take on a life of their own.
   
   But they’re not. The relationships should exist to serve the people, the people should not exist to serve the relationship. So empower your partner(s) to have control over their own agency and to have an equal say in their own relationships with you.


5. If you do choose to see multiple people, you need to treat *every single one of them according to these standards of ethics*. It is not ethical to respect your partner’s agency, be honest with them, give them the info they need, allow them the space to consent, etc. while not doing all of these things with someone else. Always keep the locus of control over the relationship between the two people in the relationship.
   
   Yes, even if you have “a relationship” of 3 or more people. Because you don’t. If there are 3 people who are all relating to each other, you have 3 separate dyadic relationships and one 3-person relationship dynamic. Each dyad is its own relationship, so the two people in that relationship ought to be the only two people with the power to control the relationship that they’re in. Relationships can be *influenced* by other people, because everything is “influenced” by everything else. But where does the *control* lie? Who has the most control? If it’s not equally shared between the two people in that dyad, then it’s not ethical.
   
   Some people will try to give you a list of “rules”, such as safer sex rules, One Penis Policies, couple-centric attempts to “protect the primary” or “protect the existing relationship”. None of those are “standard”, they’re just common newbie attempts at managing emotions. The more experienced people who practice some kind of ethical non-monogamy tend to know better and tend to structure their relationships based on a foundation of ethics as I’ve started laying out above, rather than a list of rules dictating behaviour to make people “behave” in a relationship.

“The people in a relationship are more important than the relationship” and “don’t treat people as things” are the most important axioms in building ethical relationships. From these two principles, the other ethical standards follow - respecting people’s agency, relating with consent, be honest, empower your partners, treat all of your relationships ethically not just the one that started first, etc.

If we could make this the standard of *all* relationships, instead of seeing it as a fringe standard for a subgroup of relationship types, I think we’d have a whole lot more healthy and happy relationship partners than we do. Monogamous relationships benefit greatly from following standards like these, and polyamorous (and other ethical non-monogamous) relationships can’t be done without them.

But they’re really not specific to just being involved with multiple people. That’s why they’re *ethical* standards, not open relationship standards. But if you want your open relationships to be ethical, then follow the ethical standards.

https://www.quora.com/How-does-an-open-relationship-differ-from-a-polyamorous-one/answers/114146576

Q. How can you tell if the person you are with us in an open relationship or a polyamorous one?

A. Ask them.

Ask them “what kind of relationship are you in?”

Ask them “how would you describe your relationship?”

Ask them “what label do you use for your relationship and how would you define that label?”

Ask them “would you tell me more about how your relationship works?”

Ask them.

#SeriouslyItIsNotThatComplicated #JustFuckingTalkToEachOther #IMightBeALittleBitSnarkyTonight #LowValueQuestions
 

"OMG WHEN TRIADS DON'T GO EXACTLY AS SCRIPTED THINGS GET HARD AND COMPLICATED AND MESSY AND HOW DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT TO DO AND WHY IS THIS THING BAD BUT THAT THING IS GOOD AND WTF?!"

This is why triads are not beginner relationships.  They're super complicated and super difficult and super challenging and there are tons of little nooks and crannies and shadowy corners for abuse and consent violations and unethicalness to hide in.

It takes a *really* advanced, nuanced understanding of ethics to navigate all the complexity of triads (or even quads, or any other geometric shape where everyone is involved with everyone else).  Shit goes wrong.  People gonna people, and what people do best is unpredictable things like have emotions that they weren't supposed to or not have emotions that they promised to have or make decisions that they post-hoc rationalize as totally "logical" but are really based on all those messy emotions. 

This shit is hard and you need advanced relationship skills to navigate it when you start adding more and more people to the equation.  Things don't get "simpler" when everyone is involved with everyone else, things get even more complicated than if they were all just dating individually.

And if you don't understand that (hence the need to ask questions about ethics in triads), then you're not ready for a triad relationship.

BTW, there's very little that's more poly (outside of poly-specific and/or sex-centric activities) than a swing jam.  I keep talking about how partner dancing is both a good analogy and good training for poly relationships, but a swing jam is about as poly as it gets on the dance floor.

A handful of dancers wait on the floor while everyone else forms a circle around them (usually they're people with birthdays that month or some other special thing that singles them out).  Then the music starts, and someone from the outer circle jumps in to dance with someone inside the circle.  As they dance, another person preps and, without allowing the dancer to miss a beat, takes their partner's place.

It's kind of like a swing dance version of double-dutch jump rope, where kids have to jump in and out of the ropes while they keep spinning, and a line forms with kids who all take turns with one person jumping in as another jumps out.

Some good-natured "competition" can happen between the partners who are cutting in, with one partner cutting in very quickly so the other partner cuts back in almost immediately instead of letting a third person cut in.  But it's always done in fun.  And sometimes a "tandem swing" happens, where one person dances with two partners at the same time.

The dancers in the circle have to all be aware of the other dancers around them and how they impact and affect everyone else.  They are all there to have a good time.  The partners pay attention to who is there before them, so that they don't cut in too soon and cut someone out of a decent amount of dance time.

The partners also pay attention to who hasn't danced yet and they wait before taking a second turn to make sure others have a chance to dance with the person in the circle.

There is so much awareness of what people are doing that affects those around them and of what the other people are doing that could affect their own decisions on where to be and how to move, and consideration for those who came before and those who will come after, and sharing and switching out partners and joyful play and fun competition and healthy cooperation ... a swing jam is really very much like watching polyamory in motion.

I wish more poly people would get into dancing.

(I know there are more poly dancers out on the West Coast and some in the UK, but that doesn't help me here in Florida or, apparently, anywhere else in the world since only those two locations ever chime in to "correct" me when I complain about the lack of poly dancers.  But my point is not that there aren't *any* dancers who are poly or polys who are dancers, but that the greater poly community would benefit from a stronger overlap with the dance community, in general, because of the lessons to be learned through dancing)

This one, btw, is only one person on the floor, but he's someone I happen to know personally. It's his 75th birthday jam and he even has a tandem in there:


I was actually in attendance at this dance, although I did not join the jam (I never do):


There's a dancer in a silver fringe "flapper" dress in this video who does a fucking amazing job of switching back and forth between lead and follow roles, depending on if her partner is a lead or a follow (and not always along strict gender lines either).

There is also a man wearing shorts and a lei I think who also switches back and forth depending on his partners. In relationships and in kink, I am a switch, but in dancing, this is not a skill I possess at all let alone during the same song and I greatly admire those who can.

My 6 Simple Steps to answer the question "how do you find people to start dating?"

1. Go to where the poly people are [or people who are whatever category of person you're interested in dating].
    
2. Be as open about yourself as you can in as many contexts as you can - other polys [or whatever category] nearby will find you.
    
3. Be open to meeting new people and trying new experiences, even if they don't meet some idealized image you have in your mind.
    
4. Be interesting and do interesting things. People are attracted to interesting people.
    
5. Treat everyone you meet as a unique individual. People find having their agency and humanity respected to be attractive.
    
6. Be patient.

This came at the end as a summary of a longer post, but I was writing that post on my tiny iPod and I don't think it's really that good of a post. My thoughts were kind of scattered and I didn't elucidate each point well or organize them well. That's how I ended up with this numbered list - I was trying to clarify and simplify the rest of the post.

So I'd like to rewrite it out for a real blog post. But later, because I'm still doing Halloween shopping and it's my one day off this week. In the meantime, here's the tl;dr version.

There is one good thing that seems to come out of most of my bad breakups.

If I have made any kind of connection with some of the women in my exes' lives, and those women aren't also total assholes (or haven't internalized the abuse he has subjected them to, causing them to side with their abuser and turn on his victims), then when the ex turns into a jerk during the breakup, sometimes the women reach out to me and I discover that I wasn't alone in being mistreated, and I end up building some pretty amazing friendships out of the wreckage.

My best friend is a metafore (metamour from before who still feels close enough that we don't want to give up the metamour connection even though we're technically not metamours anymore) whom we both broke up with our mutual partner for the same reason - his mishandling of all our various relationships.

I have another metafore who was smarter than I was and dumped his ass when he started to treat her the same way he treated me right before he dumped me.  Neither of us speak to him anymore, but I still consider her a good friend.

I also know a few other women who were friends with various exes of mine who have shitty breakup skills (or, at least, they did with me) who I felt that we got closer after talking about the breakup because they also went through some shit, but as a not-girlfriend while I was a girlfriend, maybe didn't have anyone else to talk to about our similar experiences until I was also not a girlfriend and they extended some compassion over the guy who introduced us.

I have quite a few former metamours with whom I am on good terms with, but whatever breakup that happened to separate us as metamours didn't fall into my "bad breakup" category for me, so it's not a surprise that we're still on good terms.

But there's something that seems to happen among women (probably our socially-required emotional labor skills that facilitate our relationship building even among extended acquaintances like metamours and partner's friend) when the dudes in our lives do shitty dude things and we reach out to each other for understanding, compassion, and healing.

Something that polyamory in particular has brought to my life as a huge bonus is a connection with women.  I was a classic Chill Girl, having exclusively male friends and all-male social circles, until I started having poly relationships.  Then, dating straight men, I was introduced to some amazing women through my male partners who I would not have gotten to know if we hadn't had that male partner bringing us together, since I didn't seek out women as friends.

Before I was poly, my experience with monogamous culture was that my male partners would tend to separate "girlfriends" from their women friends because monogamy, jealousy, possessiveness, etc.  So it had to wait until I started dating people who fundamentally did not compartmentalize or separate out the women in their lives and who had women in their lives that did not compete with each other.  Polyamory was the catalyst for me in finding these sorts of people.

Even when those women weren't poly themselves and they were platonic friends or family, it wasn't until I started dating polyamorously that I had the sorts of situations that fostered sisterhood bonds and taught me the value of relationships with women and non-cismen.

So, one thing that I can take away from even bad breakups, is that sometimes I get to build closer connections with women whom I would not otherwise have met if I hadn't dated a man they knew, and those closer connections came out of commiserating and expressing compassion and sympathy for said mutual man behaving poorly.  This doesn't give men an excuse to behave poorly, of course, but it does at least give me something to take away from a bad situation that will bring value to my future.

Thank you, "women" in my life, for all your emotional labor and Relationship Management skills.  Even though it's ridiculously unfair that we share the brunt of all that work, at least some of us recognize and acknowledge the value of that work and I am grateful for it.

I regret every day being one of the pioneers who championed the concept of "prescriptive hierarchy" / "descriptive hierarchy" (or prescriptive / descriptive primary / secondary).  I helped to make this whole confusion about power vs. priority in the poly community and I wish I had never heard the phrase or ever uttered it once I did.

There is no such thing as "descriptive hierarchy". It doesn't matter if you decide before you get a "secondary" or afterwards, if you are disempowering your partners (or are disempowered) in your relationships, that's bad.

It doesn't fucking matter if you say "It is my plan and my goal to disempower my future partners" or if you say "well I didn't plan on it, but I currently disempower my existing partners" - HIERARCHY IS DISEMPOWERING AND BAD.

If nobody is being disempowered then it's not hierarchy.  Everyone has different priorities.  Everyone.  EVERYONE.  I am not in a hierarchy with my boss or my pets even though I have pre-negotiated obligations with them and I will meet those obligations even if a relationship has to come in "second" in order to do it.

Those obligations and responsibilities exist in monogamous relationships and in single people's lives too.  They are not hierarchy.  If I make an agreement to my boss that I will show up for all my scheduled shifts, and my partner has a bad day and "needs" me to stay home with them but I don't because I have an agreement to show up to work, that's not a hierarchy, that's being a responsible fucking adult who follows through on responsibilities. 

My boss has no power over my relationships with my romantic partners - they don't get a say in what those relationships look like, they get a say in what my time with them looks like.  My boss only has the power to determine what my relationship with my boss and with the company looks like, even though my boss is in an authoritative relationship with me. 

My boss is not in a hierarchical relationship over my romantic partners.

*I*, as an adult with "free will", negotiated a relationship with my boss that requires a commitment of my time in exchange for compensation, and then *I*, as an adult with "free will", negotiated a relationship with a romantic partner that accommodates the existence of an employment relationship with someone else.  The boss has no say over my romantic partner, and my romantic partner has no say over my boss.  Even though I have priorities for each one.

If I could go back in time, one of the things I'd like to do is go back 21 years and erase every single time I uttered the phrase "descriptive hierarchy" on every poly message board across the internet.  I would then explain to my younger self the difference between power and priority, so that my younger self could better write about it being OK to have relationships with differing priorities without adding to the modern confusion about hierarchy (which is exactly what I was *trying* to say but didn't have the power / priority language to distinguish and so used "prescriptive" / "descriptive" instead).
 

I was using "descriptive hierarchy" to refer to those relationships that just naturally, organically, develop different levels of *priority* with everyone's input and equal power to make those priorities, and "prescriptive hierarchy" for those relationships that disempower people by imposing an artificial structure.

I didn't know back then the problems with using the same word "hierarchy" to apply to two very different relationship constructs.  Because they superficially resembled each other, it was easy to use the same word to apply to both, but they're fundamentally, inherently, different concepts embedded at the very foundations of the relationship.

I had no idea "descriptive hierarchy" would be used 2 decades later to justify treating partners as things just because it's "descriptive" instead of "prescriptive" (i.e. our secondary totally wants to live on her own and never move in with us, so it's OK to treat her as disposable") or that it would become the new basis for a 30-year cyclic debate where one side talks about "power" and the other talks about "priority" and nobody can get past the semantics so we never address the problem.

The funny part is that I spent most of those early years arguing that "prescriptive" was, indeed, an actual word that I did not make up.  For the first decade, people insisted that "prescriptive" was not a real word and I had to explain, over and over again, that "prescriptive" comes from "prescribe", which means, literally, to WRITE BEFOREHAND (pre = before, scribe = write), therefore something was prescriptive if it was scripted out ahead of time, i.e. decided beforehand.  Now, suddenly, I have everyone arguing with me that hierarchy isn't wrong because there are two different kinds - descriptive and prescriptive, therefore I don't know what I'm talking about.

I HAD TO CONVINCE Y'ALL THAT PRESCRIPTIVE WAS EVEN A WORD AND Y'ALL WANT TO ARGUE WITH ME NOW ABOUT ITS USE

So the tl;dr is that I am one of the people (possibly *the* person - we couldn't really remember which of us first used this phrase) who originated the term "prescriptive / descriptive hierarchy" and I am saying that this was wrong.  There is no such thing.  "Descriptive hierarchy" was intended to describe healthy, ethical relationships of differing priorities, but that is not a hierarchy at all.  Hierarchy is a ranking system, which is inherently disempowering and therefore inherently unethical.  Hierarchy is always wrong.  If your relationship structure does not disempower, then it's not hierarchy, by definition.

Hierarchy is disempowering people. All alternate uses of the term are incorrect uses and therefore misdirections. As someone who fucking coined the fucking term in the polyamorous context.