joreth | Entries tagged with unicorn hunting

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.

"My marriage is permanent! We place the relationship above the people in it! All other relationships are expendable as long as the marriage lasts forever!"

"Wow, that's not cool. Anyone my spouse and I date will automatically become an equal member of our triad! They're not expendable, they're exactly as permanent as the marriage!"

*sigh*

OK, so, I suppose it's a step up that you don't consider other people to be disposable or expendable. Yay? But you're still making the relationship more important than the happiness of the people in the relationship and you're still removing people's agency by deciding ahead of time what each relationship *will* look like, whether the people in those relationship want it that way or not.

I know it's really hard to see, because benevolent sexism is also really hard to see, and these are analogous things, but this is still problematic.

Benevolent sexism is where we switch from thinking that women are money-grubbing sluts who can't do math and shouldn't vote or talk in public and should be stoned to death for showing their ankles to unrelated men, to thinking that women are goddesses and need to be coddled and revered and pampered and who are better at nurturing and domestic tasks than men.

"But wait, isn't it a good thing to treat people well and to compliment their skills?"

Well, yes and no. it's a good thing to treat individual *people* well, but "well" depends on the recipient's definition, not yours. And it's not a "compliment on their skills" to say that "women" as a group are better at things when we all have different levels of ability and interest and especially when those things are things that society doesn't value highly and certainly doesn't pay for the way that we pay for everything else that requires specialized skills.

Malevolent sexism and benevolent sexism are two sides of the same coin - both versions put all women into a box and all women are required to fit into that box whether they actually do or not. And, especially in the case of benevolent sexism, if they don't fit into that box, they are punished for it. So women are still hindered, limited. A gilded cage is still a cage and my wings are still clipped even while sitting on a padded swing.

Plus, studies have shown that benevolent sexism is very strongly correlated to malevolent sexism - meaning that the society that has one also has the other. So just because a single person might think that women are "goddesses", that attitude only exists in a culture where someone else thinks women are "demons". So the benevolent sexist has to contribute to the overall culture of sexism that ultimately harms the women he claims to love (assuming he doesn't directly harm women as well by punishing women for not behaving goddess-like).

This "our third is an equal" attitude is basically the same thing as benevolent sexism. It might *seem* like it's a compliment or benefiting that "third", but it's still putting people into boxes and still expecting them to conform to an externally imposed role. A more ethical way of doing things is to just meet people, see how you click, and then talk to everyone involved to see what each person wants out of each relationship and allow each relationship the freedom to develop however it wants to.

My relationship with Franklin has always wanted to be what I used to call "emotionally primary" (before I dropped all ranking terms entirely, because I learned that even "descriptive primary" still contributes to this whole problem), meaning that our relationship has always pulled us towards stronger emotional connections with each other. But our lives have pulled us physically apart. If we had given up on the relationship just because it didn't meet our preset expectations of what a relationship with strong emotional connections *should* look like, we would have had to break up more than a decade ago.

But then I would have missed out on the last 15 years of a very emotionally nourishing relationship and I would be missing out on the very exciting future that we are trying to plan now.

I wish we would just erase this whole "equal" language from our poly vocabulary because people don't understand how to use it ethically. "Equal" is more often used as a blunt object to bludgeon people into predetermined roles, than out of any sense of equality or egalitarian values.

I am not "equal" to Franklin's other partners and they are not "equal" to me. I am equal to FRANKLIN. He and I have the same amount of power in our relationship to negotiate our own personal boundaries and the direction of our relationship, and *only* he and I have the power to negotiate our own boundaries and the direction of our relationship.

I cannot determine how his relationships go with anyone else, he can't determine how my relationships with others go, and nobody we are dating can determine how mine and his relationship together can go. This is what is meant by "equal".

People who talk about "equal" in this prescripted sort of way, much like people who defend hierarchy, tend to mix up all sorts of elements into the word "equal". The criticisms are almost exclusively about power structures. But these defenders want to throw in strength of emotional connection, time / attention priorities, and financial obligations.

Our relationships with other people are too *different* to be ranked as above, below, or equal to another. Franklin and I both care about our other partners very deeply and we cannot quantify our emotions to say who we care about "most".

So that's the emotions part that most people who talk about "equal" usually get confused about. I think it's foolish, at best, to even bother trying to rank how much you "love" each person, and at worst, it leads to the mindset that allows you to think of people as "disposable" and "expendable" because you don't "love" someone as much as someone else.

Priorities like time and attention are all different because we are all different people. Trying to make everyone "equal" is to dismiss their individuality, which dismisses their very humanity. Even identical twins are still unique individuals. We all want different things, and we all place importance on different things.

And there are *so many* things to account for here! My "quality time" isn't going to be the same as your "quality time" - it depends on our Love Languages, our preferences, our interests, and even our mood at any given moment. Spending time on the couch watching TV together might count as "quality time" most of the time, unless there's some other issue in our relationship that's coloring the experience for us, and then it won't "count".

There are just so many variables and so many unpredictable things to account for, that to even attempt to tally all things up and make them "equal" is an exercise in futility. And, in my observation, usually just tends to make the insecurities about priority worse when you start micromanaging relationships to make them "equal".

Financial obligations are pretty much the same thing - too many variables. People like to winnow it all down to "we have a mortgage and kids", but there are so many different things to consider like income disparity, cultural power differentials between gender and economic class, tax breaks, unpaid emotional labor, other relationship status, other support networks, other dependents ... there's a reason the US tax code is basically inscrutable without a degree in accounting. Finances are complicated.

To start ranking a relationship's importance based on only a few financial criteria is to ignore the impact that all these other criteria have on a relationship. Which is basically how we got to the point of women complaining about emotional labor in the first place.

A relationship between people who share a mortgage shouldn't be automatically more "important" than other sorts of relationships, just make sure that one obligation is cared for, like all the other obligations. That doesn't mean that the relationship overall deserves a higher ranking, or that one who doesn't share a mortgage deserves a lesser ranking. Relationships that don't involve mortgages can be every bit as "serious" and "committed" and "entangled" as those that do.

Just ... stop with the "disposable" shit and stop with the "equal to my other partners" shit. We. Are. Different. Each person is a unique individual, and consequently each *relationship* is a unique entity because the people in them are unique. Even *you* are a different person in the context of one relationship vs. another relationship. Pretty similar, sure, but that relationship influences who you are, which changes who you are.

Which relates back to a recent post I made about how you can't "add a third to our existing relationship" because that relationship no longer exists, having been permanently altered by the change in status. You have created all new relationships, including with your preexisting partner. *Everything* is different now - your relationships and the people in them.

They. Can't. Be. Quantified. Or. Ranked. Without. Dehumanizing. Or. Objectifying. Them.

Which is why even insisting that "our third will be equal in all things" is just the other side of the coin of the "disposable" perspective. It's a prettier side, to be sure. It feels kinder, it feels fluffier, it feels nicer. It even feels more ethical. I remember the first relationship I was in that espoused this canard, and I remember feeling valued at the time. And then I learned the dark side of what this actually means.

Because it comes from the same place - disregarding the uniqueness, the individuality, and the agency of the people in the relationships and valuing the relationship itself over the people in them.

For more discussion on this topic, here is the FB thread that sparked it.

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.

OTG don't start a relationship with someone who is in the process of leaving an abusive partner! And for fuck's sake, don't get upset when they act inconsistent or seem to reconcile or "go back" to said abusive partner.  Abuse does all kinds of fucked up shit to a person's head and they really need to find their own identity before beginning a new relationship.

Escaping one abusive partner into the arms of another creates a coercive dynamic because of the fucked up shit going on inside the victim's head, *even if you try very hard not to be coercive*.  The key part here is the loss of identity. Abuse wipes out victims' identities, and without a clear sense of who they are as an individual person, they are unable to create healthy boundaries for themselves in other relationships *which makes those other relationships coercive by nature*.

You cannot force someone out of an abusive relationship before they're ready, and you SHOULD not encourage them to leap straight from the abusive relationship to a new relationship, poly or otherwise.

Be "on call" for them to go pick them or their stuff up at a moment's notice, field or facilitate the finding of a new place to live so that their abuser doesn't find out about it, believe them and give them space, and most importantly, don't take it as a personal rejection or blame them when they inevitably backslide in some way including going back to their abuser.

Abuse does all kinds of fucked up shit to a person's head. If you can't be a proper support system for a victim, which includes not pushing them into leaving before they're ready and not complaining about how hurt you feel or that they "used" you or "played you" or "ditched" you when they end up not leaving or they gradually stop talking to you or they go back to their abuser, then back the fuck out of their lives. Otherwise, you risk making things worse for them.

For a better idea on how to be a "proper support system" for a victim, check out the resources in the back of Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft which includes books on how to be the loved one of an abuse victim.

This was in response to a "couple" who wanted advice on how to start a relationship with "a third" who was trying to escape an abusive partner. Other people's responses were ... abhorrent. Some of them argued for this couple to "just go get her out of there" and a few suggested that it's not the best idea but you can be careful or otherwise not treat this like an actual life or death situation that it could become.

To that, I must give a reminder: escaping from an abuser is the most dangerous time for a victim. This is the time abusers are most likely to escalate the violence to murder.

This is not only dangerous for her, it's dangerous for everyone around her. She doesn't need to escape into your home, she needs to escape to a place that knows how to keep her safe from an escalating, now pissed off abuser and that fully understands the situation she is in.  Every time you hear about some woman and her kids or her parents or her new boyfriend being murdered by an ex, it's almost always during the time she is trying to escape the ex. Everyone around the victim becomes a target for an enraged abuser.

What do you think an abusive ex, hell bent on power and control and now extra pissed off that his little punching bag is leaving, is going to think of the new boyfriend *and girlfriend* who "stole her away"?  He's going to *blame* the couple and polyamory as being a bad influence on his girlfriend and believe that he needs to teach everyone a lesson and reassert his authority. This is the time when previously emotional-only abusers escalate to physical violence too.

I can't stress enough what a dangerous time this is for her and why the concern needs to be what's in her best interest, not what's in your pants. That's also why you can't force her to leave if she's not ready. Only she understands the extent of the danger she is in, and if her mind has to rationalize why she stays in order to keep herself safe, then that's what she needs to do.

Please, everyone, read Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft. This is so much more serious than most people who haven't been there really understand.

https://qz.com/991030/your-single-coworkers-and-employees-arent-there-to-pick-up-the-slack-for-married-people/

Not poly but an example of couple privilege, which is so deeply embedded in our culture that we bring these kinds of values with us into poly relationships unless we are consciously fighting against it.

How many unicorn hunters argue that their mythical "third" should be the one to move in with them because they have the family so it would be more of a hardship for them to move? How often do we see excuses for ignoring or dismissing or mistreating secondaries because they're "single" but the couple has a "family" to protect. How often do solo polys bear the brunt of the emotional labor, the financial strain, and various "responsibilities" because the "family" is a priority and needs to remain as such?

#RhetoricalQuestions #CouplePrivilege #IHaveMyOwnResponsibilitiesThatNeedPriorityButNoOneToHelpMeLikeThat

"In fact, single people do more to maintain their relationships with their friends, neighbors, siblings, and parents than married people. They are better at staying in touch with them, and helping and encouraging them. It is different for couples who move in together or get married. They tend to become more insular, even if they don’t have children. When aging parents need help, they get it disproportionately from their grown children who are single."

"Single people are rooted in their communities and towns in significant ways. They participate in public events more often, and take more music and art classes. They volunteer more than married people do for a wide variety of organizations."

"Ideally, only in special circumstances should employees be asked to justify their requests to take time off. Otherwise, in a culture that still celebrates married people and their families... single people may be treated unfairly. For example, employers may be tempted to take more seriously a request to take time off to care for an ailing spouse than an ailing sibling or close friend."

"When single people are caring for their parents and others who need their help, they do so at greater economic risk than married people are. If they put in fewer hours at work, or step away from their jobs, they do not have a spouse to pick up the financial slack—or keep them on their employer-sponsored health insurance. Similarly, when single people get laid off or lose their jobs, they are particularly vulnerable for the same reasons."

"Even more significantly, single people are excluded from more than 1,000 federal laws that benefit and protect only people who are legally married. ... When lifelong single people die, they cannot leave their benefits to anyone else—they go back into the system—and no one else can leave their benefits to a single person either."

"Financial disadvantages in taxation, Social Security, health spending, and housing expenses add up. By one estimate, single women, relative to married women, lose out on somewhere between a half million and a million dollars over the course of their adult lives."

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

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

I just heard this amazing power counter-move that I propose ought to become Standard Operating Procedure for polys:

You meet someone through some kind of online sphere, probably a dating service or social media of some kind. It progresses to plans for a "date".
After the date has been made but before the date happens, they spring "btw, my pre-existing other partner is coming too" on you. You did not know they had a pre-existing other partner and/or they only have the one pre-existing other partner and/or you have not established your own romantic / sexual interest in said other partner.
You immediately invite a minimum of 2 other people who are special or important to you - preferably romantic / sexual partners, but any 2+ people who are important will do. Bonus points if at least one of them is cismale.

It doesn't matter if you are open to the possibility of being involved with two parts of a couple under the right circumstances. If someone pulls the Unicorn Hunter Bait & Switch on you by making a date with you and giving you the impression that it's a date between the two of you, and then "invites" their existing partner along after the plan has been made, you should "invite" someone else along too.

But it ought to be at least 2 other people. If it's just one other person, it could turn into a swingers Bait & Switch. While most UHers are not comfortable with the thought of their unicorn having any other partners, wife-swapping is still a thing that people know about, and so may be familiar *enough* for a UHer doing this predatory maneuver to counter-move against your counter-move.

And if you invite only one other partner who is a woman or presents as a woman or is perceived as a woman, this could just amp up a predatory man in a UH couple to attempt a foursome fantasy of multiple "women" all doting on him and doing Hot Bi Babe stuff for his pleasure.

Having 2+ other partners along distributes the numbers unevenly in your favor, re-imbalancing the power distribution that they are counting on having with their 2-on-1. This is very unsettling for people who are deliberately setting up situations to disempower their dates, as a Bait & Switch suggests they are attempting to do (even if subconsciously).

If they're not doing this to disempower anyone (again, whether they recognize they are doing it for this reason or not), then the thought of their date inviting their other partners when they invited their own other partner ought not to feel threatening or unbalanced to them.

I tend to invite people I'm interested in to public or social events first, especially if I will have a partner or two there. This gets the whole "meeting the other partners" out of the way early and I basically throw them in the deep end by seeing how they respond right up front to me having to share my attention among several people at once. Plus, how we behave in front of our friends is often different than how we behave on a first date with someone we're hoping to impress. So if they invite their other partners to a party or club or whatever I invited them to, I would think that's great!

But then again, I wouldn't be doing a Bait & Switch. I would say right there in the invitation "I'm going to a friend's party and several of my partners will be there. You're welcome to meet me there, and also to bring guests!" People who decline to meet me in public settings tend to get rejected pretty soon, so it's kind of a litmus test for me as to how poly they are. But now I'm digressing.

Odds are, you will get a last minute cancellation from your "date". In which case, you now have plans with 2 of your partners / friends / family! Go out and have a good time!

BONUS MOVE:

They reschedule supposedly just the two of you, but pull the Bait & Switch a second time, leading you to believe it's a 2-person date and only after the date has been arranged, they mention bringing their "other".
You invite your 2+ guests again but don't mention it to them this time, so that when the couple shows up (which they will this time because), they are not expecting 3+ people.

It is not necessary to lie about inviting your 2+ guests, just don't mention them when they pull the Bait & Switch on you. I am not normally in favor of lies even of omission, but I do think, in this particular set of circumstances, it's not unreasonable to assume that they will assume that if they invite a partner, you will invite 2+ partners *because that is how it already happened*.

Now, if they have the gall to say "btw, my partner is coming along, but could you not invite your other partners this time? We want it to be just the 3 of us", well, I won't advocate deliberately lying about inviting them, that's your call to make. I, personally, would probably just end the game right there by calling them on their hypocrisy and predatory behaviour before blocking them. But it's an option one could take.

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.

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.
I could not live with people who call women “females”. There’s a whole body of literature on what’s wrong with that term.
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.
I am straight. I am not sexually attracted to women.
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.
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.
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://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.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/Baej7f5BbtB/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Typical Unicorn Hunters -

Them: "Hi, we're kinky!"

Me: "OK, what does that actually mean though?"

Them: "He's in charge and orders us around and I live to pleasure him."

Me: "But, like, how? Does he like electrical stimulation like violet wands? Does he practice the art of aesthetic rope work called shibari? Do you wear puppy ears and a tail butt plug and crawl around on the floor and bark at him to pet you? Do you have a vacuum table that one of you gets sucked into a latex bag for compression and restraint? Do either of you get hung in the air by flesh hooks piercing your skin?"

Them: "What? No! I just mean that he tells me when to give him head and when to have sex and what to wear and sometimes spanks me when I talk back to him!"

Me: "Yeah, that's not 'kinky', that's just patriarchal heteronormativity masquerading as 'kink' thanks to 50 Shades."

In response to a question of how to have a threesome ethically and without unicorn hunting (because UHing is always unethical, but not all unethical behaviour is UHing):

Here's how I have threesomes -

Me: Hey, I think you're pretty hot and I'd like to have sex with you.

Me: Oh hey, you're pretty hot too and I'd like to have sex with you also.

Him 1: I think you're pretty hot too and I'd like to have sex with you.

Him 2: Yeah, ditto.

Him 1: BTW, I like group sex.

Me: No way! Me too!

Him 2: So do I!

Him 1: I like your other partner enough to have group sex where he's included.

Him 2: I like your other partner enough to have group sex where he's included.

Me: Well, that's convenient, since I like the both of you. So if we're all interested in group sex together, I'd like to have group sex sometime.

Him 1: [while spending time with me and Him 2 socially, starts kissing me]

Him 2: [while Him 1 is kissing me, comes up behind me to kiss my neck]

Step 2: ...

Step 3: Group sex happens.

Here's NOT how I have threesomes:

Me: Honey, I have a fantasy of a threesome, but I also have unexamined insecurities about our relationship and assumptions of possession regarding your body and also feelings of entitlement to your autonomy.

Them: Oh, that's convenient, because I have a deep fear of being alone and societal programming that requires me to submit to your fantasies and to subsume my identity into our relationship. Plus, I'm interested in sex with my own gender and this may be the only way I can explore that while simultaneously keeping the relationship I'm terrified of losing and also all the privileges that come with having a socially acceptable hetero relationship.

Me: Great! Let's create a list of traits that we want in the person we are hiring to fulfill both of our fantasies, only we won't pay her of course because sex work is gross. Her needs aren't really that important, since the goal here is to fulfill our fantasies while keeping our relationship intact. So, starting tomorrow, after we've come up with our list of qualifications, we'll start interviewing someone to have sex with us.

"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.

I've always wanted to have some best friends, like in Sex And The City. I've never really had, like, a sister, to just hang out with and confide in and do girlie things. Even as a child, I've longed for a sister to share secrets with and jump rope with and trade clothing with. I always dreamed that I had a long-lost sister out there somewhere, and one day, we would find each other.

My BF is totally supportive of me finding a good friend. But he will only allow me to have my sister-from-another-mister if he gets to watch us eat ice cream and paint our nails and he has to go shopping with us. He won't participate in any of our conversations (unless you want him to!), he'll just be there watching us while we bingewatch OITNB and sip margaritas.

He thinks this will be a great experience for me! He's so in favor of it that he wants to interview all the ladies I meet, to make sure that I'll have the best bestie ever. And he'll be there to share this with me every step of the way! When we go to the mall, he'll drive us. When we meet for drinks, he'll be there buying us the wine. When we talk on the phone, he'll be listening on the extension. All to make sure that me and my special lady friend are having the best time possible.

So, any girls wanna hit me up for some mid-week mani-pedis and the occasional Sunday brunch with me and my bf lurking in the corner? He won't say anything, and you don't have to talk to him, he'll just be there watching us!

It's so fucking frustrating how obviously creepy this is when you take the sex *out* of it, but somehow adding sex and intimacy makes people think it's LESS creepy.

Stop hiring-without-pay women to hang out with you while some dude creeps in the shadows spying on you. It's really fucked up whether there is sex in there or not.

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

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

In the first panel, either what looks like a slave auction or a sad animal shelter, with unicorns up for sale and human couples wandering around, looking at the offerings, all holding really long checklists and mostly shaking their heads at the unicorns who don't meet their criteria while the cute little unicorn foals bounce in their cages, hoping to be chosen. Outside, there is a line of couples trailing off into infinity, and only a handful of unicorns available for sale.

BTW, the couples should all look like clones of each other, with older men, very young women, piercings, tattoos, and probably some kind of pot symbol somewhere on them like in jewelry or on a t-shirt or something. He should be hipster, she should be borderline goth. And of course they should be cishet.

Next panel, we should see some of the same unicorns (all unique and identifiable, like My Little Ponys) getting dropped back off at the auction / shelter with angry or disgusted looks on the couples faces. Maybe in a long Returns line or something.

Then we see those same unicorns, now a little more battered and disheveled, up for sale again and getting purchased.

And returned again.

And repeat for a 3rd time. Each panel showing the unicorns looking more and more bedraggled and less and less excited about being chosen.

Finally, in the last panel, a handler drags one of the unicorns out to show, and she is resisting as hard as she can, angry, rearing up, digging in her hooves, baring her teeth, ears laid back, she clearly doesn't want to go. She has battle scars. Another unicorn is being dragged off the show floor or stage by her couple, in a similarly angry and scarred state.

The other veteran unicorns are all huddling together in their pen, while the new, young unicorns who don't know any better are jumping around in their own cages, hoping to be adopted.

From the audience appraising the one being brought out to show, one of the couples calls out "what's your problem? We're just looking for someone to love us! why you gotta be so defensive?! We haven't done anything to you!"

While, maybe outside, a trio of humans all holding hands walks past, looking in the window, and musing "look how they treat those poor creatures! It's so sad! I wish we could get these places shut down!"

#ItIsNotAboutTheTriad #TheyAreNotPetsTheyAreFuckingAutonomousHumanBeings #ItIsNotTheStructureItIsTheMethod #IfYouAreNotHuntingThenWeAreNotComplainingAboutYouSoWhyYOUgottaBeSoDefensive? #UnicornHunterBingo #SeriouslyTheyAllSoundLikeTheHipsterVersionOfStepfordCouples #Yall40SomethingMenDating20SomethingSubmissiveWomenWantingAnotherSubbyAreReallyFuckingCreepy #ScarfbeardManbun #SeptumpierceUndercut #QueeringHeterosexuality #JointTinderAccountForThreeways

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.

We've reached peak apologism for abusive and predatory relationship practices - arguing over whether or not a very specific example a MF couple seeking a very specific partner for a role they've pre-designed and prescipted "counts" as a "unicorn", instead of addressing the fact that the term #UnicornHunting was coined to highlight the *process* they use to find partners and the *dehumanization* of people in the poly community.

"No, no, see, we're total sexual predators and we completely ignore people's agency, but the fantasy woman WE want is to be a sister-wife, not a bisexual woman to sleep with the existing wife, so it's totally OK because she's not a unicorn!"
"No, no, see, we're total sexual predators and we completely ignore people's agency, but WE are looking for a *man*, not a woman, so it's totally OK because it's not a woman we're abusing!"
"No, no, see, we're total sexual predators and we completely ignore people's agency, but we're looking for sex-only, not a relationship, so it's totally OK because it doesn't count as polyamory!"
"No, no, see, we're total sexual predators and we completely ignore people's agency, but we're looking to build the perfect quad by preying on another couple, not a single woman, so it's totally OK because it's two for the price of one!"

Look, back in the early days when we were still figuring all this shit out and stuff hadn't been going on long enough for us to recognize it all at once, we picked out the most common end-result because it was the most common, the easiest to see, and because we were inundated by the sheer volume of posts and people looking for this one thing.

But it was never about the final configuration. The reason why Unicorn Hunting is fucking wrong is because of the process. If you have to get nitpicky about whether or not a specific example meets the definition of "unicorn" by exactly every single bullet point, then chances are you are probably still doing the thing the term "Unicorn Hunting" was coined for.

If you're not using predatory or abusive behaviour and you're not dismissing the agency of people, then you don't have to resort to picking apart the definition of "unicorn" to defend yourself.

If you're not doing the actual wrong stuff, then nobody gives a fuck if the other person in the equation is technically a "unicorn" or not. If you *are* doing the actual wrong stuff, then still nobody gives a fuck if the other person in the equation is technically a "unicorn" or not.

The term "unicorn" is merely a shorthand, and NOT THE FUCKING POINT. The term "unicorn" is important for what it represents - the dehumanizing and agency-dismissing-ness of the people seeking one, not the unicorn's plumbing or hair color or orientation or expected job duties.

I just had a minor epiphany.

I was listening to an interview where the straight white dude in the hetero legal marriage who "opened up" (granted, he had an open relationship, but then they closed up when they got "serious" because that's what you're "supposed to do", figured out that didn't work, and opened up again) decided to lecture the poly community on how we treat unicorn hunters.

As he was talking about how hard it is for the poor newbie unicorn hunters, the thought popped into my head "says the straight het dude who is never the target of these people, telling marginalized people how to react to abuse in their communities!"

After conceding that unicorn hunting is "the wrong way", he started bemoaning how mean it is when we tell them that it's the wrong way, that we need to be nicer to them and hand-hold them gently into learning why what they're doing is wrong, because otherwise these couples are going to leave the community and try to do this all by themselves with no guidance.

So I yelled at my speakers "because it's better to not chase away the toxic abusive unicorn hunters but to instead chase away all the single, bi & pan, female-presenting (or female-assumed) people?!" Because that's totally what happens. There is NO WAY to explain to unicorn hunters "gently" enough that they're doing it wrong, because they don't want to hear that they're doing it wrong, they want validation that they're doing it right and that they're justified in their approach.

I have this problem with religious debates too. There is absolutely no way to tell someone "I think your god doesn't exist" without them taking it personally, no matter how "nicely" you say it. There are no "nice enough" words, because the people who are open to hearing that message are not the problem in the first place.

So any group that tolerates unicorn hunting even a little bit ends up sending all the "hot bi babes" into the Relationship Anarchy groups, even though RA is what polyamory was *always supposed to be* (until the fucking couples with their fucking unicorn hunting found us through Montel Williams and took over - there were always hierarchical couples and unicorn hunters but they were not the majority until we reached mainstream exposure and then hordes of "couples opening up" discovered us en masse).

We get to choose: a community that is tolerant of unicorn hunting with very few hot bi babes and very few advanced, experienced polys (because they all got chased away), or a community of experienced polys and newbies who shut up and listen, all of different configurations and dynamics and orientations who feel safe because of the fostered atmosphere of respect for agency. Because these two groups are not compatible.

It's like those fucking "coexist" stickers - no, we can't fucking "coexist" because one side is toxic and harmful to the other. BY DEFINITION, the two camps are fundamentally incompatible with each other.

I've been trying to figure out why this is so fucking difficult for people to get. Even people who recognize how toxic unicorn hunting is, some of them seem to think that there is room for both sides and get all up on their high horse about how "mean" we are to unicorn hunters and how we should be nicer and softly, gently, quietly lead them into seeing other people as motherfucking human beings, not sex toys.

And it occurred to me that this is basically the same thing as white people telling POC that we need to "understand" the plight of the poor rural white folk who voted for Trump, and men telling women that we need to be less strident when we explain feminism, and gay people to be less in-your-face when we demand equal rights, and atheists need to be less "militant" (funny how most of us are also opposed to violence and the military, but whatevs) when we request space for people of other belief systems.

Because we haven't been absolutely STEEPED in their viewpoint from every angle of society, so being mean to them, obviously we just don't *understand* them!

Here's the epiphany: People who think we need to be nicer to unicorn hunters (completely ignoring the fact that there is a wide spectrum of people and personality types and argument methods that are actually used in unicorn hunting debates) see the *unicorn hunters* as the "persecuted minority" and the queer, uncoupled femmes (and our supporters) as the oppressive dominant majority.

So when someone who has nearly every axis of privilege stacked against them sees for the umpteenth bajillionth time a mostly het, cis, white couple with legal benefits tearing through their community with their homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and couple privilege, and decides they've had enough and tells that couple "ur duin it rong", that couple feels like the white man being ganged up on and cries "reverse racism!" because someone was mean to him once.

That's why we are talking past each other. No matter how many times we explain it, people who defend the "just be nice to unicorn hunters / hierarchical / abusive / misogynistic / racist / homophobic / transphobic people in our community" position, those are people who see the cis het usually white, COUPLE as the persecuted minority. And there is no "nice enough" way to explain to them that they're not, as long as they think they are.

They're just going to have to go through the trial by fire that all the rest of us did when our own privilege finally came crashing down on our heads and we learned how to see it. Seeing one's privilege for the first time, particularly after believing that one is *not* privileged, is a painful, shocking lesson. It's like having ice water thrown over your head.

Except the water is actually lukewarm, you're just all fired up with your own blustering ego, so it all feels too cold by comparison. It won't start to feel comfortable until you cool from the inside first.

Q. What is a unicorn when it comes to polyamoury?

A. Everything that Jessica Burde said. I’m basically just adding some detail to add weight to what they said (more voices and all) because lots of people want to dismiss poly advice when they don’t like it. So I’m adding basically an agreement post to support their answer - their post is not just their “opinion”, it’s the observation of those of us who have been here from the beginning and have seen the origin of words and the intention of the coining of terms and what happens and why we came up with those words in the first place.

The term “unicorn hunter” came first to refer to a particular type of person / couple who uses predatory and (& this is the important part) *improbable* practices to find a partner that is so specific and/or so unattainable and/or so unlikely to exist, that we called the partner they are looking for a “unicorn” because of it, and therefore the person / couple became “unicorn hunters”.

The History Of The Term Unicorn Hunter - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/388631.html

We could have chosen another set of terms to describe this process, but the term “unicorn” (www.TheInnBetween.net/polyterms.html#unicorn) had some precedent. A lot of the early poly community was made up of people who came from the swinger community but found the lack of emotional connection unsatisfying and so built a new-to-them style of relationship that was more along what they were looking for.

In the swinger community, a “unicorn” is a bisexual woman who is willing to have a threesome with a couple and then go away without disrupting the primary couple.

So, when former swingers were trying to find more emotionally intimate multi-partner relationships, and when some of them brought some of their swinger habits with them, including searching for a bisexual woman *who would not disrupt the primary couple* even though this new style of emotionally intimate relationship would, by definition, disrupt the way they did things (I Love You, Just Don't Disrupt Anything - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/275094.html), it was natural to adapt the term “unicorn” to a polyamorous purpose.

(https://www.instagram.com/p/BVOILerBElZ/)

But, remember, “unicorn” was never intended to apply to just bisexual poly women, not even bisexual poly women who are willing to be with two people in a preexisting relationship. We had a term for them back then - we called them bipoly women (www.TheInnBetween.net/polyterms.html#bipoly).

The “unicorn” bit was specifically because the person they were looking for was a fantasy, whereas bipoly women exist in abundance.

Some people are not familiar with the history or the deliberately intended insult in the term “unicorn hunter”, and think that a “unicorn” is simply a bisexual poly woman. Because of this, some bipoly women have started calling themselves “unicorns”.

While we want to encourage people to identify however feels right to them, and while we also want to encourage it when people “take back” offensive terms to turn around systems of oppression, this all becomes very problematic when poly people do it with the term “unicorn”.

Because the term “unicorn” *in the poly community* was never intended to apply to actual people. It was specifically chosen to refer to a construct that doesn’t exist, as a way to identify predatory behaviour. So it’s not really a term that should be “taken back” because it was never meant to apply to them in the first place.

And it’s a necessary term intended to discuss a deeply problematic, harmful set of behaviours in our community. People who do those things still exist and are still a problem. In fact, I would say they’re even worse now. It’s been almost 30 years and we still haven’t reached community consensus that objectifying and dehumanizing and fetishizing women is wrong.

Not only that, but they’ve become emboldened by another poly catchphrase “there is no one right way to do polyamory”. Sure, there is no ONE right way. That means that there are more than one path to successful poly relationships. But it doesn’t mean that there aren’t any WRONG ways. Certain methods and practices are harmful and also less likely to work than other ways. These would be “wrong ways”.

But because the community embraced “there is no one right way”, it has gotten warped over the years into “there are no wrong ways”, which is absolutely not true. So we still need to talk about this problem. And we have not come up with any substitute terms that so eloquently and simply elucidate this specific problem.

“Unicorn” = mythical creature that does not exist.
“Hunter” = predator.

A unicorn hunter is a predator, someone who is harming others and the community, someone who is *hunting* a creature that they made up and that does not exist, to fulfill their own fantasies of power and purity, who is so filled with their own hubris and delusion that they chase down figments of their imagination for their own gratification.

It’s a beautiful, elegant metaphor. Many of our early terms have fallen out of favor and been replaced by new terms that better resonate with the newer generations of polys. This one has stuck around because it’s so useful.

So when bipoly women choose to identify as unicorns *in the polyamorous context of a bipoly women who is willing to date two people who are in a preexisting relationship* (as opposed to outside context uses of the term “unicorn”), it muddies up our collective dialog about a systemic problem in our communities that need to be addressed.

Polys are all about “communication, communication, communication”. But then we take existing terms and tweak the definitions in a Motte & Bailey tactic (https://www.morethantwo.com/blog/2016/06/can-polyamorous-hierarchies-ethical-part-1-tower-village & https://www.morethantwo.com/blog/2016/06/can-polyamorous-hierarchies-ethical-part-2-influence-control) and then get upset when people don’t see us as how we want them to see us.

Sure, language evolves and all of that. But the need for the term still exists, and if you’re trying to “evolve” a word while we still need that word with its original definition, then people are going to make some assumptions based on the original definition whether you like it or not.

So a “unicorn” is not a real person, within the context of polyamory. It’s a construct used to illustrate the predatory, harmful behaviours of objectification, dehumanization, and fetishization of certain people in the poly community.

Some people have tried to strip the term “unicorn hunter” of its intended offensive definition in order to avoid accountability for their harmful behaviour. Some people have similarly tried to strip the term “unicorn” of its intended illustrative construct because unicorns are pretty and magical and some people like thinking of themselves as pretty and magical.

But the term was coined for a reason. And that reason was not complimentary.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BaekRgMhNgK/

People seem to think that triads are the starter pack to polyamory, when really they're the advanced level. You're trying to jump to the big boss level when you haven't really learned the mechanics of the game yet.

No, seriously, almost everyone who hasn't had a poly relationship yet, and especially those who are "thinking about it" or "trying it out" all opt for the triad model, somehow thinking that because everyone is in a relationship with everyone else, that'll diffuse jealousy. It doesn't. Not only does it *not* work that way, often jealousy gets amplified because it's like this little insulated cyclone where all the emotions just keep whirling around and around among the 3 people with no outlet, no pressure release, and no skills in handling it.

This was my introductory video to a vlogger named Evita, and she covers this pretty well:

"Why Are Triads So Hard" (Watch on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVO6pThcVig

In this video, Evita points out that, if you're going to feel jealousy related to your partner having another relationship with someone else, in a triad, that feeling is doubled because TWO of your partners are both having relationships with other people (each other):

"If you've never ever found yourself in a position where you've seen your partner be romantically involved with someone, see your partner be in love with someone, and seen what you're like with your partner being romantically involved with / in love with someone because you have no idea what that looks like for you ... going from never having experienced that to now putting yourself in a dynamic where it's happening *all the time*, right in front of your face, is naive at best and disillusional at worst.

Y'know, thinking that you're just gonna transition into this, going from never seeing it at all to seeing it all the time and you're just gonna be OK with it is super super naive. And most couples go 'oh, we're gonna feel *less* jealousy because we're with the same person' and it's usually the other way around.

Which brings me to my next point. It's usually double the jealousy, not less jealousy. ... Because if you think about it, both of your partners are interacting with someone else and the someone else that they're interacting with is each other. ...

The relationships will not look and feel the same and that is challenging for couples. There's usually what happens is the person coming in gets along much better with one than the other, the relationships do not look the same ... Your relationships are going to look different with the other person but these couples are approaching this going 'we're going to have the same experience' and you're totally totally not."

If you're going to feel jealousy, and remember, jealousy is a composite emotion made up of other emotions like fear of losing something you cherish, insecurity in your own worthiness, being left out - a bunch of really complicated stuff - if you're going to feel jealousy when your partner is with someone else, what do you think will happen with you have *two* partners are are both with someone else (each other)? As Evita points out, when her husband is off with another partner and she feels jealous, it's just regular old jealousy because she isn't emotionally connected or attached to that other person.

But if two of her partners are both off interacting with someone else (each other) at the same time, that's TWO partners she's feeling jealous over. And she might even be feeling different types of jealousy for each one, where her jealousy has different roots for each person. So now it's extra complicated, because regular jealousy wasn't challenging enough?

She later goes on to talk about isolationism as a separate bullet point. Newbies seem to think of triads as a single group relationship, when it's actually 4 relationships that all need to be cared for. There's the 3-person dynamic that is the triad, and then each couple within that triad is its own separate relationship and all of those relationships have to be nurtured and cared for.

A lot of newbies will try to ignore this by only nurturing the triad as a whole and never allowing any couple-time or dyad-nurturing to happen (or, rather, still nurturing the original couple dynamic, but not allowing either half of the original couple to nurture independent relationships with the new third person). Some think that if everything is "equal", if they do everything exactly the same with their third person and never have any differences or any alone-time with her (because it's almost always a her), they won't have to care for those two legs of the triad.

But a triad is more like a 3-legged stool. If you don't care for 2 of the 3 legs or any of the legs at all and focus only on the seat, you're gonna wind up on your ass when the individual legs fail and the whole thing collapses.

Each 2-person dynamic is going to be its own relationship. When your partner is off on their own with another partner, that can leave some people feeling lonely and bereft. So these people are usually encouraged to find themselves - to develop their own friends and hobbies and other partnerships so that they don't lose a piece of themselves when their partner is gone. That's co-dependency, when you feel lost or like you're missing a piece of yourself when your partner is not with you. It's OK to miss someone, but to feel as though you, yourself, are broken, partial, or you're unable to think of what to do with yourself without your partner, that's co-dependency. People in healthy relationships have other interests and other people and other intimate relationships in their lives besides their partner (yes, even healthy monogamous relationships).

So when your partner is off on their own with someone else, and that someone else *is your other partner*, that tends to double the feelings of isolationism because the other important person in your life who you would otherwise turn to while your partner is occupied *is the person your partner is occupied with*.

They don't even have to physically go somewhere and leave you alone. Just the connection that they share between each other can make someone feel left out. One of the most horrible feelings in polyamory is when you're right there, in the same room, watching your loved one share a connection with your other loved one, and feeling that you are not part of that connection, that they are sharing it with each other and not you, and it's right there in your face, reminding you that you aren't connected in that moment.

It's very isolating.

You have to level up to a certain point to gain the skills in relationships to handle this situation, and then you have to do the extra special side quests to gain the fancy armor that makes this situation not problematic and hurtful and needing to be "handled" in the first place.

Jealousy gets doubled when you have two partners to feel jealous about, but feelings of isolation also get doubled when you have two partners interacting with each other to feel isolated from. If you think you can just jump right to that level without learning how to handle your jealousy and fears and communication about that stuff first, you're gonna get slammed when the Big Boss Jealousy walks into the room. Because "if we're just always together and then jealousy won't happen" is not how you learn the skills to handle your jealousy. You have to actually face it, not just attempt to prevent it from ever happening.

Getting tag-teamed with the giant Two-Headed Jealousy Monster and Twin Isolationist Bosses at the same time is the hardest way to learn that. Passing the minor jealousy bosses in stages, where you learn their tactics and weaknesses in smaller, more manageable doses and defeating each one gives you a better weapon and better armor for the next more challenging boss, is how you eventually learn how to pass the giant Two-Headed Jealousy at the end of the game.

Triad relationships take some extra level communication skills, introspection skills, accountability skills, self-sufficiency skills, time management skills, and Relationship Management skills. Maintaining two independent relationships is actually easier on all fronts and, counter-intuitively, how you gain all those skills in the first place.

Newbies talk about wanting "training wheels". This is how they justify treating people as things. "But how are we supposed to learn how to trust people if we don't chain them in and prevent them from doing what we're afraid of?" "But how can we learn how to deal with jealousy without strictly designing our relationships and rigidly policing each other's behaviour so that nobody does anything that will trigger the jealousy?" I say all the time that "training wheels" are a horrible idea when the activity you're trying to learn is how to swim.

You don't jump in the deep end of the poly pool with training wheels. That will just weigh you down. You need water wings that will lift you up and support you while you tread water. Dating separately and learning how to disentangle yourselves and become whole, independent people again are those water wings. This is where you learn the fundamentals of swimming so that when you take the water wings off, you have the muscle memory to help you in the deep water. "Training wheels", in this context, teaches you the wrong lessons, so that you have to unlearn everything you learned with the training wheels *at the same time* you're struggling to learn how to swim. Water wings teaches you exactly those skills you'll be using in the water, just with less at stake. These are the beginning levels where you gain all those extra skill points and extra life-hearts and the fancy armor that protects you against the more powerful villains in the more difficult levels.

Start out dating individually first. A triad will work itself out when y'all are ready for it, not when you set out to make it happen.

"Ooh, that prize looks cool! I want one of those!"

"OK, but you have to defeat the final demon to win the game for that prize."

"Great, where is he, bring him on!"

"Uh, you can't just get to him, you have to go through all of these other levels first, collecting skills and tools that you will need to defeat the big boss demon."

"But I want the prize!!"

"Fine, but you have to defeat the demon first ..."

"Then show me the demon!"

"... and you can't get there until you've mastered the beginning levels first."

"OMG YOU'RE SO MEAN WHY YOU GOTTA GATEKEEP LIKE THAT YOU'RE SCARING AWAY ALL THE NEWBIES WHAT DO YOU HAVE AGAINST PRIZES I'M GONNA GO PLAY THE GAME MY WAY OVER HERE STOP TELLING ME HOW TO PLAY THERE'S NO ONE RIGHT WAY!"

also "hey, other newbies, who else wants the prize at the end and can't get to it? Let's start a group for gamers who just want the prize, where other gamers can't tell us we're wrong!"

- Every #UnicornHunter ever.

A comment I want to expand on for a future blog post. The context is that Unicorn Hunters frequently accuse the poly community of being hostile towards anyone interested in a triad, and if we were just nicer to them, they'd eventually learn how to do polyamory ethically. But because we're so mean to "couples", they just leave the community.

It is my opinion that the couples who get all hurt and feel "attacked" are people who actually do want to do the bad, predatory things, are steeped in their privilege and don't want to examine it, and are generally not approaching the community in good faith to "learn". Even if all of this is subconscious.

That's why they feel "attacked", because they are seeing themselves in the "attacks". As I say in basically every post where I criticize people for something - if you're not doing the thing I'm criticizing, then I'm not criticizing you.

Most of the cismen on my friends list who regularly read my feminist posts and don't feel attacked are able to do so because they recognize that they are not my targets (even if they might have been at one time). They see how they are not doing the things I'm criticizing, so they can be part of the group of "men" and yet not be part of the group I am "attacking".

Or they can see themselves in my criticisms and feel humbled by the recognition and seek to change.

But people who tend to see themselves in my criticisms and don't want to change, even subconsciously, start to feel cognitive dissonance, which tends to make them feel attacked, and then defend themselves with straw-man arguments, sealioning, deflection, diluting the definitions, and Motte & Bailey tactics.

And then get personally offended when I, or someone, see through the smoke and mirrors and red herrings and call them on their bullshit.

But I'm the "intolerant" one who refuses to "teach" and who "scares off" well-intentioned but naive newcomers.

My comment that I want to expand on later:

I mean, how often do we hear about people wanting to get into birdwatching being "chased off" by other birders just because they're new to birdwatching and they make mistakes that could even be harmful to the very birds they're professing to be interested in and want to be respectful of, even though that totally happens all the time?

People who are new to an activity typically spend more time with their mouths shut and their ears open, learning how others do that thing and less time arguing that their inexperience is just as valid as the experience of the veterans.

When people *do* make mistakes in a new activity and the community tries to correct them on it, those who genuinely want to learn tend to listen to the corrections, even when some people aren't as "nice" as they could be about it. We don't have all these horror stories of would-be-birders leaving the birding community because birding veterans were mean and wouldn't teach them.

And it's not because birders are just generally nicer than poly people. It's because new birders are more willing to learn, so experienced birders aren't frustrated and burnt out with constantly "educating" people who are coming to the community in bad faith, pretending to be "open" and "willing to learn" but really steeped in their privilege and demanding concessions for their environment-trashing birding preferences.

I'm considering two new poly terms for the glossary. This is the definition:

a cishet person (usually male) who fetishizes his partner's bi/queer sexual orientation and who uses said partner to obtain new partners to fulfill his fantasy of group sex with people of the genders/orientations he is fetishizing.

Which do y'all like?

Fisherman / Fishing (he uses his queer/bi partner for "bait" to "fish" for another woman for FMF threesomes)

Muskratting (from Elon Musk and his creepy partnership with Grimes, particularly the weird unicorn hunting attempt with Azeala Banks)

I think Muskratting is funnier / more clever, but I also think it's less intuitive because it relies on a knowledge of current events and is basically a fad, so in the future (and not that far off), people won't really understand why it's called that. So I'm not sure which direction I want to push this in.

Thoughts?

(P.S. - I didn't come up with either of these terms so I have no emotional connection to them. I saw them in a poly forum and I think it's a useful concept to include in a glossary - I mean, since I have terms like "cowboy", "cuckoo", "polywog", and "french kiss" in there)

We have this damn argument constantly in poly forums. Somebody calls someone a "unicorn hunter", somebody gets upset at the insult, someone else demands that there's nothing wrong with being a unicorn hunter, someone chimes in that they're a unicorn and proud of it, someone else tries to explain what the term means and where it came from, and then everyone yells "language evolves!" and "language police!" to justify whichever position they happen to hold.

And I'm fucking sick of it.

The history of this term is hard to cite sources for, because nobody really documented it at the time. I mean, all our conversations were in text on the internet, but in old BBS boards and email lists and geocities websites that are all defunct now.

So basically it's left up to the old-timers like me who were around back then to try and explain things, and then the young'ins come along with no understanding of our cultural history and how that shapes our cultural present, insisting that things aren't the way that we experienced. Most don't even realize that we *have* a "cultural history". But the word "polyamory" was coined in 1992, and it was coined because people were already doing this thing that we wanted to name. 26 years is long enough to create a sense of culture, to create art and history. It's long enough that we are now multi-generational.

So let me tell you a little story about How Things Used To Be.

The polyamorous community did not invent the term "unicorn" for a bisexual woman. That came a long time ago, at least from the 1970s, back in the disco swingers' era. It might even have origins earlier than that (as the wife-swapping version of swinging is said to have evolved out of WWII with soldiers on deployment, so swinging has been around even longer but it may or may not have been applicable to have "unicorns" in other iterations of the Lifestyle) , but since I was never part of the swinger community, I am not as up on swinger history as I am on poly history. I only know it as tangential to poly history.

So, anyway, in the '70s swinger communities, a "unicorn" was a bisexual woman willing to have threesomes with a straight MF couple, and then go away again without causing any complications like coming between the primary couple or trying to "steal" anyone. I'll be honest, I don't know if there is any subtext or any implications in that context. I don't know if it was considered an insult or a compliment or if it was neutral. Again, I wasn't part of that community, I just know that this is where I first heard the term to refer specifically to a bisexual woman.

However, when the poly community adopted it, the term was definitely used derisively. When we used the term, we weren't actually calling bisexual women "unicorns", like we were complimenting them as magical beings. We were insulting the people who were using women as breathing sex toys by accusing them of "hunting" for a mythological creature who didn't exist anywhere except in their own imaginations, to fulfill their own fantasies of capturing such a wondrous creature.

Back when the term first started getting widespread use, those of us who used it were not calling bisexual women "unicorns". Bisexual polyamorous women were "bipoly" women. That was our term for them back then. We liked portmanteaus back then more than the slang today that prefers metaphor or pop culture references. We used to say that you couldn't go to a poly potluck (because back then we didn't have "discussion meetings" or conferences, we had potlucks) and swing a stuffed parrot (because that was the symbol we used in public for people to find our gatherings) without hitting a bipoly woman.

We weren't calling anyone "unicorns". Unicorns don't exist. That was the whole point of using that term. A "unicorn" was symbolic, not a real person. It was symbolic of all the hopes and dreams and naiveté from monogamous couples curious about "opening up" their marriages. As the unicorn has always been symbolic of hopes and dreams and naiveté.

And power.

The unicorn has also always been a symbol of power. The brave and courageous hunter or prince or knight charges into the forest, seeking that symbol of purity and beauty and grace, hoping to overpower such a powerful beast, kill it, and tear its horn from its head to drink from and steal its magical properties for himself. There are actual, real thrones made out of narwhal horns and billed as unicorn horns. Ground "unicorn" horn powder was sold as medicine and magic.

Or perhaps the hero sought the unicorn be found worthy by the magical creature who only appears to the pure of heart to bestow its blessing. Every myth and legend about the unicorn says something about how the men see themselves, or how they see their gods (which are further reflections of themselves). Even the legends about unicorns being irresistibly drawn to virgins to lay their heads in the young maidens' laps and sleep (so leaving a young girl alone in a forest as a trap for a unicorn was a thing) says something about powerful men and their values.

The unicorn has never been about the animal. It has always been about the ones seeking it.

So when the poly community adopted the term "unicorn hunter", we used it in this manner. A lot of our early lexicon-creators liked literary allusion and historical references (some a little more "pseudo" than others). The arrogance and ignorance and entitlement of the wealthy white fictional and real historical men who hunted unicorns was more than applicable to what we saw happening in our own communities, with hetero couples trading on their couple privilege to maintain an uneven power distribution in their relationships.

Back then, we didn't have the language of "disempowerment" and "privilege" ... not that this language didn't exist, but it hadn't made it into widespread social use as it is now. A lot of us made a lot of semantics mistakes back in the '90s and early Naughties because we didn't have this language. But we were talking about the same things we continue to talk about today - power.

I came into the poly community as a single, bi-curious woman back in the '90s. I did not start out "opening up" a monogamous relationship. I wasn't introduced to poly society as part of a "couple". I didn't have the safety net of an existing relationship to fall back on if this "poly thing" didn't work out. If my relationships ended, I didn't have an "existing primary" that I could "close up" with and try to go back to being monogamous, or who would stick by me as we tried again as a single unit, I was left alone to mourn the loss of my relationships, and possibly the loss of several relationships if I also lost my metamours in the breakup. Unlike those couples who only lost a girlfriend, I lost an entire *family* when a couple decided to dump me for not living up to their magical unicorn standards.

From my perspective, the community was made up of two kinds of people - hetero couples and Free Agents. Long before we had the term "solo poly", we had Free Agents - people who dated and who had partners but who always operated as individuals whether they had many partners, one, or none. The men who were Free Agents were routinely looked upon with contempt for their callousness, lack of empathy, and selfishness. Even by women who were also Free Agents.

But the women who were Free Agents... I did not identify with that term. I had known too many men who treated polyamory as a way to have lots of sex without doing any emotional labor in their relationships (not that we had *that* term either). What I wanted was to build intentional family. So I didn't identify with the Free Agents. But because I always maintained my own identity and independence whether I was partnered or not, I was seen, essentially, as a Free Agent by the hetero couples, who almost exclusively did hierarchical polyamory. The fact that I wanted a "family" but was "unattached" made me extremely attractive to hierarchical polys looking for a bipoly woman to "add to their relationship".

So let me tell you how people treated me. I have a whole inbox from an old poly dating forum filled with nothing but straight men asking me to join their households either as an equal threesome or as "sister-wives", raise the children, keep the house, and manage the chicken farm.

No, seriously, there was one in particular that actually opened up correspondence with me looking for a co-wife to raise chickens in Montana. Or, South Dakota, or something. And when I complained about his email online, a half dozen other women responded that he had sent them the exact same email, verbatim. A form letter seeking a co-wife to run his chicken farm.

Many of them didn't start right out the gate like this guy, asking if I'd be interested in becoming a wife. Most of them went through the motions of pretending to want to get to know me first, but really, all of these meetings and correspondences were interviews. They had a job position to fill - co-wife - and they wanted to see if I could fit into that position.

The first couple of emails from the first couple of guys ... it's easy to overlook the feeling of being "hunted" at first. Especially if you're in a category of person who, statistically speaking, never gets hunted and is expected to be the hunter. Complain about catcalls to a lot of men, for instance, and many of them will respond with "I *never* get complimented! I would *love* it if women would just yell out a compliment on the street sometime!"

When you're in a category of person who has a lot of social capital and a lot of cultural power, even if you, personally, have setbacks and challenges in your life, it's really difficult to understand how someone without that capital and power might feel on the receiving end of attention from people who have it. Because part of the advantage of all that capital and power is the freedom from experiencing life without it and not ever needing to even notice what life is like without it.

So, the first few emails just sound like ... dating app messages. But the next few emails, and the next dozen emails, and the next hundred emails, over years and years and years of them all being the same thing - hetero couples not listening to me, not seeing me, not getting to know me, all of them looking for what I can do for them and not really caring about who I am or what *I* may be getting out of the deal...

It's predatory, it's demoralizing, it's depressing, and it's dehumanizing.

Hence, "unicorn hunters".

So, before our history is lost to ... well, history, I wanted to make a record of what it was like back then. I wanted to put in black and white what our intentions were when we were still coming up with the terms that people throw around, and away, these days with careless abandon.

Sure, "language evolves" and words change meaning. But a word's *origins* are important. Words, out of context, might have just a simple definition. But within context, the word can say a whole lot more than just a line in a dictionary. The origins of a word can tell you what a culture's *atmosphere* was like when the word was coined. It can show you insight into how we got to any given point and when we turned a corner and where the culture was destined to go from there. It can explain the subjective experience of the participants of being in that culture.

Words have power. We started using the phrase "unicorn hunters" to describe a very specific set of circumstances and a very specific type of people. We needed that term because we needed to be able to discuss a very big and very real problem we were having. If we couldn't discuss it, we couldn't address it.

And now we have people entering the community who were in diapers back when the term was first being coined, arguing about "evolving language" and "taking it back" and being "proud" to be unicorns, as if all our history doesn't matter. We still need to talk about disempowerment in relationships and predatory behaviour in our community. The need for the term still exists, whether that specific term has "evolved" or not. But we don't have a replacement for a term that is still incredibly accurate. And the words we *do* use to describe what we mean when we say "unicorn hunter" are received with even more offense.

Because that term is meant to be offensive. It's meant to describe offensive behaviour. That's what we always meant when we started using that term nearly three decades ago and that's what many of us still mean when we use it now. People might want to erase all the subtext and context that comes with the term "unicorn hunter", but I want to make sure that we at least don't erase the history. That history will tell us where we came from, and show us where we're going.

For reference:

https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/368069.html - How Do You Bring A Healthy Third Person Into An Existing Marriage?
https://findpoly.com/blog/unicorn-hunting/ - Looking For A Third
www.unicorns-r-us.com/ - Unicorns R Us
https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/tag/unicorn+hunting - The Blog Of The Innkeeper, entries tagged with "unicorn hunting"

Couples wanting to "open up" their relationship for the first time (besides being impossible, because you can't just "open" an existing relationship and expect it to be exactly the same as before just with more people, you actually end up creating whole new relationships) often spend a great deal of time fantasizing and worrying about hypothetical future relationships with people they haven't met and have created in their minds, who they make up to be either their greatest fantasies or their biggest fears.

Then these couples go about looking for these hypothetical, mythical people. They simultaneously seek for some magical goddess (because it's usually a bi cis woman) that will fit their giant laundry list of qualifications, while seeing monsters peeking out from behind the eyes of everyone who doesn't fit that list.

What they're doing is overestimating the happiness that they expect to find with their mythical pet and overestimating the UNhappiness that they expect to find if their new pet doesn't meet all their criteria.

This is called Impact Bias.

"The impact bias is our tendency to overestimate our emotional reaction to future events. Research shows that most of the time we don’t feel as bad as we expect to when things go wrong. Similarly we usually don’t get quite the high we expect when things go right for us." - Jeremy Dean www.spring.org.uk/2008/05/why-youre-sucker-for-impact-bias.php

In other words, people are notoriously bad at predicting what will make them happy. (paraphrase of Franklin Veaux)

Impact Bias does several things, two of which are particularly relevant to polyamory:

1) When predicting how an experience will impact us emotionally, things we haven't experienced yet are REALLY difficult to accurately predict and we usually get it wrong.

2) We have our own "theories" based on our culture and our cultural experiences, and those "theories" are often wrong.

What all this means is that couples, if they want to find success in polyamory, need to be aware of Impact Bias in a similar way that they are told to be aware of NRE. They don't actually know what will make them happy, even though they feel really strongly that they do. They are likely basing those predictions on cultural assumptions. But those cultural assumptions come from our monogamous culture, which means that they don't apply to poly relationships.

Trying to apply mononormative assumptions over poly relationships tends to make them fail because poly relationships, fundamentally, run contrary to those very mononormative assumptions. The couple's background, past experiences, and cultural exposure are all conspiring against them to give them bad information when they make their predictions. Predictions made on faulty premises usually come out wrong.

When everyone in the forums is saying "stop focusing on a single bi woman to love you both equally in a live-in triad" and "all those rules aren't going to help you 'protect your relationship', just let go and trust", and the couples are feeling upset and defensive because hey! they've thought all this out and they know how they feel and what they want! ... no, you probably don't.

I mean, yes, you probably do feel all that fear and hope and desire, but it probably doesn't reflect reality. Everyone falls victim for Impact Bias, just like everyone falls for all the other cognitive biases. They're what our brains do. The advice for NRE is to feel what you feel, but keep in the back of your mind that it's a temporary state and likely an illusion so don't make any *real world plans* based on NRE because NRE is lying to you. Fiction can be a fun experience, even a meaningful, profound experience, but at the end of the day, it's still a fiction.

The same goes for this Impact Bias - feel your feelings, just know that they're probably lying to you so don't actually make plans based on them. You are probably overly optimistic about how happy you will feel if you find some magical unicorn with perfect boobs and a penchant for childcare, and you are very likely overestimating how terrible things will be if you try dating someone who doesn't meet all your criteria, like someone who is only interested in one of you or who maybe has a penis or doesn't want children.

So just relax, acknowledge your fears and your fantasies but let them go and just meet people. Dating someone a little different from all your rules probably won't be as bad as you think it will, and searching for The Perfect Match probably won't bring you as much happiness as you think it will - at least not enough to be worth the price of dehumanizing all your interviewees and missing out on other potential sources of happiness.

If you ever want to see just who is willing to put their money where their mouth is in terms of poly "equality" and "our others are just as important to us as we are to each other", ask if they'd be willing to divorce in order to give one of those other partners legal protections, rights, and obligations, and see how quickly people justify that their need for legal protection is necessary for life and more important than anyone else's need.

Usually the conversation goes like this:

Me: So, you want your metamours to feel "equal", but you won't divorce so they can marry, huh?

Them: We can draw up legal documents to make them equal if necessary.

Me: OK, so then why not divorce and let them marry and YOU draw up legal paperwork to make yourself "equal"?

Them: Because there's this thing I need that I can only get from marriage.

Me: ...

Me: So, you're saying that legal contracts can't give you the same things?

Them: [without noticing the irony] No, I have to stay married to get this thing.

Me: 0.o

Me: ::blinkblink::

Me: So, much like why gay people wanted marriage and said that civil unions were not good enough and they were being treated like second class citizens and did not have equal rights, maybe that's partly why people say you have couple privilege and why they don't want to date couples and why they don't feel truly equal?

Them: No but they are! We totally love our OSOs as much as each other!

This is why it's about power, not emotions or priorities.

#ItIsEqualAsLongAsIAmNotTheOneToSacrifice #ButItIsDifferentWhenIDoIt #ButIHaveTheGreaterNeed #UntilYouDoNot #ButWhatAboutTheChildren #InATrulyFairSystemSometimesYouHaveToBeTheDisadvantagedOne #WeDoEgalitarianPolyAndDoNotBelieveInCouplePrivilege #ExceptOnlyOurKidsGetHisHealthInsurance #WhatWeAlreadyDecidedNoKidsWithAnyoneElseAnyway #ButWeAreTotallyEgalPolyAndOurSecondariesAreEqual #OopsDidISaySecondariesOutLoud?

I have, on occasion, offered to host "guest posts" for people I know who wanted to write something they felt was important but didn't feel like their own platform was the appropriate place for it, for whatever reason. I'm not really known as a blogger with a large audience, but I figure with my history of topics I can probably afford to host certain posts when others can't or would rather not.

So, today I'm providing a platform for Leni Hester on Facebook, who wrote the following post in a group that I and others felt would make an excellent public resource and reference article. They asked for name attribution only, no link-backs. Linked references and commentary at the bottom added by me.

A PSA for Unicorn Hunters! For those of us who enjoy playing with couples, here are some things I wish you would keep in mind:

I'm HUMAN. Unicorn hunting sounds really icky and violent.

The risk is ALL mine. If anything goes wrong between us, I mean ANYTHING--she gets insecure, he loses his 'momentum', indigestion, I tell a joke you don't find funny, you name it--I'm the one who pays. It'll be "okay, party's over, please get dressed and get out" and no matter how I feel, i get to drive home in tears while you two do self-care and cuddle.

Couple Privilege. Yes I know your relationship is the center of your lives. It is not the center of MINE. If protecting the "sanctity" of your relationship supersedes my physical health, my safety, my feelings, and my time--it's obvious y'all don't want a lover. Y'all want a sextoy. Please check out Babes in Toyland for an inanimate object, and leave the actual human beings alone.

One Penis Policy. Hahahahahahaha! You're hilarious, bro.

Babysitting and House chores. No, I will not watch Chad Jr. and Becky Marie while you have date night. I know for a fact, you will NOT pay me for that time. You want me to help clean up before we have a date? Sure! Then I expect YOU BOTH to come over and help me paint or help me move. Not holding my breath.

Ghosting. Eventually you two will meet someone cuter, hotter or less intimidating to the wife, at which point I will be expected to have the good manners to just disappear. My hurt feelings will be proof that I'm crazy, my anger will be proof I'm a bitch, and the fact that I had sex with you will be used against me.

Offended by this? If y'all can't behave courteously, that's not on me. Maybe look into why these simple boundaries feel unreasonable, and be honest: do you really want to be poly? If you want the sex but hate having to care for another person, maybe poly is not for you. Figure this out before you pull another person into your drama.

And this shouldn't need to be said, but it does: This is not the place for #NotAllUnicornHunters. We already know that there are people out there who happen to already be partnered and who happen to like threesomes and triads but who aren't doing these kinds of things. Congratulations, you don't suck. But instead of centering yourselves yet again by reminding everyone here that you're Not One Of THOSE Couples, you could instead talk to *other couples* and tell them not to be like this.

People who are technically part of a privileged group but who consciously and conscientiously object to a stratified privileged society don't tend to feel offended or insulted or even guilty when people who are part of a disenfranchised group talk about the problems between the groups. They already know that they're not the targets or the objects of the criticism, so they don't take it personally and they can really hear the criticism without feeling attacked. And they can feel secure in turning to others in their group to say "see this? This is a problem that our group contributes to. As a member of this group, I think we can do better."

So if you're not one of Those Couples, then be one of these other kinds of couples instead. *We* are not the ones who need to know, in this space, that you are an exception to the rule. It's your brethren who need to know that you are not one of Those Couples and you disapprove of those who are, that you will not defend them or hide them, that you will stand up to them and help us make our communities less welcoming to their toxicity.

We don't need to hear yet again that #NotAllCouples. We need to see it by your actions, which includes not centering yourselves in our discussions, but signal-boosting and supporting us in the spaces where we aren't normally heard.

https://medium.com/@PolyamoryINC/the-most-skipped-step-when-opening-a-relationship-f1f67abbbd49

"What you didn’t realize when you were living in the cocoon of a monogamous relationship is how much of a monogamous relationship is a favorable breeding ground for codependence. ...
Disentanglement will help 90% of that go away. And it’s rather simple. And you can do it all before you ever go on a single date.
Step 1 - Pick a night, any night, and leave. ...
Step 2 - Make the night random. ...
Step 3 - Get comfortable having to ask each other for date nights. ...
Step 4 - Now, and only now, ease into dating other people."

This. Thisthisthisthisthis.

All of this.

There is only one thing I would amend this with:

This article is about not subsuming your identity into your relationships (usually into your couple) and how avoid doing that. It calls this a single step - disentanglement - but then goes on to give 4 steps on how to disentangle yourselves from a codependent (read: monogamous) relationship. It even insists that people who intend to remain monogamous learn how to disentangle themselves for their own relationship health, which I totally agree.

In the last step, you finally get to the part where you "open up" your relationship and start dating people. I totally agree that you should do all this other work first, so the dating part will be a long, slow process because you have to do this other stuff first.

This article *does* point out that people have trouble keeping to plans and to learn to forgive yourself for not following the timeline exactly. So what I'd like to amend is really very nitpicky and only because I've seen people who don't engage in polyamory in good faith abuse this otherwise well-intentioned advice. But I think it's *really* important, important enough to mention.

The article insists that you start out dating slow - only once a month, and then not until a few months in do you start kissing, and another month in for making out, etc. What I don't want to see happen is for couples to make "agreements" that they won't have a date night with a new partner more than once a month for 4 months, and then they won't kiss their new partner until month 5, and they won't start making out with their new partner until month 6, etc.

This guideline is supposed to teach you how to *disentangle* yourself from your partner. If you start making *agreements* with each other that dictate what you can and can't do with people who are not present there to negotiate the agreement, and when you can and can't do them, that's the exact opposite of learning how to disentangle yourself.

Yes, please learn how to be an independent individual while partnered before you stick your toes in the poly pool. PLEASE do this first! But don't then undo all that work by sitting down with your spouse and making "agreements" with each other about how quickly or slowly your forays into dating will go.

The point of the slow speed in the article is to make sure that you really learn to disentangle yourselves first, to give yourselves time to become full people again, and not these weird amalgamated conjoined spouses. The point of the slow speed is not to then yank yourselves back together with agreements that dictate other people's behaviour, particularly if it feels contrary to the wants and desires of those people who are behaving and who aren't the one enforcing the agreement.

Yes, we absolutely want you to take things slow - as slow as you need to! Just don't shoot yourselves in the foot by doing exactly the opposite of the whole point of this advice, which is to become independent people. Don't follow up all that hard work learning how to be whole and complete with some kind of "rule" or "agreement" to connect you back together again.

The article even says that this monthly timeline thing is a *guideline*. If you don't happen to have anyone of interest when you're ready for this step, then make it a *personal* goal to try dating once a month because that's a pretty reasonable goal to start with. But then once you meet someone and you're ready to start dating them, make sure you talk to them directly about your concerns and your process and decide *with them* how frequently the two of you will share this experience together.

Because let me tell you, as the new partner feeling New Relationship Excitement, seeing you, their new love interest, only once a month *fucking sucks*. It's going to feel like torture not seeing you for a whole month, doubly so if the reason is because "I made a promise to my spouse and they won't let me go out with you more often" (which adds resentment on top of the yearning), so get their input on how often they want to see you and how often you are both available to see each other before making any decisions about frequency.

Then you can let your existing partner know what you've *decided* with your new partner and work with your existing partner on reassuring them or compensating for your time apart, or whatever it is that needs to happen so that the decision *you've made with the new partner's input* can be acted on with consideration.

Remember, the whole point is to become independent people engaged in an interdependent relationship. Don't undo all your hard work with old, codependent habits.

Not too long ago, Professor Sex contacted me and asked if I had some extra energy reserves to address a question she had. She asked, if I was on a poly/CNM social networking site (not a dating site but there are no moderators/rules about dating etc.) and I see the following post: "Hey folks, we are a secured married couple in seek of a third to complete our triad. Any women in our state?" --- if I were to assume that they were well meaning and just needed to be educated, how would I reply to that?

So I wrote out a long response. And a whole ton of it got used in an article addressing Unicorn Hunters! I think it's a great article (not just because it uses so much of my own material) and I'm so pleased to have something like this I can bookmark and link to in all the forums whenever this subject comes up. I like it because the tone is so much nicer than I usually end up being because I'm out of patience, and yet it doesn't mince any words or pussyfoot around the subject, or even make allowances. That's a really hard line to toe.

I even got to throw some love out to my dear metamour, Maxine, when the link to her blog post about poly unicorn math was included. Remember, I have now added tags for all my blog articles on Unicorn Hunting, Hierarchy, Couple Privilege, Triads, and Solo Poly, which are all related to the subject of this article. Most of the posts under those tags are decidedly not so polite in tone. But if you're looking for more of my opinions on the subject, they can be found here.

I was also asked a second question, which may or may not find its way into another article someday.

In your opinion, is there an ethical way to "unicorn hunt"?

No. The term was specifically coined to describe an unethical practice. By definition, it is unethical. The words themselves mean "mythological, non-human creature" and "predatory". It is a label for behaviour that is dehumanizing, objectifying, and predatory. I write more about how and why it's unethical on my blog.

There is, however, an ethical way to form a triad that happens to have two bisexual women and one straight man - and that's by simply being one of those people and managing to run into the other two people and having the relationship form naturally out of the compatibility between those people. Don't try for one. Be open about who you are and what you have to offer a relationship, and be open to meeting all kinds of people and considering all kinds of relationships. An FMF triad may form out of the people you meet that way, and if it happens organically, without any prescripting of roles or having anybody in the relationship tell another person in the relationship what they can and can't do with their own bodies, minds, or emotions, then it might be an ethical FMF triad.

Don't try to find people for the spaces in your life, find spaces for the people in your life.

I want to respond to everyone who ever utters the phrase "open our relationship" with the following:

Stop saying that phrase. Every time you want to say that, replace it with "deconstruct our relationship and reconstruct it as a new, open relationship". And then start *seeing* your relationship as a brand new relationship that is open, not an existing relationship that is identical in every way to the old one except now you can talk to or fuck other people.

Because you are not "opening up". You have to rebuild your relationship from the ground up, with new paradigms and new assumptions and new expectations. Your new partners are not entering an existing relationship, even if they date both of you. They are constructing WITH YOU a whole new set of structures.

You are not adding on a rumpus room to an existing house that doesn't change anything about the rest of the house and where you can conveniently close the door when you want to pretend that it doesn't exist.

You are building a whole new building complex with multiple structures that interact with each other and share infrastructure while maintaining separate other elements that all add up to one beautiful complex of dwellings that each inhabitant ought to have, not just a say in designing, but the *final* say in designing the part in which they inhabit over anyone who lives in other parts.

So stop saying you want to "open up your relationship". You're not "opening up". You need to "deconstruct" your relationship, and rebuild something totally new that might have some similar elements, like all houses have plumbing, or whatever, but it's still a new relationship with new assumptions and expectations and totally different property lines.

Don't say you are "opening up", say you are "deconstructing" your relationship and constructing new ones.

I think if we all start using this language instead, it will really hammer the point home and make everyone think about what they're doing in a different way, which will hopefully lead to more intentional, more compassionate, and less fearful relationship practices.

You can't "protect" your "existing relationship" if that relationship is already gone because you're deconstructing it to build something totally new. Raze it to the ground, like any construction project requires you to remove what's there before you start building something new.

And, like any good construction project, you start with the foundation that will properly support the rest of the structures. Don't build something on top of a foundation that wasn't intended for this type of building in the first place.

(For more on this subject, click on the tags below, especially for unicorn hunting and couple privilege)

Your regular, sporadic reminder that not everyone who is poly started out as a "couple opening up" or a bisexual woman who got courted by a couple, and that not all poly relationships involve polyfi FMF triads.

In fact, the majority of poly people and relationships are not this.

Not all of us are hetero men and bisexual women. Not all of us are cisgender. Some people are even gay! And asexual! And aromantic! Some women are straight and some men aren't!

And most of us have relationship structures that don't fit a convenient geometric shape.

#polycule #TheAmorphousSquiggle #TheTangle #IStartedOutPolyAsAMostlyStraightSingleWoman #NeverOpenedUp #AlwaysPoly #IHaveWaitAMinuteFirstDefineTheTermPartner #MyRomanticNetworkNeedsA3DFlowchart #SorryIHaveNoIdeaHowManyPartnersMyPartnerCurrentlyHasIHaveLostTrack #OKSoWeAre3rdMetamoursTwiceRemoved? #MyBestFriendsSistersBoyfriendsBrothersGirlfriendHeardFromThisGuyWhoKnowsThisKidWhosGoingWithAGirlWhoSawFerrisPassOutAt31FlavorsLastNightIGuessItsPrettySerious #IAmYourFathersBrothersNephewsCousinsFormerRoommate

https://longreads.com/2017/10/10/the-horizon-of-desire/

"Why 'you knew what the deal was going in' is bullshit in relationships. Just because I knew the deal doesn't mean I am required to consent to it unendingly.
'Consent is a state of being. Giving someone your consent — sexually, politically, socially — is a little like giving them your attention. It’s a continuous process. It’s an interaction between two human creatures.'"
~Jessica Burde

The article linked is about sexual consent in the context of what constitutes "real rape" and our current Rapist-In-Chief's endorsement of the new social climate of Rape Culture. But "you knew the deal going in" with respect to poly relationships is a natural extension of this same mindset, even if it's adjacent to the conversation about Rape Culture.

It's a coercive practice in the poly community where, usually, a cis-hetero couple lays down the law for some poor bisexual woman about what their relationship is going to look like once she signs her life away to them (sometimes not much different from the scene in 50 Shades, with actual contracts on paper and everything).

And then, when the woman who was initially snowed over with lust and New Relationship Excitement and the promises of double the fun by a, usually, more experienced couple, and not a little bit of strong-arming her to accept what would clearly be manipulative and toxic relationship practices in a monogamous context but who get away with it because it's "polyamory" so obviously it's going to look different so why can't "toxic" = "healthy" when we're turning the whole monogamous paradigm upside down ... ahem,

when this woman eventually starts to add up all the red flags and she can't ignore her misgivings any longer, or when she just changes her mind and her libido as people do over time and wants to renegotiate the parameters of her relationship *as we all have to over time*, the couple trots this old worn out trope and demands that she not ever change, that whatever she consented to previously still holds, and it's ALL HER FAULT for "disrespecting the primary" by daring to want something other than what she signed up for.

Consent, whether it's missionary sex in a long-term, hetero, vanilla relationship, casual hookup sex with the person you met in a bar, or ongoing intimacy in a poly relationship, is a continuous process and it is required *the whole time*, not just once up front. Expecting anyone to maintain a sexual, emotional, or romantic agreement they made in the past is coercive and a part of Rape Culture. Even when it's a couple doing it to a bisexual woman who "knew the deal going in".

"The problem is that technically isn’t good enough. 'At least I didn’t actively assault anyone' is not a gold standard for sexual morality, and it never was."
"Ideally you want them to say it again, and again, and mean it every time. Not just because it’s hotter that way, although it absolutely is; consent doesn’t have to be sexy to be centrally important. But because when you get down to it, sexuality should not be about arguing over what you can get away with and still call consensual."
"Rape culture describes the process whereby rape and sexual assault are normalized and excused, the process whereby women’s sexual agency is continuously denied and women and girls are expected to be afraid of rape and to guard against it, the process whereby men are assumed to have the erotic self-control of a gibbon with a sweetie jar of Viagra, creatures who ought to be applauded for not flinging turds everywhere rather than encouraged to apply critical thinking."
"The thing is, if you accept the idea a woman has the absolute right to sexual choice, you must also wrestle with the prospect that she might not make the choice you want. If she’s really free to say no, even if she’s said yes before, even if she’s naked in your bed, even if you’ve been married for twenty years, well then — you might not get to fuck her."

See how often these things apply to a couple's "third" when you mentally place them in these statements?

I had a match available to answer someone's genuine-seeming question on why some of the less-offensive unicorn hunting posts were also picked on. The thread is a good thread, with thoughtful yet passionate responses. My comments aren't that great, because I just typed quickly, trying to answer before I leave my house to the mercy of the coming hurricane. But there are some nuggets in there that I'd like to be able to find again, to write a more comprehensive post on the subject later. It is my opinion that couples-seeking-thirds is *always* coercive and disempowering and cannot be anything else. But it's really hard to explain why. Here are some of my comments touching on why:

Polyamory isn't an add-on to a relationship. Polyamory isn't something that COUPLES do, it's something that PEOPLE do. It's when a "couple" is seeking, as if that couple-relationship is a sentient being of its own. It's when the *relationship* is prioritized above the individual needs of the people.

When the relationship is prioritized over the needs of the individual people in it, and when any relationship requires any one person to have a relationship with someone else, those relationships are fundamentally, inherently coercive in nature.

People get all hung up on the configuration, as if we're complaining about triads, instead of recognizing the *nature* of the relationship itself. Unicorn hunting is coercive and disempowering. It just so happens to most often take the form of a MF couple seeking a bi woman for a triad.

It's not the triad that's the problem, it's the hunting that's the problem.

If you read any material on emotional domestic abuse, stuff that is a clear red flag for mono het relationships are things that the poly community just nods its collective head at, like, "well, sure, that makes sense, you totally need to organize your multi-person relationships that way in order to stay safe! What? It's just our preference! There are no wrong ways to do poly! Stop oppressing me for wanting to oppress others!"

Seriously, read Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft, and see how many couples-seeking-thirds do these kinds of things to their thirds.

For some reason, poly people like to reinvent wheels. Just because some of us are seeking to dismantle the monogamous paradigm, it doesn't mean that everything we've learned about monogamy needs to also get thrown out. We've learned a lot about what NOT to do, but the larger poly community seems to want to start over completely from scratch.

So now we have to re-learn what coercive relationships look like, because it's somehow "different when we do it". As if having 2 people in positions of power exerting coercive control over a third is less wrong than when one person does it.

Why Does He Do That is a book written by an abuse specialist who specializes in men-on-women abuse. He includes some nods to other demographics, but this is his specialty. It's tempting to write this book off because of that, but I think it's really important not to.

The reason is because men-on-women abuse has an added layer of culturally supported misogyny protecting it, and this book acknowledges that. How intersectional social issues affect abuse in relationships differs among demographics. White cis het men in particular are at the top of the privilege food chain, so it's important to see how all those privileged positions affect their ability to abuse and their type of abuse.

Even though we are polyamorous, we are still living in a monogamous culture. So we have couples privilege on top of all the other layers of privilege. Granted, couples privilege is not even in the same class as race or gender when it comes to oppression, but it is *one more layer* of a privileged class that affects abuse.

This is why I think we can take the lessons we learn from Why Does He Do That and apply it to unicorn hunting. In the microcosm that is polyamory, couples have the cultural support that white cis het men do, so we can draw parallels.

In addition to that, many of those unicorn hunters have white cis het men at the helm, having been steeped in the same culture that protects and excuses the abusers in the book. Throw in some internalized misogyny, and their women partners turn into enablers, funneling and directing the abuse out towards a third even while they are subjected to the very same coercion by their men partners. Like when child abusers turn their victims into accomplices later in life, only less dramatic.

So, as touched on in a comment above, because of the nature of most unicorn hunters just happening to be cis-MF couples (usually white but not always), it's bigger than just individuals being coercive and it's bigger than just "couples privilege".

Unicorn Hunters exist because we live in a culture that, through several axis of privilege and oppression, have spawned this one, little demographic of cis-MF couples seeking thirds that is a culmination of all kinds of intersectional privilege.

Which means that they are *inherently*, definitionally, fundamentally, harmful to the individuals they hunt and to the community as a whole. And this book is relevant for that point.

Related reading:

www.quora.com/My-wife-is-interested-in-and-Im-open-to-polyamory-with-a-second-man-How-do-you-bring-a-healthy-third-person-into-an-existing-marriage

My wife is interested in and I'm open to polyamory with a second man. How do you bring a healthy third person into an existing marriage? We are not having children and are not close to our biological families, but all of our friends have or are moving away. We miss having “family” and there are times that two just doesnt feel like enough. We both have attraction to men but have no desire to replace the other.

I’m answering this because I see this sort of thing all the time, where someone asks “how do I?” about polyamory, and a bunch of people say “you’re going about it the wrong way, do it this way instead” and the person asking the question gets upset that no one is validating their approach.

Which is ridiculous because the person asking the question is asking that question precisely because they don’t know the answer. Listen to the collective wisdom of those who have been there, done that.

The word polyamory has been around for 27 years. We’re now onto multi-generational poly people. That’s a LOT of accumulated wisdom. Don’t dismiss it just because you don’t like what it says, the way so many others have.

I’m answering this to add one more voice, so that it’s harder to say “these are all just opinions and I don’t have to listen to them”. It’s not *just* opinion. It’s *experience*. And it’s experience earned the hard way.

Don’t try to “bring someone into our marriage”. You can’t. It’s impossible. You do not “add a third” to an existing relationship, you create all new relationships. Even your existing marriage will be recreated as a totally new relationship that’s now “open”. Treat each dyadic relationship (of which there will be 3) as their own entity that requires nourishment and care, and then treat the relationship among the 3 of you (whether it’s a triad or a Vee arrangement) as *it’s* own entity that needs nourishment and care.
Yes, you read that right, when 3 people get into a relationship, you have 4 whole new relationships to care for. You do not “add a third” like simply pouring in a new liquid into an existing drink and it all blends together into one drink.
The phrase “healthy third person” reveals a pretty sex-negative, abled bias. That’s going to come across pretty poorly when you start engaging with poly communities. Go do a LOT more research on sexual stigma, body positivity, and ableism.
Join poly communities - as many as you can make time for (at least one being in-person). Regular discussion group attendance is not everyone’s cup of tea, but you really need to know other poly people to develop good poly skills. You need to see how others are succeeding (or failing) and you need to know people who understand and accept polyamory as a choice (because even compassionate mono people just don’t have that mindset or that experience to really empathize and see the joys and problems of what you’re about to experience).
Being isolated is one of the tools of abuse. This doesn’t mean that I’m saying you’re being abusive. It means that abusers understand how important it is to have a support network and to have more objective sets of eyes looking in on a relationship to see things that the people in the relationship are too close to the situation to see. Abusers understand how important these things are, and that’s why they try to remove these things from their victims.
You don’t want to unintentionally put yourself in the same sort of dangerous situation that abusers try to create intentionally. You need a support network that extends beyond your romantic relationship and you need people who can see your relationship from other angles outside of the relationship. That’s a tool for mental health and relationship health. Join communities to meet other poly people and build a support network. If you don’t like structured discussion group meetings, go long enough to make friends and build up a social network through the group.
Don’t join groups for the purpose of meeting your potential partner. Sure, if you want to meet someone who is open to polyamory, you’ll have more luck if you’re in spaces where poly people gather. But going to these groups in order to *use* the group as a dating service is usually both poor etiquette and off-putting (unless the group is specifically labeled as some kind of poly dating service).
In general, going out for the purpose of finding someone is less successful than just being yourself and doing things socially. People don’t generally like being interviewed and then hired for the job of Your Next Partner, and that’s what it feels like when you go out “looking”. But people *do* generally like meeting people who share their interests and values and are interesting people doing interesting things. So go out and be interesting and meet people. Dating partners will *eventually* follow from that. And if you just go out and be interesting, you might be surprised at all the different places you will end up meeting partners.
Speaking of job positions, don’t treat people as things. Again, people are generally attracted to those they find interesting. They are not here for you to use. They do not exist to fulfill your desires. They are not supporting characters in your story. They are whole and complete humans and deserve to be treated as such. They are the main characters in their own stories. A lot of newbies go out and say “we’re looking for someone who can do these things and be this way and likes this stuff”. Try shifting your perspective away from what the other person can do for you, to what *you* can offer in a relationship to another person. That’s not the end, that’s just the start, but do that first before you get to the next part of that equation.
Don’t decide ahead of time what the relationship ought to look like and then try to find people to fit into that idea. Again with the “the people you date are real people” thing. The happiest, most successful relationships are those that built organically, over time, based on what *all* the people in the relationships want and need and negotiated. Just meet people and listen to what the *relationship* is telling you that it wants to be. Most people find themselves surprised to be happy in configurations that they didn’t anticipate, mainly because people really suck at predicting what will make them happy. It’s not the configuration that brings happiness, it’s the people. The “correct” configuration develops from the people, not the other way around.
Don’t try to “protect our marriage”. You can’t. Even if you remain monogamous, you can’t. Shit happens and Game Changers exist. All the promises you make to each other don’t mean anything to the #10 bus with broken brakes that comes careening around the corner and into your car. All the rules in the world won’t save you from cancer. All the agreements you agree to won’t stop one of you from leaving if you change who you are or what you want over time. Ask anyone now sitting in divorce court how well that “promise to love and honor until death do we part” really lasts when someone decides it’s not what they want to do anymore.
Your marriage will work, or not work, because of the two of you in it, not because of some other person. If you try to “protect” your marriage against your third person, first of all it won’t work because it has nothing to do with them, and second of all, you can’t ever fully engage in a romantic relationship with another person if you are simultaneously viewing them as a “threat”. That is a barrier to intimacy and a Sword of Damocles hanging over their head. Most people will not want to take that role anyway, and those who do will be in a fundamentally disempowered relationship.
If you want someone to give you their heart, you have to be just as vulnerable and just as intimate as you expect them to be. They can’t open up and fully trust you with their heart if you think of them as a threat and put up barriers to them in the interests of “protecting our marriage”. Their relationship with you deserves all the same potential to develop as your marriage did when you first met your now-spouse.
Which also means that once you decide to “open up”, if you leave yourself a back door by agreeing to dump partners if one of you thinks it’s not working out, or if you think you need to “work on our marriage”, you’re treating other human beings as disposable, which is not giving them the same potential, not treating them as whole human beings deserving of intimacy and vulnerability, etc. Don’t do this.
If you decide to “open up”, then you’re open. If you’re not involved with anyone else and you want to go back to monogamy, that’s one thing, but dumping existing partners for the sake of your marriage is doing all of these things here that we are all saying are bad ideas. Frankly, your other partners deserve better than what you’re offering if you’re willing to do this.
And related to the previous one, don’t do “rules”. Don’t even make “agreements” when the “agreement” is something about what you can or can’t do with another person, especially if that other person isn’t yet present to give their input. Talk to *each person* (your spouse, your future partner, etc.) about how *they want to be treated*, and then treat them that way. “I want you to not have sex with that person” is not a statement on how I want to be treated, just FYI. Discuss what things you can and can’t do *to that person directly* - that’s what getting consent looks like and that’s what boundaries are. But don’t make decisions (whatever word you use to label them) with one person about what you will or won’t do *with another person*. That’s treating people as things, which we’ve already discussed in several comments and at length in this own comment.
Nobody should have less power to negotiate what you can and can’t do to or with them than someone who isn’t you or them.

Remember, when you go to a community and say that you want to do something, and a bunch of people in that community try to tell you that it’s not a great idea, don’t dismiss it just because it was "too long; didn’t read", or because they had an attitude and you didn’t like their tone, or because everyone is being “too negative” towards you, or because you’ve thought about it a lot and you’re pretty sure this is what you want to do in spite of their objections.

If the people in the community are telling you that an idea you have isn’t a great idea, listen to them. They’re probably telling you that for a reason. And being new to the community, no matter how smart you might be or how much you’ve thought about the idea, the collective experienced community is probably in a better position to be able to predict how well your idea will work in practice. Lots of things sound good on paper, but when the rubber meets the road, we already know how it plays out because we’ve done it and seen it a million times before.

Don’t “add someone to our marriage”. Start a whole new set of relationships with your spouse and your future partner.

Also, read More Than Two (www.morethantwo.com)

Hey! You are not "entering an existing relationship" or finding someone to "enter / join your existing relationship". You are creating a WHOLE NEW SUITE OF RELATIONSHIPS!

Please just fucking stop saying that phrase.

YOU ARE NOT ENTERING / FINDING SOMEONE TO ENTER AN EXISTING RELATIONSHIP

YOU ARE NOT ENTERING / FINDING SOMEONE TO ENTER AN EXISTING RELATIONSHIP

YOU ARE NOT ENTERING / FINDING SOMEONE TO ENTER AN EXISTING RELATIONSHIP

YOU ARE NOT ENTERING / FINDING SOMEONE TO ENTER AN EXISTING RELATIONSHIP

While we're at it:

You cannot protect your existing relationship from upheaval.

You cannot prevent your existing relationship from changing.

You cannot prevent your existing relationship from ending.

You cannot convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced that polyamory will be good for them.

You cannot guarantee that you will all make it out of this intact.

You cannot "go back" if it doesn't work out.

When you change the fundamental nature of your relationship, in any way - be it polyamory, having a baby, separation, moving in, closing it up, whatever - you CHANGE YOUR RELATIONSHIP. It is no longer your existing relationship, it is a brand new one. But that's never more true than when that change includes the number of people with an active participation in your relationship, such as having kids or getting new partners.

As a matter of fact, when you start adding people, you don't get a brand new relationship, you get 4 new relationships when there are 3 of you, and 11 new relationships when there are 4 of you, and the number goes up geometrically (if I recall correctly the math increase term) from there.

Maybe everything will all work out for the better. Maybe your relationship will change for the better. But it is no longer the same relationship.

If you have a baby, then your relationship *used* to be "child-free couple", but now it's "family". You are no longer a child-free couple and you never will be that same couple again. You might some day be "couple who lost a child", or "couple with grown children who no longer live at home". But you will never again be the same "never had kids together couple" that you were before the baby.

And you did not "add" that baby to your couple. You created a whole new family with a whole new person.

When you "add a third" or "open up", you are, just by virtue of even having the discussion, changing your relationship. You have changed it, and you can never go back to the time before you brought it up. You can go back to being a couple again, but now you're "a couple who discussed / tried opening up". You will never be that pre-open couple ever again.

You cannot protect your relationship.

You cannot preserve your relationship.

All you can do is hope and work with intention so that your relationship continues to grow in ways that nourish everyone in the relationship. EVERYONE, not just the two of you.

But it might not. It might not grow and nourish everyone, or anyone. That is a possibility, no matter what you do, but it's pretty probable if you keep keep trying to "protect" things.

It's not the same relationship anymore. You are not "adding someone to an existing relationship". Just strike that phrase from your vocabulary and never utter it again.

In fact, don't just strike it, replace it with the repeated phrase above. Constantly remind yourself that you ARE NOT and CAN NOT do that.

If your relationship has any chance of continuing to grow in ways that nourish everyone in it, I promise you that it is through this reminder.

There's this pernicious trope in the poly community. It says "it's OK to restrict someone else's behaviour as long as they all agree to it" and "if one person doesn't want his partner to have sex with other men, and she agrees to it, then it's OK", etc. For some reason, people seem to think that it's totally acceptable to tromp all over someone's agency, as long as the other person doesn't stop you from doing it. But I have a BIG problem with this.

If everyone wants to "restrict" themselves, then there's no need for someone else to "restrict" them. If one person has to "restrict" another, that's where coercion comes from. The language is important. It leads to *excusing* abuse.

There's nothing wrong with 3 people who decide together that they all want a closed triad. There *is* something wrong with one person dictating on behalf of all 3 of them that they will be in a closed triad (or 2 people dictating to the third that they will be in a closed triad). It would be just as wrong for one person to decide that the others *must* date or have sex with people outside the group whether they wanted to or not (or for one or two people to decide that another *must* have sex with that person if the other wants to have sex with this person whether the other is interested in both or not, i.e. the "package deal").

Our language affects how we think and feel and behave. The relationship configuration isn't the problem, the language is.

In studies of other languages and other cultures, they discovered that people's perceptions are actually different and that they are not able to do the same things that other people do simply because of the words that they use and the way they use them.

For example, in English, when we speak about time, we use language that measures physical distances, i.e. "short break", "long wedding". Time is perceived as a distance traveled. But Greek & Spanish speakers use words referring to quantity - "small break", "big wedding". In Spanish, time is perceived as a unit of volume.

In studies, they found that learning a new language that uses different concepts for things like "time", people actually become aware of perceptual dimensions that people who only speak one of the languages can't perceive. Language and our use of it effects our emotions, our visual perception, and our perception of time, among other things.

In a study years ago, they looked at the language of primitive tribal cultures untouched by industrial societies who didn't have words for things that they had no context for, such as global distances. Because of this, they actually couldn't *see* things that they had no language for. It's not as simple as holding up a smart phone in front of a tribes person and that phone being "invisible", but their brains literally couldn't see things the way that other people could.

One of the things they had trouble with was perceiving distance, because their concept of "distance" is very different from someone who has seen pictures of the earth from space, for example, and who regularly talks about distance in terms of thousands of miles or kilometers, compared to someone to talks about distance in terms of steps taken or the time to get there on foot.

So, back to the point. Language shapes how we think and what we believe. People who are prone to using language that disrespects the agency of others are *more likely* to have beliefs that disrespect the agency of others, and are therefore more likely to *do* things that disrespect the agency of others. And they are also therefore more likely to be unable to *see* how they are disrespecting the agency of others.

We see this when people use words like "permission" vs. "checking in". Some people casually throw out that they need to "ask the spouse permission" to do something, rather than phrasing it like "let me check in with the spouse to see how they feel about that." That's SUCH a huge implicit difference in how the person being granted "permission" is viewed by the person granting it!

The big difference, I discovered a while back, is that there are basically 2 types of people in these discussions - one who focuses on the outcome and one who focuses on the method of achieving the outcome:

To people who focus on the outcome, it's an "end justifies the means" kind of mentality, where the outcome is the same so it doesn't matter how they got there because the result looks superficially identical.

To people who focus on the method, these aren't even in the same universe. When the method differs, the outcome is irrelevant because that superficial resemblance isn't the POINT. The tools and methods we use to get there is the whole purpose.

And I'm coming to learn that the people in the first group can. not. see. the. difference.

This is why the language is so important. Their use of language wires their brain so that they are *unable* to see the difference. They literally can't see it, like the apocryphal tale of the South American tribespeople who couldn't see the ships that the Spaniards sailed in when they landed on American soil (of course that's not how it happened, but the tale has lasted as a fable with a moral anyway).

Their use of language is actually limiting their brains' ability to perceive things that other people can see.

The idea that anyone could actually "restrict" anyone else is an illusion. People only follow the "rules" that they want to follow. If 3 people made an agreement to be a closed triad, that agreement is only followed for as long as all 3 people *choose* to follow it. As soon as any one of them doesn't want to follow it anymore, it's over. The "restriction" is an illusion.

I once knew of a guy in a D/s relationship who insisted that his slave was his literal slave in every sense of the word - that it was "real" and that he "owned" her in exactly the same way that he owned his TV. And he kept insisting this right up until the day she served him with divorce papers. His "restrictions" over her only lasted for as long as she allowed them to last. It's all an illusion and he did not actually "restrict" her, she chose to self-limit her own behaviour. It was all her choice and it always was.

If people in a triad use language like "it's OK to restrict someone else", then they are more likely to believe that it's OK to restrict someone else, and that, by definition, is coercion. If the other person willingly "agrees" and *chooses* to self-restrict, then no one in that group is, or even can, restrict her. She is making her own choice. As soon as she decides not to self-restrict anymore, it's over.

Unless the others in the group *actually* have power over her to make her perform actions against her will. In which case, this is abuse and this is exactly the problem people are warning about with the use of language.

Someone will inevitably bring up D/s relationships in these discussions. I prefer to keep D/s discussions separate - kinda like it's a 201 course and we're still talking about Abuse 101. You can't get to the nuances of D/s in 201 until you master the concepts in Abuse 101. But I'll mention why it's different here anyway, but if you don't grasp the underlying concepts, then the subject of D/s and why it's different will only confuse you.

We use the trappings of this kind of language in the context of D/s relationships because some people really want to feel that these things are true for themselves. If two (or more) people have a D/s agreement, where they will use language like "I forbid you to do X" and the other person obeys, that's an exception to the rule. But not really. It's an exception to the rule that you should never use the phrases that imply ownership or that disrespect agency, but that's only because the very act of a D/s agreement is an act of empowerment and agency.

What I mean is that the submissive in a relationship *always* retains ultimate control over what happens to them. They are choosing to enter into a role-playing agreement where they engage in a fantasy structure of their choice. The power dynamic is an illusion. It's called power *exchange* for a reason. As soon as the submissive loses the power to revoke consent, that's when it becomes abuse.

But the fantasy requires the ability to use this sort of language. In order to make the brain feel like it's real, we have to make the exception and allow language that is otherwise unacceptable. The trick, then, is to balance the use of language with the internal respect for agency. This is indeed a very tricky balancing act and not many people can do it. So it's usually better to leave out BDSM exceptions when talking about the dangers of language and coercsion.

So, excepting D/s agreements (assuming that D/s agreement truly does value and respect the agency of the people entering into the agreement because that respect and value for agency is what makes it an illusion and therefore not doing what I'm complaining about here), no, it is never, ever, acceptable to "restrict" someone else's behaviour. That is literally the definition of coercion and abuse. If one person has a preference for a certain type of behaviour and another person *chooses* to acquiesce to that preference, that is not someone "restricting" someone else - that is one person choosing to self-restrict. The moment it is not acceptable to say no, that's the moment that consent is violated and that's when it becomes abuse.

The language that implies imposing one will over another is the language that leads to the belief that it is OK to impose one will over another. That belief is what *enables* us to abuse others. Without that belief, one is simply not capable of abusing someone else. Of being a dick in other ways, sure but not of *abuse*. You NEED that belief in order to abuse someone.

And that belief is formed by accepting language that excuses it.

So when we're talking about people who "agree" to various things, it's so important that I can't even stress how important it is, to use the kind of self-empowering language that discourages abusive beliefs and that discourages the community's ability to overlook abuse. When we promote "but they agreed to it, so it's OK", we open the door to "why did she stay if he was abusing her? She must have agreed to it." This is how abuse gets excused. This is how victims get blamed. This is how an entire society builds itself on a structure that empowers abusers and disempowers victims.

The whole reason why victims "stay" with their abusers is because the society around them will. not. let. them. leave. And part of that is because we give them shit for "staying" even though we have removed any support to help them get out. When coercion is part of the picture, they aren't "agreeing" to it, they are simply not allowed to not-agree. And then we blame them for their own abuse because they didn't not-agree. So we need to change our language so that we center the individual people and their choices over the other people imposing their will.

She is not "agreeing" to be abused, she was abused and couldn't not-agree. He didn't "agree" to be restricted by someone else, he chose his own limitations. These aren't "agreements" between two people, these are things that each person is personally empowered or disempowered to do. Those words are important.

Just like asking people of privilege to change their language use if they don't really intend to imply whatever racist or sexist or -ist thing that goes along with the words, it is important for our entire community to be cognizant of our own language use and to change it to accommodate belief structures that encourage freedom, choice, and empowerment.

If a white person were to defend his use of the n-word because "it just means a stubborn person" (someone actually told me that not too long ago), I would have to question his motives and why it's so important for him to use that word. Why *that* word, when there are so many other words for stubborn people? Why is it *so* important to keep a hold of *that* one word when people are telling him that it's harmful?

When we say that the language of choice vs. restriction is harmful to the community, I have to question the motives of those who insist "it's just a word" as a defense to keep using it. If it's just "a word", then it should be no problem to give it up. Because we *know* that words have power. Otherwise it wouldn't be any big deal to switch using that word to another. We know that words are important. So we have to look at why there are even debates at all around people using disempowering language.

So please listen to people who might know a little something about abuse and coercion and disempowerment when we say that this language is problematic, and if you really want to refer to someone who is choosing to self-limit themselves, then say so instead of couching it in terms that imply disempowerment and abuse.

If you don't mean to support abusive and coercive structures, then don't implicitly support them with the language you choose.

"But WWWHHHYYYYY are you all so mean to unicorn hunters?!? We just want to be loved, like everyone else!"

Maybe because we've seen more than one post where a couple wants to "add a third", except the sex doll, er, I mean new hire, er, that is the "lucky lady" is trying to leave an abusive relationship, and the couple starts asking advice on whether they should risk their hearts with her because it looks like she's flaky and may "back out" of their relationship?

Like, the concern here, folks, isn't that someone you know and presumably care about is IS IN AN ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP THAT SHE CAN'T LEAVE, but that she might break *your* hearts by going back to her abuser. Because you getting "played" or "dumped" by someone WHO IS IN AN ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP is the real issue here. 0.o

"Yeah, but we're people too! Our feelings matter!"

Uh, no, not so much, not in this case. Your feelings really don't matter here because ABUSE. This is *exactly* what we're talking about when we complain about treating people like things, disrespecting agency, couple-centrism, etc.

This is why unicorn hunting is a bad thing.

"But we're part of a couple looking for a third, and we don't do THAT!"

Yeah, it's not this very specific situation that's the problem, this is just an especially egregious example that 1) is totally obvious to most people that the unicorn hunters are the fucked up ones, and 2) the unicorn hunters STILL can't tell what's wrong with them because they're the ones who described the situation in the first place, so they obviously don't think they're being problematic here.

There is an underlying mentality that is the problem, and it's a problem because that mentality manifests in a million different, often unanticipated ways. We can't always predict in what way the unicorn hunters will mistreat their "third", but we can predict that they will, and that all reasonable people will recognize it when they do but they will continue to feel that they are the ones being victimized by the circumstances.

Today, with this hypothetical couple, it's a girl who is trapped in an abusive relationship so badly that even though she's in the process of trying to escape, she may not make it but the couple's biggest concern is how bad their feelz will hurt if she gets sucked back in, with maybe some afterthought to how much "drama" she's bringing to the triad because of her abuser's actions with regard to her leaving him and/or dating them.

Tomorrow it might be someone being gaslighted to believe that the triad fell apart because she was too "needy" or because she "changed" when she "knew the rules when she signed up", and what a "drama queen" she is for having wants/needs beyond what everyone agreed in the beginning.

The next day, it might be some poor guy who dared to fall in love with some girl who isn't allowed to feel her feelings because she signed a contract, maybe even literally, giving all her future feelings away to the couple, thereby introducing "drama" by developing feelings that she promised she would never have.

A woman tries to escape abuse, and signs point to a high chance of failure. But the issue on everyone's mind is ... what about the couple she promised to date once she escaped? What about their feelings about her flaking out on them? And what about the drama she'll cause if she does leave and he makes trouble for everyone and she flip-flops and possibly goes back to him later anyway? What about the couple?!

#UnicornHuntingIsProhibitedHere #CouplePrivilege #dehumanizing #NeedFulfillmentMachines #ThePeopleInTheRelationshipNeedToBeMoreImportantThanTheRelationship #EmbeddedCoersion #OutOfTheFryingPanIntoTheFryer

#Irony: #Polyamory is explicitly supposed to be about "more than two", and yet every resource we have, every discussion, every fear, every relationship rule, everything centers around couples. We have to "protect the primary couple"; we have to "respect the original or preexisting couple"; we have to develop communication so that we can improve our relationships (implied to be between couples); we assuage fears by talking about how the new relationship can improve the old *couple*'s relationship; singles and solo polys wonder how to get into couples "of their own"; and dog forbid we neglect to discuss how to "open up" an existing couple! ...

"The Couple" takes on a life of its own and soon it's a battle between The Couple and everyone who is not part of The Couple. That goes for the single interloper who is a threat to The Couple and yet is also the same person they want to "include in their relationship" and that goes for everyone who has seen this story play out a million times before and tries to warn The Couple that we already know the ending to this story.

Y'know what? Fuck "The Couple". I don't give a rat's ass about your relationships anymore. I certainly don't "respect" your coercive, destructive, exclusionary relationship. I care about the people in the relationships, and that includes everyone that the people in The Couple are about to sacrifice on the alter to The Couple. I have partners of my own. I have life partners. I have entangled partners. I have partners I care deeply about and who share significant portions of my life with me. Fuck those "couples" too.

I want to focus on building *partnerships* with my lovers and metamours and friends and family. A partnership isn't *inherently* limited to a "couple" and no one dyad gets to take precedence over anyone else and certainly no *relationship* gets to take precedence over any *person*. The partnership must always exist to serve the people in the partnership and never the other way around. Sometimes my partnerships do include just two of us, and that's fine, but fuck The Couple as its own entity. I care about the people, even the two who make up The Couple, but I do not care about The Couple as if it were a living, breathing person in its own right. I do not grant The Couple personhood status. People are more important than The Couple.

And fuck those cousins of The Couple who elevate The Triad or The Quad or The Tribe or whatever fucking group name you have to the same status as The Couple. You won't have as much social support as The Couple, so you might think that your little relationship unit deserves to be in a protected class, but a bully is still a bully even among minority groups so fuck your application of The Couple filter over your technically-more-than-two relationship too.

And if you try to argue semantics with me over what you think makes a "couple" and whether that's different from a "partnership" or not, fuck you too, you're missing the point.

I have a problem with Relationship Anarchy. I'll preface this by clarifying that it's not a problem with RAs themselves, or even the basic philosophy. My problem is that everything that defines RA are the reasons why I got into polyamory in the first place and it irritates me that so many of us feel the need to create a separate space for it.

When I got into polyamory in the late '90s, I was told about this new thing called "polyamory". I was told about it because I was trying to explain to a date why I could never be his "girlfriend". I was trying to explain how I needed the freedom to explore relationships as they happened, organically, and to take them where the relationship itself wanted to go naturally. I said that I just couldn't be penned in anymore, so I had to be non-monogamous, but I thought this necessarily meant that I would have to give up "relationships" because, in my experience up to that point in my life, you either had a monogamous Relationship, or you had a bunch of Friends With Benefits, and nothing in between. I expressed a deep sense of loss at the idea of trading big-R Relationships for freedom, but that was a sacrifice I was committed to making, even though I felt torn about it. He said "I know what your problem is - you're polyamorous!"

So I looked it up. Everywhere I looked, hideous Geocities websites and forums with infantile UIs all said the same thing - freedom, independence, naturally occurring relationships, fluidity in relationships, valuing different kinds of relationships for what they are instead of forcing them to all look the same - everything I was looking for and everything that, years later, people started calling "relationship anarchy".

Except the labels thing. I differ from many RAs on the importance of labels. And back then, the poly community was as divided on labels as it is now with one side coming up with all kinds of useful (and some not so useful) terms faster than we could adopt them and the other side eschewing "all labels" because they couldn't be "boxed in".

I think it's naive to take the position "I don't use labels" because we clearly use labels all the time. This entire sentence is made up of labels. I labeled that string of symbols and grouped them together into an identifiable set and called it a thing that everyone reading this can understand even if they all have a slightly different understanding of what that thing actually means. It's called "language" and it's how we communicate.

Labels are important for a variety of reasons, but that's a whole other rant and I don't want to digress here (or in my comments) about it. Point is, I do use labels descriptively, I am emphatically anti-prescriptive labels, and I've been having this same argument about labels with the poly folk since I joined the communities back in the last century.

So, the reason why I have a problem with RA is because, based on my introduction to polyamory back when it was still fairly new, polyamory IS relationship anarchy. My experience with the community says that this whole couple privilege thing, this whole closed triad thing, this whole relationship escalator thing, this whole ranking of relationships based on the categories and usually involving the type of sexuality involved, this whole valuing the Primary above all others - my experience says all that was added to polyamory after the fact and that those people came into what I had started to feel was "my space" and started fucking things up for the rest of us.

Maybe, technically, it wasn't "added" after the fact, because it depends on which specific local community one got involved with back in the beginning, but based on my introduction, those couple-based concepts as *defining* poly elements came later. Back when I joined, people may have held those concepts but polyamory itself was much looser, much simpler - it just meant "many loves" and required being ethical about it. That's it.

That left a lot of room for a variety of expressions of polyamory and it didn't automatically associate the term "poly" with all that other bullshit that is essentially mainstream monogamy with "permission to cheat" or as essentially religious polygamy minus the religion (or, rather, substituting one patriarchal religion for a goddess-worshiping religion which is technically not patriarchal but I could argue is still misogynistic because it's still objectifying, but that's yet another digression that I don't want to get into here).

I have a problem with RA because I feel like we already HAD a community for exactly that, but couples with their hierarchies invaded, took it over, and pushed everyone else who is like me out. Not that there wasn't room in polyamory for a variety of ways to practice it - back then we did have terms for the spectrum with "family-oriented" at one end and "free agent" at the other. So I'm not even saying that polyamory must be a term to describe exactly what I'm doing and no one else who is doing similar but not the same gets to use the label. There was room for most of us in the community, back then.

I'm saying that the couples with their fucking rules and fucking fears and fucking disrespect and fucking disempowerment got so numerous and so loud that they tainted the community to the point that people on the other end of the spectrum felt that it was better to just break off and create their own communities rather than stick around and improve the existing community - a possibly futile exercise.

Not everyone left, of course. Some of them identify as both RA and poly and are trying to drag these couples out of the toxic, abusive programming they've had from mainstream society and into the whole reason why we all came looking for something like polyamory in the first place. And some of us are sticking around and not identifying as RA (even though one could say that I technically am RA, I just don't use it as an identifying label) because we still believe that this is what polyamory *is* and we're still trying to keep those couples from destroying our cultural history altogether by being the only ones left (history is written by the victors, as they say).

So Relationship Anarchy bugs me, not because of the people who choose the label or because of the definition of that label, but because the label reminds me every time I see it that we already HAD a space carved out for us but people with their toxic bullshit came in and filled it with their abusive practices and self-defenses so much that many "free agent" type veterans left in disgust and new people see only Those Couples when they look at the community and if they're not like Those Couples, they decide that this community isn't for them so they wander off to find something that fits better.

RA bugs me because I am resentful of what people have done to the poly community that I first joined which resulted in the sorts of people I came here to find splintering off to form, basically, the same community that we started out with only without attracting Those Couples because it costs too much to deal with their insistence of trying something fundamentally in opposition to mainstream society while using all the same mainstream tools.

It kinda reminds me of the A+ community when socially conscious atheists split off from the atheism movement community because of the racist, misogynistic, trans- and homophobic assholes making it a toxic waste dump, only the RAs were more successful in carving out their own niche whereas SJW atheists are still trying to find the right way (i.e. comfortable fit) to label and organize themselves. Also, the RA symbol of a heart and an A in place of the infinity reminds me of the poly atheist symbol, which is the infinity-heart with an A - not sure which came first, but I saw the poly atheist symbol first so that's what I associate with an A in a heart.

So, I have a problem with Relationship Anarchy, but it's not the relationship anarchists - it's the people who drove them to feel that they needed some other community in the first place because the community we had doesn't provide a safe enough space for them and their ideals. So, really, I have a problem with the poly community and I just want it to be better so that RA isn't a necessary thing.

http://the-orbit.net/brutereason/2016/04/04/one-penis-policies/

I had a partner once who, when I found out that their pattern of both he and his wife only dating women was partially instigated by his discomfort with having his wife date a man and not fully because she was really more into women than men, I got really upset with him and pointed out the inherent sexism. I went through the usual objections, including the idea of ownership over his wife's body, etc., but right now I want to focus on his reaction to the proposal that the reason why he wasn't bothered by his wife having female lovers but was regarding male lovers is because he, fundamentally, believed that "lesbian sex / women's relationships don't count".

It basically boiled down to "I can't compete with other women and they can't compete with me because we have different parts, so I'm not threatened by them because they offer her something she can't get from a relationship with me, but another man can give her the same thing that I can, therefore she might leave me if she has access to another man" with the further assumption that said other man would necessarily be "better" in some way to facilitate the threat that she would leave if she only had the chance to know some other man.

This idea equates people with their genitals. A) No one can "give her the same thing [you] can" because NO ONE ELSE IS YOU. B) Since your relationship is not purely sexual, a woman can also give her the "same" things that you do, which are good sex, companionship, understanding, support, love, fun times, arguments, and everything else that makes up your relationship in addition to inserting your penis into her vagina. C) Women can also insert penises into vaginas - either the ones that are part of their own bodies or the ones bought in the store.

Since this argument is literally condensing all of human romantic / sexual interaction to which body parts people can mash together, it requires an unspoken assumption that mashing two particular set of body parts together is more important than mashing any other set of body parts together because mashing those other body parts together (or, y'know, any other part about relating to each other) couldn't possibly compare to or threaten the act of mashing that one set of body parts together.

BY DEFINITION, being afraid that someone else's vagina coming into contact with someone else's penis might make that vagina-haver discard everything about your relationship that makes it special and break up with you, but not being afraid of someone else's vagina coming into contact with literally any other body part from some other person will do the same thing is erasing the validity and legitimacy of relationships between women (going with the position of those who defend this policy of equating vagina-having with "women").

I also want to address the idea of using rules with what's called "sunset clauses" - a specific time limit for when the rule will end. This is a legitimate use of rules to work through specific issues and I have used them myself. However, I remain suspicious of them as "rules" - limitations that one person imposes on (or asks nicely of) another person(s) with regards to how they interact with other people to mitigate one's own issues, again, primarily because of this same former partner.

He and his wife also used the excuse of sunset clauses to justify rules, and they used these as "evidence" that they were both "getting better" and experiencing "personal growth". What would happen is that he would have a bad reaction to the idea of his wife doing a thing with a guy, the wife would hold off on doing that thing until the husband felt better, then when he could deal, he allowed her to do the thing. Their position was that, since the wife was building an ever-growing list of specific activities that she could do with men, clearly the husband was "getting better". I thought that sounded like it too.

I was wrong.

Yes, the wife was able to check off additional specific sexual activities over time that she was able to engage in, but neither of them ever got out of the mindset that *he* had a right to control access to *her* body or that sexual relationships with other men was somehow inherently more "threatening" than sexual relationships with women. There was never any actual personal growth happening, just a desensitization of specific sexual activities and positions. That is not "working on it" and it is not "getting better". It's basically just moving the goalposts while defending the same basic premise.

There is a time for when people have such a strong emotional reaction to something that the first thing they can focus on is just desensitization. I've used this tactic myself. But the point of desensitizing myself to an idea is to "numb" the emotional reaction enough that I can see through it to the root issue, and then actually do work on the root issue itself, so that I won't *need* to continuously desensitize myself to something that, ultimately, has nothing to do with me in the first place (i.e. my partner's other relationships).

But too many people stop at the desensitization process and think that, now that they're "numb" to this one thing, problem solved! Then that exact same issue gets triggered by a totally different thing, and they think "well, last time this desensitization made it more bearable, let's do that again!" It's the emotional equivalent, to borrow the pill analogy from the article, of taking shit loads of ibuprofen for my endometriosis. Every month, I'm wracked with pain and forced to spend a day or two in the fetal position, so I take ibuprofen to numb the pain enough to barely function. That is not a solution! A solution would be to attack the endo at the root cause so that I don't have to rely on copious amounts of drugs that may ultimately damage my liver from chronic use ever again!

Unfortunately, our medical industry is also misogynistic and has not put any effort into solving the root cause of endo, so millions of women are stuck desensitizing ourselves just to make it to work every month or ripping out a part of our internal organs which may or may not fix the problem anyway.

So don't let your cultural misogynistic programming work like our cultural misogynistic medical industry - we should not accept as sufficient the mere desensitization of emotional issues or hacking out deep parts of ourselves just to function. Focus on solving the actual problem of not seeing queer relationships as equally legitimate to hetero ones so that you don't need that mental ibuprofen anymore.

Here's a surprisingly effective gaslighting tactic that I find in poly groups that is less likely to be appropriate in monogamous pairings:

First, either find people who want desperately to belong to *a* group or your group specifically, or build a group of people who learn to place belonging to that group as an important part of their identity or goals (i.e. make the relationship more important than the people in it; protect "the marriage" or "the family" at all costs, etc.).
Next, whenever someone does something that you don't like, get the rest of the group to side with you against the other person.
Finally, make the act of disagreement a hinge issue that can affect the other person's inclusion into the group, whether it is or isn't.

This places an additional burden on the person as an "outsider", as someone who could lose, not just this argument or this concession, but their place in the group entirely. Simply by having a disagreement, their position as a member of the group becomes threatened. It's not enough that they have a disagreement with someone they love or that the outcome of the disagreement may mean that they lose something (either the thing they're disagreeing about or the partner in the event of a breakup), but that the very nature of having that disagreement means they *have* lost something - belongingness.

When the importance of belonging to the group is high enough, individuals will backpedal on the issue they disagree about. They will either make a concession for the "greater good" or they will "decide" that the issue isn't all that important anyway. It becomes more important to maintain group cohesion than it does to protect and maintain one's individuality.

Once one's own individuality is less important than the group, one's own needs and rights are less important. This is how you get people to subsume their identities in a relationship. This is how you can coerce a poly person into an abusive relationship even with "multiple sets of eyes" watching.

Example:

Riley: I'd like to start dating someone new.

Quinn: The group doesn't agree. Why would you hurt all of us like that? Don't you care about us? Doesn't all our history and our commitments mean anything to you?

Riley: I'm sorry, I won't date anyone new. It wasn't that big of a deal anyway, just an idea I was tossing around.

-----

Jordan: So, things with Sam have been going pretty well lately. I think we could be taking things to the next level.

Alex: Wait a minute, what about us? Your time with us is already stretched thin. Can't you see how much this hurts Shannon? You made a promise to us to put us first. Between this and your school and your part-time job, you don't have enough time for everyone. Besides, what about safer sex? *We* don't feel comfortable with *you* taking on extra risk. That's not a choice that we would make for the group. You're endangering the people you care about. You need to break up with Sam right now.

Jordan: OK, you're right, I'm sorry, I didn't realize how much I was hurting you. I'll end things with Sam.

In both of these examples, the needs of the group were more important than the needs of the individual, and the otherwise good and wonderful quality of compassion within the individual was exploited to get them to give up something of themselves in favor of maintaining the group. Jordan's relationship with Sam wasn't anything done TO the group, but Jordan was convinced that the relationship was a direct, active action to harm the group. Riley hadn't even done anything yet but was convinced that what they wanted to do wasn't really what they wanted to do because Quinn re-framed the argument to be about what Riley once said they wanted before circumstances or feelings had changed (or to rephrase what Riley had once said to make it seem like Riley had said those things).

Both of these examples are things that I either personally witnessed (as in, I saw the arguments in question, I'm not just "believing" someone's personal retelling of a story that I wasn't there for) as an outside observer or was subjected to myself. Both of these examples represent more than one case. Both of these examples flew under my own radar for a while because I thought I knew what abuse would look like based on my own experience with abuse but I didn't. It took extreme scenarios before I could finally connect dots and see that coercion exists in the very foundations of certain poly community "principles" and "values" - namely those fear-based principles that got grandfathered into the poly community by people still carrying around their Monogamous Mindset.

I am *still* a proponent of family-based polyamory. I still greatly prefer the network style of poly that includes close friendships with metamours and a balance of group cohesion with independence. But I rail against couple privilege and polyfi and unicorn hunting because those systems are set up from the beginning to undermine that balance. It is absolutely possible to be part of a close-knit poly group and to compensate for the pressures of the group on the individual. But the key here is that you have to *compensate* for them because they are built into the foundations, between our cultural privileges and our own human tendencies towards tribalism, these are things we have to guard against.

But in poly forums, I see too much protection for these systems and not enough safeguards. This is how abuse runs rampant in our communities.

Unicorn Hunters‬ talk about adding a new girlfriend to their relationship like they're adding on a new room to their house. The house is already built, already has the foundation, the electrical, the plumbing, the layout already designed. All they get is this new room, but the house essentially stays the same up to the doorway where the new room has been added.

The reality is that building a triad is more like building a new house from scratch, or perhaps even simply buying a new one. A married couple decides that their current house isn't meeting their relationship needs anymore - they want something a little bigger, a little different, a little less conventional.

Their old house has a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, and two bedrooms. It's nice, but they'd like something more. The new house also has a kitchen and a living room, but it has 2 bathrooms and 3 bedrooms and a smaller room billed as an "office". There are lots of similarities between the old house and the new house - lots of the rooms serve the same function, both are made of a wood frame with drywall and plaster and siding and roof tiles and double-pane windows and both have electrical wiring and plumbing. But it's still a totally different house in addition to just having more rooms to accommodate the growing family.

The house is in a different neighborhood, so you have to drive around a bit to learn where the grocery store is and the nearby restaurants and the best path now to get to work and the movie theater. The neighbors, while still human beings, are different people and you have to get to know them and develop new connections that might look different than the ones you had with the old neighbors. You might be a little more inconvenienced in this new house because you have to drive past a school during school hours and traffic backs up making you late for work if you don't start leaving earlier.

It's an adjustment, moving into a new house. Ultimately, it might be the best decision you ever made, and your life will get better for it in the long run. But in the beginning, you might have to make some adjustments, like finding new paths and doing some internal remodeling or redecorating when your old house was already furnished exactly the way you liked it. Or, it might be a mistake and you might find yourself moving again in just a short time.

But if you really wanted the exact same house, only with one more room, I'd recommend you don't make that new room out of a human being. Take up a hobby or a pet. But a person is going to be disruptive. A person is going to change things far more than adding a door at the end of the hall where there used to be a wall - something that makes your house look mostly exactly the same and that you can only tell the difference if you go into that space, but that you can ignore if you just close the door.

Don't think of it as "adding a new girlfriend to our relationship" like she's a rumpus room tacked onto the back end of the house. Think of it more like getting a whole new house that, while it has many similar elements, is still a totally different building that will contain your family.

And wait to build that house until everyone who is going to live in it is present to offer their preferences for what they want in a house that they're going to live in too. Maybe you and the new person all agree that they should live in a separate mother-in-law suite in the backyard, rather than being attached to the main house, but they should still be there to help design that mother-in-law suite themselves, since they're the ones who have to live in it. But if they really are going to be part of the main house, then they really ought to have an equal say in what color the walls are and what kind of layout they want, not just to move into a house that already exists and doesn't reflect their own personality or preferences.

Remember, people are not accessories to your existing marriage, nor are they extra rooms you tack on to your existing house. They are the architects of their own lives, and if you want them to share your life with you, then they need to be collaborators.

‪#‎UnicornHunting‬ ‪#‎polyamory‬ ‪#‎poly‬ ‪#‎polyamorous‬ ‪#‎OpenRelationships

‬

Social Media Site: List your relationship status! Even though we've had "open relationship" as an option for years, now you can link to one partner only!

Poly Person: Oh good, now people can tell that I'm poly because they couldn't tell before when I had "in an open relationship" selected, I named everyone I'm dating in the "about me" section, and said the word "poly" in the description. Linking to only one partner in the sidebar will totally clear up all the confusion!

OKCupid's new "poly" feature is, IMO, a step backwards because we could *always* link to our partners' profiles (or anyone's, for that matter) in the open text boxes of our own profiles (which begin, BTW, right under the picture & stats header). This actually reduces the poly visibility and accessibility that OKC had previously given us. One person argued that people don't read the profiles and therefore missed the part where she identified as poly in her profile. To that, I submit that anyone not willing to read her profile won't see "open relationship" and her partner's name in the profile either because *they're not reading the profile*. They also likely won't know specifically what *kind* of "open relationship" they're in (as there are many types, some of which are not compatible), again, because they're not reading the profile. There's nothing to be done about people who don't read the profile short of either changing the culture to make that practice an aberration or back-end coding on OKC's part to prevent people from contacting anyone without some kind of "proof" that they read it, like passing a quiz or checking an "I have read this profile" box like a Terms of Service agreement with the ability to report people who turn out to have lied on that checkbox which penalizes the account holder, perhaps by removing their ability to contact people at all after a certain number of reports. Come to think of it, that's not a bad idea.

But I digress. Point is, OKC already recognized poly folks exist. It already had "open relationship" as an option. Yes, I know that "poly" and "open relationship" are not interchangeable, but it was always friendly to the subset of "open relationship" that is "polyamory". It already allowed us to link to multiple partners. It even had forums (don't know if it still does because I haven't been there in a while, but I was quite active on them for a time) and some of those forums were poly-specific where you could go chat about polyamory to poly people. It already had hundreds of questions to answer that would weed out non-poly folk. When you answer questions, you rate how important those questions and their answers are to you. Those answers and those ratings contribute to your match score. There are tons of poly and open relationship questions to answer, so how you answer those questions affects how well you match with other people on those specific topics. If you answer enough questions and rate them important enough, eventually you will reach a point where any match above a certain percentage is almost guaranteed to be poly too. On top of that, you can set a filter to hide any match *below* a certain percentage, so you could use OKC to see and be visible to only people open to non-monogamy. This has been How This Works for many, many years.

I'm actually quite disappointed in the poly community in general for heralding this new feature as some kind of pro-poly feature. It's not. It reinforces couple privilege, it reinforces the trope that poly or open relationships are something that couples do when we ought to be promoting the fact that it's something that *people* do, and it erases every version of open relationships that don't prioritize one partner above all others or that even don't prioritize romantic relationships above all other types.

This is not a boon to the poly community. This is not actually helpful at all. It does not add *anything* to our profiles that we didn't already have, but it does take away from our profiles. I've linked to

tacit since we started dating 11 years ago. The earliest other partner that I am confident I simultaneously linked to in the body (and isn't an unreliable memory that could just be wishful thinking) was 8 years ago. I have since edited my profile with each new partner and each new breakup, sometimes even including metamours who had OKC profiles.

Years. Now, suddenly, OKC is all "hey, look, you can link to your partner!" Whatever dude, you're not helping me out any. Not giving me anything I hadn't had before. And, while it's not *removing* the ability to link to multiple partners in the body text, going from "link to other profiles (multiple) in your body text" to "link to one partner in the sidebar" is still less poly-friendly than its other, preexisting features.

‪#‎OKCFail‬ ‪#‎UnicornHunting‬ ‪#‎OpenRelationshipsMeanMoreThanOneByDefinition‬ ‪#‎OneStepForwardTwoStepsBack‬

Listening to people justify giving romantic partners full access* to each other's phones & emails in the aftermath of a broken trust in order to rebuild that trust. Saying that because someone did something related to texting that was "against their rules", it sucks, but it might be a necessary way to regain the trust of the person who was betrayed.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

If someone has broken an agreement or betrayed the trust of the other person, giving someone full access to things that DON'T BELONG TO ONLY THE PERSON IN THE COUPLE IN QUESTION is not acceptable. Texts and other communication owned by the "betrayer" are not their sole property. Those communiques (and, more importantly, the thoughts and intimacy they contain) also belong to the person who sent them. You are not sharing something that is private to the person who broke the rule, you are sharing something that is private of someone who is not in the relationship where the broken trust occurred.

By insisting on full access to the communications of a third party, you are pawning off the burden of repairing your broken trust onto that third party. The *third person* is the one who has to shoulder the responsibility for the "betrayer's" actions and for the "betrayed's" fear. And not just that person who participated in whatever action constitutes a "betrayal", but ALL third parties who might communicate with the "betrayer" in that manner - every single person has to give up their own privacy (and potentially hamper their own intimacy, even platonic and familial ones) to assuage the "betrayed" and fix this now "broken" relationship. All friends, all family, even all future partners (for those in open relationships) have to pay for what the "betrayer" and some other person did.

If your relationship is now "broken" and you are trying to rebuild trust between the two of you, it is your ethical responsibility to find a way to work through that pain and fear in a way that makes the two of YOU shoulder the entire burden for the work involved. It is not ethically right to violate the privacy and intimacy of people who are not in your relationship, who did not break any agreements (because they didn't make those agreements with you since they are not your partner), and who are not trying to rebuild any broken trust with you. New metamours may be trying to *build* trust with you, but they should not have added onto their load the responsibility of *REbuilding* the trust that someone else broke.

If you are choosing to put the work into this relationship so that you can eventually trust your partner again, that is your choice and you need to shoulder the burdens of your own fears regarding your partner's lack of trustworthiness. I'm not saying it doesn't suck. I'm saying it's YOUR burden to carry. All too often, poly people carry into polyamory with them bad habits from monogamy that go unchallenged in monogamous culture.

Until the industrial revolution, and really until WWI, marriage was not considered the One Relationship To Rule Them All. In fact, just the opposite. Philosophical treatises were written and sermons were preached condemning the act of making one's spouse the sole source of all types of support. People were expected to find emotional, financial, labor, and sometimes even sexual support from all manner of relationships other than their spouse. Placing one's spouse in a position of one's Everything was considered to be an affront to God himself because it was seen as replacing God with a human being. Men and women were expected to have strong emotional ties to people of the same gender, and in some eras, those ties were expected to be stronger than the ties to one's spouse. Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, extended family in general were expected to live under the same roof, or at least nearby, to help with the labor of running a household and raising children. One's pastor or preacher was expected to carry the burden of one's religious commitments and spiritual support. And, in certain eras and locations, sex with one's spouse was considered a necessity for procreation but sex for pleasure was expected to be saved for one's lovers. It was considered "unseemly" to be "too in love" or too infatuated or too attracted to one's own spouse. That wasn't their role.

But then, somewhere along the line, mainly about the time that the industrial cities took over as holding the bulk of the population, all that changed. With famine and war, people left the countryside in droves and flooded the urban centers, leaving behind extended family, generational churches, and best friends. The nuclear family took over because single adults left their entire network behind to make a living in the big cities and started raising families alone, while existing families could often only pack up themselves (the spouses and kids) to search for a "better life" in the city, again leaving behind their support networks. Suddenly, spouses HAD to become one's Everything because all they had was each other.

Although the U.S. has made attempts to build other sorts of networks from the wreckage the Urban Influx left on the old-style networks, the nuclear family and the myth of the One reigns supreme. We have elevated the role of the spouse (and by extension, any singular romantic partner) to such a degree that people, even those of us conscientious objectors who ought to know better, can't even see the ethical dilemma with privileging one role above all others. When faced with questions like "should your spouse have unrestricted access to your text messages", we don't even blink an eye when we shout "of course!" That's not even a question for most people - it's taken for granted that spouses would share everything. Even those things that don't belong to the other spouse to share. It's written into marriage vows. It's part of the cultural fabric. And if some third party would dare to suggest that this thing here doesn't belong solely to the spouse in question to be giving permission to access, it's just flat out assumed that the romantic primary couple has "priority" so of course anything belonging even in part to the spouse belongs entirely to the spouse and simultaneously belongs to the other spouse. Requests for privacy are seen as direct challenges to the primacy of the couple.

Personally, if my romantic relationship isn't strong enough to accommodate for individual privacy, I would say that the relationship isn't as "primary" as one would think. The specialness and strength of my relationships and of my role within those relationships comes from the connection itself which is comprised of the individuals that make up the relationship, and nothing can take that away short of the individuals themselves. Including the rights of the individual within the relationships. Once the rights and integrity and very personhood of the individuals within the relationship are seen as less important than the relationship itself, the relationship is inherently doomed because the foundation of the relationship is the individuals in it.

So no one has "unrestricted access" or "full access" to those paths of intimacy, including communication, that involve anyone other than the two of us on that path together. Some of my partners and metamours may have emergency access, but that is not "full access" or "unrestricted access". Attempting to access the communications and therefore possible paths of intimacy of my other partners and loved ones is seen as a boundary violation, both my own boundaries and those of the other people, by the one doing the accessing. It is understood that the wrongdoing here is in the accessing of data, not in the keeping of privacy.

When I was a teenager, my sister used to sneak into my room and steal my clothing and my cassette tapes. No amount of shouting or sneaking into her room to steal them back would stop her. I begged my parents for a lock on my door to keep her out. They responded that a locked door would enable me to hide things from THEM, and as my parents, they had a right to access every space in the house, including my space. I had no right to privacy as their daughter living on their property. These are the kinds of assumptions that we bring with us into poly relationships - property and ownership of other people - their bodies and their minds.

As a child, I knew this was wrong. As an adult, I know now why. This is a violation of my very autonomy, the thing that makes me a person. So, in my romantic relationships I can leave the metaphorical door unlocked because everyone knows that opening that door without an emergency-based reason would harm the relationship between myself and the person who opened that door. My partners are not children or pets who can't be trusted to stay out of my room, nor are they overprotective parents who think that I am not entitled to my own autonomy. Should I ever feel the need or the desire to lock my door, my partners understand that it's my room to lock and they didn't have a right to access that space anyway. But, because they understand this, I can leave the door unlocked for safety purposes and everything that anyone gives me that I keep in that room is safe from anyone else getting to it.

I understand the desire to infringe on someone else's rights in order to make the bad feelings go away. I understand how scary it is to shoulder my own burdens in a relationship where there is fear, insecurity, and broken trust. I've been there, I've done that. To this day, I may feel a strong enough fear to prompt me to ask to violate someone's boundaries for my own comfort. But the key is that I do not assume it is my right to do so, and I must shoulder the burden myself to do the work on repairing the broken trust and calming that fear. The allure of making someone else carry one's own burden is strong. It will take everyone's effort to stand up to that allure and to create a culture that does not support the violation of other people's boundaries, privacy, and intimacy in service to our own fears and pain.

* By "full access", I do not mean that one *must* keep a lock on their phone and *never* show any texts to one's partner. My phone doesn't even have a lock because it's a dumb flip phone, and I have a shared document online with passwords and other instructions for access to my files in the event of emergencies where someone else needs to run my life on my behalf. But my partners have no interest in accessing my data short of an emergency, and everyone who communicates with me has a reasonable expectation that what they say to me will be held in confidence if they ask for it. When they communicate with me, they know that they are communicating *with me*. They do not have to communicate with me under the assumption that they are also communicating or sharing with someone else. Assuming that all communications will be shared with someone else creates a built-in filter that hampers and infringes on the intimacy we can build together because they can only build as much intimacy with me as they are willing to build with this other person who will have access to that intimacy.

Partners who ask for "full access", in this context, are not asking for pragmatic, emergency-based access, nor do they technically have access but a lack of interest in accessing data. Those are different situations and one that I am not addressing, so please don't derail the comments with "I can read my husband's texts because we trust each other but I don't because I don't care / we trust each other." That's not what I'm talking about. "Full access", in this context, is when one partner is suspected (or known) of possible relationship agreement violations and the other partner deliberately goes into their data (or wants the ability to do so) in order to check up on them. They either want to police their activity like a child who can't be trusted to do their homework without the teacher sending home a homework sheet that the parents check off every night, or they want the threat of checking their activity to act as a deterrent to prevent their partner from misbehaving.

And these people will justify their actions or their request to violate privacy on the grounds that their partner has already proven that they can't be trusted, therefore punitive and corrective action is necessary. That or if an infidelity of some kind hasn't actually happened, they will hand-wave away their violations with things like "if he's not hiding anything, then it shouldn't matter if I have access" and other hand-wavy justifications like the ones my parents used to deny me a lock on my door, which all have the underlying root of couple privilege and ownership. It's not about "hiding" things, it's about treating partners as adults who have the right to make their own decisions (even bad ones), and about respecting the autonomy of both partners and third parties, AND about carrying one's own relationship burdens and responsibilities without pawning the work off onto someone else.

http://www.alternet.org/sex-amp-relationships/how-i-got-burned-my-polyamorous-relationship

I really wanted to open this link and blast the author for their monoprivilege, their insecurity, or their discrimination. Then I read the tagline "Those you pursue are humans who have feelings and needs and desires and don't cease to exist when you go home to your primary partner." and I wanted to herald this as more ammunition in my fight against couple privilege.

But by the time I got to the end, I wanted to smack them both.

This whole situation is filled with wrong. Both sides are wrong, both sides are doing harm. First, the couple *is* exactly what's wrong with couple privilege. The author is completely right about "I told her I didn't like a man telling me what I could and couldn't do in my bedroom." This is absolutely unethical. It is ethically wrong and un-compassionate for people to decide what someone else can and can't do with their own bodies. When the husband and wife decide, before ever meeting the author, that the wife will never spend the night and will never use dildos in her sex play with others, this is WRONG. I have the utmost sympathy for the author being treated like a second-class citizen, like a need fulfillment machine, and for having her agency dismissed.

But the author isn't exactly on a moral high horse herself. And no, it's not because "the fault is mostly [hers]" for failing to have seen the red flags. She is right that the media portrays this couple privilege enshrinement as Just How Things Are Done and the media fails to explore how this affects everyone who isn't part of the primary couple. So, much like people exploring kink and BDSM for the first time, she shouldn't be blamed for being thrust into a relationship style she had no knowledge of with shitty tour guides and then failing to know how to navigate it well.

No, her fault is that she didn't want to be poly in the first place. She went into the relationship under false pretenses herself and now she's blaming all of polyamory for failing to consider her monogamous needs under our poly banner. If this couple didn't have these kinds of rules, if they were truly egalitarian, truly open to others, not hiding behind their insecurity, the *author* still would have seen her relationship as being "loved by half of one".

"Sharing the person I loved most in the world with someone else was the most painful experience I've had as an adult. This is the nature of Polyamory, however." This is *not* the nature of polyamory. This is a flawed premise. In order for polyamory to work well, the participants have to drop the idea that people are things that can be "shared" in the first place. Our partners are not toys that we share with others. Our partners are human beings who share *their* time with us.

"The irony is that Poly people believe that they are somehow more evolved than their monogamous counterparts when in fact, they are quite often driven by selfish desires, a fear of true intimacy, and a need to feel validated by more than one lover at a time." This is her mindset. No matter how the couple handled their relationship, she was never going to feel valued or loved in a poly relationship because she is starting with the assumption that polyamory is selfish and for people who are afraid. She is starting with the assumption that monogamy is the only path to "true intimacy". With that assumption, everything else follows that her experience with polyamory is going to suck.

This article pisses me off because she's not wrong about how couples often treat their secondaries. This is why I'm opposed to hierarchical structures. But it pisses me off because I can't use it show couples how they're hurting others because she is exactly what those couples are trying to protect themselves from. She is merely validating and justifying their use of unethical, selfish tactics because she is the exact thing that they are afraid of - someone who is really monogamous, coming into an existing relationship, developing feelings, and then wanting to destroy the preexisting relationship so she can have one of the partners all to herself. And calling them "selfish" in the process.

There can be two "bad guys" in any relationship. Both sides here are wrong. Even if both sides are making valid points, both sides were still in the wrong. Couples: you can't make up rules that affect the new people without the new people's input. You can't decide what they can and can't do with their own bodies. You can't decide ahead of time the course a relationship will take. New people: you can't bring in your Monogamous Mindset into a poly relationship and expect it to work. You can't expect to have your monogamy catered to in a poly relationship - that defeats the purpose of having a poly relationship. You can't treat your partners like objects or possessions. You can't hold onto your monogamous values about intimacy, sexuality, jealousy, time, and agency. If you view everything through a monogamous filter, you will never find satisfaction or security in a poly relationship.

Both sides are actually doing the same thing. Both sides are viewing the Couple as the pinnacle of relationship intimacy. It's just that both sides think that their side is the one who ought to get the highest ranking. The couple and the author are both viewing the wife as a piece of pie that they have to cut into pieces and share with each other.

The husband doesn't want the women to use dildos because there is something magical that happens when you put a penis in a vagina that erases all the specialness of any other relationships. The author gets jealous when she thinks about her girlfriend going home and having sex with her husband because there is something magical that happens when you put a penis in a vagina that erases all the specialness of any other relationships.

The couple wants to protect their relationship from losing the ability to post camping photos or having to explain to others who is having sex with whom, so they keep the author hidden from public view. The author wants the right to post camping photos or to have others know who is having sex with whom so she resents the couple's public identity.

Couple privilege & hierarchy in polyamory and the "cowboy" mono coming to "steal our wimmen" are two faces of the exact same coin. This is why neither should be accepted in the poly community.

www.elephantjournal.com/2014/10/when-emotional-abuse-looks-a-lot-like-love/

"Because abusers see their partner merely as an extension of themselves rather than their own person with every right to their own opinions and limitations, boundaries are often blurred."

This. This so clearly and succinctly explains the problem I have with our culture's view on relationships. And this toxic attitude has seeped into the poly community. It starts as the One True Love fantasy. It morphed into the Soulmate dream and the "two halves of one whole" myth. When we subsume our identity into the relationship, and when our partners accept that submission, that enables abuse even if the abuser never *intended* to abuse or be malicious.

The act of viewing a partner as an extension of oneself rather than an independent person who has chosen to entangle their life with one is an abusive act. Merely seeing a partner as an extension is a dehumanizing event and robs them of agency, even if you are "benign" about what you do with that view.

When it moves into polyamory, we see this in closed groups and in typical unicorn hunting "add a third to our relationship". I shouldn't have to say this, but I will because I do have to: this is not a commentary on the *structure* of triads or of core couples with extramarital or extrarelationship partners. This is about the *mentality* that often leads to a particular structure rather than other structures because those structures are so compatible with abusive mentalities. It is possible to be in a triad that is not abusive. I was in one myself. But the structure of a pre-existing couple wanting to add a very specific sort of person to "complete" their household has, at its very foundations, the script for abuse.

It's right there in the descriptions - "complete us", "add to our relationship". This could be a quad or a quint or anything else. It's the context, which is why motivations are so important.

Abusers see their partners as extensions of themselves. Couples who see their "secondaries" or their "thirds" as an extension of themselves or an extension of their relationship are starting out with the exact same dehumanizing, agency-removing viewpoint as abusers. People in quads that put the "family" group above the needs of the people in it are dehumanizing their partners, which removes their agency, which *fundamentally* removes the ability to consent.

I was in an 6-person group that was ostensibly "open" (because I don't do closed relationships). Some members viewed the other members as extensions of themselves via the family group. This led directly to abuse.

It's not the structure, it's the mindset. It's just that there aren't a whole lot of dehumanizing abusers out there deliberately setting up *open* networks. That's too difficult to control.

But a triad filled with unexamined gender assumptions and gender and/or racial privilege, with a dash of cultural discrimination in the form of couple privilege is much more logistically easier to control because those things are tools for control, as well as including built-in support for isolation and other common abuse tactics.

Poly folk are so busy reinventing the wheel and thinking that mono-based scripts don't apply to us, that we're all too ready to ignore and rationalize away abuse under the well-intentioned but very damaging rose-colored lens of "there's no Right Way" and "truth is relative" and "we are trailblazers making up our own society as we go".

It's so very easy to hide abuse when the culture has its own persecution complex mixed with our fucking harmful American Rugged Individualism. Galileo Effect, Dunning-Kruger Effect, No True Scotsman, and our fantastically good innate ability for self-deception - it's past time to stop harboring abuse in our communities and in our relationships.

Share The 8 Inforgraphic - 8 Warning Signs Of An Abusive Relationship

No patience anymore. "But what if my husband and his new girlfriend make a decision that takes time or money away from me, the mono partner? Don't I get a say in what they do?"

No, you don't. You never did, even if you made a rule that says you do. That's an illusion. They'll do what they want to do. The only thing you get a say in is how he treats YOU, not how he treats someone else. It's harsh, but reality doesn't really care about our feelings. And the reality is that he is his own individual with his own agency, and so is she, and your opinion of what they do in their relationship ultimately doesn't matter. It only matters for as long as they let it matter, which means, ultimately, it doesn't matter.

If he wants to spend money on her, you could technically get into legalities with common property laws. But, ultimately, if it's something he really wants, he can divorce you and spend his money on her anyway. If he wants to spend time on her that doesn't include you, you don't get a say in that. You don't get a say in how he spends his time that isn't with you.

You *do* get request an amount of time that would make you happy, but it's up to him to decide what he has to cut out in order to make that time for you. You also get to request what kind of time he gives you (i.e. if you want some fun date time mixed in with the household duties, etc.), and then the negotiation between the two of you can begin. But he will spend whatever time on her that he wants to spend, and if he doesn't have enough time left over between his girlfriend and his job and his friends and his hobbies to suit you, then the only thing you have any real control over is whether to accept the time he gives you or to leave.

Now, in a caring, healthy relationship, he won't be a dick about it and he'll try to work with you to give you enough of his resources to keep the relationship flourishing. But the bottom line is that, regardless of how caring and loving he is, his resources (his body, his time, his emotions, his intimacy, his money with certain legal exceptions) are his to allocate and his relationship with his girlfriend belongs to the two of them and you get no say in it.

If you've chosen wisely and married a caring, considerate man, then he will take your feelings into consideration and try to make decisions regarding his resources and his other relationship(s) that don't tax you too much, but that's not the question. If I were talking to him, I'd be advising him on how to treat *you* compassionately and considerately as he begins new relationships, but I'm not addressing him right now, I'm addressing hypothetical you. And your question is, do you get a say? The answer is no, you don't.

I'm tired of mincing words, which is why I'm vaguebooking instead of addressing anyone directly, because this response would not be well-received as written and I'm out of patience for addressing this question constructively because I've seen this question for the last 18 years and I'm tired of it. At some point we all need to just take a deep breath, be an adult about it, and jump. We do not get a say in our partners' other relationships - romantic, familial, friendship, or work-related.

We can advise and we can indicate consequences if their other relationships *directly* negatively impact our relationship. That's it. Those relationships are not our relationships and we do not have any right to hold power over them. The people in those relationships will do as they will anyway. If they want to be considerate towards us, then a rule making them considerate is unnecessary. If they don't, then a rule won't stop them.

I think the entire poly community would fare much better if they all had the horrible opportunity to experience what it feels like to pull a veto and have their partner just blink at them and say "no". It hurts. But it's like ripping off a bandage. I think that some people will not be able to accept that vetoes and hierarchy and other methods of control are illusions until they experience first-hand that it doesn't matter how much you love someone or they love you, it doesn't matter what rules you set in place in the beginning, that Game Changers happen and there is nothing we can do or say to make someone do what we want when they no longer want to do what we want them to do.

Much like spoiled, entitled children, it would probably do the entire community a world of good to have someone tell them "no" once in a while. I get that it's borne out of fear, but the only way past fear is to face it. The world still turns, the seasons still change, and we continue to march towards the inevitable heat death of the universe. There is much we can't control, so we need to give up trying to control that which we can't, and focus on that which we can.

I saw a post that I just can't get out of my head. A married hetero couple has decided that they will be expanding their attempt to have a baby by allowing the wife's boyfriend to try to father the child too. Sounds wonderfully poly, right? Well, this couple has also already decided that they won't learn who the bio-father is, and no matter who that bio-father is, the married couple is who will raise the child. And they're going to announce this decision to the boyfriend soon.

I just can't properly express my horror at this situation. There is so much wrong here that I'm having trouble knowing where to start. This is exactly the kind of thing we're talking about when we complain about not being an equal partner. I want to be very clear about this: I am NOT suggesting that the boyfriend MUST be an equal co-parent to the child. What makes this a disempowering relationship, what makes the boyfriend not an equal is not what role he will play in the child's life, but that the decision on that role has been made without his input.

Here's the thing. I'm adopted. I strongly believe that my bio-parents made the right decision in giving me up for adoption and I have always believed that. This is not about who gets to be the parent. The decision to give me up was made by my bio-parents, not my adopted parents. My adoptive parents did not decide that I should be their child and then they found my bio-parents and announced to them from on high that they shall bear their child for them. I have a relationship with my bio-mom, so I actually do know the circumstances of my adoption. She decided, on her own, without any coercion from anyone, that giving up her parental rights was the best thing for me. Her parents would have supported her if she had decided to keep me. It was a hard decision for her, but she made that decision because she believed it was the best thing for me. She chose my adopted parents from a list of hopeful parents. My adoption was a case of everyone involved coming together and choosing each other voluntarily. My bio-mom had full agency in the decision to not be a parent. If anything, she had more power in the decision than anyone else in the equation.

I am a firm believer that not everyone should be parents, even if they contribute the genetic material to the child. I support parents who leave their children and spouses because I believe it frees the kids and spouse up for building working families and prevents children from being raised by parents who don't actually want to raise them. I don't approve of leaving children in financial straits, but that's a different rant. I wholeheartedly support people who do not want to be parents, for whatever reason, and I believe that children are better off not being parented by people who don't want to be parents.

I keep reiterating that my argument is not that the boyfriend ought to be the father because I know that some people are going to hear my objection and come back with "but what if he's OK with not being the dad?" That's not the point. That's SO not the point. The point is that the decision has been made for him by people, at least one of whom is not even in the relationship and who will not be biologically related to this man's child. Imagine if a divorced woman remarries, and her new husband has the ability to go back in time and tell his new wife's first husband "this kid that you're about to father? Just so you know, it'll be my kid. Legally, and in practice, and from before it's even born. You don't have a say in this, if you don't like it, you can just avoid impregnating your wife, or you can divorce her now before she gets pregnant and we'll find someone we like better to father my child for me."

"But he doesn't have to accept! He's free to say no, or to leave if he wants to." Again, missing the point. Once someone has given their heart to another, they are not as free to say no as it seems. Especially when that person is already entangled with people who, judging by this situation, have set him up in an inherently disempowering situation. If everyone involved believes they are happy with their current arrangement, and if he is in love, it's all too likely that he'll look at the situation and think "sure, I don't mind not being the 'father' because I'm still the boyfriend and I'll still be a major part of my child's life." Because when one is in love, imagining the day when the relationship goes sour and custody battles get wicked seems so ridiculous, so absurd, that one usually doesn't even consider it as a possibility.

"Of course my partner would never be one of those frightful, evil witches who would keep me from my own child! If I thought they were that kind of person, I wouldn't have fallen in love with them in the first place!" No one who ends up in divorce court, bitterly tearing their children in half and using their children's bloody pieces to whack each other over the heads with ever thought their spouse was the kind of person who would do that sort of thing. When we're in love, we can't even imagine our partners doing anything so horrible. This is why people are able to say stupid things like "unconditional love". I guarantee that there is something that your loved ones can do that will make you stop loving them. The problem is that you don't think they are the kind of person to do that sort of thing.

And you are also terrible at predicting your future emotions - everyone is. What we think is acceptable when we're in love, we often don't think is acceptable after the love is gone. I've certainly agreed to things in my relationships because I was in love and I didn't think it was really that bad, but after the relationship ended, I was disgusted at myself for having agreed to it and for not seeing how that thing was really a prelude to exactly those things that led to our breakup and it was actually far, far worse than it looked from the beginning.

Things like veto, and this situation, are like that - they don't seem that bad when you haven't gone through it and you're in love so you can't see how the other person could possibly have bad motivations or would possibly take advantage of the situation and harm you. It's usually not until you've gone through it and are out the other side that most people even have the opportunity to see it for the bad thing that it is, and even then usually the only people who do so only do because it didn't end well. It's like when people don't wear their seatbelts.

I know a guy who refuses to wear a seatbelt. Apparently he was in a car accident once and got ejected from the car, and someone told him that it was a good thing that he did because if he had stayed in the car, he would have been injured worse or killed. So he never wears a seatbelt. He's been ticketed multiple times for it, but each time he goes before a judge and says that he absolutely will not change - that he's only alive today because he didn't wear a seatbelt. The only way he will ever learn what a bad idea it is to not wear a seatbelt is if he gets in some horrific wreck that makes it obvious that a seatbelt would have prevented his permanent paralysis or loss of limbs or the death of a loved one or something. And even then it's not guaranteed that he'll learn that lesson, but it will take something awful to get him to see that not wearing a seatbelt is inherently a bad idea if anything can convince him at all.

Some people go their entire lives never getting into car wrecks. Maybe they get into a fender-bender or narrowly miss another car or something. But, out of sheer luck and the mysteries of the statistically probable, some people manage to not do something like roll their car down a hill (not that I would know anything about that). And they will go through their life believing that something they're doing or not doing is responsible for not dying in a car crash.

I knew another guy who tailgated something awful. Because of him, I learned how to sit in the front seat of a car and never once look out the front window. I was terrified of him rear-ending someone and having my legs crushed beneath the dashboard as the car crumpled underneath the rear bumper of the car ahead of us. He thought he was a good driver. He insisted he was a good driver and that he had certain skills that prevented him from rear-ending anyone. A couple of years after we broke up, he totaled his car by rear-ending someone. I dated a first-responder and we were always pulling somebody out of a broken wreck of a car because he was obligated to respond to any accident he came across and we came across a lot while out on dates because we dated in California - home of the original Road Rage and the California freeway system.

I have a dozen stories just like this - some idiot thinks they're bulletproof and that they are because of something they're doing or not doing. And many of the people we hauled out of mangled steel and burning hulks came out of there still believing that it wasn't some failure of theirs that got them into the accident.

What I'm trying to say is that if, and that's a big if, but if this boyfriend just happens to be OK with impregnating his girlfriend and not being allowed to be the kid's father, that's coincidence. It's not proof that the hierarchy is working. If he was really OK with it, then it wouldn't have needed to have been decided ahead of time. And if he is OK with it, then he probably isn't in a position to understand his own disempowerment. He probably believes that he has all the choice because he chose to be in a relationship with these limitations. So this couple will parade him about with "but our secondary says it's OK, therefore it's not disempowering!" Yeah, and I know some black people who don't mind if their good white friend calls them nigger either. It's still fucking racist. If the boyfriend agrees to this, it's likely because he can't imagine the married couple doing anything to make him regret the decision. So it will probably take them doing something to make him regret it before he'll understand what's wrong with this whole mess and how the deck was stacked against him from the beginning.

That's the problem with abusive structures, as I'm coming to learn, unfortunately from first-hand observations - they seem reasonable at the beginning, or from the outside, because if they seemed unreasonable at the beginning, no one would get into them. We often can't recognize them until it's too late and we're neck-deep in alligators. Some of us will even vehemently defend the swamp because we can't see the alligators from our vantage point. We'll insist that we have agency and that we are empowered, because we can't see the invisible threads being woven around us that will hold us down while the alligators eat us, and we won't see those threads until we try to move out of the little niche we think we carved for ourselves.

And, even worse, we often can't see when we're the ones weaving the sticky spider silk around our prey, because it's just what we do so we don't know anything different. Hey, he wandered into our web, didn't he? We couldn't have trapped him if he hadn't stood right where we could build our web. It's his freedom of choice. So why should we bother to change our ways when there are victims just lining up to stand where we can weave our webs around them? Oh, I dunno, maybe because it's not good enough to be a spider, trapping prey in a swamp filled with alligators? Maybe because we should be trying to become people who are willing to help lift up our partners out of swamps instead?

If your relationship structure includes the ability to make decisions for people without their input, your relationship is inherently, fundamentally, unethical. Period. It doesn't matter if those people are willing to accept those decisions. If they were not able to come to the table with you as an equal and say "here's what I am interested and willing to do with you", then you are, by definition, disempowering your partners. The final configuration is irrelevant. It isn't about who gets to be the primary and what if someone likes being a secondary. It's about who gets to decide who gets to be the primary or the secondary. If the answer includes people who are not in the relationship that the decision is affecting, and it doesn't include anyone who is in that relationship and is affected by the decision, then it is an unethical, unequal, disempowering structure. It's not the configuration or the end-result roles that make it so, it's the process.

Current Mood: sick & pissed off

"But we need rules to keep people from lying to us!"

I got news for you honey, rules don't keep people from lying to you, they only tell people willing to lie what they need to lie about. An honest person and a liar look exactly the same ... until after you discover the lie, and by then it's too late. Rules won't stop someone from lying because, and I'm gonna let you in on a little secret here ... someone willing to lie to you won't care that there's a rule against lying. It's like someone who is intent on murder isn't going to say "oh, you mean it's illegal for me to own a gun? Oh, well, I guess I won't go murder then!" Being against the rules isn't what stops people from lying, cheating, or hurting us.

But I'll tell you what does stop them from doing those things, most of the time. Respecting people's autonomy, giving them the freedom to make their own decisions, and providing enough safe space for them to tell you things that you might find difficult to hear - that's what prevents most people from lying.

It's kind of amazing how much more willing people are to be honest to you if they believe that it's safe to be honest to you. Lying takes effort. It takes work. But our society rewards lying and punishes telling hard truths. This doesn't mean, of course, that you're not allowed to react or have bad feelings when you hear something upsetting. But it does mean that there has to be some incentive to tell a hard truth that is greater than the incentive to lie and the consequences for telling the truth have to be less than the consequences for lying. Why should I tell the truth if I can lie and nothing bad will happen to me?

Because telling the truth would make a better person, and if you don't make it so difficult for me that not being a good person is the lesser consequence, then I'll tell you the truth (giving myself Brownie points for being a Good Person) and avoid the hassle of lying.

This doesn't stop everyone from lying, of course. Some people have a mental disorder called pathological lying. Some people have programming that's just too ingrained. Some people get off on secrecy and subterfuge. But the kicker is that, for those people, the rules won't stop them anyway. The rules just tell them how they can "win" the game by oh-so-considerately laying out exactly what they can or should lie about. The rules don't weed out liars, they create opportunities for liars.

I've often been baffled by guys who would get into relationships with me because I said I wanted an open one, and then they would proceed to lie to me about seeing anyone else. Like, WTF dude? You have my blessings! There's no reason to lie! Those people are out there, absolutely. What do you think would have happened if I had made a rule that these guys couldn't date other people? Do you think they would have said "oh, well, I WAS going to sneak around behind her back and fuck this chick on the side, but now that she SAID that I couldn't, I guess there goes that plan then!" Because that's totally realistic, right?

People who are going to lie are going to lie. Supporting people's freedom and autonomy and encouraging them to follow their own path while nurturing a haven for them to share the stories of their travels with you is far more successful at weeding out liars and developing honest relationships.

I know, it's surprising, that treating people with respect makes them want to be respectful back. Totally counter-intuitive, right? Well, yes, it is in a culture that confuses "respect" with "fear my authority". But it's really easy to make people fear you. It's much harder to make them willingly respect you.

Our culture can't always tell the difference between "treat me like a person" and "treat me like an authority" because it uses the word "respect" for both concepts. So some people think that the only way to make a partner treat them like a person is to make their partner fear their authority.

I've heard from many people, even within the poly community, that they want to get married, for instance, because being married will make it more difficult for a partner to leave them, so they will feel more secure in their relationship knowing that their partner will be disinclined to leave because of the difficulty.

Some people are less interested in treating their partners like autonomous human beings than they are in controlling their behaviour, specifically in "making" someone "respect" them, "love" them, not lie to them. You can't *make* someone feel respect (and a lot of people assume that you won't lie to them if you respect them). Tying them to you legally does not make them love you or prevent them from leaving. Passing rules against lying does not keep people from lying to you. Even passing rules and making scary punishments does not stop people from lying to you. It just makes them work harder to not get caught. But it's not love and it's not "respect".

I guess if fear and control is what you're going for in a relationship, at least you can own up to that and stop kidding yourself that you're doing it for the "respect".

Profile

Joreth

The Inn Between

Page Summary

Reminder: Lots Of Polyamorous People Never "Opened Up" A Relationship
Malicious & Benevolent Hierarchy Are Two Sides Of The Same Dehumanizing Coin
Polyamory & The Prisoner's Dilemma (And Some Gender Role Bullshit In Poly)
Out Of The Frying Pan Into The Fire - Escaping Abuse & Leaping Into Relationships In Polyamory
Your Single Coworkers & Employees Aren't There To Pick Up The Slack For Married People
How To Find A Discreet, Suitable Man For My Wife
Unicorn Hunter Bait And Switch Power Counter-Move
Would You Be The 4th Female?
How Do You Feel About Your Non-Traditional Relationships Now?
What Are The Most Helpful Rules You've Seen In Open Relationships?
Standard Rules Of Polyamorous Dating
We're Kinky In A Heteronormative Vanilla Sort Of Way
How To Have A Threesome
But What Happens When Triads Don't Work As We Planned?
Looking For A Brunch Bestie
6 Steps To Finding People To Date
#ThingsIWantToToon: The Unicorn Auction
I Apologize To The Entire Poly Community For This One
OTG STOP FUCKING DEBATING WHAT "COUNTS" AS A UNICORN!
An Epiphany About Unicorn Hunters
Because We Keep Having This Damn Argument About Unicorn Hunters And The Unicorn
Triads Are Advanced Polyamory Not The Beginner Starter Poly Package for Just Opening Up n00bs
Don't Be Mean To The Newbies, We're Just Trying To Learn!
New Polyamory Term?
The History Of The Term Unicorn Hunter
How Impact Bias Affects Polyamory, Poly n00bs, And Couples Wanting To "Open Up"
A Test For Couple Privilege In #Polyamory
Guest Post: A PSA For Unicorn Hunters
The Most Skipped Step[s] When "Opening A Relationship" + 1
I Was Quoted Extensively In An Article On Polyamorous Unicorn Hunting!
"Opening Up" A Relationship Doesn't Work, Try This Method Instead
Reminder That Not All Polys Opened Up A Couple Or Are Single Bi Women For Couples
Why "You Knew The Deal Going In" Is Bullshit In Relationships
Some Off The Cuff Comments On Unicorn Hunting
How do you bring a healthy third person into an existing marriage?
You Cannot "Add Someone To Your Relationship". Stop Saying That
It Is Never OK To Restrict Someone Else Even If They "Agree" To It
But What About Our Unicorn Hunter Feelz?
Fuck "Couples"
I Have A Problem With Relationship Anarchy...
One Penis Policies, Or How Girls Don't Count
Group Cohesion As A Coercive Tactic In Poly Relationships
Honey, Let's Add On A New Girlfriend To Our Existing Relationship!
OKCupid, Let's Talk About The Definition Of "Open Relationships"
Because He Cheated, You Must Give Up Your Privacy
Shut Up. You're Both Wrong.
When Emotional Abuse Looks A Lot Like Love
Don't I Get A Say In Their Relationship?
Yet Another Rant On Disempowerment In Poly Relationships
But We NEED Rules To Keep People From Lying To Us!

August 2024

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Ranty Lessons by Joreth

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