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I've been seeing a lot of "this thing happened between my partner and their other partner. How do you handle that / deal with that / take that / interpret that happening between your partner and their other partner?"
My answer is (and my advice that pretty much everyone should also do this) "there is nothing there for me to handle / deal with / take/ or interpret. If it wasn't about me, then it's not about me and there is nothing for me to react to."
It's things like, the metamour wants to try some sex thing that they haven't done before, or some new person has been flirting with or sexting the partner, or maybe the metamour dislikes something about the partner and they had a disagreement over it. It's relationship stuff between two people who are not me, and it's not something like abuse or anything damaging to my partner.
This kind of thing is symptomatic of our cultural values of ownership and possession in romantic relationships, and the lack of agency and autonomy. Those values seep into our subconsciousness and into our assumptions about relationships and they manifest in all kinds of strange and interesting ways, even when we think that we respect and value our partners as people. We probably do, but it's really hard to overcome all the cultural programming that we're subjected to.
And when someone asks how I feel about something that occurred between two people who aren't me and had nothing to do with me, that programming becomes obvious. At least, it does to those of us who have learned to read code.
The context was something like, someone posted in a *poly* forum "How would you handle someone flirting with your partner?"
My reaction was "there's nothing for me to 'handle'. It's not something that's hurting him, it's between two people that has nothing to do with me."
There wasn't any lying or deception going on, there wasn't any actual sex yet, the poster knew about the existence of the person flirting with their partner before it happened, and the partner & the flirty person had some romantic history together.
That's not the only post I've seen, just the latest one that prompted this post. What would we do about some situation that is not happening to us? The underlying assumption is that we have some right or obligation to interfere in some way, that what happens to our partner happens to us or is some kind of statement to us or about us that we need to react to.
I've also seen it for things like "how would you handle your partner dating someone who you don't like?" or "what would you do if your partner started dating someone who wasn't [insert whatever quality here that you think is important in a dating partner]" and "how would you deal with your partner's other partner wanting to have a kind of sex with your partner that you haven't had with them?", all with the implication in the way that they word it and in their follow up comments that *you* ought to be doing something about their relationship, not questioning how to handle a *metamour* relationship, which is a different sort of question.
I find the whole thing very weird and off-putting. The very question, and the fact that it comes up so often under different contexts, belies some incredibly deep, unexamined assumptions about possession in relationships that bleed into the polyamorous communities.
My answer is (and my advice that pretty much everyone should also do this) "there is nothing there for me to handle / deal with / take/ or interpret. If it wasn't about me, then it's not about me and there is nothing for me to react to."
It's things like, the metamour wants to try some sex thing that they haven't done before, or some new person has been flirting with or sexting the partner, or maybe the metamour dislikes something about the partner and they had a disagreement over it. It's relationship stuff between two people who are not me, and it's not something like abuse or anything damaging to my partner.
This kind of thing is symptomatic of our cultural values of ownership and possession in romantic relationships, and the lack of agency and autonomy. Those values seep into our subconsciousness and into our assumptions about relationships and they manifest in all kinds of strange and interesting ways, even when we think that we respect and value our partners as people. We probably do, but it's really hard to overcome all the cultural programming that we're subjected to.
And when someone asks how I feel about something that occurred between two people who aren't me and had nothing to do with me, that programming becomes obvious. At least, it does to those of us who have learned to read code.
The context was something like, someone posted in a *poly* forum "How would you handle someone flirting with your partner?"
My reaction was "there's nothing for me to 'handle'. It's not something that's hurting him, it's between two people that has nothing to do with me."
There wasn't any lying or deception going on, there wasn't any actual sex yet, the poster knew about the existence of the person flirting with their partner before it happened, and the partner & the flirty person had some romantic history together.
That's not the only post I've seen, just the latest one that prompted this post. What would we do about some situation that is not happening to us? The underlying assumption is that we have some right or obligation to interfere in some way, that what happens to our partner happens to us or is some kind of statement to us or about us that we need to react to.
I've also seen it for things like "how would you handle your partner dating someone who you don't like?" or "what would you do if your partner started dating someone who wasn't [insert whatever quality here that you think is important in a dating partner]" and "how would you deal with your partner's other partner wanting to have a kind of sex with your partner that you haven't had with them?", all with the implication in the way that they word it and in their follow up comments that *you* ought to be doing something about their relationship, not questioning how to handle a *metamour* relationship, which is a different sort of question.
I find the whole thing very weird and off-putting. The very question, and the fact that it comes up so often under different contexts, belies some incredibly deep, unexamined assumptions about possession in relationships that bleed into the polyamorous communities.
