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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).
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.
