The Journal Of The InnKeeper

Reminder: Lots Of Polyamorous People Never "Opened Up" A Relationship

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 22:21:49 GMT

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.

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Why Would You Sleep Apart From Your Significant Other?

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 21:21:53 GMT

www.quora.com/Would-you-have-a-separate-bedroom-from-your-significant-other-and-why/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Would you have a separate bedroom from your significant other and why?

A. I do not sleep well with others.

I have back problems and I need to sleep in a semi-reclined position (that means partially sitting up). It makes my pillow arrangements inconvenient for people who sleep more traditionally laying all the way flat. So I can’t really cuddle or snuggle with someone while sleeping, and if we’re not going to be touching at least part of the time, what’s the point of sharing a bed?
I am a ridiculously light sleeper. I wake at *everything*. My sister used to sneak into my room at night to steal my clothing and my cassette tapes. My parents refused to allow me to have a lock on my bedroom door because they felt it was too “secretive” and they wanted access to my room at all times (they did not listen to me when I offered for them to have a key and they did not see any violation of privacy here).

So I became super sensitive to motion at night. I could hear the air pressure change outside of my bedroom door when someone approached. I woke every single night to my sister attempting to sneak in, once I developed this sensitivity. Every night *for years*.

So sharing a room with another person who snores, tosses and turns, mumbles, moves, or gets up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom is incredibly disruptive to me. No matter how many hours of sleep I get, when I share a room with other people, I sleep so poorly that I feel jet lagged all the next day.
I have several sleep disorders - Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, Sleep Paralysis, and Night Terrors. With the DSPS, my internal sleep clock is off by about 6 hours. My body does not think it’s bedtime until around 4 in the morning and insists that it’s not time to wake until noon. Sharing a sleeping space with people who are on a different sleep schedule is disruptive to both of us, as one of us is not yet tired and still active while the other is already asleep and then reversed in the morning.

With the Sleep Paralysis and Night Terrors, these things are both triggered by regular disruption of the REM cycle, at least for me. So, things like hitting the snooze button repeatedly for several hours (yes, I’ve done this) will trigger an episode, especially if I do this for several days in a row. Also, people who are restless sleepers and move a lot will interrupt my REM cycle enough to trigger an episode. So are snorers.
I’m also probably a synesthete. Synesthesia is a condition in which experiencing something with one sense is received as another sense. So, like, some people taste color, or they actually visually see sounds. My version is that certain sounds produce an actual physical sensation in my body that is not just the standard “air vibrations entering the ear canal” sorts of feelings, nor is it that internal thumping feeling everyone gets with really loud bass. My favorite feeling is the sound of one particular type of singing voice that produces the sensation of what I refer to as “liquid cat fur” gently rubbing down the back of my throat.

Snoring produces a painful, rage-inducing feeling in my head and chest. I absolutely cannot sleep when there is any kind of snoring at all, even the occasional one-off snores that happens to almost everybody. It will wake me instantly with pain and rage. I’ve had to learn how to sleep with earbuds in playing music at full volume just to drown out the sound of snoring because sleeping through loud music and hard things in my ears was less painful than hearing that sound.
On top of all of these health issues, I’m polyamorous and introverted. The introversion means that I really need space that belongs just to me, where I can feel safe and go to recharge and where nobody else is allowed in without my express permission. In most house layouts, there are very few options for giving people their own space, other than bedrooms. And as I live below the poverty line, affording a home with a shared bedroom and all the normal rooms and also private space for everyone quickly starts to become very expensive. It’s easiest to make the private space also be everyone’s bedroom.

The polyamory means that I am likely to have multiple partners. If I live with more than one partner, then all my health issues are compounded because there are more than 2 people all attempting to sleep in the same room. Trust me, I’ve done this, and it did not end well for me. I was in a group once with 6 people and they all insisted on sharing a bed together. After the novelty wore off, it became a living hell for me with 3 different snore patterns, 2 “morning people” to my “night owl” pattern, no privacy for sex, and crawling in and out at the foot of the bed without disrupting anyone else to get to my space. Even giving everyone our own bed-sheets did not solve the problem of different preferences in ambient sleeping temperature either.

If any of my partners do not live with me, then when I want to have them spend the night, I either have to kick an existing partner out of his own bed (and then have sex in a bed that someone else sleeps in, which doesn’t bother everyone but does bother some), or we have to have a house big enough for a spare room that’s dedicated to guests and that goes empty the rest of the time. I don’t usually have the money for houses big enough to have rooms that are only being used occasionally.

If I live with one partner, and our house is big enough for a shared room and a guest room, we might as well just each have our own bedroom. That way nobody gets kicked out of their “own” bed when a guest comes over. Then there are no hurt feelings over used sheets, interruptions of routine, feeling “left out”, etc.

My personal preference is to live in my own, self-contained space like an apartment. My ideal fantasy is to have that self-contained space be on shared property with other partners, such as an entire apartment building for everyone in the network where we all get our own self-contained space and also a “common area” where we can come together for large family meals, recreation, etc.

This way I get my own room, I get All The Closet Space for my costumes, I get a work space for my hobbies where my clutter and mess doesn’t impact anyone else, and a kitchen where *nobody touches my knives except me*, and yet I can walk barefoot down the hall, or in some state of undress, to the next door over to visit with a partner or metamour, and there is enough separation between us that sounds of sex or loud music or enthusiastic video game play are not intrusive to anyone.

This whole sharing a bedroom thing is a relatively recent trend in human history. We have tried a whole slew of different sleeping arrangements, each with their pros and cons. There is no reason to believe that the house layout of one master bedroom for a romantic couple and several smaller bedrooms for children with common rooms like a kitchen and living room, is the “proper” configuration. That was a lie told to us by post WWII propaganda in the United States trying to force everyone into a nuclear family setting for a capitalistic, patriarchal society.

Family structures have varied all over the map throughout time and across cultures. This one particular configuration should not be the “default” that everyone falls into automatically, and those who don’t are considered deviations. If anything, this nuclear family model is the historical deviation, and it’s turning out to have less and less applicability as American and Western European cultures evolve into more ethical structures allowing more freedom for individual variation and preferences in people’s pursuit of happiness.

I think more heteromononormative relationships would benefit from separating sleeping quarters and developing personal spaces within shared homes the way some of us who do relationships differently have done with our own families. This doesn’t mean that people can’t be *allowed* to share sleeping space when they want to. Just that having their own space and learning to accept sleeping apart as a “normal” option for relationships (rather than a sign of a problem) helps in developing autonomy, individuality, and solves a lot of poor sleeping habits that we Westerners are kinda famous for.

Once we start sleeping better, the rest of our days tend to get more productive and we become generally happier, which will spill into the happiness and success of our romantic and familial relationships. We currently spend a lot of money on various products designed to mitigate or compensate for the problems that come along with shared sleeping space. Those are problems that could be solved entirely by simply not sleeping together (when our circumstances and finances allow for it).

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What Does Commitment Mean In Polyamory?

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 02:30:53 GMT

https://www.quora.com/What-does-committed-relationship-mean-in-terms-of-polyamory/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What does "committed relationship" mean in terms of polyamory?

A. There is an atheist saying: “I contend that we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you”. It means that everyone lacks belief in gods, so when you ask what it’s like to not believe in *your* gods, it’s much like what it’s like when you don’t believe in other gods.

Commitment in polyamory is much the same thing. Everyone commits to a variety of things in their relationships. Polys just don’t commit to sexual exclusivity. Otherwise, we commit to many of the same things. When you took your wedding vows (or when people do, if you, reader, personally haven’t gotten married), there were all kinds of commitments in those vows, and I’d wager that none of them were “I promise never to let my genitals touch anyone else’s genitals”.

For instance, these are my wedding vows. I’d bet some of them sound pretty similar to a lot of your monogamous wedding vows:

I commit myself to you
As your spouse
To learn and grow with,
To explore and adventure with,
To build and create with,
To support you and respect you
In everything as an equal partner,
In the foreknowledge of joy and pain,
Strength and weariness,
Direction and doubt,
For as long as the love shall last.
We exchange these rings
To symbolize our connection to one another.
They represent a commitment
To honor and respect one another
And to recognize
The agency and essential humanity of each of us.

See? Nothing in there about genitals or sex. All we did, really, was leave out the parts about forsaking all others and the part about forever, but the rest is pretty similar to monogamous vows.

A friend of mine once said that being poly is kind of like being vegetarian, where people find out that she doesn’t eat meat, so they ask “OMG what do you even eat then?!” as if the absence of meat means that, literally, the majority of foodstuffs on the planet don’t exist. There’s so much more to eat besides beef, chicken, lettuce and Wonder bread, and if you thought about it, you’d realize that you eat a lot of the same things that vegetarians do too, they just don’t eat meat.

Because polys have to think a little more deliberately about the kinds of things we commit to, since there isn’t really a social template to follow and we can’t just do things by default, some of us probably have come up with some commitments that monogamous people don’t make. I’m not saying we’re *identical* to monogamy only without sexual exclusivity.

In fact, I’d even bet that *monogamists* aren’t identical to each other and y’all make some commitments amongst yourselves that are unique, or at least not common or that not everyone else makes too.

I’m also childfree by choice and solo poly, which means that in addition to not being sexually exclusive, I also don’t make commitments to things like co-parenting or cohabiting. So, I’m sure that some of my personal commitments are things that other people don’t make in their relationships. But they’re still normal sorts of things to commit to that even mono relationships could benefit from.

And a lot of them are things that a lot of people do commit to, but so much of monogamy is by default and by implicit assumption. So, if pressed, a lot of people could probably admit to some of them being values they also hold, they just never really thought about it or said it out loud like a vow.

I have so many things that I commit to in relationships, that I wrote a whole page on my website that I managed to get more than 20 blog pieces out of when I broke it down by each commitment that I make in my relationships:

www.TheInnBetween.net/polycommitments.html

The full explanation of each point is on that page. The bullet list is:

I am committed to respecting my partners' autonomy, agency, and personal sovereignty - that is, respecting their right to make informed, un-coerced decisions and to be responsible for their own decisions, their right to act according to their own free will, and their right to own their body and control what happens to it.
I am committed to respecting my partners’ right to make their own life choices.
I am committed to doing my best to practice flexibility and compassion with regards to the paths my partners may take in life.
I am committed to respecting the roles that other people play in my partners’ lives.
I am committed to allowing my metamour relationships to find their own structure and direction without forcing them into a predetermined shape.
I am committed to considering my metamours as "family" regardless of the structure or emotional closeness of our individual metamour relationships and to treat them accordingly.
I am committed to working through problems with my partners starting with the assumption that we love and cherish each other and are therefore really on the same side.
I am committed to supporting my partners in being the best version of themselves that they can be.
I am committed to taking care of myself so that I can be the best partner I can be.
I am committed to protecting the safety of myself and my partners through informed consent and risk-benefit analysis of behaviour, prioritizing evidence-based reason above emotional justification.
I am committed to addressing issues early in order to prevent them from becoming too big to handle.
I am committed to prioritizing situations, not partners, because all my partners are a priority.
I am committed to including my partners on the higher ring of priorities in my life (partners / work / pets / family emergencies / etc.) and to not passing them over in favor of other events or people too often.
I am committed to accepting assistance from my partners when needed, and sometimes just when it would be nice.
I am committed to limiting my actions and words which have the intent or goal of harming my partners, although I acknowledge that some decisions I may make for the benefit of myself or my relationships may result in hurt as a consequence, unintentional or not.
I am committed to be as clear about my expectations as possible, both with myself and with my partners.
I am committed to choosing the Path of Greatest Courage by always being honest with myself and my partners while simultaneously allowing compassion to dictate the delivery of my honesty.
I am committed to prioritizing the happiness of the individuals over the longevity of the group if / when those two values are in conflict.
I am committed to discussing harm reduction plans and contingency plans for when bad things happen, because I understand that we can’t always prevent them from happening.
I am committed to allowing the relationship to find its own structure and direction without forcing it into a predetermined shape and to considering alternate structures and directions before automatically resorting to breaking up when situations and priorities change.
I am committed to becoming a friendly ex should a breakup occur and the situation is such that it would not be harmful to remain in contact, with the understanding that “friendly ex” is a statement on my own actions, not the structure of the post-breakup relationship.
I am committed to choosing partners who share my values so that they also make similar commitments to themselves, to me and our relationship, and by extension, my other partners (their metamours).
I am committed to not expecting anyone to live up to the Perfect Poly standard, including myself.
I am committed to allowing myself and my partners the forgiveness and the freedom to be flawed, to have bad days, and to occasionally fail to live up to expectations or commitments, providing that the bad times do not outnumber the good times in either frequency or emotional weight and the commitment to prioritizing individual happiness over longevity still holds.

Honestly, the frequency with which monogamous people ask polys incredulously about what we could possibly commit to if sexual exclusivity is off the table kinda makes *me* want to question *them* about the kinds of things *they* commit to, since they can’t seem to come up with what else we might commit to on their own.

“But what do you commit to if not sexual exclusivity?”

“Wait a minute, what do *you* commit to? Is sexual exclusivity really the only possible relationship commitment you can come up with? Is that really the only part of your relationship that makes it stand out as something special? That elevates this relationship above all others? Is this really the only difference between your marriage and all your other relationships? That you have sex with just this one person? What happens if one of you gets sick and you can’t have sex with them anymore? Is that the only thing holding your relationship together? If you can’t have sex, does your relationship fall apart because you have no other commitments to each other? What do YOU commit to besides sexual exclusivity?”

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What Are The Most Helpful Rules You've Seen In Open Relationships?

Sat, 12 Dec 2020 23:39:17 GMT

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.

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I Apologize To The Entire Poly Community For This One

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 17:57:50 GMT

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.

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#Advice What Are The Expectations Of The First Wife In Polyamory?

Sun, 26 May 2019 19:11:58 GMT

Q. In a polyamorous relationship is the first wife expected to be emotionally involved in the joys and sorrows of the other wives?

A. POLYAMORY: Literally, poly = many + amor = love. The state, practice, or intention of maintaining multiple romantic relationships simultaneously, with the full knowledge and consent of all the people involved.

POLYGAMY: Literally, poly = many + gamos = marriage. The state or practice of having multiple wedded spouses at the same time. This term does not imply the gender of any individual within the relationship.

POLYGYNY: Literally, poly = many + gynos = woman. The state or practice of having multiple wedded wives at the same time.

POLYANDRY: Literally, poly = many + andros = man. The state or practice of having multiple wedded husbands at the same time.

In the US, it is currently illegal to have multiple spouses of any gender. So, as Jessica said, the only way you’d have multiple wives is if two women married each other. And in that case, I would *hope* that the two wives were emotionally involved in the joys and sorrows of the other. At least, if they had the standard sort of marriage where they got married for love, rather than the “traditional” sort of marriage where they got married to join families and houses and merge land and property. If the latter is the case, then I suppose it wouldn’t be expected for either of them to be emotionally involved with each other.

Polyamory is an overarching term that means only “many loves”. That phrase can be interpreted in a very wide variety of ways. Implicit in the definition are the concepts of “ethics” and “consent” and often “romantic love” (although not necessarily that last one), but even when you imply many ethical romantisexual loving relationships with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved (the tightest definition of the term), that’s still a pretty broad term that includes a lot of variation.

For example, I am kitchen table egalitarian solo poly with a hint of RA. That’s 4 overlapping subtypes of polyamory right there. Kitchen Table Poly means that everyone in the polycule (colloquial; a group of people related by polyamorous romantic and/or sexual connections) - that is, your partners and their partners and their partners’ partners, etc. - everyone in the polycule knows each other and is comfortable *enough* with each other to sit around a kitchen table together, sharing conversation and coffee, or a meal, or whatever. This term was coined by Kimchi Cuddles.

The opposite of Kitchen Table Poly would be Parallel Poly, where one has multiple romantic and/or sexual partners that run parallel to each other and do not interact at all. It is implied by the “polyamory” part of Parallel Poly that the other partners at least *know* of each other and consent to being in a non-monogamous relationship, but they generally do not interact with each other and each relationship is highly compartmentalized and segregated.

Egalitarian Poly is a relationship structure where each person in any given relationship is equal in power to the other person in that relationship to shape and control that specific relationship and no one outside of that relationship has any more power over that relationship than the people in the relationship.

A lot of people think it means that the metamours (my partner’s other partner) are equal in status and priority *to each other*. I cannot stress enough that this *is not what egalitarian poly means*. It means that if I am in a relationship with Bob, then Bob and I are full equal partners in our relationship and nobody has more power over the course of our relationship, the shape, the look, or anything about our relationship than Bob and I have together.

Egalitarian polyamorists can have relationships that look different. An Egal Poly can have a legal spouse, a cohabiting partner, a casual partner, an anchor partner, a nesting partner, a comet partner, an FWB, etc. All of those terms are defined at The Inn Between - Polyamory btw, but you don’t need to know what they all mean for the purpose of this discussion.

The point is that Bob here can have all different kinds of relationships and still be Egal Poly. As long as the reason why each relationship looks the way it does is because Bob and that partner both want their relationship to look that way, they’re the only two who negotiated what their relationship looks like, and nobody else can tell Bob what one of his other relationships has to look like or what he can and can’t do with any of his other partners.

Each relationship that Bob gets into has to have the full freedom to grow in whatever direction it wants to go that Bob’s “first” relationship had when he wasn’t involved with anyone else.

The counter to Egalitarian Poly is Hierarchical Poly. There are 2 different definitions for this term, and it is my opinion that one of those definitions is grammatically incorrect and because of that, the use of that definition confuses and obfuscates a serious problem in the community.

So when *I* use the term Hierarchical Poly, this is what I mean: A term used to denote an unequal power structure among participants in any kind of non-monogamous relationship or group. This is where certain people are given actual power over other people and certain other people are disempowered by this relationship structure. Other people will use the terms “power” and “priority” interchangeably. For more on my thoughts of the misuse of the term “hierarchy” and the dangers of hierarchy, you can visit my blog post tag on the subject.

Solo Poly is the practice or philosophy of engaging in polyamorous relationships as an individual person and prioritizing the autonomy and agency of everyone involved over the group as a unit, regardless of how emotionally intimate or even logistically entwined each of the relationships are.

So, what this means is that a “sopo” or a solo polyamorist can have no partners, one partner, or several partners, but we always think of ourselves as an individual with partners, never “half of a couple”. We make our own decisions, we often live alone (but we don’t have to), and we move through life as an independent person.

This does *not* mean that we don’t develop deep, emotional connections or that we don’t *consider* how our actions affect our partners. Solopolys are often *interdependent*. That is, we often build close networks of people that we have deep intimacy with and with whom we can rely on, much like any other family. We just don’t give up any of our autonomy or subsume our identities into the “couple” or family unit.

Every person in a relationship is more important than the relationship itself. Which means a solopoly person will not try to “protect the relationship” at all cost. If the relationship is not bringing joy or value to everyone in it, then the relationship is not worth protecting. The safety and happiness of the *individuals* in the relationship is more important than the longevity of any relationship.

Solo Polyamory is actually a pretty complex and nuanced concept, so there is a whole lot more I go into here, if you really want to read more about it: But What Does Solo Poly Even Mean? - A Personal Perspective

Now,Relationship Anarchy (RA) means the practice or philosophy of not ranking partners according to type of relationship and sometimes refusing to label relationships at all to avoid the sorts of priority or ranking assumptions that accompany certain labels. Often there is no distinction between romantic and non-romantic relationships and platonic relationships can be held in as much importance as romantic or sexual relationships.

Western cultures have the Relationship Escalator. This is the presumptive path that romantic relationships are expected to take with an order to events or milestones and a pace that is assumed and imposed by society. The children's song "first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage" is a simplified example of the Relationship Escalator.

RAs reject this Escalator. They do not accept a hierarchy of relationships imposed from the outside. They might have some relationships that have higher priority over others, but they do not assign that priority based on a predetermined hierarchy ladder that our culture has assumed.

So, for example, in the US, very generally speaking, we assume that a legal spouse would have all the priority and power for a given person, and family-of-origin comes second (except perhaps in cases of medical emergencies), friends come after that, and coworkers and acquaintances come last. Some individuals may rearrange this hierarchy for themselves, but the point is that the class of relationships that a person has comes attached with default priority, and the only way for someone to have their priority changed is to change the relationship.

RAs do not feel this way. A platonic friend could have the “highest” priority in their lives while a romantic partner might come in “second” in a case of competing priorities. An RA might choose a life partner and co-parent from among their family or platonic friends rather than a sexual partner. An RA might choose to prioritize themselves first and maintain only loose commitments and connections with everyone else. There is no structure to Relationship Anarchy - that’s kind of the point. Everyone gets to decide for themselves what everyone and everything in their lives looks like, not have their lives or their relationships dictated to them by society.

So, back to my original point… I am kitchen table egalitarian solo poly with a hint of RA. This means that I *prefer* to develop, at the very least, an acquaintanceship with all of my metamours - with my partners’ other partners. I like to meet them in person, to know who they are, and to build friendships with them where possible.

But I do not have any say whatsoever in the relationships my partners have with other people. I do not get to impose on them any restrictions or limitations or contribute to any discussions about how their relationships will look, even if I “was here first”. If I don’t like one of my partners’ other partners, I have no say in whether or not he dates her or how that relationship goes. I can choose to limit my own contact with my metamours if there is a problem, but that relationship exists outside of and independent of me.

I prefer to live alone and I make all my own relationship decisions by myself. I consult my other partners because their feelings and thoughts are important to me and I am considerate of how my actions affect them. But ultimately, any decisions to be made rest with me alone. And I reject any power over their decision-making even if they want to give it to me. I want to have some *influence* because I view my relationships as *partnerships*, where we are working in tandem to build something together. But I don’t want *power over* another person’s autonomy and agency. They have to be responsible for their own decisions and actions. I will support, encourage, and sometimes even disagree with, but never control the thoughts, actions, or decisions of my partners.

So to finally get around to answering your question, no, I am not “expected” to be involved with my metamours’ “joys and sorrows”. That would be giving up my freedom of agency and that of everyone else. I am free to build whatever kind of relationship with my metamours that my metamour and I want to build together, including becoming best friends, becoming lovers ourselves, or even having no contact, and everything in between.

My partners cannot dictate to me what my other relationships look like, and that goes for my romantic relationships, my friendships, my familial relationships, *and my metamour relationships*. My partner and their other partner do not have the power to decide on my behalf what kind of relationship I will have with either my partner or their other partner.

As a legal spouse, I do not expect my spouse’s other partners to be friends with me or to be to be emotionally involved in my joys and sorrows, even though I “was here first”. My spouse also does not expect me to be to be emotionally involved in the joys and sorrows of his other partners, or vice versa.

However, I do very much enjoy the friendships I have built with some of his other partners. My metamours bring value to my life. Half of the reason I do polyamory in the first place is because of the metamour relationship. There are a lot of different types of non-monogamy, but the term “metamour” is only used in polyamory.

Polyamory is the style of non-monogamy that best honors the relationship between one’s partners other partners. Some forms of non-monogamy block that connection entirely. Some forms of non-monogamy “expect” that connection and force it even when it does not make the participants happy.

But in polyamory, we honor the idea of “metamours”, which includes respecting the freedom of said metamours to build and develop their own relationships (or not) without undue pressure from the culture, the community, or even the mutual partner.

It’s true that some individuals within polyamory do not live up to these ideals. Some individuals who do polyamory do, in fact, attempt to restrict contact among their partners, or who do, in fact, attempt to force connections among their partners. Poly people are still people, after all, and we all still make mistakes and often are subject to the social programming we were given from our larger culture. But this is not the polyamorous *ideal*. Neither extreme is an assumption of polyamory itself. Polyamory itself leaves the question of metamours open to the interpretation of those participants.

And in my own life, I have found that my metamour connections are the best part of non-monogamy. Multiple partners are great and all, but there are a variety of ways I can get that. And often I only have one partner at a time, or no partners at all. It’s my metamours who make this style of relationship worth it to me.

My metamours bring joy and value to my life. They are my family. They are my support network. They are my friends. They are my confidantes. They are my co-conspirators. They are my rocks, my anchors, my steady ground.

Not all of my metamours have developed such close connections with me. Some of them I never even met. Some of them I actively disliked. Some of them brought such conflict that my life was disrupted and made worse because of their presence. Just like the diversity of any sort of relationship that someone else has control over - like in-laws or coworkers.

But when they *do* work out, it’s the best relationship in the world to me. My life is enriched by some of the women my various partners have dated over the years, and I am a better person because of their presence in my life. And they would not have had that kind of presence in my life (if they had any at all) had it not been for the mutual partner who chose to date us both.

So, no, I am not “expected” to be emotionally involved in the joys and sorrows of my partners’ other partners. I don’t expect it, my partners don’t expect it, and those other partners don’t expect it.

But I cherish it when it happens naturally, organically.

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What #Polyamory Really Looks Like

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 23:59:22 GMT

#WhatRealPolyLooksLike

“Oh you’re poly?! Are you dating lots of people? Tell me about your partners!”

"So, how many partners do you have, then?"

Well, I've been in a seriously long-term, low-key toxic relationship with the Entertainment Industry. It takes up most of my time and it interferes with all my other relationships, but I just love it.

Ballroom dancing is my secondary. I don't get to see it very often, but it's a wonderful change to my regular routine - I dress up, I go out, I get to forget all the daily grind stuff, and I come home all excited and giddy from the endorphins, and often a little too sore to walk straight.

I also have a pretty exacting Dom named Costuming. Every so often, Costuming decides to cut in and make me service it with long hours spent on my knees on the floor or bent over a table with a variety of textiles and a box of sharp pins. Everything else gets put on hold until I've completed the tasks that Costuming sets out for me.

My husband and other romantic and sexual partners have pretty well adjusted to being long-distance with all the others taking up so much of my time. I think things are working out, in spite of the challenges.

Tell us about YOUR partners! Use the hashtag so we can see all the diversity of #poly relationships! You can also just tell me in the comments if you want.

#polyamory #polyamorous #OpenMarriage #OpenRelationships #ConsensualNonMonogamy

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The History Of The Term Unicorn Hunter

Sun, 21 Oct 2018 22:20:10 GMT

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"

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The Care And Feeding Of Independent People - Yes Please Feed Us

Thu, 26 Jul 2018 20:39:36 GMT

You know what I'm really fucking sick of? People who see all my independence and my relationship and poly experience and think that means that I don't need any care and feeding at all.

"Joreth is self-sufficient, so I can just put her on a back shelf somewhere and she'll just be there waiting for me when I have time to get back to her. "

"Joreth knows how to do introspection and stuff so I can just leave her to it while I put out everyone else's fires for them or with them. My other partners need help, but Joreth can handle all her shit by herself."

"Joreth is good at being alone so I don't need to pay attention to the fact that we haven't spoken in over a month, but my cohabiting spouse hasn't heard my voice in 20 minutes and they're getting anxious so I'll just put off talking to Joreth another day."

"Joreth spent years getting over her painful shyness so when we go places together, I can ditch her as soon as we cross the threshold because she already did the work on herself so now she doesn't need my companionship."

"Joreth and I have lots of common friends so I can ditch her when we go out together because all these people are her friends too so she isn't alone if I disappear for the remainder of the event."

"Joreth has been alone for so long, I don't really need do build up any common friends or shared activities because she's used to going out solo so she'll be fine if I never come along to her things or include her in my things - she'll still find a way to go out and socialize."

"Joreth has so much patience and understanding that I never have to worry about her emotional needs or pay attention to her Bids For Attention or manage my own issues in order to save some resources to help her with her issues because she will just serenely take everything in stride."

I do not have infinite patience. Sometimes I feel insecure and need reassurance. Sometimes I get a little selfish. Sometimes I need to do coupley things even when I don't like being part of a "couple" just because sometimes it's fucking nice to have someone else around to go to movies with or to walk into a strange environment with as mutual support or who knows me well enough to finish my sentences.

Sometimes I just want to be someone's priority. Maybe not their only priority, or even not their absolute #1 priority (that should be themselves), but A Priority. Sometimes *I* want to be the whiny troublesome partner who needs looking after instead of looking after everyone else, always doing the emotional labor in a relationship, or stepping back politely while the metamours get all the attention and energy from our mutual partner leaving none leftover for me.

Sometimes I want someone else to be the designated grown up. Being good at relationshipping doesn't mean I'm flawless at it. But even people who know me IRL and who should know that forget it.

And, of course, it's hard to talk about publicly as a community leader, because when we're not flawless, we lose credibility. So I can't turn to my community for support because they're looking to me to uphold the example, and I can't go to my partners because they're the ones I'm having the problem with and the problem is that they think they can get away with not being there for me and shouldering some of the burden.

Fuck all that. I need care and feeding and attention too.

From my comments in my FB thread:

Like, solo poly doesn't mean NO poly. I'm still a fucking partner, I still need to be treated like one, not the backup plan or that old college buddy who will be there whenever you get around to calling them. ...

I feel like a polite "hey, pay some attention to me, please!" should be sufficient and I shouldn't have to be a squeaky wheel, at least not in a romantic relationship where, presumably, the other person *wants* to exchange attention with me. It's not like I'm a passive communicator who requires people to read between the lines and magically divine my thoughts to figure out what I want.

But when other people expect to only notice when relationships are on fire before they start fixing things because that's how everyone else gets noticed, my polite "hey, pay some attention to me, please!"s get lost in the chaos of the rest of their lives.

So then I wait until I'm pissed off, and when I finally start shouting, people get surprised to find out that I'm at the end of my rope over here and when did the fire even start, let alone turn into a blaze, and oh crap, did this relationship have to blow up when everything else is on fire too?

Well, yeah, if there had been routine maintenance done, then this one wouldn't be blowing up while they were busy being distracted by other fires to put out. The check engine light has been on for a long time now. Apparently I need to start adding annoying beeping to my check engine light, to prevent people from ignoring it just because there are no knocking sounds coming from the engine just yet.

Have I mixed my disaster metaphors sufficiently yet?

The big problem is that by the time I start becoming that squeaky wheel, I'm actually pretty done and ready to start withdrawing too. So it's often too late to fix anything by then.

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I Think My Parents Are Finally Getting The Hang Of This Whole Poly Thing

Sat, 24 Feb 2018 04:00:18 GMT

I think my parents are finally getting the hang of this whole poly thing.

Since we got married (at my parents' house), my parents finally remember and recognize Franklin as my partner. Because he's always been long-distance to me, he isn't in a lot of my pictures that I post online and I don't have a lot of "we did this thing last weekend" stories about him, so it was easy for my parents to "forget" that I'm dating him. But now he's a legal spouse, so that "counts" to them.

During the whole wedding extravaganza, they had a chance to meet Ben, who is our Squiggle Designated Extrovert and can charm the pants off of anyone (especially girlfriends' mothers). Both of my parents just fell in love with Ben, who made himself indispensable during the wedding by filling in the gaps wherever someone was needed. Ben has the same sort of "family" connection that I do, which is that family-of-origin of the partner is important so he makes friends with parents & siblings of partners that even outlast the romantic relationships. I still send holiday cards to my high school boyfriends' parents.

So now they can't pick just one of my partners as the "real" one, because Franklin is the spouse and the person I've been with for 13 years and Ben left such an impression on them that they continue to text each other directly just to see how each are doing.

I had to actually reassure my parents that neither I nor Franklin would feel slighted if my parents developed a friendship with Ben because of his outgoing, friendly nature that makes him so easy to like. They were concerned that we would feel that they were undermining or dismissing our married relationship by befriending Ben, so I got to have yet another poly talk with them about the independent nature of solo poly relationships and the solid self esteem of both of my partners who do not take things personally when people like or dislike the other one because it has nothing to do with them personally.

Now my parents actually tell me to pass along their hellos and well-wishes to both partners!

#polyamory #ItOnlyTook20YearsButTheyMightFinallyBeGettingIt #ParadigmShift

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Converting Regular Songs To Decent Poly Songs

Sat, 24 Feb 2018 03:48:56 GMT

One of my ongoing rants is the anti-polyness of pop songs. With only a very small exception of artists who do an excellent job with music production and in that "it factor" in writing music, most of the songs that are written by poly people as poly songs are really pretty terrible songs, quality-wise. The recording quality is terrible, they don't have the full range of instruments to make a good, round sound, and the lyrics, while they rhyme, aren't really all that catchy.

Say what you will about the banality of pop lyrics, but they're catchy and they stick, which is what makes the songs popular.

Popular music (through the ages and genres, not just Britney's and Justin's music) is popular for a reason. It's well produced, it's catchy, the combination of instruments and vocals blend into pleasing sounds, and if the lyrics themselves aren't exactly high poetry, they're memorable and they flow.

So I've long said that what we ought to do is just record parodies of popular music with poly themes - people would be much more willing to listen to it, I think. Of course, we'd still need decent recordings, but we already know that the melody will be liked.

So, here's an excellent example: One of my favorite songs is Pink's Leave Me Alone, I'm Lonely. I think it's an EXCELLENT example of what it's like to be solo poly, except the song is clearly not poly. It has one line that explicitly excludes multiple partners. But, it also means that there is really only one line that needs to be altered to make it a solo poly anthem. And it's ridiculously easy to change this line too...

I don't wanna wake up with another
But I don't wanna always wake up with you either

to:

I might wanna wake up with another
You might not wanna always wake up with me either

So now we just need someone who can do justice to a Pink song to get the karaoke track and a decent mic and record this very slightly changed song to make a *really* good solo poly song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtEwKSFdA-Y

Go away
Give me a chance to miss you
Say goodbye
It'll make me want to kiss you

I love you so
Much more when you're not here
Watchin' all the bad shows
Drinking all of my beer

I don't believe Adam and Eve
Spent every goddamn day together
If you give me some room there will be room enough for two

Tonight
Leave me alone I'm lonely
Alone I'm lonely
I'm tired
Leave me alone I'm lonely
Alone I'm lonely tonight

I might wanna wake up with another
You might not wanna always wake up with me either
No you can't hop into my shower
All I ask for is one fuckin' hour

You taste so sweet
But I can't eat the same thing every day
Cuttin' off the phone
Leave me the fuck alone
Tomorrow I'll be beggin' you to come home

Tonight
Leave me alone I'm lonely
Alone I'm lonely
I'm tired
Leave me alone I'm lonely
Alone I'm lonely tonight

Go away
Come back
Go away
Come back

Why can't I just have it both ways
Go away
Come back
Go away

Come back
I wish you knew the difference
Go away
Come back

Go away
Give me a chance to miss you
Say goodbye
It'll make me want to kiss you

Go away
Give me a chance to miss you
Say goodbye
It'll make me want to kiss you

Go away
Give me a chance to miss you
Say goodbye
It'll make me want to kiss you

Tonight
Leave me alone I'm lonely
Alone I'm lonely
I'm tired
Leave me alone I'm lonely
Alone I'm lonely tonight

Tonight
Leave me alone I'm lonely
Alone I'm lonely
I'm tired
Leave me alone I'm lonely
Alone I'm lonely tonight

Tonight
Go away
Give me a chance to miss you
Leave me alone I'm lonely

Alone I'm lonely
Say goodbye
It'll make me want to kiss you
I'm tired

Go away
Give me a chance to miss you
Leave me alone I'm lonely
Alone I'm lonely

Say goodbye
It'll make me want to kiss you
Tonight
Go away

Give me a chance to miss you
Say goodbye
It'll make me want to kiss you

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Poly Valentine's Day

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 07:33:13 GMT

Holidays in polyamory, even the "romantic" ones are much the same as any other holiday, only maybe with more schedules to consult (honestly, with 2 kids, godparents, and extended relatives, it's not any more schedules to consult than my monogamous childhood).

Many polys spend V-Day alone because they don't have any partners at the moment, like single people.
Many polys spend V-Day alone because their partners are long distance, like many monogamous people such as couples with one or both in active duty military service overseas.
Many polys spend V-Day alone because they didn't win the priority to get that exact day to celebrate, like a lot of partnered people whose partners work in emergency services and have to work that day.
Many polys spend V-Day alone because they don't celebrate, like some monogamous people who are conscientious objectors.
Many polys spend V-Day with partners but not doing anything different than any other day because they don't celebrate, like some monogamous people who are conscientious objectors.
Many polys celebrate V-Day on alternate days, like many monogamous people who are busy on the exact day like when it falls in the middle of the week, and polys might choose to celebrate on alternate days for the same busyness reasons or because they have multiple partners so they have multiple celebrations.
Many polys celebrate V-Day with as many of their partners and metamours as they can get at the same time, just like many monogamous people who celebrate a romantic holiday with their partners and their friends, or make it a family holiday with the kids, or with their entire extended families.

It's really no different than being monogamous (meaning that there are all kinds of ways to celebrate holidays even among monogamous people), and it doesn't *have* to be a big, stressful thing - at least, it doesn't have to be a *different* stressful thing. Some of y'all want to make this holiday really important and then stress out about it, no matter how many partners y'all have.

It's really very simple. Ask your partners how they feel about the holiday. Then find the compromise that makes everyone feel cared for without putting anyone out too much. If this is a big deal to one or more partners, then make it a big deal. If it's not, then don't. Express your own preferences too.

Go out together as a group. Have your own coupley dates all on different days. Give gifts. Don't give gifts. Deliberately avoid the materialistic, couple-centric commercialism by NOT celebrating your romantic relationships, but by celebrating your *metamour* relationships instead.

It's really not any different from monogamous people, except for a small percentage of us who might have group sex. That's probably different from monogamy. Depending on your definition of "monogamy". But other than that, most of us celebrate like monogamous people do. If you're new to poly and stressing out about how to celebrate: relax. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than the holiday normally is.

But a word of caution - if you're new to this and you're starting out by "opening up", make a point to ask your newer partners what their feelings are on the subject, and try to prioritize *their* feelings, because they get the short end of the stick in most other things.

And if there's really a conflict between your partners, then opt for either the group date or the alternate dates where *nobody* gets The Day for themselves. Part of learning to be ethically poly is learning that we all have to give up some of our privileges and expectations in order for everyone to feel safe enough to want to concede theirs in return. You learn to trust by giving trust. You get their cooperation by being cooperative at them.

For those who do celebrate some version of Valentine's Day, consider sending your *metamours* V-Day cards or gifts, taking your metamours out for dinner instead of (or in addition to) your partners, and if you're into the whole gift thing, consider mother-jewelry to symbolize polyamory with birthstones to represent everyone in the polycule instead of the typical exclusive-heart type jewelry.

I mean, it can be emotionally challenging to figure out how to celebrate romantic holidays when one has multiple partners - who is going to be left out by not getting the fancy dinner on that exact day? So subvert that by sending the partners off and take your metamours out instead. Or go out with everyone all at once, and have the one-on-one dates *all* on some other day so that nobody gets The Day but everyone together does.

Send a card to your metamour telling them how much they mean to you. Buy your partners and metamours jewelry that has room for more-than-one like mom- or dad-jewelry with birthstones. Turn a mono-centric, commercial holiday into a celebration of non-mono relationships with very little extra effort - just take your metamours into consideration and prioritize them instead of your romantic connections for this one day.

And what about metafores? Those former metamours who are basically still family even though you no longer have a mutual partner? Those people who, in some cases, are "the best thing I got out of my relationship with our partner was you"? Why not spend this day appreciating their place in your life, a place they might not occupy had it not been for a partner who is no longer in the picture? Send them a "glad you're in my life" card or FB post too!

Me, personally, instead of Valentine's day, I'll be celebrating Villaintine's Day by wishing my metamours and metametamours a happy Villaintine's Day and possibly scheming with my Villaintines, as good Villaintines do.

#MadEngineer #Chaosbunny #KillerOfDreams #TheOutsideContractor #HarbringerDestine #VillaintinesDay #SinglesAwarenessDay #NeverTooEarlyToStartPlanningWorldDomination #IMeanGangingUpOnMutualPartners #IMeanExpressingLoveAndGratitudeForMyPolycule #PolyHolidays

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I Was Quoted Extensively In An Article On Polyamorous Unicorn Hunting!

Tue, 26 Dec 2017 21:03:31 GMT

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.

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I Cannot Share My Partners Because They Are Not Mine To Share

Sun, 12 Nov 2017 21:08:59 GMT

I write a lot about the non-possessiveness of love. This was my latest comment on someone's FB post:

I cannot share my partners because my partners are not my possessions to share. Their body, minds, emotions, and time do not belong to me, they belong to them and them alone, and THEY choose to share THEMSELVES with me (and anyone else).

What they choose to give of themselves to others is not something taken away from me because it was never mine to begin with.

What they give of themselves to me is a gift. And only when received without entitlement and without obligation does it remain a gift. Otherwise it is a tithing, and I am nobody's lord and master to be tithed to.

We are equal partners in this partnership. That which I choose to share of mine, I share freely. That which they choose to share of theirs with me, they share freely. Together, it blends into a wonderful new entity that is our relationship.

But always it is made up of mine and theirs, and we each retain sole ownership of ourselves - our bodies, our minds, our emotions, and our time - to share with whom we choose.

Nobody can take that away from me which is not mine to begin with. My partners are not mine to share, they share themselves with me, and that is exactly what makes relationships so special, so unique, and so irreplaceable.

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Reminder That Not All Polys Opened Up A Couple Or Are Single Bi Women For Couples

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 19:27:28 GMT

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

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Things I Want To 'Toon: The Relationship Escalator

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 20:40:00 GMT

#ThingsIWantToToon: I want to show a picture of people riding an escalator with signs or markers or levels that are labeled with common Important Relationship Markers (like "first date", "first kiss", "meeting the parents", "PIV sex", "marriage", "baby", "first mortgage", etc.)

The people all look remarkably similar, bland, and like they're trudging through the process unwillingly or neutrally. Maybe one or two of them look happy and excited to be there.

In the next panel, or maybe down on the ground floor, there is a buffet set up with several different food tables scattered around in a non-linear fashion with all the same labels on the dishes, and maybe a few not listed on the escalator. People are wandering around, not in line, browsing, excitedly helping themselves to this or that, walking away with heaping plates or sparse plates, all generally looking happy to be there and full of color and "energy". Maybe a few people standing around the edges with empty plates looking nervous.

And at least one person in both groups is looking longingly at the other group.

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How Do You Mix Finances & Still Stay Off The Relationship Escalator?

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 20:33:22 GMT

Q. How do you handle things like shared finances, economic support, gifts, co-owned property, etc. without letting those financial entanglements create Escalator expectations in your relationships? When people start buying dinner for each other, or buying gifts for each other, or owning property together, it's usually a sign of a relationship going somewhere, like, to the next step. But what if you don't want to move to the next step? How do you mix finances and still stay off the Relationship Escalator?

A. I'm solo poly and always have been. I don't live with any partners. But I do tend to date other people who respect autonomy very highly. We discuss our expectations and assumptions about money early and often in our relationships. And then money (or the equivalent thereof) is offered as gifts freely, without obligation. Sometimes the gift is rejected, and that rejection has to be received gracefully - that's part of the "without obligation".

One of my partners has a full time job whose salary more than meets his needs, plus he puts in a lot of overtime. He has his own goals for his money and I don't pay attention to the specifics like how much exactly he makes or what he does with his money. I just know that he is comfortable with his spending and income.

I, however, am a freelancer. My income is erratic. Some months I have a surplus, some months I have a deficit.

This partner will often come over for several days at a time and then go home and we won't see each other for several days at a time again. No set schedule, just whenever we both feel like it. Every so often, he hands me a handful of bills "because I eat your food and I want to help out."

I am free to reject it if I want to, but I know that helping others makes him happy and he can afford what he gives me. I don't expect this money and he gives it to me whenever he feels like it. It's totally no-strings-attached. I have food at the house that he can eat. Sometimes he gives me cash to put towards buying more food.

When we go out, we just automatically assume that we're going dutch, unless one of us says "I got this". And then the other one just smiles and says thank you, and that's it. There is no obligation to pay, and no expectation of payment or of what that payment "means". It just happens when one of us feels like doing it.

He also likes to do repairs around the house. His Love Language is Acts of Service. He'll fix things, like my washing machine when it got vandalized, and he installed a watering system for my plants in my tiny garden. He does these things because that's how he shows that he loves people. He does these kinds of things for *everyone* who mean something to him and who will let him.

One weekend, we drove 4 hours south to a mutual friend's house, climbed an ancient tree in the back yard, and re-rigged this massive potted plant that the previous owners had hung there years before. We had to cut the chain out of the tree branch and re-hang it with padding so that it didn't cut into the tree again. The mutual friend had once mentioned that he was afraid the limb would break during a storm and crash into the house. So, because my partner and I both climb things and hang things for a living, we went down there to fix our friend's tree. Because we love our friend and it made us happy to help.

Then there's the story of my metamour and my AAA insurance. She was concerned for me and had the money at the time. It made her feel better to know that I had emergency roadside service with my car breaking down a lot that year. She paid for one year, I said thank you, and that was the end of it. I didn't expect her gift and she wasn't obligated to do it. She just did because she wanted to. And then she paid for another year. And then another. Each year was an unexpected gift. Finally, one year, she said she couldn't afford it anymore. So I thanked her profusely and told her how much it helped me and that was the end of it.

When my house got broken into and all my electronics were stolen, one of my partners who had some extra cash lying around offered to replace one of them for me. Just a gift, because he knew I needed it.

My ex-sweetie, to this day, asks me to do the driving when we meet up and then he pays for something to compensate for me doing the labor. If we just meet for, say, lunch, then I drive out to him and he pays for my lunch.

When we speak at conferences together and we carpool, he has me drive and then he pays for all the gas because he feels it's a reasonable trade-off for not having to put the wear and tear on his car or do the work of driving. I really like to drive, he really likes convenience and is willing to pay or it.

It's not an expectation, though. If he ever didn't do this, that's OK with me. If I couldn't afford to drive all the way to him, or cover the gas on long trips, I would say so and we'd work out some other arrangements.

I am legally married, but my husband and I have a long-distance relationship. We do everything dutch. We have our own households, we have our own money, we have our own incomes, and we have our own expenses. If we ever *did* have any extra money to give, we would help the other out, because we love each other and relieving the stress of being poor is an act of love.

But we are both freelancers and don't have enough to support another. However, I do pay retail for all of his books so that he gets his royalties. I don't expect free access to his writing just because we're in a relationship together. He never asked me to buy his books. I just do. Because I want to help and I have a thing about supporting artists if I share in their art (y'know, being a starving artist myself, and all).

I never found it very difficult to have a mixture of independence and support from partners, but that's because I tend to date people who have similar views on these things as I do. And, being solo poly, all of my relationships from the very beginning are explicitly not Escalator Relationships. There is never any expectation that moving in together or any of the other entanglements are on the table. Any exchange of money is given and received as an isolated gift without obligation or expectation.

If somebody wants to do something and the other can't afford it, we just say we can't afford it. Then, if the other person can afford to cover both of us, and they *want* to cover both of us, they offer. If they don't, then they don't offer. That's it.

As for large purchases like buying property - I look at these kinds of expenditures as business ventures among colleagues. Lots of people can buy property together. My parents owned a vacation home with our next door neighbors when I was growing up. They are *definitely not* poly. Making purchases or having large expenses is a totally separate thing, to me, from being in a relationship. There is no expectation of "going somewhere" because all kinds of different people make these kinds of purchases.

One of my metamours and her husband (before they were poly) bought a duplex with another couple years ago, and they've shared that house for ages now. People who aren't in relationships spend money on each other all the time. Again, reference my metamour and the AAA subscription. We're metamours, so obviously there's no expectation that we're "going somewhere".

Anything involving finances is a *business* or *legal* matter. It's property law or contract law. That's separate. So we handle things that way. If we wanted to buy property together, it would be as 2 investors buying property together.

Tying the state of our romantic relationship to the state of our shared property seems ... weird to me, and a little bit coercive. "Because we own a house together, you now have to share my bed every night and have sex when I want it because that's just an assumption that goes along with owning a house together."

That's just ... weird. For us, owning a house with someone means only that we own a house together. It doesn't say anything about the state of the relationship, except maybe that we're on good enough terms to own property together.

And we TALK. We talk and talk and talk and talk. We all just *know* that going on vacation together doesn't mean that it's a sign that we're headed for the alter or something (well, except for the time 4 of us *did* take a trip together and 2 of us ended up married, but that was the intention of that particular trip!) We all just *know* that buying property doesn't mean that our romantic relationship is necessarily changing in any way. We know that because we all talk about what these kinds of things mean to us.

Buying property together might change the nature of our relationship, but it doesn't have to change the *romantic* relationship. It means that we are now romantic partners *and* property co-owners. So we would have an additional commitment to paying our share (whatever that arrangement is) and not screwing over the other person financially, but the *romantic* relationship is whatever the romantic relationship is.

I would have the exact same sort of financial commitment to a platonic friend that went in on a large purchase with me, just like my parents had a financial commitment to our neighbors when they all bought that vacation condo together. It *certainly* didn't mean that they were now a polyfi quad or something. They were still just neighbors and friends.

I think that, probably since I've always been this way about money and relationships for as long as I can remember, even as a monogamous teenager, that I can't really conceive of it being any other way. *I* have trouble understanding why helping out a partner when they're having financial difficulties automatically means that the relationship means something different than it did before helping.

Also, I think being poor and having a lot of poor friends helps with that too. A lot of people in my industry are used to fluctuating finances and hard times. So we all kinda keep an eye out for each other and help when we can. Most of us do that with no sense of obligation, because we believe that even if this one friend that we supported doesn't return the favor, somebody else will if we should need support someday.

I had a string of bad luck with housing a couple years back and I had to move 7 times in 2 years. One of my coworkers took me in twice during that time period. No expectations, no obligation, he just wanted to help. He was between homes himself just a year earlier, and some of our other coworkers took *him* in when he needed a place to stay. So he invited me in as "repayment" for all the friends who housed him when he needed it.

The second time I had to stay with him, after I was there for a few months, his bills went up so he asked me to start paying rent. He suggested a reasonable rent amount that was open to negotiation, and I payed until I found my own place to live again. In none of this time was there ever any expectation that our relationship was "going somewhere".

One of my former fuckbuddies is also my car mechanic. He drives the same car and just has a flare for automotive maintenance. He likes messing around with engine parts. I pay for all the parts, he does the labor for free, and this is the case whether we are sleeping together or not.

He was a coworker first. At the time, I was living in one town and working in his town 2 hours away. He used to let me crash on his couch so that I could take several days worth of work in a row and not have to drive 4 hours round trip every day on top of our 12 hour work days. Free of obligation, he just supported me in a way that I needed and that he could provide.

Somewhere along the line, we started sleeping together. And then somewhere along the line, we stopped. In the middle of that, I moved to his town so that I didn't have to commute anymore so I no longer needed couch space, and he started fixing my car. We haven't hooked up in, I dunno, like 6 years now, but he came over last week to work on my car again.

I think if people learned to value their friendships more, these difficulties with entanglements and assumptions would be easier to deal with. When we make our partners into our *entire world* and our whole support system, then we start tying together all of these otherwise unrelated things.

But if we have friends that we can rely on for emotional support, financial assistance, physical labor, emotional labor, etc., and those friendships aren't expected to "go somewhere", then I think we would all be better at developing the tools that protect our relationships from these Relationship Escalator traps.

The people best suited for my nesting partners may not be romantic partners. Good co-parents might be former romantic partners or never-been-romantic partners. Caregivers to disabled people might be best found among our siblings or relatives or platonic friends. A metamour might be the best source for financial assistance during economic downfalls.

There's no reason any of this should be tied to romantic relationships and no reason why romantic relationships should be assumed to be something other than what they are.

My relationships are what they are. Sometimes, we help each other out financially. Sometimes we make legal or financial commitments to each other. Sometimes they are romantic. Sometimes, those things overlap.

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Solo Poly Is Not Interchangeable With "Casual" Relationships

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 01:46:03 GMT

From a tumblr post I made a couple years ago:

aithne
Polyamory for Writers
* Solo polyamory (someone who does not want a primary-style relationship, but rather prefers multiple casual/less committed relationships)

jorethinnkeeper
::HeadDesk::

People have good intentions, but sometimes when people get things wrong, they REALLY get it wrong. I appreciate all efforts to educate the mainstream public on what polyamory is and is not so that the subject can be treated compassionately and with consideration. But sometimes even people within my own subgroups take a misstep.

Solo polys are not people who don’t want a primary-style relationship or who prefer casual / less committed relationships. Solo polys are people who prefer to maintain their independence while in relationships. This can take many forms. Just like polyamory itself, there are a lot of ways to do it, so we can only ever use the broadest form of the definition if we want to actually include everyone who does it. Polyamory means “multiple loves” and is generally accepted to be limited to “romantic” love.

But attempting to narrow it to sexual love, or to only people who ONLY have relationships that are full-on big-L Love relationships, is to leave out a large percentage of people, such as asexuals who have perfectly happy and healthy relationships but with little or no sex, and people who are indeed poly and have or desire multiple loving relationships but who also have or desire romantic and/or sexual relationships that do not include big-L Love or whose relationships up until now have not lasted long enough to reach the big-L Love stage yet.

Solo polys are a similar varied bunch. Some of us actually do have relationships that resemble “primary” relationships, depending on how you define “primary”. Some of us do have or desire live-in, life-entangled relationships. But they also date as individuals and make relationship decisions as individuals. Others do not have such relationships but aren’t opposed to them, they just don’t happen to have them right now. Others are opposed to them during certain times of their life and deliberately choose not to have them at this moment. Others are opposed to them as a blanket philosophy.

Solo polys are not opposed to commitment. That’s probably the part that makes this misunderstanding move out of the realm of simple gaff and into offensive territory. This is making the same mistake that monos make about polys - namely that there are only certain things that a person can commit to or else it doesn’t “count”. For monos, that’s sexual fidelity - some believe that if you aren’t committed to sexual fidelity, then you’re just plain old not “committed” to your relationship at all. As polys, we know this for the fallacy that it is.

But then many polys make the same fallacy, just a step or two to the side. They understand that sexual fidelity isn’t the only thing that people can commit to, but some seem to think that, I dunno, buying a house together (because it requires a 30-year mortgage) or raising children together are the only things people can commit to.

I am every bit committed to my partners as any non-solo poly or mono person. I’ve been with my partner, Franklin, for [over] a decade now. We’ve seen each other through happy times and sad. We’ve weathered other partners trying to come between us and trying to control our relationship, we’ve dealt with changing life circumstances, and we’ve re-built our relationship to handle trials and tribulations like distance and mismatched life goals. Just like any other committed relationship.

The difference is that I don’t live with him, and we have no particular compulsion to change that. Sure, we’d like to live closer to each other than we currently do, but our relationship does not feel a pull to buy a house together, have children, mingle finances, and “settle down”. That does not mean that I am any less committed to the health and happiness of our relationship than anyone else.

Another difference is that we each value consent and agency above all else in our relationship. So we each demand the freedom to live our life as would best suit ourselves. We are committed to flexing and adapting and accepting each other when we each make our respective life decisions, including who and when to take another partner, and how those other relationships will look.

Other kinds of relationships do not have this kind of freedom, or they prioritize the relationship above the individuals in it. Our commitment is to the happiness of each of us as individuals, and if the relationship does not make one or both of us happy, our commitment to the other’s happiness gives us the opportunity to change the relationship until it does make us happy, up to and including a breakup. I’ve seen other relationships that try to hold onto the relationship at all costs, including the cost of the participants’ happiness. This is the “staying together for the kids” method, as an example.

There is no lack of commitment in my solo poly relationships. We even commit to many of the same things that other relationships commit to. It’s kind of like that atheist proverb “I contend that we are both atheists, I just lack belief in one more god than you do”. I am committed to many of the same things that other people commit to, I just don’t commit to one or more specific things that certain other people commit to, such as sexual fidelity. Solo polys can even choose to have children if they want, although I don’t.

The key to solo polyamory is the priority on independence, individuality, and autonomy. This doesn’t mean that other relationships don’t place a priority on those things. But it does mean that those things are the *defining* feature of solo poly. Not lack of commitment, not “casual” relationships, not even living alone.

We are defined by our priority on independence, individuality, and autonomy. That’s it. Everything else is variable, just like polyamory itself is about multiple loves but the details vary.

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