The Journal Of The InnKeeper

Country music has a bad reputation for being pretty misogynistic.  The current crop of pop country is especially bad about that, sparking an epidemic of songs about girls in tight shorts who do nothing but sit in the cabs of pickup trucks.  But like most genres, country is actually pretty diverse and has a prestigious lineage of feminist music.  I've been building a playlist of "feminist" country music and I'm up to more than 50 songs so far.

Unlike Hollywood, however, this list is nuanced and shaded.  The movies would have us believe that there are only 2 kinds of feminist representations - the badass Strong Female Character who can kick ass (except when she needs to be rescued by the leading man, of course) and has no other personality, and the man-hating harpy.

But this playlist shows many sides to the "strong woman".  It's not all about women beating up their abusive men in retribution, although those songs exist too.  In many places, it intersects with classism (although, to be fair, it's still predominantly white, as is the larger country genre, but there is one song in there about interracial relationships at a time when they were still taboo), where sometimes some ideals have to be sacrificed for the more immediate need of survival. Sometimes it's not about triumphing at all, but about existing in a misogynistic society.

There are tales of revenge, of liberation, of parenthood, of singlehood, of being caged, of sexual freedom, of running out of choices, of standing up to authority, of making the system work in her favor, of rejecting her circumstances, of accepting her circumstances and making the best of them, of birth control and abortion and sex, of career options and motherhood choices, of sorrow and pride and love and heartache and loneliness and optimism.

They are all stories of being a woman. This is what feminism looks like.

Watch on YouTube

From April 30, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

www.quora.com/What-is-a-common-sign-that-a-marriage-relationship-is-heading-for-a-breakup-which-many-people-often-neglect-or-dont-know/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is a common sign that a marriage/relationship is heading for a breakup, which many people often neglect or don't know?

A. Dr. John Gottman and his team of relationship researchers have identified what they call the Four Horsemen of the Relationship Apocalypse. When these 4 traits appear in a romantic relationship, Dr. Gottman can predict the demise of said relationship with a ridiculously high degree of accuracy (most reports are over 90% accuracy). So if your relationship has these 4 things, it's probably doomed.

The Four Horsemen: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling - https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-four-horsemen-recognizing-criticism-contempt-defensiveness-and-stonewalling/

2 things that most people don't know is that 1) just having conflict in a relationship or feeling anger is NOT, by itself, a sign that a relationship is heading for a breakup - people have arguments and conflict and feel anger and that's just the nature of interacting with other people in intimate settings, so just having arguments doesn't mean that the relationship is unhealthy or about to end, but that 2) there is a ratio of how *often* or how *much* conflict or unhappiness a relationship can withstand and it's much lower than most people think.

In a relationship, Gottman and other researchers also discovered that there should be a ratio of "negative interactions" to "positive interactions" overall in a relationship that is 1:5. That means that for every bit of ";negative interactions", there should be 5 bits of "positive interactions". Lots of people think that they should stay in relationships until the happiness ratio tips over to where you are unhappy more than half of the time. That's not true.

The Magic Relationship Ratio, According to Science - https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-magic-relationship-ratio-according-science/

So, the predictors of the ending of a romantic relationship are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Anger is not among the predictors. If you have these criteria in your relationship more often than 1:5 compared to positive interactions, the relationship is probably on its way out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.quora.com/Would-you-ever-consider-a-new-relationship-with-someone-who-previously-dumped-you/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q.   Would you ever consider a new relationship with someone who previously dumped you?

A.  I have considered it.  I have given second chances.  I have gotten into several relationships with people who dumped me previously.  I have regretted every single instance of this.  Without exception.

Every time the second chance ends, I get bitter and say “no second chances ever again!  If we break up, it’s for a reason!”  And then someone comes along and, for some reason, I justify to myself that this one is different because of whatever specific circumstances.  It’s never the exact same thing twice, but that’s because everyone I date is a different person.  The relationship itself was different.  The breakup was different.  The reasons for the breakup was different.  I wanted different things back then than I do this time.  Whatever, it’s always “different”.

And not once have I ever been correct.

Not only have I never once been correct, but I regretted the second chance to the point of actually wishing I could undo the entire thing.  I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but for the most part, I’ve learned things from those mistakes that make me who I am today.  If I were handed a magic telephone booth and told I could go back in time to change whatever I wanted about my own life, most of those things I wouldn’t actually change.

These second chances?  Yeah, I’d change them.  I’d erase the whole fucking thing.  I’d get rid of all the good times that went along with them.  I’d delete any lessons I supposedly learned from them.  I’d get rid of the whole second chance for each and every one of them.

So here I am, still stinging from my most recent poor “second chance”, still angry about it, telling everyone about how I keep saying that I don’t do second chances and that each time I do is somehow an “exception” to the rule, knowing that I will probably find some other “exception” to justify doing it again in the future.  And that I’ll write another blog post or social media post or advice column or whatever, telling people that second chances are bullshit and I don’t like to do them.

I am, apparently, an incurable optimist hiding in the skin of a cynic.  I ought to listen to the cynic more often.

As I sit squarely in the middle of the season that triggered my last bout with depression, I came across this Facebook post I wrote towards a lull in the depression.  It's interesting reading it again almost 2 years later.  Although I think I have pulled out of the depression itself, I have not, in fact, gotten past my self-doubt of my character judgement, and I wonder how much of my inability to trust my own judgement has interfered with my ability to date and meet people in the past couple of years (really, this year shouldn't count, since I'm also not meeting people because I refuse to date in person, which, on top of my prickly online personality, means guys don't generally stick around long enough for me to consider them worth dating):

REALLY long rambling.   Basically, I'm just doing some introspection out loud.

My last several breakups have severely undermined my confidence in my ability to judge character and make good partner choices.  First was the guy who managed to date 2 feminists and then go full on misogynist "but misandry!" after we all broke up (his choice to breakup, btw, he's not doing some incel "the feminists dumped me, therefore women suck!" thing).

Next was the guy who abused all his other partners and I didn't see it.  Then was the guy who ghosted me and I gave him another chance, only to have him ghost me a second time.  Before that second ghosting was a casual partner who ghosted me once, I gave him a second chance, and he also ghosted me again.

Then came the dude who was so terrified that I would find someone to replace him that he dumped me for his ex-gf, because that makes sense.  #HeLiftedMeUpAndThrewMeDownCryingPleaseDontHurtMeMama

So in the middle of my depression, I'm having a serious self-esteem issue over my ability to make good choices for myself.  Which leads me to questioning and probing at some of my patterns, trying to identify and recognize them.  I noticed one pattern several years ago, but couldn't really identify it.  I could tell *something* was a common thread, but not quite sure what. I think I may be zeroing in on it.

I have different kinds of attractions to people.   I'm sure others do too, but I'm interested in mine right now, to troubleshoot, not trying to identify some Grand Unifying Theory Of Attraction that other people might also feel.  The most obvious is sexual attraction - we have a chemistry where we feel drawn to each other, aroused, can't keep our hands off each other, etc.

And I have an aesthetic attraction to someone where I just find them so pretty that I have to keep looking at them.  For most of my life, I mistook this as sexual attraction.  This partly contributed to my early confusion about my orientation.  I thought I was bi because I found some women so aesthetically attractive that I felt I had to keep looking at them.   But, it turns out, at least in me, the aesthetic attraction and the sexual attraction are two separate axis that may or may not cross and when it comes to women and femmes, they do not cross.

I can have an intellectual attraction to someone where we click really well on intellectual interests and pursuits.  I get excited just thinking of the conversations we could have together.  I also discovered something that I'm starting to call my Fascination Attraction.  I have noticed that there are a few people in my past who I felt drawn to in a unique way.   I felt a kind of fascination with them that wasn't really any of the above attractions.

It's kind of similar to the fascination that some people might feel when looking at a particularly interesting insect.  Some people find insects gross or creepy or weird or scary or whatever.  Some people find insects beautiful.  But some people don't find them to be either, they just find them *fascinating*.

And, of course, it's not purely aesthetic for me, but chances are that the person I feel this attraction to isn't necessarily *conventionally* attractive.   Not that they're *unattractive* - I mean, they often are considered attractive - just that, well ...

Let's say that the Avengers is a lineup of what counts for "conventionally attractive".   If you look at the whole cast, there's actually a pretty decently diverse range of appearances, given that it's still Hollywood.  I've seen a handful of different Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic/Good/Evil charts using Avengers characters.  There are quite a few archetypes in that cast.  But, because it's Hollywood, for all their diversity, they're still *conventionally attractive* within their archetypes.

So, let's say that the people I feel this Fascination Attraction to fit a description more like "interesting".   Even given the range of Avengers-attractive, they might be more aptly described as "interesting" *even if people also happen to find them aesthetically attractive*, if that makes sense?

That's really my type, if I could say that I had a "type" at all - interesting.   I like people with interesting faces.  Sometimes that falls under the category of "conventionally attractive", sometimes it doesn't.

So, I have this Fascination Attraction.  I'm not entirely sure what is drawing me to this person, because it's not aesthetics *even if they happen to be conventionally attractive* and it's not intellectual attraction *even if they happen to be intellectually stimulating* and it's not even sexual attraction *even if we happen to have sexual chemistry*.

I don't really know how to describe it, except that it's recognizable to me as this kind of attraction.  I can go through my romantic and sexual history and pick out which of my previous partners I felt which of these attractions for that drew me to them initially (over time, as I get to know someone, my attraction tends to be more nuanced and pull from several different directions).

But the point of identifying all these different types of attractions is to recognize patterns associated when I act on the different types of attractions.

For instance, when I act purely on sexual attraction, I tend to find out after the fact that we have radically different political views and I might regret either getting to know them better or having started a sexual relationship.  Like my mechanic, for instance - the homeopath conspiracist who thinks cigarettes won't kill him but chemotherapy will and that David Hoagg is part of a troupe of "crisis actors" who fake mass shootings.
 Like, sure, he was a good fuck back in the day when we were sleeping together but holy shit! I still haven't decided which is worse - finding out just how much of a barking moonbat he is or knowing that I used to get naked with him now that I know his bizarre ideas.

So, when I feel an instant sexual attraction to someone, I probably ought to rein in the hormones a bit and ask myself, do I really want to fuck someone who will very likely turn out to be my opposite, politically speaking?  Or am I willing to have the sexual experience and just go out of my way not to get to know him, so that I don't have to deal with that knowledge if he turns out to fit squarely in my Sexual Attraction : Wild Beliefs bell curve.

This Fascination Attraction, now ... that's an interesting one.  See, when I have casual sex with someone with wildly divergent sociopolitical views, I don't feel anything particularly strongly, except perhaps some embarrassment in some of the more extreme cases.  But with the Fascinators, that's where the roller coaster rides seem to happen.  Extreme highs and lows.  More regrets.  More "I wish I had known that up front" thoughts.  More "maybe I shouldn't have" or "maybe I should have gone more slowly" or "maybe I should have taken the other option".

I'm not yet sure if this is consistent across the board.   I have to do more plotting of my history chart to see if the correlation is steady or if there are any exceptions.   But with my recent self-doubt, it makes me very nervous when I find my interest in someone hitting that Fascination Attraction button.  I feel drawn like a moth who knows exactly what will happen when I touch that flame but I go anyway.

So I hit the brakes and pull back, and then I second-guess my second-guessing, and down goes the spiral.  With my depression and my recent painful dual breakups, I find myself less inclined for emotional attachments and more interested in casual relationships or hookups, but that leaves me open to the Fascination Attraction, which I am now second guessing because of the depression making me doubt my ability to judge people well or make good choices.

And 'round it goes.

I'm really kinda anxious for this whole depression thing to fuck off for a while.   It's making me lonely and driven to pursue finding partners but also to back away from potential partners because I assume I'm going to fuck it up by choosing poorly.  Catch-22.

www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-move-on-from-a-friendship-relationship-that-ended-badly-and-abruptly/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. How long does it take to move on from a friendship/relationship that ended badly and abruptly?

A. As long as it takes.

This may sound flippant, but it’s true. There is no magic formula that will let you predict how any given person will “move on” from any given breakup. There are far too many variables.

It’s kinda like how Ian Malcolm describes chaos theory in the movie Jurassic park:

The person, the breakup, all their life experiences up until that point, the specific things going on in their life at that same moment like work or family relations, hell, their hormonal balance at that time, who else they have in their life to support them through the breakup, their diet, everything in their life current and past adds up to how any given person will handle any specific breakup.

It will take as long as it takes.

Q.  How do polyamorous people handle break ups? Do they have an easier time moving on since they tend to have multiple partners?

A.  We handle our breakups the same way we handle literally everything in our lives - in the same way monogamists do. Which means that there is a diversity to how we do things because we are a diverse group, just like monogamists are.

Some of us have better communication skills than others and some of us suck at them. Some of us get into (and subsequently out of) relationships with people who similarly have good communication skills and some of us get into relationships with people who suck at them. Sometimes, regardless of how good anyone’s skills are, the relationship itself has a particular dynamic that either brings out the best in us both or the worst in us both, and that affects how well we handle the breakup.

When I was 18, I had a small, close-knit circle of friends and a handful of other friends who weren’t part of that circle. I also had a high school sweetheart whom I loved very much. And I had a “best friend” who was part of that small, close-knit circle of friends. She and I were closer than either of us were to anyone else in the group.

On our high school graduation day, I threw a co-ed sleepover party. Of course, she was invited. Of our close-knit circle, she and I were the only seniors so the others weren’t graduating with us, although they were also invited.

On our graduation day, she seemed distracted and distant. Well, it was a busy day and we all had a lot going on. During the day, after the ceremony, the party was mostly my family. It was only after dinner when friends were supposed to show up and it would turn more into a teen party.

So when she didn’t show up during the day, I felt her absence and I was sad, but I get it. She had graduation things to do too.

But as the night wore on and she still didn’t show up, I started to get hurt. I started paging her (because nobody had cellphones back then) to find out where she was and when she would be there.

She finally showed up late, with her boyfriend and several of his friends. None of them had been invited (because my mom was already freaked out at the idea of a coed slumber party, there was no way she was letting boys she hadn’t met yet stay the night). She came into the house but didn’t speak to me, she only spoke to other people.

Finally, I had been hurt enough and I ran out of the room and into my parents’ bedroom to cry. While my mother was in there consoling me and I wondered why my best friend was being so distant, my sister poked her head in to tell me that my friend was leaving, without saying goodbye.

I ran outside to find her already in the backseat of the 2-door car. I asked her if she would at least give me a hug goodbye, and she shouted from the backseat “I’m already in the car and it’s hard to get out.”

That was the last time we spoke.

My best friend dumped me on our high school graduation day and then ghosted me. My high school sweetheart, whom I loved very much, was there with me. My loving parents were there and my mother consoled me. I was surrounded by friends.

But I still hurt. And it took me a very long time to get over this breakup.

Having other people around does not make breakups hurt less, it just gives you a softer place to land when you fall and people around to help nurture you while you are feeling your pain. It doesn’t matter if it’s polyamory or monogamy or even not romantic at all. Breakups hurt, and they hurt in varying degrees depending on the circumstances of the breakup, and no amount of other people make them better because people are not interchangeable and you still have lost someone who meant something to you.

I have lost other friends when we simply mutually faded away. Those endings didn’t hurt as much. I have lost some friends after big arguments. Those hurt. I have been surprised to lose friends because I thought our friendship was a good one but they didn’t, so they “broke up” with me when I didn’t realize there was something to break up over. Those hurt. I have had friends have mature, reasonable conversations with me over what kind of friendship we had and whether it was bringing joy and value into each other’s lives, and when it wasn’t, we weren’t friends anymore. Those hurt too, but not as much and not for as long.

Everyone goes through “breakups” with people, and everyone has some category of relationship in their life that multiple people hold. Some people have multiple siblings. Lots of people have multiple friends. Losing one of them doesn’t hurt less just because you have others of them. Having a support structure might help with the healing process, but it’s the specific nature of the relationship and the way the breakup was handled that really affects how much the breakup hurts.

Very little that poly people do is specific to polyamory. It’s usually not a poly problem, it’s a people problem.

www.quora.com/How-do-polyamorous-people-handle-break-ups-Do-they-have-an-easier-time-moving-on-since-they-tend-to-have-multiple-partners/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, I'm waiting until I finish the whole show (up to wherever is current) before I give a full review of The Magicians, but this line really pissed me off:

She says "that's what I'm mad at you for - not the cheating part.  The part where what you did made me lose you."

Here's what happened -

A guy and a girl (both socially awkward) finally hook up after months of tension.  They start a relationship.  No conversation about monogamy takes place on screen.

The girl comes from openly poly parents.  Both the guy and the girl have a couple as their best friends who are clearly in a primary but open relationship with the guy in the couple being flagrantly bisexual and fucking every cute boy that moves.

So one night, after partying particularly hard to celebrate something big, the guy in question ends up in a drunken, debaucherous threesome with the open couple.  He wakes up the next morning with very little memory to find the girl sitting on the edge of the bed where the 3 of them are sleeping, pouting.  She storms off.

With no conversation about what any of this all means, they just assume that they're broken up now and the girl goes and has angry revenge sex with another guy in the social group.  They spend the rest of the season mad at each other and awkwardly tying to complete the tasks that make this a show in the first place.

What is pissing me off about this line is that it is totally devoid of personal responsibility.  She is not mad that he cheated, she's mad that his cheating *made her so mad that she broke up with him*.

WTF DUDE?

What he did absolutely did not "make her lose him".  That is a choice she made.  And she's totally free to make that choice, but it's still her choice.  Thousands of couples experience cheating every day and choose to stay together and work through the circumstances surrounding the cheating.  She of all people has a background in how to deal with this.

In fact, her own mother managed to have an affair and make it work.  Her parents have one of those toxic "poly" relationships where they only ever do anything *together*.  But her mother started a relationship with a guy without the father, and that counts as "cheating" in their relationship.  Eventually, they hashed it all out, and the Other Man joined the couple in a triad and everyone was happy.

So, I mean, toxic and fucked up, but even they had the tools to deal with it that didn't resort to ending a relationship for a first infraction and without talking about it.

If she didn't want to "lose" him, she could have prevented it.  He never intended to break up with her and regretted (what he remembered of) his night with the other couple.  It was a casual fling borne of high emotions and copious amounts of alcohol.  It was not an action *intended* to end his relationship.  That was not its goal.

She didn't "lose" him.  She rejected him after his infidelity.  Then she deliberately set out on a course of action intended to hurt him with her revenge sex (which he pointed out the difference when she got mad at him for judging her for it - "what I did was a mistake, what you did was on purpose and malicious").

And she's mad at him for it.

No wonder finding him in bed with their friends hurt her - she has no concept of owning her own shit, of accountability, of knowing her own emotional landscape, or of taking responsibility for her actions, let alone how her emotions dictate her actions.

I didn't much like her throughout the show.  Now I hate her.

If she is to be mad, she should totally be mad at the betrayal of their (implicit) agreements and promises to each other.  That's OK to be mad about.  Weird to me, because I don't operate that way, but a broken agreement is worth getting upset about.  But to be mad at him because *she* got so mad that she broke up with him?

That's some impressive mental gymnastics to abdicate any responsibility right there.

PSA: When your friends are going through a breakup, if you are particularly close with them and have previously been in the role of support for them with their relationship stuff (or they have for you), and your friend reaches out to you for support during a breakup, you may choose to be there for them, or you may choose not to take on that particular role for yourself at this time.

But if you have not already established this kind of supportive role with your friend who is going through a breakup, try to resist the call to suddenly be their sounding board.  Even if you think you can handle it.  Even if you think that you truly have the purest of intentions.

Some people want to manipulate social circles with sordid stories of the breakup or the ex.  Some people want to gossip.  Some people want to elicit a more active role from you in revenge, punitive action, or other things.  Abusers, in particular, are *very* good at convincing others that they have been harmed and making it look like they're just "reaching out" for support when they're actually undermining the other person's ability to find their support.

Some people just don't have very good boundaries and don't recognize what is appropriate and what isn't in terms of sharing private and personal details of a relationship and a breakup.  There are tons of reasons - both benign and harmful in *intent* - for someone coming to you with the story of their breakup.  But there are very few times in which accepting that role is actually *helpful*, either for your friend, for you as the support, or for the community everyone is all a part of.

So if you don't already have that kind of relationship with someone and they contact you from seemingly out of nowhere wanting to connect or looking for support for a breakup, and *especially* if you *do* have a connection to the ex, it's probably best to clearly state your own boundaries that this is not a role you feel suited for at this time.

If *you* are going through a breakup and you have somehow managed to lose or avoid building your own support group with a very small number of people who can handle being in the role of "I will listen to you trash talk your ex so you can vent" buddy, you may find yourself now needing to reach out to people you haven't before.

Some advice:

Breaking up is hard. It's where your ethics meet the road.  And we ALL fuck up here.  This is how to fuck up a little bit less.

The thing about new partners, is that I end up revisiting a lot of memories of old partners. When I'm in a new relationship, we talk about ourselves, and part of ourselves is our past that made us who we are today. So I end up going over a lot of old stories, partly as illustrations for how I want to be treated or want not to be treated, and partly because I'm just sharing stories of my experiences and who I am.

I don't know if "ironic" is the right word, but what got me on this tangent tonight is not a "new" partner, exactly, but talking with my most recent ex-FWB during our breakup, rather than as part of the "get to know each other" stage in the beginning. Perhaps because our relationship was less than a month, and the breakup came suddenly, and he's actually doing his part of the breakup well, some things that I associate with a "beginning" didn't happen until the end. This isn't really relevant, I'm musing tonight.

Anyway, during one of our breakup talks (because a good, compassionate breakup where both people are being kind and considerate of each other often takes several discussions and check-ins to make sure everyone is OK), I got to talking about some of my abusive exes.

Here's the thing... when I was growing up, all of our "afternoon specials" about abusive relationships were about domestic physical violence. I knew all the warning signs for a physically *violent* partner, but I knew absolutely nothing about an emotionally abusive or psychologically controlling partner.

Over the years, I've told a lot of stories about a lot of exes. In the last decade or so, as I've had the opportunity to meet and know some truly amazing people, when I've told these stories, I've been met with horrified reactions. I was not prepared for the strength of the horror in these reactions. To me, these stories were about jerks, sure, but "horror"? I mean, they weren't great stories, but I also thought they were run-of-the-mill "bad", not "abusive-bad".

Now, with a lot more education on what abuse is, I can look back over my relationship history and see that I've actually been involved with a whole bunch of abusive men. Remember, when I started telling these stories, I was not aware that they were tales of abuse. So I'm not retconning my memories, which can happen pretty easily. I can look back over the time I told one particular story, and at the time I thought it was normal-bad, but now I can see that *the story I told at that time* was actually abusive-bad.

So I've been in a lot of abusive relationships. But what I always had going for me is a strong sense of self. You can ask my mother about this. She and I have been locked in conflict over my agency for literally my entire life. She describes me as "headstrong" and "independent". From day 1. What would happen is that I would get into a relationship with someone who I saw as confident and "strong", and because I was excited to be in that relationship, he would treat me well.

But eventually NRE would wear off, and I would start showing more enthusiasm for my own life than for his. And, being an abuser (which means he believed he was justified in controlling his partners behaviour to match what *he* thought they ought to do), he would employ various psychological tactics to bring me back in line and to behave more like I did in the beginning of the relationship when I was drugged out on NRE.

But my strong sense of self would kick in and I would always resist. And he would escalate, and I would resist harder. In a very short span of time, one of us would get pissed off enough at the other to break up. So I didn't recognize these relationships as abusive because the conflict would be relatively short-lived and always resulted in a breakup, usually with me angry rather than sad over it.

Over the years, I have been faced with some form of the question "how would your exes describe you?" from a variety of sources - Cosmo quizzes, new partners, friends, etc. One of the things I pride myself is on being honest about my "flaws". So I would usually answer these questions with something along the lines of "cold-hearted bitch". That was, I believe, the most common parting shot I would get from exes.

I have always been described as "cold", as "unfeeling", even been accused of sociopathy on more than one occasion. Some days I would agree with those descriptions. Other days I'm baffled how anyone could think that of me. You see, one of the reasons why I'm polyamorous is because I feel. so. much. I have so many feelings that I'm often overwhelmed by them. I sometimes feel like River Tam from Firefly, when her brother finally starts to make progress in diagnosing what her captors did to her when they experimented on her brain - "She feels everything; she can't not."

I went out with a guy not too long ago who is way into the woo. I find his beliefs to be completely absurd, but I do find some of the language he used to be useful as metaphor. When we first started talking, he described me as "empty". He said that he "looked into me" and found just this empty space where he expected to find ... I dunno, "me", I guess. Later, as I began to trust him and to develop feelings for him, I let my guard down and he noticed. He discovered what all that "empty space" was for. Whatever emotion I was feeling at the moment floods into all that space. He said he had never met anyone who felt so much at one time. He said he couldn't even see how he once thought I was "empty" before. I said that I was never "empty", I just had walls up and was only letting him see me controlled.

I feel a lot. I feel so much that it's just too much to keep up continuously. I have to shut down every so often, just to stay sane. In fact, one of the primary symptoms of my depression is apathy. When all the bad shit gets too overwhelming and sends me into suicidal ideation, I just stop feeling anything. I think this is the main reason why I haven't managed to kill myself yet - I want to be dead but I don't feel strongly enough about anything to go through with it.

Back to my long history with abusive men. Gendered abuse has some particular traits. Women are socialized to be nurturers, caregivers, to be polite, to consider other people, to do emotional labor. Men who want to control women can use this as a form of control.

"Why would you hurt me like that? You don't want to hurt me, do you? You should stop what you're doing so that I don't feel hurt by it."

"Now, now, be a good girl..."

"Stop being so hysterical..."

"Pull yourself together, you don't want to make other people uncomfortable, do you?"

When my former metamour was being abused by our mutual partner, he accused her of hurting him for wanting to be with her other partner. She wanted to do a thing, he would get upset by it, she would try to understand why he was upset, he would accuse her of hurting him. This would immediately stop her in her tracks, as she spent the next several days wracking her brain to understand *why she was hurting him* so that she could stop.

Not me.

I moved in with my abusive fiance, against everyone's advice. Almost immediately after moving in together, he began trying to control me. He wanted to change my clothing, change my career, force me into a homemaker role. I even asked him several times why he said he loved me, since he didn't seem to like me very much.

One of the many things that he would do was coerce me into sex. He would try to initiate sex very late at night when I had to wake up early the next morning. I would reject him, so he would wait until he thought I was asleep, and put his hands between my legs and try to take my underwear off without waking me. Most of the time I had not fallen asleep yet, but I would pretend to stay asleep, hoping to discourage him but it never did. Every single night I would "wake up" to him molesting me and I would yell at him to leave me alone, and he would start an argument that would keep me awake for *hours*, trying to talk me into having sex.

After a few weeks of this nightly molestation and some chronic sleep deprivation, I started trying to leave the argument. I would get up to go sleep on the couch. As I reached the door, he would threaten to break my prized figurine collection unless I remained in the room. So I would grab my pillow and sleep on the bathroom floor, which was *technically* still in the room.

When you're in a relationship with someone, you typically work under the assumption that both of you are operating in good faith. At least, people with reasonably healthy views on relationships do. Sure, there may be conflict, but we assume that we are both on the same team and that we both want to resolve the conflict, and that we both care about each other so nobody would want a resolution that actually compromised the other person's integrity or sense of self or value system.  We might be *angry*, but we don't feel that our partners are out to get us deliberately.

This is how abusers get their foot in the door. They are not operating in good faith. So I spent those weeks arguing with him because I earnestly believed I just had to make him see why this was hurting me and he would stop because he didn't *really* want to hurt me.

But by the time I was willing to sleep on the tile floor with my head next to a toilet? I no longer believed he was operating in good faith. I was not able to leave right away, but with all my big emotions and the constant attempt to wear me down, I had to find some way to live there until I could leave.

Enter the coldness.

Once I started to believe that he really did not have my best interests at heart, I went cold. I shut down. We weren't simply not seeing eye-to-eye, he fundamentally did not see me as a whole person. He saw me only in terms of how I could support his story arc. So I stopped caring about him in return.

One of the things I had suspected him of, was being a pathological liar. At first, his lies were ridiculous but, again with the good faith thing, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Looking back on them now, I can't understand how I ever thought they could even possibly be true. But I was young and naive and in love. He made up all kinds of outrageous stories, which I will save for another time because this is already very long. Now that I had lost the rose colored glasses and I could finally see the flags were red, I decided not to believe anything he said and to start calling him on his shit.

One day, we were driving home from my parents house (where I did my laundry) and we got into one of our repetitive arguments in the car. We lived in an apartment complex with a carport underneath the apartment units. I pulled into our slot, got out of the car, got my laundry basket from the back, and started walking across the low-ceilinged carport towards the stairs to our unit, all with him still arguing about whatever.

I had gone cold. I was simply refusing to argue any further. I just couldn't expend any more energy or emotion on this same fucking argument one more time.  I said what I had to say and that was the end of it, as far as I was concerned. He did not like that, and kept arguing at my retreating back. He hated it when I went cold.

Suddenly, he stopped talking, mid-sentence. I heard a rustling, and when I looked back, he was lying on the ground, seemingly unconscious. I assumed he was faking. I stood there for a moment, watching him to see if he would get up. Then I adjusted my grip on the laundry basket, turned on my heel, and walked up to our apartment, leaving him lying on the oil-soaked concrete.

I went upstairs and started putting the clothes away. Eventually he came into our bedroom, holding his hand to his head and walking unsteadily. Slurring his words, he said that while we were arguing, he somehow managed to walk into one of the low pipes in the carport and knock himself unconscious (he was 6'4" and the carport ceiling was about 6'6" high so he had to duck under the plumbing pipes).

And THEN, while he was unconscious, a mugger came and stole his wallet. He woke up just as the mugger grabbed it and ran away. Most of his fabrications were stories intended to illicit sympathy from me, so that I would stop being mad at him and start feeling worry and concern instead. This was the most transparent lie he had ever told (and he had told some whoppers!).

So I said "oh my god! A mugger! We better call the police right away!" He immediately tried to talk me out of it, while I "argued" how important it was that we file a police report. I mean, what if the mugger came back? What if he tried to rob *me* while I'm down there alone, at night? He doesn't want anything bad to happen to me, did he? I picked up the phone and actually hit 9-1 before he finally came clean.

He made the whole thing up because I was so mad at him and he just wanted me to stop being mad at him. So I dropped the act and the phone, said "no shit", and gave him the silent treatment for the rest of the night.

This story, and several others, have been running around my mind for the last week or so. Particularly the part about being "cold". It used to bother me. At least, when I wasn't actively in one of my defensive modes where all my emotions shut down, it did. But this week I realized something. I frequently go "cold" at the end of a relationship, but talking with my ex-FWB about some of my experiences with abuse, I noticed the pattern. I go "cold" as a response to abuse.

This abusive fiance was deliberately trying to manipulate my emotions to control my behaviour. In this particular story, I finally got him to admit it. He didn't want me mad at him, so rather than address the thing I was mad about, he tried to make me feel sorry for him and to feel concern for him. Because he was trying to manipulate me into *feeling* what he wanted me to feel, my response was to stop feeling entirely.

Well, not "entirely". Like Hulk in one of the Avengers movies, I still always feel rage. That's always bubbling beneath the surface, all the time. But it gets compartmentalized, and in these situations, I just stop feeling.

Abusers are not evil super-villains twirling their mustachios and consciously plotting the manipulation of their partners. They are quite often people in pain. They are people who feel fear, as we all do. It's just that their reaction to fear is to hold a metaphorical gun to someone else's head and make them do things to prevent themselves from feeling fear. They are calculating to a certain extent, but mostly they just feel fear and they feel *justified* in reaching for tools of control to address their fears.

My abusive fiance abused me because he was afraid. He was afraid to lose me. So he tried to direct my feelings towards those that would tie me to him. So when I stopped having feelings, he was terrified. Apparently it's very scary to have someone you love go cold on you. I wouldn't know. If any of my exes ever went cold on me, it was towards the end of a relationship where I was probably sliding into apathy myself.

But as I looked back over my history, at all the people who accused me of being "cold", these were also all the same people who, when I tell stories about them to relatively healthy, non-manipulative people, are the ones that my friends recoil in horror about and tell me that they were abusive. Apparently this is my last defense mechanism for abuse. You can't manipulate my emotions to control my behaviour if I don't feel any emotions.

I'm kind of surprised at the realization that all those accusations of being "cold" were A) probably all true, but because B) were in response to abuse. When I think of abuse victims, I see mostly afternoon special TV characters and my former metamour who was an emotional wreck at the end of her last abusive relationship. I see people who are beaten down, dejected, shells of their former selves, but most of all, *emotional*.

But when *I* face abuse, I get hard. I get cold. I get sharp. There may be a reason why I like knives so much.

I'm not saying that being in abusive relationships doesn't leave long-term damage on me. It usually takes me a while to trust people again. And I'm very cynical. I don't like to open up to people. It seems like I'm very open because I talk about so many personal things in very public spaces. But I can talk about things while being guarded. I'm not really sharing any intimacy, even though I'm sharing a lot of details.

Apathy and coldness and hardness are my defense mechanisms. It's when you know I've reached the end. These are what come out in response to abuse, control, manipulation. I can only extend my compassion so far. When I feel like the other person is not meeting me in the middle, when they're not operating in good faith, when they're trying to control me, I take away those parts of me that make me vulnerable to harm and control - my emotions.

Becoming a knife edge is my response to abuse.

Some day, I hope to cease being surprised at how many people are REALLY offended at the idea that a person might be able to end a relationship with someone *just because they want to* and not because the other person is a horribly abusive person.  I mean, if we can just end relationships for *any reason* or no reason at all, what's to keep our own partners with us? What's to stop everyone from breaking up with us just because?!?!

Uh, well, maybe how you treat them, for one thing. This might actually require you to keep putting in effort into your relationships because there's no point at which you've "won" and you're done.

But for another thing, nothing. There is nothing to keep our partners with us or to stop them from breaking up with us. Nothing at all. Because if there was something preventing people from breaking up with us, THAT WOULD BE COERCION.

Which is a consent violation.

And abusive.

If your partners are not with you because they actively want to be with you every single day, then you're duin it rong. Your partners can leave you. Your partners can die. There is nothing in the universe guaranteeing your relationships.

Now accept that and appreciate every day that you *do* have with your partners for the gift that it is, not the prize that you are owed for having completed the appropriate levels and making it to the castle.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-01/sp-auw010615.php

The researchers specifically looked at "self-concept reorganization," the process of seeing and defining yourself separate from your ex and from the relationship. Asking the participants to reflect on their relationships helped the participants "build a stronger sense of who they were as single people," Larson says.

in close relationships, people begin to feel as though they overlap with the person they are close to. "The process of becoming psychologically intertwined with the partner is painful to have to undo," she says. "Our study provides additional evidence that self-concept repair actually causes improvements in well-being."

The recovery of a clear and independent self-concept seems to be a big force driving the positive effects of this study, so I would encourage a person who recently experienced a breakup to consider who he or she is, apart from the relationship," Larson says. "If that person can reflect on the aspects of him- or herself that he or she may have neglected during the relationship but can now nurture once again, this might be particularly helpful."

Although this article was about breaking up, recovery from breaking up, and the study was most likely exclusively about monogamous relationships, my take-away from this article is that solo poly is one relationship style that can give people a leg-up in breakup recovery. Since solo poly is defined, more or less, by the individuality of the participants, regardless of the emotional connection, and the intentional relationship structure is based on communication and self-reflection of needs and wants, it seems to me that people who practice solo poly well probably already have the tools necessary to recover from breakups quickly and in healthy ways, and also that people who practice solo poly well probably have the *potential* to have less painful breakups in general since there is less entwinement happening in the relationship to begin with.

With only a few exceptions, I have always felt that I "got over" my breakups faster than it seemed other people did. Some people have accused me of not really loving my exes if I could move past a breakup quickly, and in my blacker moments, I have wondered the same thing. In my most self-doubtingier moments, it has crossed my mind to wonder whether or not I don't feel as deeply as others.

But then I swim out of my morass and realize that the whole reason why I get so upset at the shit I rant about online is precisely because I feel so deeply about things that I get overwhelmed by bad stuff. And then this study comes out, and it just reinforces the high-self-esteem-voice in my head that, no, I'm just fine, I love just as "much" as anyone else. I just probably have more tools in my toolkit for handling breakups because I always maintain my sense of self as distinct from my relationships. My relationships are things that I do and connections that I treasure, but they are not the entirety of my identity. They aren't even a large portion of my identity, in spite of *how* I do relationship (i.e. being poly) being a large part of my identity.

And, it turns out, this thing that I've always done instinctively is probably what makes it possible for me to have had as many breakups as I've had (and also to have withstood as many attempts of people to trap me in abusive relationships as I have) and to still be able to trust in the next one, to open up and risk being vulnerable the next time, and to still believe that I'm worthy of love and that there is more love out there for me to find even after yet another breakup.

I've lost it now, but someone once wrote a blog or a forum piece about the failure rate of polyamorous relationships.  This is one of my pet peeves - polyamory is held up to impossible standards of "success" by monogamists, yet those standards are not applied to monogamous relationships.  What I mean is, when a relationship ends, the Monogamous Mindset declares that relationship a "failure", whether it's poly or mono.  But when a poly relationship "fails", it's a sign that polyamory itself is doomed to failure.  Yet, when a monogamous relationship "fails", monogamy itself is not seen as inherently flawed, just that couple is seen at having failed in their relationship.  I HATE this double standard, and I also hate the bunch of assumptions that underlie the idea, including that longevity is the sole measuring stick for success in a relationship.

So, someone wrote a piece somewhere on the internet asking how many of our poly relationships have to fail before we give up clinging to the idea of polyamory and just admit that it's doomed.  Naturally, I had a few things to say about that:

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How many monogamous relationships have you witnessed that ended? How many were great for a year or two before some form of amicable split? How many went down in flames? How many people have you witnessed that got involved with a single person EVER and remained with that person until death? Personally, I know only a few, the majority of whom are in my grandparents' generation (and even my grandparents are divorced). I also know more monogamous people who remain involved with someone who tried to hit them with their own cars than monogamous people who haven't (seriously, I can give you 3 names just off the top of my head, and more if I think about it). Should I then extrapolate that monogamy is bad because so many monogamous people try to commit vehicular manslaugher on their spouses? Or is it perhaps more likely that I know a lot of dysfunctional people and it's not necessarily monogamy's fault?

Of course I'm not saying that monogamy is always bad or a "failure", or even a death sentence. But I am saying that confirmation bias is a logical fallacy. Statistical analysis requires a large sample population to be representative of the population as a whole, and a method to remove personal bias from interpreting the results. "What I've seen" does not count as representative, nor unbaised. It especially does not count when coming from counselors whose sample population is made up exclusively of their own therapy practice. They (and you) have a skewed sample popluation because of the types of people they are likely to see - in the case of the counselors, people whose relationships are already in danger, hence the reason for a trip to a therapist. People with functioning relationships don't tend to seek counseling, don't tend to make headlines, and don't tend to get noticed by friends and neighbors without intentionally sharing the details of their relationships.

Also, because of the stigma, and in some cases, legal threat, you probably know more poly people in "successful" relationships than you're aware of because a large number of poly people are still in the proverbial closet. There have been countless people who were rendered speechless upon discovering old love letters and other evidence of lives they never knew their parents had, when going through their personal effects after death: same-sex love affairs, mistresses, swinger partners, kinky sex lives, even whole other families. My paternal grandmother was completely unaware of my existence until 30 years after my birth (and to this day, she refuses to believe I'm not a charlatan trying to scam her family out of money and not really related).

If people can keep secrets this big from their spouses, children, and parents, it's ridiculous to think that your friends, neighbors, and acquaintances aren't also keeping secrets from you, let alone the cute waitress who serves you coffee at your favorite restaurant, your hunky UPS guy, the guy sitting next to you on the bus, or your kid's soccer coach, especially if you have ever exhibited the subtle and unconscious signs that you are not accepting of the idea of polyamory and are therefore not someone who is safe to confide in. You have no idea what people are doing in the privacy of their own bedrooms (or kitchens, or dungeons, or play parties) if you aren't there to witness it and you are completely unaware of what you don't know.

I'm also saying that if you hold these standards up to polyamorous relationships and suggest or imply that polyamory doesn't have the appropriate numbers to count as "successful", then you have to hold monogamous relationships up to the same standard. And, as studies have actually shown, people are NOT clamoring for the end of monogamy when shown the high "failure" rate. In fact, when we see headlines like "49% of first marriages end in divorce", the article is not usually calling for an end to monogamy, it tends to be calling for a tightening up of the standards of monogamy so that we can get that failure rate down (and even in some cases, a "redefining" of monogamy so that people can broaden what "counts" as a "successful" monogamous relationship). As for that statistic, keep in mind that it's for "first marriages" - second and third marriages have an even higher failure rate and every relationship prior to the first marriage had a 100% failure rate. Monogamy's track record for longevity is really not very good at all.

Longevity alone is not a good measuring stick for "success" in a relationship, be it polyamory or monogamy. Millions of people are stuck in loveless, even abhorrent, marriages because of pride, of religious edicts, of legal complications, of "family values", of social stigma, of emotional restrictions, and more. If those relationships last for life, should they be counted among the successes? If they were to end, would they be counted among the failures? And how would we know which relationships they are? Relationships are rarely what they appear to people on the outside.

A relationship is successful if it meets the goals set by the participants. For some, longevity may be the only or most important goal, and in that case, simply ending *would* be considered a failure. But for others, the happiness of the participants may trump that. Some may be to raise a family. Some may be for financial incentive. Some may be for companionship.  Some may be a combination of goals.  Personally, since you asked for personal stories, my goals tend to be about intent, rather than longevity. I intend for my relationships to emphasize communication, for the participants to actively contribute to (but not try to be responsible for) each others' happiness, to find compromises and common paths, to support each other in our endeavors including personal growth and discovery, to be compassionate, to learn from my mistakes, to grow as a person through the influences of my partners & metamours, and I intend to be ethical and considerate in my breakups should the relationship no longer be a source of happiness to all the participants.

My relationships almost never end because of polyamory. They end for the same reasons that monogamous relationships do - compatibility. They end because we eventually figured out we are not romantically compatible in some way, just like how most monogamous relationships end. They end when we want different things from our relationship, or when we have different goals, or when we have personality conflicts that just can't be overcome. So many people want to blame polyamory for the ending of a poly relationship even when the polyamory part wasn't the problem, but when a monogamous relationship ends, it's not the fault of monogamy.

A relationship can also be "successful" when it has a successful transition from one form to another, and sometimes that means transitioning from a romantic relationship to a platonic one. As a line in a movie once said, I don't tend to think of breaking up as a relationship ending, I tend to think of it as two friends getting back together.

People change over time and sometimes they just don't change in the same way or at the same rate as the people with whom they are in relationships, and sometimes the relationship cannot remain in the same state when the people have changed in certain ways. That doesn't necessarily indicate a failure of the relationship. It indicates the luxury our society has of demanding such an enormous amount of responsibility from a romantic relationship. Insisting that marriages include love is a relatively recent addition to the structure, and with the almost-equality between the genders regarding income and independence in our society, we can now have the luxury of requiring higher demands of our relationships than ever before in our history, and the luxury of ending a relationship when it doesn't meet all the demands we place on it.

The "failure" rate of relationships is not a sign of degrading family values, as some would like to think. On the contrary, it's a symptom of HIGHER family values, demanding even more from relationships than ever before and not settling for less. Relationships are no longer simply about property and alliances. Now our partners are expected to be our best friends, confidantes, lovers, and co-parents in addition to securing property for our offspring and allying our families. Because of all that monogamous relationships have to live up to, monogamy itself has a very high "failure" rate.

One of the advantages to polyamorous relationships is that they do not need to live up to this high standard of a single person being everything to someone else, much like past relationships did not need to - with family, friends, church, and lovers taking up the slack for emotional intimacy and child-rearing since the spouse was not supposed to fulfill all those roles. Poly relationships have a lot of flexibility and they can look like a lot of different things without being a "failure" or coming up short in comparison to some Happily Ever After relationship that has been pre-charted for us in fairy tales and romantic comedies. A poly relationship can look like whatever it wants to look like, and if it doesn't look like someone else's relationship, or if it ends without one of the partners dying, if the participants think it was successful, then it was and no one else has to agree or approve of it.

If I fall in love with someone who is not compatible with me as a live-in partner, I can enjoy that relationship as it is without ever having to cohabitate. Since monogamous culture has a prescribed path for relationships (first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage), a loving relationship that doesn't have the goal of marriage and cohabitation might seem like a failure. But in polyamory, it doesn't have to be if we are happy with the arrangement.  And if a cohabitation situation is still desired, continuing to enjoy this fulfilling but non-living-together relationship does not prohibit a cohabitation situation with someone else who might be more compatible in that role. Rather than being disappointed at the relationship for not living up to its enormous expectations, I can enjoy the experience for what it *does* provide, which is usually fulfilling in its own right if not constantly being compared to a fairy tale.

This is fundamentally different from "settling", by the way.  "Settling" is "taking what you can get", it's accepting something you are not completely happy with because the alternative, which is to go without, is worse.  I'm talking about liking my roasted chicken because I like roasted chicken, and not being disappointed in my chicken just because it doesn't taste like grilled salmon.  Settling is more like eating a rice cake because you're hungry and don't want to go without *something* but you're on a diet and you'd really rather have a chocolate cake instead, so you munch the crispy rice as a diversion just to shut your stomach up so you won't keep thinking about chocolate cake when you know you can't have it anyway.

If my relationship does not follow the love-marriage-baby path, if we do not cohabitate, if it ends before one of us dies, but we are all happy at the time and we do not regret it when it ends, why should that be considered a failure? And if you're going to hold us to that standard and declare "success" or "failure" on other people's relationships and an entire relationship style, that standard ought to be held up to your own chosen style.

So, I ask you, when do you call monogamy a personal failure and move on? Do you just keep trying? Or redefine and create relationships of a different type?