Eve Rickert's Blog, page 6

#WLAMF no. 20: Shelf-stable consent

A couple of months ago, I was presenting at a poly event. We were talking about consent, and someone used a phrase I’d never heard before, but which the linguist in me (who’s basically an eight-year-old squeeing over the neat things people do with language) was absolutely delighted by. She and her partners had, she said, shelf-stable consent.

Consent is not a thing that’s given once and lasts forever. You do not consent to sex with someone for all time simply because you’ve consented to it onc...

#WLAMF no. 18: Feeling worthy

I have said many times that one of the core secrets to good relationships is good partner selection. A huge number of relationship problems can be avoided up front simply by choosing good partners: partners with compatible ideas about relationships, with good communication and problem-solving skills, partners who are not abusive or controlling or entitled.

But there is a prerequisite to good partner selection. It’s one I don’t often think about, because it’s something I’ve always taken for gra...

#WLAMF no. 12: The flip side of couple privilege

In our book More Than Two, one of the dangers Eve and I talk about with existing couples opening their relationship to polyamory is the problem of “couple privilege.”

“Couple privilege” is a set of assumptions and expectations, some external and some internal, that we make about relationships. No mater how hard we try to be egalitarian or treat new partners as “equal,” we can assert privileges–sometimes without intending to–in our existing relationships, and end up disempowering anyone we may...

#WLAMF no. 4: Observations on community

While Eve and I were on our book tour, we stopped for a time in Salt Lake City. Our host was a poly organizer and community leader who also had a degree in mathematics (which is, like, one of the hottest things ever, but I digress).

She introduced us to Salt Late City’s poly scene, which is amazingly rich, dynamic, and cohesive. We’d expected to see strong, thriving poly communities in places like San Francisco and smaller, more fractured communities in conservative places like Salt Lake City,...

Privacy and Transparency in Polyamory: What’s the Balance?

One of the most common tropes in the poly community is, “The three rules of polyamory are communicate, communicate, communicate.” Communication is the lifeblood of any healthy relationship, which is why we have not one but two chapters on communication in the book More Than Two.

There’s a place where this emphasis on communication can lead us down a dark path, though, and that’s when we mistake basic privacy for poor communication.

One of the questions I hear often in conversations about polyam...

Coming full circle to a memoir

There is something we don’t talk about much in polyamory. Those of us who are educators and activists tend to focus only on the positive aspects of polyamory. We’re so busy playing cheerleader (see, polyamory is healthy! It’s fun! You can have your Kate and Edith too! There’s no need to be afraid your partner will leave you from someone else, when they can have both of you!) that we don’t talk about the bits that are scary and disruptive. We don’t talk about the fact that, yes, even in polyam...

Bunny ears?

You’ve been asking. Now you know.

The post Bunny ears? appeared first on More Than Two.

Achievement unlocked: The book tour winds down

This blog post comes to you from Seattle, Washington, where we’re getting ready to do one last podcast before the More Than Two book tour wraps up for good. Looking back over the last seven weeks on the road, it feels like we set off a million years ago to tour the country in a camper van talking about polyamory. And yet, at the same time, I almost don’t want it to end.

Looking back now, the tour feels a little surreal, like we were playing the world’s most immersive video game. And in true vi...

On the Relationship Bill of Rights

In June of 2003, I added a new page to my rapidly-growing site about polyamory. The new page, Polyamory for Secondaries, had a section on it called “A Proposed Secondary’s Bill of Rights.” My partner Shelly, who has contributed her thoughts on consent and “family-style” relationships right here in this blog (and whose writings and ideas about consent and ethics in romantic relationships were instrumental to us as we were crafting the ethics sections of More Than Two) contributed significantly...

Emotional outsourcing: Why structural approaches to jealousy management fail

Earlier this summer, a writer who goes by the pen name Elizabeth Sternpublished an article inSalontitled “Jealous of what? Solving polyamory’s jealousy problem.” Franklin and I wrote the following as a response.

Anger is cruel and fury overwhelming, but who can stand before jealousy?

—Proverbs 27:4

Elizabeth Stern has hit the polyamory jackpot. She has two loving, secure partners who are highly compatible not just with her, but with each other. The two loves of her life like each other, share in...