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January 16 - June 8, 2019
As polyamory has grown as a relationship model, it has developed its own vocabulary. Folks in poly relationships will talk about "compersion," a feeling of joy at the happiness of a partner in a new relationship, and "new relationship energy" or NRE, the giddy, honeymoon phase of a newfound love. You might hear someone talk about "wibbles," or minor twinges of jealousy. An OSO is a person's "other significant other."
Forget the fairy tale. "Happily ever after" is a myth because people, unlike characters in fairy tales, are not static. We live, we grow, we change. Happy, healthy romantic lives require not just continual reinvestment but constant awareness of the changes in our partners, our situations and ourselves. Our partners do not owe us a guarantee that they will never change, nor do we owe anyone such a guarantee. And as we change, so do the things that make us happy.
Polyamory introduces the prospect of chaos and uncertainty into what's supposed to be a straightforward progression to bliss.
But happiness is something we re-create every day. And it comes more from our outlook than from the things around us.
Loving more than one person at the same time is not an escape from intimacy; it is an enthusiastic embrace of intimacy.
deliberately, intentionally constructed are more satisfying, and more likely to lead to happiness, than relationships whose shape is determined by default social expectations. It is absolutely possible for a monogamous relationship to be built by careful, deliberate choice. Many people are content in monogamous relationships, and that's fine. Monogamy doesn't necessarily mean simply following a social norm. If you decide that polyamory is not a good fit for your life, that's okay. Don't do it or let anyone push you into it.
Acting without thought for your partners is a poor long-term relationship strategy.
Betrayal, not sex, is cheating's defining element. (A person can move from cheating to polyamory, though it's a road fraught with peril; we get into that in chapter 17.)
Keeping many simultaneous relationships going is not for the faint of heart. Problems can occur in any relationship. Personality conflicts can arise, and all sorts of things can go wrong. In a polyamorous relationship, there are more opinions being offered, more people's feelings to get hurt, more personalities to clash, more egos to bruise. Navigating a disagreement or problem in a poly relationship requires outstanding communication skills and good problem-solving tools, which is kind of the point of this book.
Polyamory is not safe. When you give your heart to someone, it might get broken. Vulnerability can be painful. Many people try to protect themselves by placing strict controls on the form their relationships may take, or on the level to which they may grow. We have never seen this approach succeed; it merely replaces one kind of pain with another. Polyamory takes guts. It increases love and joy, but it also increases the odds that you'll be hurt. That's how it goes with romantic relationships.
One of the amazing things polyamory offers is the freedom to negotiate relationships that work for you and your partners. The possibilities are not always obvious, even for people who have lived polyamorously for years. For example, there's often no need to "break up" a relationship if something (or someone) changes. Maybe we can keep a connection and reshape it in another way. We can build relationships that are free to develop however they naturally want to flow.
Relationships that last a long time are called successes, without regard to misery, and those that end are called failures, without regard to happiness.
Monogamy tells us what to expect. Polyamory does not.
The extreme end of free agency is called "relationship anarchy," or RA. It's an approach that rejects the need to categorize and rank relationships at all ("Joe is my friend; Mark is my boyfriend; Keyser is my husband") or to create rules or define roles. In particular, RA does not privilege sexual or romantic relationships over others.
Even when a good monogamous relationship is nonsexual through mutual choice, it is often treated dismissively, if not derisively. "You and your wife haven't had sex in two years? Oh, I'm so sorry. That must be awful! What's wrong?"
To come to terms with their new agreement and forge a relationship that was loving, mutually supportive and happy, Eve and Peter had to confront a number of deeply ingrained, toxic beliefs about sex and relationships: You owe sex to someone you're in a relationship with. Sexual desire is something that can be offered or withheld at will. A lack of sexual desire is, at best, a sign of something wrong in the relationship.
Franklin and Amber's experience shows that judging relationship success based on some arbitrary criteria makes less sense than judging success based on whether the people involved think the relationship is a success.
There's a saying among poly people: "Love is infinite; time and attention are not."
The danger here is seeing other people as need-fulfillment machines. When a need isn't being met, that need can feel bottomless, and it can be tempting to go out searching for a person to fill it. One of Franklin's partners calls this "Frankenpoly"—stitching together the perfect need-providing romantic partner out of bits and pieces of other people. We've also heard it called "Pokémon poly," after the idea that you need to collect a complete set of different kinds of partners.
There are a thousand ways communication can fail and only a few ways for it to succeed. Yet
When we talk about communication in polyamory, we're actually talking about a very specific type of communication: speaking the truth about ourselves, our needs and our boundaries with honesty and precision, and listening with grace when our partners speak of themselves, their needs and their boundaries. This kind of communication isn't really about words. It's about vulnerability, self-knowledge, integrity, empathy, compassion and a whole lot of other things.
Small words can hide big misunderstandings. What is sex? What is a relationship? What do we mean by words such as permission, consent or commitment? A disagreement about the meaning of that last word popped up during a panel on polyamory Franklin once participated in at a convention:
Rather than use vague words like respect, you will benefit from spelling out what your expectations are. If you believe that older relationships have priority in terms of time and scheduling, for example, say so. Using vague words like respect creates an easy way to accuse others of breaking agreements any time they do something you don't like, without actually having to make explicit agreements.
Reasonable. The word reasonable (and its evil twin, unreasonable) get tossed around very easily. Is it reasonable to want to tell a partner what positions she is allowed to have sex in? Is it reasonable for a partner to kiss someone else in front of you? The problem is, what's "reasonable" is largely cultural and subjective. Most people would probably say it's not reasonable
Otherwise well-intentioned people who generally act in good faith can end up making that choice, for any number of reasons. The most common reason is emotional vulnerability: fear of rejection, fear of being ridiculed, fear of being wrong, of hearing no, of being found less desirable by our partners. And even as we claim to want honesty, we may subtly discourage our partners from being honest with us because we don't feel prepared to hear truths that might be painful.
Problem is, one of the most basic rules of life is that you cannot get what you want if you don't ask for what you want.
Perhaps the most common justification for dishonesty in a relationship is the notion that the truth will hurt worse than a lie. A person who cheats on a partner may think, If I tell the truth, I will hurt my partner, but if I don't, my partner won't need to experience that pain. This reasoning says more about the person making the argument than it does about the person he is "protecting," because consent is not valid if it is not informed. By hiding the truth, we deny our partners the opportunity to consent to continuing a relationship with us. Controlling information to try to keep a partner
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The solution to triangular communication is simple in theory—don't do it—but difficult in practice, because it's easier to talk about things that bother us with anyone but the person whose behavior is at issue.
Communication can be hard when it leads to embarrassment or shame. If you were brought up to believe that there are certain things (like sex) that you just don't talk about, shame can interfere with communication…and you might end up wondering, "Why is my sex life so unsatisfying?" and being afraid to hear the answer.
Coercion happens any time you make the consequences of saying no so great that you've removed reasonable choice.
If your partner sets a boundary or says no to a request, she probably has a good reason. That reason might not even be about you. It's important to respect a no even when you don't understand it.
If you can't respect their choice, it's time to examine your own boundaries.
If you're hurting because of a boundary your partner has set, knowing how to practice active listening can be especially useful. Active listening involves asking genuine, open-ended, non-leading questions, then listening quietly to the answer, and then repeating back what you heard so it's clear that you heard it correctly, as we discuss in the next chapter.
If I have a problem with someone's behavior, do I discuss the problem with that person?
Before we look at some helpful communication strategies, there's something we have to say: You are, almost certainly, a lousy communicator. How can we say that when we don't know you? Because 99 percent of the population—ourselves included—are lousy communicators. Most of us are exceptionally good at misunderstanding each other, misreading each other's tone and intent, and failing to get our point across. But usually we don't realize it. Usually we think we've communicated just fine, and it's the other person who has a problem. Passive and passive-aggressive communicators tend to believe they
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Nonviolent communication. Often called NVC, nonviolent communication involves separating observation from evaluation and judgment, and separating feelings and needs from strategies and actions.
Asking for what we need, rather than what we think might be available, is kind to our partners, because it communicates what we want authentically—as long as we are ready to hear a no.
okay if the answer to your request is no. The difference between asking and demanding is what happens if the answer is no. If you're not okay with hearing a no, then you are demanding.
When a partner has done the work of asking clearly for what she needs, take it seriously. Even small requests can be very hard to make, and they can lie at the tip of some very big emotions. If you can't meet the request, at least acknowledge it by saying no, and preferably explain why.
we waited for immunity to uncomfortable emotions before traveling this road, we'd never budge.
Understand that your emotions often lie to you. Feelings aren't fact. It's possible to feel threatened when there is no threat, for example, or feel powerless when you aren't.
Try not to validate, suppress, hang on to or deny your emotions. Just feel them, understand what they're trying to say…and then let them pass. Emotions are like weather; they come and go. Don't tell yourself you "shouldn't" feel them, but don't keep rehearsing things that keep them alive, either. Acknowledge them and let them go.
Many conflict-resolution professionals stress the value of curiosity, accompanied by active listening.
Not just any question, though. The question should be genuine and open-ended, a serious request for more information about another person's feelings, intentions or motivations.
Good communication is not just reactive, but proactive. That means regular checking in, just to see how things are going: and not just with your partners, but with yourself.
The most immediate is that if you tell your partner "It's okay to ask for anything you want," it better be true. If you're not prepared to make it safe for your partner to open up to you, he won't. Because he'll feel he can't. We don't always yell at people who
The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach.
We give such talismanic power to jealousy that the fear of it alone can shape our relationships. We've never heard anyone say "Polyamory? I wouldn't want to do that. What if I feel angry?" or "What if I feel sad?" But many people say "Polyamory? What if I feel jealous?" The fact is, at some point you will. Few people are born immune to jealousy. The good news is, jealousy is just an emotion like any other emotion. Sometimes you feel sad, sometimes you feel angry, but you don't let those feelings define you. They don't run your life. Jealousy doesn't need to either.
Jealousy is the feeling we get when we drag tomorrow's rain cloud over today's sunshine.
But one of the things that can make jealousy such a challenge is that it's a shape-shifter: jealousy masquerades as other emotions. Before you can fight it, you need to see it for what it is. Some of the emotions that can have jealousy at their root are fear, loneliness, loss, sadness, anger, betrayal, envy and humiliation. If you are feeling these in connection to one of your partners or metamours and there's no obvious reason, or if the emotion is much stronger than the situation
