Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator Quotes

“consent is an ongoing process, not a one-time choice.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“The people in the relationship are more important than the relationship. Don’t treat people as things.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“Many people choose solohood due to an ethical or emotional aversion to treating people like territory.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“An Escalator relationship is expected to become a permanent, dominant, unchanging feature of life. However, relationships rarely work that way.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“The term “anarchy” is widely misunderstood, especially regarding relationships. It’s often perceived as implying a lack of structure and accountability. Far too often, people toss the term “anarchy” around as a cool-sounding synonym for chaos or nihilism, or to rationalize shirking responsibility or consideration.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“When people practice polyamory and also value fairness and consent, walking that talk can feel profoundly scary. They might fear, for instance, that prioritizing those values could jeopardize the considerable time, money and effort they have invested in a home, a family, a lifestyle or future plans. This perception of risk fuels many strategies, including relationship hierarchy, to control or prevent change.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“veto power can obscure personal agency and accountability in relationships. A partner who says, “I must break up with you, I have no choice because my primary partner demands it,” is, in fact, choosing to end that relationship. Shifting responsibility for this choice onto a third party (or phrasing a breakup decision in terms of “we,” when only the primary partners comprise that “we”) may be a rhetorical sleight-of-hand to deflect personal accountability while hurting someone.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“Social assumptions of couple privilege make it relatively easy for established, nonexclusive couples to unthinkingly adopt the habit of favoring their existing relationship, even at others’ expense.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“Agreements empower people, whereas rules enforce power imbalances.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“It’s common for partners in consensually nonmonogamous relationships to attempt to impose requirements or limits upon each other, or upon their other partners — while specifically not calling these efforts “rules.” Instead, such efforts often are called agreements or boundaries, since those words tend to sound fairer, or at least less harsh.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“Relationship hierarchy is most commonly practiced by people who are new to polyamory, as well as in blended relationships where not everyone is polyamorous. This may be because hierarchy can make polyamory function somewhat like a traditional relationship since it is an Escalator hallmark. Thus it can feel more familiar and secure to people who are accustomed to, or who may even prefer, monogamy.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“patriarchal polygamy is often practiced in ways that actively disempower and disadvantage women, violate their consent and pit them against each other.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“polygamy (plural marriage) that is motivated by patriarchal religious tenets is widely assumed to be intrinsically abusive,53 not because it’s nonmonogamous, but because it can be sexist.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“far more primary than secondary partners voiced the opinion that hierarchy is mostly beneficial.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“Relationship hierarchy: In consensual nonmonogamy, this is a framework for making choices between overlapping adult intimate relationships in a network. Hierarchy describes how people functionally rank their intimate relationships relative to each other, at least in certain contexts. It also determines how and when this ranking gets exercised. In a relationship hierarchy, some or all choices that might affect more than one relationship are foregone conclusions. They are effectively decided in advance, by default, in favor of the relationship or partners deemed “primary.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“Not living with lovers can help keep relationships fresh and vital, by encouraging partners to never take their shared time for granted.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“Some partners try living together and then move apart because they discover this is healthier for them and their relationship. Socially this can be quite challenging; under Escalator social norms, moving apart is strongly equated with relationship failure. But for some people, moving apart is exactly what makes their relationships work.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“Under current social norms, if friends develop a sexual or romantic connection that isn’t heading toward the Escalator, this is often perceived as foolish or dangerous — or at least, as a sure way to ruin or cheapen that friendship.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“While some relationships accommodate don’t ask don’t tell smoothly, it’s common for this practice, over time, to end up fueling the very suspicion, jealousy and insecurity that it was intended to mitigate.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“Casual, automatic suspicion and disapproval is a key enforcement mechanism of social norms. This can make it much harder for people to consider the option of consensual nonmonogamy, let alone try it.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“Compulsory monogamy is the simple idea that in our culture, monogamy is somewhat less than optional. …Modern systems of cultural conformity perform the miracle of allowing us to think that we are making a choice, when the choice we are making is really not much of a choice at all. Monogamy is one such choice.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“The human mind tends to equate familiarity with safety. People often instinctively assume that something new, unfamiliar or unusual is more likely to prove dangerous or inferior. This is why “weird” usually does not imply “good.”  Thus, it may feel daunting merely to contemplate the possibility of exploring an unusual or new path — even if a less popular approach might end up working much better.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“when people say that a relationship is real or serious, they usually mean that the couple in question appears to be riding the Relationship Escalator. This can have the unfortunate side effect of marginalizing people whose treasured intimate relationships somehow diverge from social norms.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“In mainstream culture, relationships that include both sex and romance often tend to be emphasized and prioritized above friendships and other types of connections that one might have with other adults.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life

“I'd like to be able to form close personal friendships with partnered people to whom I might be attracted, in a way that would be considered ill advised in traditional relationships.  Such friendships are rarely actually sexual, but they are closer than most monogamous people would trust or understand, in my experience. People often believe such friendships would threaten a monogamous dyad.”
― Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life