I’ve been listening to the Polyamory Weekly podcast pretty regularly for a while now and I found the latest show on communicating ‘fearlessly’ with one’s partners quite timely and relevant. Mainly because I don’t do it.

Oh I do communicate some. I’ve learnt to tell my partners when I’m not comfortable with something or how I feel about things and all that. Sometimes I’ll even bore them with why I feel the way I do and they, bless their hearts, will listen. I love listening to them and discussing how they feel and what they want too and I love that they feel safe enough to open up like that. But me? The way I hide what I want, you’d think it was the secret code to bringing about Armageddon.

I have my reasons. And yes, they’re all about mommy and daddy and their unique brand of Let’s-fuck-up-the-kids. (Issues springing from childhood, you say? My, what a novel concept.) But the trick is realizing not everyone is my parents (thank you, unspecified, non-denominational and utterly fictitious deity) and that not everyone is a lying sack of shit that manages to consistently disguise itself as a lovely human being.

Basically, I hate being told ‘no’. And not because I’m a spoiled brat. I hate putting myself in a position that allows another person the power to decide whether or not I get what I want. (Control issues? Ya think?) So when it comes time to fess up to a partner that I feel like crap right now and would like some attention, I turn into an all-singing, all-dancing treasure trove of information on the weather, politics, movies I want to see, movies I hate, that funny website I’ve been meaning to tell people about, something stupid a colleague said, that sudden itch on my left foot - anything at all, basically, to avoid the issue.

Yes, I know. Not the healthiest of approaches. As Minx points out in the podcast, by not bringing it up at all, you remove all possibility of getting what you want. When you speak up, there’s at least a 50% chance - and probably more - that you’ll get it. And it’s not like staying quiet feels all that great. If it did, there would at least be some justification for it. But not speaking up doesn’t actually stop you feeling scared or worried or insecure. In fact, it can compound it because on top of feeling like crap, you feel alone and unsupported, and isn’t that just what you need? Well done, you, for retaining control and keeping things…er…controlled.

Even if your partner(s) can’t give you what you want or be there for you in the way you want them to right that minute, telling them how you feel gives them the opportunity to at least express support and remind you that you are loved. And that may actually end up being pretty much all you really needed anyway.

So to hell with the I-must-always-be-invulnerable schtick (which wasn’t really convincing anyone anyway). Part of being a grownup in any kind of relationship is getting up the guts to express your needs and understanding that a ‘no’ does not mean that you are a worthless human being undeserving of love, specially when all it might actually mean is that your partner’s stuck in really lousy traffic.

Lately, the terms ‘primary’ and ’secondary’ have been popping up rather more often than usual in the Poly blogosphere (at least in the part of it that I read) as well as in some of the recent discussions I’ve had with people in the community.

In essence, I understand the usefulness of the terms ‘primary’ and ’secondary’. Not always, but often enough, a polyamorous setup will include one pair that has had a longer relationship with each other than with any of their other partners, and this older relationship will include shared finances, kids, property, etc. Often, but again, not always, this relationship will have started out monogamous and then become polyamorous over time. With the shift to poly will have come some questioning and reassessing of the time spent by the original couple with each other, shifts in responsibilities, and adjustments of different kinds within the relationship, all of which will have been dealt with in whatever way seemed best to the couple at the time. One way of dealing with it is to set up the original relationship as the ‘primary’ relationship and to count all other relationships as ’secondary’.*

On the face of it, that’s pretty reasonable - the older relationship seems the most ‘real’ or even ‘grown up’ one given the presence of financial investments in housing and other kinds of property, shared living space, shared family, shared children, shared goals, and the mutual support that all of this entails. This casts a newer relationship as less ’serious’ because the people involved are only just starting out and can’t really say for sure whether it’ll last or end up filed as a pleasant diversion. The amount of time invested in each relationship is also (usually) in proportion to the number of places where the lives of each pair intersect - the more points of contact, the more time given to (and needed by) the relationship. This then also leads to the conclusion that the first relationship - the primary in this case -  is more important, more worthwhile, more permanent, more serious, etc. than the second - or secondary - relationship.

This bugs me for a number of reasons - some of which I realize are specific to me and my situation. I’m sure the above can and does work for many people and I don’t mean to imply that there’s something inherently wrong or bad with they way they do things. It’s just not, I’m beginning to understand, the way I want to do it.

First of all, in this kind of situation, one relationship will always be older than the other, but I think casting one as less serious and one as more based solely on that is a mistake. Eventually (however far down the track) I think the relative ages of the relationships in question cease to matter very much. Using the sibling analogy, there’s a bigger gap between a two-year-old and a four-year-old than between a twelve-year-old and a fourteen-year-old; by the time they’re reach twenty-two and twenty-four, the gap has shrunk even more, and so on. Each relationship grows and matures at its own pace, but, assuming it lasts, it does get there.

Another thing that puts me off the terms ‘primary’ and ’secondary’ is the implication that one must maintain this dichotomy and pull back if the ’secondary’ relationship starts to stray into ‘primary’ territory. Privileging one relationship over the other, while perhaps reasonable at the outset, can soon start to limit the ’secondary’ relationship unfairly. Obviously, not all relationships automatically bloom into always-and-forever type scenarios, but assuming a connection that feels lifelong is made, I don’t think it makes sense to deliberately stop it from developing. As I understand it, the whole point of polyamory is the ‘many loves’ idea, ie, the freedom to have multiple committed relationships. A primary-secondary setup seems, to my mind, to limit that unnecessarily.

Speaking of privilege, there’s also the assumption that primary partners have a say in each other’s secondary relationships. Again, while that may make sense at the beginning when you’re only just beginning to figure out your desires and boundaries - and is probably very useful in some cases - I don’t think it’s sustainable in the long term. Once begun, relationships can and do take on a life of their own and are intensely personal and specific to the individuals involved. Interference from a third party is just that: interference. To give a third party veto power over the relationship after a certain point is grossly unfair as well as disrespectful to all involved.

No two relationships are identical so you can’t really expect them to be equal in all respects, but you can value each for what it is. Terms like ‘primary’ and ’secondary’ are unnecessarily limiting and impose a structure that may not actually suit the nature of either relationship. I’ve heard over and over that each relationship finds its own level* and I have found that to be true. Sometimes, relationships move levels quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes not at all. And sometimes they end up at the same level quite unexpectedly and it can be something of a challenge to figure out how to make it all work. But I’d rather have the challenge than put relationships into artificial cages and not allow them to grow as they will.

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*That may be a quote or a paraphrase from The Ethical Slut.

In the comments on my last post, bentcrude asked me to do the interview on her site. I did it, though now I’d like to add a few things to the ‘other words that describe you’ section since Polyamory didn’t get much of a mention. I also don’t know why ‘What did you come out as?’ is repeated or why the second says ‘gay’ since I never said I was no longer interested in guys when I first came out - just that I’d also like to date women. Anyway, I’m sure that’ll get sorted. In the mean time, enjoy reading about all the different experiences on there.

So we told some of H’s family and got a pretty good response. This time, he did the talking, which I think was a good idea given that he’s the reason they’d be interested in the first place and because, by talking about it, he takes some amount of ownership of it. Even though he’s not interested in finding or forming other relationships, polyamory is something that we made a decision about together and something that we are still exploring and expanding together. Neither of us would be where we are if it weren’t for the other.

I also realize that I need to stop using bisexuality as a reason for being poly. It came up when H told his family about A and someone asked, ‘If she’s doing this because she wants to be with women, what’s with the boyfriend?’ Given how we’d framed the whole situation, I think that was a reasonable enough question. I honestly am no longer sure what I said at the time because I’ve since talked it over with several people, but I’ve basically concluded that while bisexuality was the avenue through which I learned about polyamory, it isn’t the reason I’m polyamorous. I am increasingly sure that even if I weren’t bisexual, I would be polyamorous and that I am both is a coincidence, if an extremely convenient one.

I feel a strange reluctance to talk about polyamory - to even mention it - to people who are about to get married and want to talk to me, the long-married friend, about it. I don’t know what it is. I personally don’t see marriage as the be-all end-all of a relationship. It’s just another optional step along the way as far as I’m concerned. But I suppose I think that marriage is a much more loaded concept for those about to start one than for most other people and I while I’m happy to discuss marriage and poly as ideas with people who are either single or have been married a while, those on the threshhold seem to have a very emotional, almost brittle, relationship with marriage and I don’t want to stress it any further. Which of course could be a complete projection of my own negative feelings towards the institution and ultimately have nothing to do with the almost-marrieds themselves.

I’m not sure how to proceed. The Poly Old Fart asked an important question a while ago and I’ve been thinking about it since: Why am I blogging?

This is and isn’t a journal. While I’ve outlined my journey from a monogamous to a polyamorous situation here, I’ve left out lots of details, not published a lot of what I’ve recorded elsewhere about each relationship, and attempted to protect other people’s privacy to the extent that I could. I have, however, posted some very personal things that I can’t take back now that they’re out there. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to take them back when I posted them and I’m OK with that. It was important for me to write those things and important for me to know that someone had read them. I needed to get the frustration I was feeling off my chest, as well as the realization that I needed to acknowledge some very basic things about myself - things I had known all along and chosen to ignore or push aside for the time being.

I didn’t expect people to read my blog and then write to me telling me they understood what I was going through or that they were just a few months behind me in the figuring-it-all-out process and that what I’d written had actually helped them along. For me, this was just a space in which to vent, think, and maybe at some point connect with other people in the same or a similar situation so that I could get my head together. The positive comments and support have been wonderful and I’ve learnt a lot from other poly bloggers who’ve been either poly or blogging, or both, for far longer than I have.

I wouldn’t call myself an activist either, but I am a communicator. My instinct upon finding out about something new and interesting and challenging is to broadcast it. Acknowledging that I was bisexual was a big enough ‘event’, if personal, but discovering polyamory and realizing how much potential there was in it was way too much to just sit on. And then, as often happens when one ‘discovers’ something, I found many other people had got there first and were doing a brilliant job of talking about the emotional, political, financial, social implications of being polyamorous. So now I write and I link.

I stop at communication though. I don’t seek to evangelize or convince people that polyamory is the One True Way, mainly because while it is a good fit for me personally, my experience with it is limited. Most of my information comes from the community I interact with, the books I read, and the bloggers I follow online.  I respect experience and knowledge gained through the thoughtful examining thereof and overall, I’ve found experienced poly bloggers do rather a lot of that, which is catnip to this kitteh.

My own poly relationships are going well. A and I are rolling along happily and my relationship with S is growing firmer as we get to know and trust each other. H and I are closer than ever in a lot of ways and his ‘role’ in the community has come as something of a happy surprise all around. We’re all discovering new things about ourselves, our relationships, our feelings, our attitudes, our wants, our insecurities and much more. Everyone’s at a different point, but we manage to communciate over the gaps and even though we don’t have much of a blueprint, we’re building something.

And that is where I reach the next question: what do I write about now? I’m quite protective of all three of them, but particularly of A and S because H at least knows about this blog and that I write about him (the other two know that I have a blog and expect to be mentioned, but that’s it). I want to write about them - about how they make me feel, how we’ve worked things out, who they are, etc - but I want to protect both their privacy and mine. I also get cynical and think, really, how different is any of what I have to say from the millions of other relationships that get started and are built on every day? Just because there are more people involved doesn’t really make it news. So then I think I should take a leaf from the books of the poly bloggers I read and talk instead about the larger issues, the ideas, the conflicts - the learning and the  learning process, really. That’s what’s meant the most to me when I’ve read other blogs and if I’m to do anything with this blog, providing an account of what I’ve learned from being polyamorous is probably what would be most useful, both to others and also to me.

Nine people who know, that is. I didn’t end up emailing that friend of mine but I caught her a little earlier than when we were supposed to meet and filled her in. I’d only just told her when our other friend joined us so I leapt up to greet her while friend 1 attempted to digest what I’d said. Friend 2 assisted her and, after the requisite questions, we moved on to other things. I was fairly confident that things were ok, but I knew for sure when they spotted an opportunity to tease me about it all and pounced on it, proceeding to be thoroughly mean and catty to me. *sigh* Nothing says ‘I love you’ like a heaping helping of well crafted sarcasm, and the craftsmanship these girls are capable of is superb.

Two more coming out stories, and neatly labeled too.

1: In which being blindsided turns out to be less unpleasant than one would expect

A week or so ago I told a friend of mine about being poly and bi. She’s very queer-friendly so I wasn’t worried about her reaction to my being bisexual, but from past conversations I’d gathered that she might not be terrible approving of the whole poly thing and I’d had some concerns about how she might react. She, along with a few other friends, have a tendency to use H and me as a sort of benchmark for relationships because apparently we’re ‘just so perfect’. I know they mean to be complimentary, but that sort of thing makes me feel stifled. Pedestals don’t really allow for much wiggle room, you know? Just because H and I have a great relationship doesn’t mean we didn’t or don’t have to work at it , nor does it mean that we don’t have a lot to learn and a lot further to go yet. (Plus I’ve never been able to shake that cheery little line from Oedipus at Colonus: “Count no man happy until he is dead.”)

Anyway, I decided to tell her about being bisexual first because I figured that would be the easy one. It was. I wrote a story a while ago that involved a very mild sex scene between two women and she said she’d had her suspicions since then. No big deal. Then she asked what I intended to do about it, why I wanted to come out, etc., so that allowed me to segue nicely into polyamory and my own current arrangement. That got a tiny reaction, but only a tiny one - as usual, the mention of other partners led into the usual series of questions:

• is H seeing anyone? How does he feel about your other partners?
• How do you get/manage time?
• Who are these people and how involved are you with them?
• Are you happy?

I’m actually a little surprised that I haven’t got set answers yet. Perhaps that’s because at the moment I’m still telling people I care about and so want to tailor my responses to what they need to hear most or first. They all end up with the same information in the end, really - they just get it in whatever order suits them.

The upshot was the standard, “if you’re happy, I’m happy for you.” And then she threw me a curve ball. She asked where on the sexuality spectrum I would place myself, to which I responded - and this is something I’ve been working out slowly over the past few months - that I am mainly attracted to and interested in women but willing to make exceptions for some men. “Hm,” she said. “Me too.”

What the…?

And then I wasn’t all that shocked. It’s weird when, in the face of new information that at first blush seems like it should be surprising, you find that no, actually, you’re not that surprised at all, and that, in fact, things suddenly seem to have slipped into sharper focus. Anyway, the rest of it is her story so I won’t share that here, but we both left that conversation a lot lighter and a lot closer.

2: In which I effectively turn ten years on their head

Yesterday, I was chatting with a friend I haven’t seen in ages but who, like quite a few people I haven’t seen in ages, means a lot to me. I hadn’t had a conversation with her for a while and I knew she’d had a lot on her plate, so I’d left off the revelations for the time being. Now that we were talking, and since she’d asked how things, including my marriage, were going, I thought I’d come out with it.

Before I get further into this, a bit of background: We’ve known each other since college, and have always had a very close but also very antagonistic relationship. I’ve always disagreed with the concept of marriage, have never wanted children, have been unwilling to compromise myself or my future for the sake of a relationship, etc. Now she’s never disagreed, exactly, but she’s always questioned whether it was possible to ‘be like that’ and survive. My getting married was her biggest ‘victory’, proof that ‘my way’ was untenable, etc. But for all her crowing, she’s always been genuinely concerned about how the hell I was going to deal with being married since she knew I hadn’t actually changed my mind about marriage. I will also point out that she has technically turned out the be an even better example of ‘my way’ than I have. I also trust her completely - we’ve kept each other’s secrets for ten years now and I fully expect that to continue, regardless of how close or distant our relationship gets.

So you can understand why she’d ask about ‘the marriage’ and you can understand why I’d tell her. For her, I started out by telling her I had a girlfriend and that H was cool with it. As it happened, she’d been researching polyamory because a mutual friend had been involved with someone who cried poly whenever she wanted to get more serious (but that’s a rant for another day), so I didn’t have to explain much. What got her was the bisexuality because she said that while she thought I might be ‘open to experimentation’, that she’d always considered me absolutely hetero. Given my track record - and my silence - that isn’t terribly shocking. Still, she was very supportive and accepting and, when I said that I’d been a bit afraid she wouldn’t approve, demanded, in her tongue-in-cheek manner, exactly which judgmental friend I had her confused with. Hmph.

She’ll come back with more questions as it sinks in, I think, because while she’s taken the poly side of things in her stride, there’s about ten years’ worth of stuff that my coming out as bi and my admission that I have pretty much always been more attracted to women than to men might re-color. Here’s hoping it doesn’t get too negative.

3: A conclusion that isn’t

So that’s 8 people at last count. Eight people I care about who know that I am bi and poly after years of assuming that I was straight and monogamous. And so far, all of them have responded with kindness, with acceptance and with some degree of curiosity about poly. And, with any luck, it’ll be nine tomorrow evening. I’m not too sure how to handle this one because normally I’ve spoken to people one on one. This time, I’ll be out with two friends, one of whom I came out to a while ago. I would have told the other friend earlier, but it seemed a bit weird to do it over email and the last time I saw her was with an even bigger group. Still, it’s important to me that she know, because, even though it makes no material difference to her life, she’s someone who generally understands where I’m coming from - or at least makes an effort to - and I think this is too big a part of who I am to leave out. It’s funny too because I thought I would have told her before I told our other friend, but that’s lousy scheduling for you. Maybe I’ll have to resort to email after all. If, that is, I want her to know before I see her, which is beginning to feel increasingly important.

So I ended it with M the other day. Things generally started to go south about a month and a half ago - right after we got all warm and fuzzy, it seems. Now, of course, all the little niggling doubts I had about our relationship suddenly seem like such blindingly obvious red flags. Ah well. You learn.

Basically, I no longer felt safe. I didn’t realize that was the case initially, specially since I’ve had a bit of stress piling up from various other quarters. I thought I wasn’t paying as much attention to M as before because I was tired, frazzled, upset, distracted, etc. I thought we weren’t catching up as often as before because she’d been ill and overworked. All those things were true enough, but they were excuses, not reasons.

A friend of mine once commented that your body doesn’t lie to you. I think she has a point. At least for me, physical contact hinges on trust. I can talk a good game, but if I don’t feel safe with someone, touching them, particularly intimately, is out of the question - it makes me physically ill. It’s not a pleasant reaction at the best of times, but when it’s your girlfriend that makes you recoil, it fucking hurts.

A while ago, M carelessly mentioned something I had told her in confidence in front of someone I barely knew. I don’t for a second believe that she meant any harm, but I was quite upset and she realized her mistake and apologized. It was a slip. But it shook me pretty badly - worse than I thought because, H recently reminded me that I mentioned wanting to end it when I got home that day. I had forgotten I’d said that, but it’s true and, now that I think about it, things weren’t quite the same from then on.

While the incident itself was Not Good, I think what it did was highlight the fact that there was a disconnect between us. Our attitudes towards a few important things were quite different and I found that I’d done my stupid just-smile-and-go-along-with-it thing, which is never a good idea, however easy it seems at the time. You keep hearing about boundaries, and in theory it makes perfect sense that you would identify and then defend your own, as it were. But in practice…well, the balance between patrolman and peacemaker can be a bit difficult to negotiate.

Still, M is a smart woman and realized something was up, so she asked. And the upshot of that conversation was that I no longer wanted a physical relationship with her. Which hurt her. But I think that she would have been more hurt if I hadn’t been truthful and it had all come out at some later time, so I am telling myself that it is for the best. It’s awful to be the one doing the breaking up. It’s no cakewalk to be broken up with, but I think I prefer to be on that end, really. There’s certainly less guilt involved and you don’t feel quite so much like a horrible person who apparently doesn’t care about hurting other people. Halfway through, I was wondering why on earth I was torturing her like that and almost backed down. I’m glad I didn’t, ultimately, but there was a moment there when I’d have given anything to not have said what I had. Perhaps it would have been easier if one or both of us were given to histrionics. Unfortunately, it was all calm and reasonable and I got to explain how I felt and she explained how she felt, we cried, we went home.

And so it’s done. It’s over. We will carefully avoid all contact and try not to run into each other for the time being, and hopefully, over time, she’ll be able to stand being in the same room as me. She’s a wonderful person - just not someone I should be in a relationship with.

Someone asked me a few months ago what I ultimately wanted with my relationships, where I saw them going, etc. At the time, I had no clear idea and, for the most part, I still don’t. But the other day, A stopped by and, while I was in the other room, I heard him and H talking. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the friendly, warm tone they were using made me smile. They get along. They have stuff to say to each other. They make the same kind of (awful) jokes and defend each other for making them too.

I like that. I like that very much. It makes me happy to hear them getting along. It makes me hope very very quietly - so that I don’t disturb things by pushing too hard - that this can continue indefinitely and keep growing. Growing into what exactly, I don’t know, but growing all the same.