The Polyamorous Misanthrope

A problem I’ve noticed in my own life, as well as lives of many other poly people is a lack of social support.

I don’t mean that your mother doesn’t like and understand that you’re poly, though that is something of a symptom.

What I mean is that the social context where people often expect sympathy and support if often lacking in the wider community.

Let’s go with the most common one — divorce. It is not unusual for someone who is poly, especially one living in a multi-adult situation, not to get a lot of support or understanding if one of the partners moves out. Hey, you’ve got other partners, still, right?

Even if it’s not as extreme as a divorce, but is “merely” a breakup, you may not get the understanding that a monogamous person might.

There are a dozen little things you start running in to. If you find you are getting depressed and need help, you have to gather your thoughts together well enough to educate mental health workers about polyamory before you can get appropriate treatment¹. It’s very hard to listen to a counselor’s input, because sometimes a counselor might be confronting you with things you don’t want to face, and it’s really easy to blow that off as “poly prejudice”, especially if you have the slightest pig-headedness to your nature.

What kind of things help?

• “Being out” — You can’t be supportive of what you don’t know about. My co-workers knew I lived in a group marriage. When I was saving boxes to help an ex move, my co-workers treated it with the same sympathy as they would any co-worker going through a more “standard” divorce. If they hadn’t known, they would have been confronted with this nut who would tear up when she picked up a box without having the slightest idea why. And in the throes of a divorce is hardly the time to whip a little “poly education” on anyone! More importantly, because we were out, we were able to have open lines of comunication with the children’s teachers, asking them to please keep us informed of behavioral issues, etc. It was a big help! Because the people knew us and had a context on which to hang the whole idea, they got what was going on pretty well.
• Having a social circle that is not connected only with your partners — Avoid the “group hug” thing too much if you’re in a poly group situation. Yes, your family and that closeness is important, but you want to have a context in which you’re just you, not part of the Petting Zoo, or OLQ, or Our Little Tribe, or Kerista, or the Oneida Community. Your family context is important, but have an identity outside of that. If you knit and no-one else in the family does, for goodness sake, make it to your stitch-n-bitch regularly! Have an outside project, interest or activity where you hang out with people that aren’t necessarily poly.

I’m not necessarily saying to do this in case someone dies or divorces you, though. People need a wide range of contacts, family, friends and wider social networks². A social support network is as important for our needs to give as our needs to get.

I recall encountering someone commenting on being polyamorous on Usenet many years ago, saying, “I don’t have a lifestyle, I have a life!” I liked that, because I think it is all too easy for we poly to get tied up in our polyness, and especially our families if we live in multi-adult households, and lose touch with the outside world.

So, yes, have a life! It’s good for you, good for reality checks, and actually ain’t so bad to show that we polys are “real people” too!

¹Try that in the throes of a mental health crisis sometime. It’s even less fun than it sounds like!
² Yes, even we introverts need that. You’re still a monkey, even if you’re a weirdly-wired one.

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I ran across the acronym H.A.L.T for a reminder in times of stress or distress on the Flylady mailing list.

Basically, it runs like this.

Self: I feel like crap. I’m ruminating. I’m upset, I hate the world (or myself, or whatever tends to be your danger signal for negative emotion).

This can be a trigger to H.A.L.T — examine yourself.

The acronym stands for four things that it is useful to check for:

Hungry
Angry
Lonely
Tired

The order is actually important.

First is Hungry.

Humans are not meant to function well when we are hungry. Hunger means that we need to make it our first priority to fuel our bodies or we’ll die. Oh we take pride in “forgetting to eat” or some such nonsense, sometimes — proof of God knows what. Maybe you think it means you’re being focused. Maybe you want to prove to yourself that you don’t have a bad relationship with food. Whatever.

Not fueling up on a regular basis doesn’t help your mood. Me? I’m lucky. I get cranky as all hell if I fast. I know it. I get clear signals. So, I try to eat about five times a day. Yes, you heard me right. Five times a day (I follow more or less a weightlifter’s regimen. It takes off the excess fat while keeping me comfortably satisfied). I don’t drive myself into negative moods that are too difficult to control from lack of eating. I challenge you to do an experiment and keep an hourly mood chart sometime. I guarentdamntee that you find a correlation between negative mood and a meal too far in the past. If you feel you’re losing control of your feelings and are hungry, often fueling up with something healthy will calm you down and help you gain perspective.¹

Second is Angry. Anger is an emotion with a strong imperative. It’s also biologically based as a protection mechanism. If you’re angry, you’re feeling a need to protect yourself. It’s a healthy enough trigger if you treat it properly and check out what you’re angry about. Are you setting good boundaries? Are you enforcing them? If you’re spiraling and you’re not hungry, check out the anger issues. Plenty of people don’t acknowledge anger and what it means. Is that what’s going on? Do you need to speak up about something? Are you hanging on to something that it would be useful to let go?

Third is Lonely. We humans are social creatures. Yes, even cranky misanthropes need company from time to time. Spiraling emotions, if you’re neither hungry nor angry, can be loneliness. This can be a trickier one to satisfy immediately. If you’re reading this, though, chances are good you’re online in a forum where you can at least chat with someone. Try it. If it helps, that might be your issue.

Last on the list is Tired. We’re not meant to chug along like steam engines and never stop. We need sleep. We need rest of other sorts. If you’ve eaten, don’t feel angry, and you find that you’ve had enough company to satisfy you, then it might very well be that you’re tired. Take a nap, if you can.

Following this won’t mean that you’ll always feel great. Life isn’t like that. As people we have our ups and downs. What this is meant to do is to help you in times of stress to help you keep your cool and stay balanced. It’s meant to help you make helpful decisions instead of merely reacting in times of stress.

¹ Yes, this can be the basis for emotional and binge eating. My own personal touchstone for whether or not it’s actually hunger vs. a desire to eat emotionally is if cobb salad will satisfy me. If it will, it’s hunger. If it’s chocolate or bread or somesuch, chances are that I need to go further down the HALT list and see what need is unmet.

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I’ve gotten some pokes from various sources saying that I’ve posted a lot about what to run away from, and what to avoid, but what about turning it around?

What do you say “yes” to?

• Mutual support of each others’ goals.

It’s good to cheer on a partner’s accomplishments and it’s good to have your own applauded. Good relationships recognize the personal development of each of its members. You’ve kept the kids quiet while your partner is studying, or you’ve had a partner gallantly put on sound-cancelling earphones so that you can learn to play the violin, haven’t you? That’s good stuff. Good relationships are encouraging of growth and learning.

• Fun

Fun is sometimes underrated. A good relationship can and really ought to have an element of play to it where you’re doing nothing more useful than simple enjoyment. Play is good. You don’t have to have kids to have a squirtgun fight, and being able to lay on the grass and find shapes in the clouds with a love is a good thing.

• Feeling “heard”

When you’re confident that when you speak up, your partner will listen, it’s a very good sign, indeed. Now “listen” does not mean “will automatically do what you want”. It’s when you know that the person will try very hard to understand where you’re coming from, and is interested in your point of view.

• Feeling motivated to listen deeply

The flip side is your own willingness to return the same depth of attention to your partner. When you have a deep drive to understand that person into his bones, you’re coming from a good place.

• Celebrating individuality

A good relationship encourages you to develop yourself as a whole and complete individual. As much as you might want to be with your partner, in a good relationship, instead of feeling dependant, there will be a feeling of interdependence that comes from knowing in your bones you’re self-sufficient and are choosing the wonderful give and take of a relationship that makes being human good.

• Feeling accepted

In a good relationship, you’ll know your partner is fine with you being a geek, or an introvert, or that you’ve a constant desire for activity and company, or that you really just have to keep your cereal bowl in the fridge. You’ll feel good about accepting your partners’ quirks and eccentricities. In fact, the best relationships are the ones where you feel the most grounded in being you. In a good relationship, being fully yourself feels very good, indeed.

Poly is about relationships when it’s all said and done. While it’s much easier to list things to watch out for and run from, the sweet and subtle things to which saying “yes” is a goodness deserving a great deal of attention.

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This week’s column is by guest writer, Jenny Ford.

Forget those piles of paper, bulging closets, and kitchen cabinets full of lidless plastic containers. The real stressor in life is not physical clutter, it’s emotional clutter.

Just as the physical clutter can be dealt with by a big one-off effort and a little daily maintenance, the emotional clutter doesn’t need to dominate your space, either.

What is emotional clutter?

Have you ever noticed that some people seem to have lives absolutely jam-packed with dramas? They have piles of needy friends, closets bulging with work crises, and a seemingly endless supply of angst-ridden personal conflicts.

We have a sneaking suspicion that at least some of these dramas are avoidable, or perhaps being blown out of proportion – as evidenced by our use of the term “drama queen”. to describe these people. One of my friends said that he had stopped using the term “drama queen” because it carried the connotation of femaleness, and having a drama-filled life is not a gender-specific trait. He suggested “drama capsule” as an alternative.

For me, I tend to start to categorise a person as a “drama capsule” when the drama they were dealing with at the time I met them has been replaced by several others in turn, with only small gaps or even overlaps between them.

I have distinguished two types, though many people are both at once.

Type 1 drama capsules have unconscious processes which create dramatic situations around them (for example, they are drawn to relationships with addicts or abusers, they abuse credit cards, they overcommit in high-stress jobs, they chronically cheat on their partner/s, or whatever). In those cases, the “drama situations” tend to be those which I would agree were dramatic if they happened to me (for example they wind up in hospital, in court, having panic attacks, with an STD, with their partner leaving them, etc). You could also call this type of person a “drama magnet”.

Type 2 drama capsules are people who can take relatively small bumps in the road and magnify them into prolonged, exhausting, emotional situations. You could perhaps refer to this type of person as a “drama addict”.

For example, I recently saw a situation where poly guy and poly woman got together for an evening, with the prior knowledge and consent of all partners, to explore sexual touch. Due to both individuals’ past histories, all concerned expected this would stop short of actual intercourse. In fact, through some fluke of compatibility, neither person bailed and actual intercourse occurred.

Because the intercourse was unexpected, his girlfriend very upset. She was too devastated to go to work for a couple of days, had to pull out of her uni course for the semester, and couldn’t even discuss the issue with the other woman for a month. In proportion to the triggering event, a fairly extreme emotional response.

The ultimate exhaustion arises when multiple Type 2s get together. Just about anything can be ricocheted around, escalating at every turn, with more and more hurts and upsets to be pandered to, almost indefinitely.

I think that we all have Type 2 tendencies when we are depressed, sick, tired, or otherwise stressed and resource-depleted. We can all over-react to things that would simply wash under the bridge on a better day. I wouldn’t consider someone a Type 2 unless there was a consistent, long-running pattern of it.

How To Declutter

First, look to yourself. Are you abusing drugs or alcohol, are do you have partner who is? Are you running up debts without knowing where the money will come from, or do you have a partner who is? Are you lying to your partner? Are you working (or exercising or anything else) far too many hours a week? Are you winding up in jail, in court, in hospital, or depending on the kindness of friends and relatives on a regular basis? There are organisations to help with each and every one of those drama-generating conditions. Call one. Deal with yourself.

Second, if you’re not generating dramas directly, consider the last three things which produced strong emotional stress for you. Exclude stressors which have happened to you (death of a close associate, unexpected job loss, unplanned pregnancy, moving house, etc). Include those stressors if they happened to someone else but were very emotionally stressful for you, but otherwise focus on emotionally upsetting situations you have had with other people. Write them down. Put dates next to them. If all three happened within the last three months, there is a real possibility that you have a drama addiction.

Grab a self-help book on cognitive behaviour therapy, get some counselling, and/or take up meditation. Keep reminding yourself “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff,” and “It’s All Small Stuff..”

Third, if you don’t seem to fall into either category, ask yourself whether most of the stress in your life comes from supporting your partners through their dramas. Maybe one or more of your partners is a drama capsule.

Assuming you want to maintain the relationship (a drama capsule can be very sweet , supportive and loving between crises, after all), I recommend that you get very, very good at boundaries. Go to Al-Anon, Nar-Anon, or another codependency support group. Find a good self-help book on behaviour modification, co-dependency and/or boundaries. Stop rewarding your drama addict for being overwhelmed by drama. Start rewarding them for dealing with situations calmly and detachedly.

We all have times when events conspire. We all have times when we are physically run down, or sick, or under-resourced, and we over-react. Cleaning up your emotional space after those times is like cleaning up after a party – a bit of an effort, and then back to normal.

A habit of over-dramatising is like a habit of untidiness – it will take self-discipline and a long period of practice to change your ways.

But the results are worth it.

Jenny Ford has an Honours degree in Psychology and works as a business consultant and executive coach …. by day. In her other life, she is a polyamorous, bisexual community-builder and relationships coach. She has husband, a girlfriend, a boyfriend, three children (though the teenager could count as three all on her own), and two cats. She lives in Sydney, Australia with a subset of the above family members and is currently researching how to bend space and time so she can live with ll the people she loves in all the places they want to live without leaving Sydney. Expressions of appreciation for Jenny should take the form of Lindt chocolate balls. Bonus points if they are the black 60% cocoa ones.

Decluttering Your Emotional Space

© 2007, Jenny Ford

Used by permission, all rights reserved

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The Western concept of romantic love is appalling and causes a lot of damage. There are days when I want to go back in time and kick Eleanor of Aquitaine’s ass. [1]

Here are the ideas that I see are most common, and ideas I think are about as unproductive as can be.

Love=Romantic Passion.

This idea is first because it is the absolute worst. Do I enjoy romantic passion? C’mon, I’m polyamorous. Of course I do! The crucial thing to remember is that obsessive passion simply is not love. It’s a chemical reaction. Is it fun? Sure. But it’s as addictive as caffeine, cocaine or any other stimulant you might care to think of. Basing a life decision on it is foolish. And have I been such a fool? Of course I have! Haven’t we all? Love, real love, has almost nothing to do with either emotion or chemicals. And for all that the whole polyamorous “It’s not about the sex” mantra frustrates the living soul out of me, there is one thing that is correct: love is not about sex.

Love as defined as romantic passion is forever, and if it goes away, then it must be that it was not True Love.

No. I sometimes wonder if when in the initial throes of romantic passion if love is even possible. You see, one of the issues of romantic passion is a perceived dissolution of ego boundaries. You’ve probably all heard the phrase “I and my beloved are one.” The thing is, that when the chemicals that cause romantic passion go away, the ego boundaries snap back into place. Lotta people don’t like when this happens and will often go rushing off for the new high – that new feeling of “oneness”, without stopping to examine what the natural stages of a mature relationship are or can grow into.

The person to person adult love is only possible in a “self” to “self” – a relationship in which you no longer have that addictive need for your partner. If you’re addicted to the romantic high, you’ve actually objectified your partner and turned him/her into a commodity. Can you love (as in have a personal relationship with) coffee or cocaine? No, but you might find the withdrawal unpleasant when you cannot get it. “It” is the operative word here. You love people. Once you turn that person into an “it” or a thing, love isn’t even possible.[2]

I am not at all trying to assert that you must be unemotional and passionless to love. In a healthy, fulfilling person to person adult relationship, there will be play, laughter, tears, snuggling, lovemaking and all those things that humans do to be close. Anyone who has had a long term relationship of the sort I am describing will still feel warmed by a particular look in his partner’s eyes, will still find the warmth of his touch exciting – all of that I’m certainly not saying that you shouldn’t care whether or not you keep the relationship. Of course you care! That’s the point! It’s just that the ego boundaries will be firmly in place, you each will respect and even honor each others’ individuality, and you’re not panicked at losing your “fix”. You won’t panic if something happens and the relationship goes away.

Romantic Passion is a good basis for choosing life partners.

Choosing a romantic partner whose values are very different from your own is going to make for a bad life partnership. Now I want to differentiate between values and tastes. If you like free-form jazz and your partner prefers baroque, or you like Indian cuisine and your partner prefers steak and potatos, it a matter of taste, not values. I also want to make it clear that when I say values, I do not necessarily mean “morality.” There are people whose personal values are such that they set their careers above all else in their lives. This is neither moral nor immoral, but a matter of what that person… values. Values can include morality, of course. My values are such that I would not be able to have a successful relationship with a serial killer.

A successful life partnership will be with someone whose values are similar to yours. Note that I said “similar”, because after all, love occurs between individuals. Individuals will have differences. If you could quantify it (which you really cannot, other than a very rough approximation), you might want to say that you don’t want more than a 15% variation from your own values. Any more than that, and that relationship will really only feel good as long as the chemistry lasts.

Interestingly enough, when the idea of courtly love as we know it started, it was never intended to be a life partnership such as a marriage. By its very nature, it was supposed to be adulterous, and having nothing to do with the duties and obligations attendant upon the noble[3] marriage relationship. Even in the stories of Guinevere and Lancelot, the whole thing fell apart when they attempted to move in together.

Okay, so here I go on about what ain’t love. So what is love?

In spite of my deep love of the book Stranger in a Strange Land, I have to admit that Jubal Harshaw’s definition, “Love is that condition in which the happiness of the other person is essential to your own” is a bit off base. You see, I could love someone who has a mental illness such as depression, and while loving that person deeply, might still be happy myself.

I like M. Scott Peck’s version a lot better — “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Do notice that the way Peck expressed that. He did not say “oneself”. He said, “one’s self”. This is an important distinction. Selfhood, individuality and self-ownership are very important to the exercise of (if you will excuse the expression) true love. You cannot love someone else until you have a fairly solid sense of your own self.

Love is also a choice. This is where it differs quite a bit from romantic passion. Have any of you fallen hard for someone you wish you hadn’t? (I have in the past). But when it’s love, when you’re there willing to extend yourself for that person’s spiritual growth, you find yourself making conscious choices. You also find yourself setting personal boundaries such that you’re in a position to be more capable of investing yourself in another’s personal growth as needed. As the other person decides he needs you, and you decide you can give, mindja. I don’t suppose anyone who has read my stuff thinks I’m into that “for your own good” nonsense in an adult relationship.

[1] Eleanor of Aquitaine was one of the principal architects of the whole “Courtly Love” tradition, from which we Westerner have drawn many of our ideas of love and romance. In fact the word “romance” itself comes from the narrative poems about chivalric heroes and their ladies.

[2] “And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” Granny Weatherwax in Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett. (And you can stop that damned eyerolling. Pratchett is a very wise man, and the character of Esme Weatherwax is actually a pretty loving person).

[3] As in social class nobility. Peasants didn’t have time for all that stuff.

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