The Polyamorous Misanthrope

For all that I often make cracks about couples looking for that bi-chick to move in with them for lives of Perfect Poly Bliss, sometimes you really do find someone who might really want to form a family with a couple.

When moving from a couple dynamic to a triad, you’ve kinda gotta be willing to let the coupledom go first. No, stop looking at me like that. I know you’ve been together for fifteen years, and have a house and kids. If the couple part is that damn important to you, do everyone a favor. Be poly, if you want. Form relationships and enjoy them. But stop bloody well looking for someone to “add” to your marriage to “make it complete”.

If you really want a triad let it be a new relationship. You’re really not going to be able to preserve the original couple with exactly the dynamic it had. The dynamics are all gonna change, anyway, and probably in ways you couldn’t have anticipated even if you thought you had all the facts. That’s okay. New relationships are new relationships.

I’d like to offer some helpful ideas to consider if you’re wanting to form a new triad.

· Move into a new home together. Move out of the house the couple shared.

I don’t blame you if this first one makes you squawk. Lemme esplain… No, that would take to long. Let me sum up.

If you have been living in a couple for any length of time, you have your own space. You’ve filled that house to make it “yours”. It’s very difficult to integrate a new family member into the old space. It can be done, but let me ask you a few questions:

Do you have unspoken rules about who gets to touch what and when around stuff?

Does the kitchen sort of “belong” to the primary cook, and is this person even slightly territorial? I was, and didn’t realize it. When OLQ moved in together, it was a very good thing, indeed, that we did move into a new house, as the kitchen wound up “belonging” to the cook of the night rather than have territorial issues between people in the household. Moving all of us into a new home was something we did right. (Yeah, we did things wrong, too, but that wasn’t one of them).

Is there a workbench or garage that is the primary “lab” of someone in the present household?

Do you have a method for filing books/papers/CDs/DVDs?

If you all create a new home together, it’s a good way to get around these issues. I promise you, they’re very real. Don’t think you’re exempt. It’ll bite you.

After observing poly households and listening to various living arrangements for a long time, I begin to think the Oneida Community had the right idea – give every adult member a small bedroom of his or her own.

If you have a “master” bedroom with a couple and then another bedroom for the new member, you’re screaming that there is a hierarchy to the relationship. Maybe you’re okay with that, but the sort of person who is independent enough to deal with a poly live-in relationship won’t be in the long run.

And the whole “all adults in one bedroom” thing? Just… Don’t. Not unless each person has another totally private space of his or her own. I don’t give a damn how extroverted and in love with having people around you all the time you are. Everyone needs some little space of their own. If they don’t get it physically, they’re gonna start creating it in their heads. Not a good thing if you’re looking to keep relationship bonds.

· Establish rules about parenting if there are children.

I’ve written more about poly parenting, I think, than any other subject. Just click on the parenting tag here in this blog and you’ll come up with most of what I have on the subject that I think is really useful. I’m not going to reinvent the damn wheel here.

· Expect individuals to have individual lives (and possibly loves)

Something OLQ did that was radically and horribly wrong was that we tried to be a single unit of four people rather than four individuals with lives who chose to live together. My God, we were so foolish. We did it with the best of intentions. One of us had come from some incredibly tightly-knit generational type family, so the joined at the hip type marriage was all that one knew. Others loved the idea of together, together, together.

Until it started to chafe.

A standard monogamous marriage can just barely stand doing all social things together, taking all vacations together and going to all events together. Even then, I’m not so sure that’s really the healthiest thing in the world to do.

When you’ve got more than two people?

Well, think about it: Even the most compatible of people are going to have their own individual tastes, goals, needs and desires. Make sure that you allow for those however you can. It’s actually good to do things as a family, but make sure that each individual adult has things that are Not Part of the Family that they’re doing as well.

· Don’t try to engineer everything

If your family rules start to look like a corporate merger, you might be stifling things a bit. While I’m all for having things out in the open, talking them out, and certainly writing a property sharing contract, allow for the serendipity that you’re going to find in any effective life. Just because you’ve been studying group dynamics for a long time, can quote all the mistakes you think the Oneida Community made, have elaborate theories on why the Nest system from Stranger in a Strange Land wouldn’t work, and have studied cult theory until you could write a thesis on it without checking any more references, don’t think that this theory is going to trump the infinite variety of human choice. Real people are cranky, cantankerous and gloriously unpredictable. It’s why sociology is more of an art than a science.

I’d actually encourage anyone who wanted to form a group poly household to take a few cues from some business models of relationships. No, no, don’t think I mean that it needs to be all cold and corporate. Believe it or not many large organizations these days are clueing in to the fact that the people are really the important part of any organization and that making sure that everyone’s needs are served is a good way to have a healthy, happy organization. I’ve recommended The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People more than once here, and I’ll beat the drum for it again.

But, don’t by whatever you hold holy, think you can make a triad some sort of “couple plus” relationship. It’s not “just like a monogamy, but with more people”. Let it be what it is and you’ve a better chance at the relationship working out happily.

“You like coffee! I like coffee, too! We must be soul mates and spend all of our time together!” — A wise online friend with whom I really oughta make a coffee date.

I’ve noticed among the various online perverts a certain tendency. If we’re sexual deviants, it’s not unusual to expect that to come along with a sheaf of assumptions about other similarities.

A guest column was recently scolded because someone got some queer colloquial language “wrong”.  From a scientific point of view, some incorrectly-applied terms  have developed other meanings through subculture usage.  In the tradition of the Good Editor, I’m gonna stand up for the author here.   The author was using the expressions in the technical, rather than jargon, sense and was using them absolutely correctly.  I would have accepted either technical or colloquial if the meaning seemed obvious from context.

Friends, just because one is poly, or lesbian, or whatever, does not necessarily mean that everyone in the pervert community is necessarily going to agree with you on all subjects of language, politics and religion. It certainly does not mean that the person is going to be up on the minutiae of technical terminology you might you for your own relationships.

The implication was that if you’re not up on all of this, then you’re not supposed to be writing these columns.

Hell, I only learned that “beard” is an expression for a female companion of a homosexual man who does not care to make his homosexuality known about a month ago! I know the handkerchief code exists, but I’ve no idea what means what. So, you guys that think that people that aren’t up on all the jargon should just stop reading this column now. I’m constantly running across new language and new concepts.

Things that are big and obvious to you and your life might not necessarily be so to everyone’s. I cannot count the times that someone who is pagan will become poly and think that every poly person they meet is not only pagan, but their brand of pagan using exactly their terminology¹.

I suppose I find it funniest because I used to run across that sort of thing from church to church as well. In-groups develop their own language, but often forget that they are often relatively small in-groups. They begin to think that their way of thinking is somehow the right way to think. In a community as diverse as the polyamory community, this can become a little problematic.

I’m not saying that language and defintion don’t matter.  I’m a writer, for God’s sake!  Words and their meanings matter a great deal in my line of work.  But assuming that if one calls oneself polyamorous that one is necessarily going to approach things as you do or have the same attitudes isn’t going to be very productive to you in the long run.

¹If you’re of the slightest mischievous frame of mind, this can become an endless source of entertainment as well.

I’m on vacation, so damn’f I’m writin’ something important!

Ask me a question, either here or via email, and if it entertains, horrifies or piques my interest, I might write about it/snark it/answer it with all the sober seriousness in my power.

Caveat Emptor and all that snot.

See y’all next week. Be good, play nice, and don’t burn the house down.

Kisses,

Mama Java

P.S.  Make sure to eat your vegetables.

I follow my intuition, go with my gut, all that. The times I haven’t? Well, things didn’t exactly have what I would call an optimum outcome.

Does this mean I think, “Well, I feel this way, so it must be true!” is the way to go.

Not. Even. Close.

We get a lot of pushing to follow our feelings, trust our intuition, go with our guts — as if digested waste can think. The problem comes in with the misunderstanding of what “gut feelings” are for and how they work.

It’s not mystical, really.

The human brain is set up to gather and integrate data very quickly — so quickly that we’re doing so without thinking of it consciously. Think of catching a frisbee. It’s physics, and you can write the equations by which you perform the actions, but you’re not consciously figuring vectors when you see the disc coming at you. You just catch it. Doesn’t make it magic.  But if you study the physics, you can describe the exact mechanism pretty clearly.

If you just go with your feelings without looking for facts, you’re running around with one eye poked out. You have no depth perception.¹ You’re missing the other viewpoint, and it’s an absolutely necessary one to make sure you have a clear 3D picture of what’s going on.

I wanna digress a little bit and talk about facts. It’s basic and simple and people get it wrong all the time. If it happened, it’s a fact. If it hasn’t happened, it’s a theory or a prediction. If you hold a kitten over a working blender and open your hand, the prediction that it will fall in is actually not a fact. It’s a theory. It’s a theory that has a whale of a lot of evidence to point to the probability of kitten puree², but it’s not a fact. We clear? Good.

So where does someone who finds her intuition a good tool get off lecturing about facts?

Simple. If you trust a feeling without digging for supporting facts, it will bite you. As Franklin Veaux wisely commented, “Just because I feel bad doesn’t mean someone else did something wrong.” If you feel bad, the fact is that you feel bad. Doesn’t prove a thing.

I’m gonna admit to a slight hypocrite moment here. Recently I made a business decision based on no facts I could find. I had taken a temp job that felt wrong — I mean, soul-suckingly, sleep-deprivingly bad. From a factual, logical point of view, the job was mostly positive. It got me a shot as some experience I would not have otherwise had, had more secure income than I’m used to as a freelancer, and several other good things. I decided to go on feelings and resign from that job. Yeah, it turned out quite well. I found other avenues to replace in the income and experience. But I cannot pretend for one second that I found appropriate backing facts before I made that decision. I tried, but at the time, the thoughts weren’t thinking. I can see now that taking a temp job with no specific end date or end to the project wasn’t going to work with my business plan, but that was hindsight in terms of my decision-making, and hindsight should be suspect because justification is easy at that stage.

What I didn’t do was fool myself. I didn’t pretend facts that I wasn’t seeing. I didn’t make anyone else responsible for how I felt.³ I didn’t fool myself that it was risky. The fact (it happened, so it’s a fact) of the positive outcome wasn’t some mystic anything. It was that I was not fooling myself about the risk and got my ass in gear in a big way to hustle and get the positive outcome I wanted.

This applies to relationships. If something happens where you feel bad or something feels “wrong”, you owe it to yourself to examine your feelings then look for facts.

Scared a Dear Love is gonna leave you?  Well, are you scared for a genuine reason or not?  What are the supporting facts?  What, specifically has happened that says that it’s in the Dear Love’s character?  Can you recall at least one (if not more) instance?  If there’s nothing, your feelings are coming from somewhere else.

Is a Dear Love late home for the umpteenth time?  Are you spinning out of control because you’re edgy about it?  What are the facts of the matter?  Not the supposition, not the extrapolation. What are the facts?   Don’t know them?

Give it up. Go take a hot bath.  Have a cup of tea.  Think about something else for awhile.

Wait till you can get the facts.

¹Which could lead to an interesting essay on ole Mr. Wednesday, but that’s not for a poly column.
² This image was shamelessly stolen from a friend of mine. Ten points if you can find the essay. It’s a favorite to which I often refer.
³ ‘Cause… well, they aren’t.